Yay! This brings us one step closer to "The Feed" in The Diamond Age - just make it send a string of organic molecules (no arsenic though) and your 3D printer will make whatever food you need on your end.
Step 1) Why only 60mph? Once you have evacuated the air in the tubes I don't see why there would be a speed limit, how about 600mph? Or 6000 mph?
Step 2) Now use it for general cargo.
Step 3) Now put humans in it. I can't help but think they are already thinking of this because a 2m (6 ft 6 inches) capsule is enough to fit most people. Unfortunately, squishy humans are limited to a around 1G of acceleration, but I love the idea of a 15 minute trip from New York to Washington DC.
The guy has put himself in front of television cameras during press conferences
Yeah, I think that's it. The soldier is behind bars and quiet, while Assange goes about making announcements of future leaks. You are right: it is about press.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that I said Wikileaks is absolved of responsibility. My point is that the person who stole from the government gets almost no press, while the guy who runs a web site is treated like a terrorist. Not that the soldier is going to get off by any means, but the press response has been absurd.
Why is the focus on Wikileaks and it's leader? This is a great case of shooting the messenger. Bradley Manning was the solider who stole the information. How he disseminated it is not the point. Granted: Wikileaks posted the information, but if Wikileaks didn't exist they would have just posted it elsewhere. Do you think that if a dozen newspapers suddenly got this information in the mail, they wouldn't have posted it? I doubt it. And are the owners of the newspapers who posted the information being targeted by the federal government? I haven't heard anything about that.
Stopping Julian Assange isn't going to solve the problem. Better idea: infiltrate Wikileaks and corrupt the information before it arrives. Let them post garbage. Ruin their reputation.
I don't care if looks like a ham sandwich, if someone permanently attaches it to a supporting structure like that, it should be taken seriously
And so began the string of phony ham sandwich bombs, ultimately forcing the US government into bankruptcy. The head of the Boston bomb squad was quoted as saying "Thank God the terrorists haven't discovered bologna!"
These crazy defenses arise because the penalties are so absurd. You can't make a 16-year-old pay $27k in damages for downloading a CD. That's not sane. I think they should try the cruel-and-unusual punishment defense.
You do get phone support if you use the paid Google Apps.
Good to know. Also: I didn't mean to imply that Google doesn't offer paid services.
Google does offer Google Search Appliance for enterprises.
Yeah, it has been out for a while too. Do you know any businesses that use it? In another thread, someone asked how many Fortune 500 companies use Google's business solutions. I would love to know.
Google hasn't gotten too far with offering corporate services, and I suspect they aren't that interested. It's one thing to provide a free email service that is based on ad revenue and data mining. But selling that and providing an SLA offering 99.999% up-time is a different market. You have to provide real support and respond to issues - Google has forums for reporting bugs but I can't call them and say "Hey, my gmail isn't working" and get an answer. I can't call them and report that an RSS feed isn't working or that a gadget is screwing up my iGoogle page. And rightfully so -- those services are free perks. If you don't like 'em, don't use 'em - but they are the best of the free options.
Another interesting example is Google's "desktop" search tools. Google Desktop has been around for a decade and I've seen 1 or 2 small businesses use it, but no one large and not seriously. It is more like something that some techie guy installs on his machine and that's it, which is too bad because it is something businesses really need.
Haven't you noticed they pulled all private corporate leaks and European and other countries leaks?
No actually, I hadn't. Neither has anyone else, because they are getting DDOS'd. I have not heard or seen anything indicating that they pulled leaks. To the contrary: Just today he announced that they are releasing leaks for a major US bank. Wikileaks releases whatever they are given.
It is time to sue the patent office, not the patent holders:
The question the Supreme Court must answer is "What burden of proof is required to invalidate a patent?" The difficulty is that the *legal* answer may not match the *real world* answer. In theory, it should require a high burden of proof because the patent office already examined the patent application, determined it was patentable, searched for prior art, etc. But in reality, the patent office isn't doing that. I wish I could find the public statement where they basically said it isn't their responsibility to search for prior art. This problem is amplified by the fact that recent administrations are relying on the patent office to become a revenue generator.
In my opinion, Microsoft should sue the patent office. If the Supreme Court operates under the assumption that the patent office is following a certain procedure, and they are not, then they should have a case against the patent office. Then, they can go back to the courts and invalidate the patent after they have proven that the patent office is not doing their job.
This test with healthy individuals doesn't mean that we should ignore food contamination and that double-dipping is okay. It shows that double-dipping is okay so long as each person is completely healthy.
But what if one of the people double-dipping has an illness? We shun food contamination because someone might carry a disease and not realize it because it isn't symptomatic yet or because that person's immune system is holding it at bay.
I used to have this problem with Slashdot, then I started to realize that I was just reading too many articles. If I forgot what it was about, I was probably getting worked-up and angry over something I shouldn't be. Since this realization, I've become much happier, concentrating on those subjects that I really do have an interest in, rather than those that Slashdot headlines make me think I am interested in but forget about last week.
You certainly could do that. A fair bit of work, especially in a cross-platform application. But then again, I don't know if this problem exists outside of a Windows world (yet).
Only slightly less difficult than that, is making the installer mark the add-ons as already approved. Even so, it is still a good idea because while installing a plug-in without permission is a gray area, pretending that the user clicked "yes I want this" when they didn't is probably illegal.
the ratio of engineers to programmers was about 5-1, that's one in six people doing the work
This part confuses me. "Engineers" are the people who do the real work. That is why programmers are "software engineers." What kind of engineers did you have that didn't do any real work?
That company must have been really messed-up. I am on a project with about a dozen engineers, and one person is working on traceability. (No CMMI though.)
Clearly everything should be done to prevent explosives getting on board an aircraft in quantities sufficient to cause structural failure and bring the plane down.
Actually, that should not be the goal. And it is that mistaken basis that causes all this strife.
All of this security stuff began after 9/11. 9/11 wasn't about terrorists destroying planes - it was about terrorists using planes to destroy other things. Planes are expensive, and they carry lots of people. Just like malls, cars, stadiums, and restaurants. But the goal is not to find every possible gathering of people and prevent bombs from getting in. That's impossible, and doesn't scale. The goal is to prevent terrorists from taking over planes, because planes can be turned into WMDs.
We are in this debate over millimeter wave scanners and body cavity searches because we, Americans, forgot what we were trying to prevent. One of the best bosses I ever worked for will often listen to a suggestion and reply with "What problem are we trying to solve?"
Funny thing is, I also have graphite lodged under my skin. It was an accident when I was in...4th grade if I remember correctly. I just turned around and another kid was holding a pencil horizontal and it nicked my finger. I've been amazed that 20 years later it is still there and noticeable. But no harm done.
They already do. Some years ago, the FCC mandated that all cell phones send location information when the phone dials 911. It is somewhat of a necessity anyway, since if I am in California but my billing address is in New York, you don't want the New York 911 dispatcher to get my call. There was an uproar over this ruling, because it doesn't prevent the from sending this location information when other calls are made.
It is secret in the same way that Area 51 and the Pentagon are secret. Everyone who cares can hop in a car and see them. They are secret in that we don't know exactly what they do.
GM caught a lot of flak for how it behaved after the law was repealed (destroying all EV1s), but they weren't the root cause despite what popular documentaries say.
GM did a lot of other things to make the EV1 look bad. They probably had some valid reasons - the car was expensive to build, and battery technology was not where it is today, although it isn't that far different.
In the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? they interview a man who was a higher-up assigned to the EV1 project. Throughout the documentary, he points out ways that GM intentionally thwarted the project while assigning him to make it look like they were trying to promote the car but failing. I can't remember his name though.
...arguing that hybrid vehicles (powered by gas but with batteries to sustain them at idle and to enable regenerative braking)
They really argued for hydrogen-powered cars, which they knew then, and know now, are not going to happen any time soon. IMHO, their main goal was not to get time to innovate.
All the conspiracy theories about GM blocking the electric vehicle hinge on one assumption - that an electric vehicle is cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles right now.
True, but I think the comparison would be a lot more fair if you stop assuming that people need to transport 5 people and 200lbs of luggage 250 miles per trip. Gasoline cars can do that, and electric cars cannot. So you are right that they aren't apples-for-apples competitive.
if California wants to encourage new technologies by drafting legal requirements, then pulls a double-cross by dropping the requirements before companies can recoup the money spent creating those new technologies, why should the companies be obligated to let California benefit from said technologies?
I have to grant you this is a hell of a point - I never thought of it that way.
Final Thoughts: Taking power (and space) from free DIMM slots is certainly a novel idea, and is beneficial to overly cramped installations. I can easily see these being used for embedded and other custom systems where high storage performance is needed without the wasted space.
So the entire purpose of this hyper-expensive convoluted creation is to save a power cable...? The whole article reads more like an advertisement + some benchmarks. I see no benefit to this thing whatsoever. Unless I am missing something, it sounds more like Viking was trying to make a non-volatile memory chip (that would be kinda cool) and realized it wasn't going to work, so they had the engineers rip out everything novel about it and just use the DIMM slot to save a power cord.
Slashdot Mirror
Yay! This brings us one step closer to "The Feed" in The Diamond Age - just make it send a string of organic molecules (no arsenic though) and your 3D printer will make whatever food you need on your end.
Step 1) Why only 60mph? Once you have evacuated the air in the tubes I don't see why there would be a speed limit, how about 600mph? Or 6000 mph?
Step 2) Now use it for general cargo.
Step 3) Now put humans in it. I can't help but think they are already thinking of this because a 2m (6 ft 6 inches) capsule is enough to fit most people. Unfortunately, squishy humans are limited to a around 1G of acceleration, but I love the idea of a 15 minute trip from New York to Washington DC.
The guy has put himself in front of television cameras during press conferences
Yeah, I think that's it. The soldier is behind bars and quiet, while Assange goes about making announcements of future leaks. You are right: it is about press.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that I said Wikileaks is absolved of responsibility. My point is that the person who stole from the government gets almost no press, while the guy who runs a web site is treated like a terrorist. Not that the soldier is going to get off by any means, but the press response has been absurd.
Except GM isn't making you sign a 2-year contract to buy expensive gas. Apple makes their money from the app store, and from their contract with AT&T.
Well, maybe that's a bad example because Apple didn't really do any "R&D", but it certainly did cover the cost of that went into the shiny design.
That's is R&D.
Why is the focus on Wikileaks and it's leader? This is a great case of shooting the messenger. Bradley Manning was the solider who stole the information. How he disseminated it is not the point. Granted: Wikileaks posted the information, but if Wikileaks didn't exist they would have just posted it elsewhere. Do you think that if a dozen newspapers suddenly got this information in the mail, they wouldn't have posted it? I doubt it. And are the owners of the newspapers who posted the information being targeted by the federal government? I haven't heard anything about that.
Stopping Julian Assange isn't going to solve the problem. Better idea: infiltrate Wikileaks and corrupt the information before it arrives. Let them post garbage. Ruin their reputation.
I don't care if looks like a ham sandwich, if someone permanently attaches it to a supporting structure like that, it should be taken seriously
And so began the string of phony ham sandwich bombs, ultimately forcing the US government into bankruptcy. The head of the Boston bomb squad was quoted as saying "Thank God the terrorists haven't discovered bologna!"
These crazy defenses arise because the penalties are so absurd. You can't make a 16-year-old pay $27k in damages for downloading a CD. That's not sane. I think they should try the cruel-and-unusual punishment defense.
You do get phone support if you use the paid Google Apps.
Good to know. Also: I didn't mean to imply that Google doesn't offer paid services.
Google does offer Google Search Appliance for enterprises.
Yeah, it has been out for a while too. Do you know any businesses that use it? In another thread, someone asked how many Fortune 500 companies use Google's business solutions. I would love to know.
Google hasn't gotten too far with offering corporate services, and I suspect they aren't that interested. It's one thing to provide a free email service that is based on ad revenue and data mining. But selling that and providing an SLA offering 99.999% up-time is a different market. You have to provide real support and respond to issues - Google has forums for reporting bugs but I can't call them and say "Hey, my gmail isn't working" and get an answer. I can't call them and report that an RSS feed isn't working or that a gadget is screwing up my iGoogle page. And rightfully so -- those services are free perks. If you don't like 'em, don't use 'em - but they are the best of the free options.
Another interesting example is Google's "desktop" search tools. Google Desktop has been around for a decade and I've seen 1 or 2 small businesses use it, but no one large and not seriously. It is more like something that some techie guy installs on his machine and that's it, which is too bad because it is something businesses really need.
[citation required]
Haven't you noticed they pulled all private corporate leaks and European and other countries leaks?
No actually, I hadn't. Neither has anyone else, because they are getting DDOS'd. I have not heard or seen anything indicating that they pulled leaks. To the contrary: Just today he announced that they are releasing leaks for a major US bank. Wikileaks releases whatever they are given.
It is time to sue the patent office, not the patent holders:
The question the Supreme Court must answer is "What burden of proof is required to invalidate a patent?" The difficulty is that the *legal* answer may not match the *real world* answer. In theory, it should require a high burden of proof because the patent office already examined the patent application, determined it was patentable, searched for prior art, etc. But in reality, the patent office isn't doing that. I wish I could find the public statement where they basically said it isn't their responsibility to search for prior art. This problem is amplified by the fact that recent administrations are relying on the patent office to become a revenue generator.
In my opinion, Microsoft should sue the patent office. If the Supreme Court operates under the assumption that the patent office is following a certain procedure, and they are not, then they should have a case against the patent office. Then, they can go back to the courts and invalidate the patent after they have proven that the patent office is not doing their job.
I pray you never have children. :-)
This test with healthy individuals doesn't mean that we should ignore food contamination and that double-dipping is okay. It shows that double-dipping is okay so long as each person is completely healthy.
But what if one of the people double-dipping has an illness? We shun food contamination because someone might carry a disease and not realize it because it isn't symptomatic yet or because that person's immune system is holding it at bay.
I used to have this problem with Slashdot, then I started to realize that I was just reading too many articles. If I forgot what it was about, I was probably getting worked-up and angry over something I shouldn't be. Since this realization, I've become much happier, concentrating on those subjects that I really do have an interest in, rather than those that Slashdot headlines make me think I am interested in but forget about last week.
You certainly could do that. A fair bit of work, especially in a cross-platform application. But then again, I don't know if this problem exists outside of a Windows world (yet).
Only slightly less difficult than that, is making the installer mark the add-ons as already approved. Even so, it is still a good idea because while installing a plug-in without permission is a gray area, pretending that the user clicked "yes I want this" when they didn't is probably illegal.
the ratio of engineers to programmers was about 5-1, that's one in six people doing the work
This part confuses me. "Engineers" are the people who do the real work. That is why programmers are "software engineers." What kind of engineers did you have that didn't do any real work?
That company must have been really messed-up. I am on a project with about a dozen engineers, and one person is working on traceability. (No CMMI though.)
Clearly everything should be done to prevent explosives getting on board an aircraft in quantities sufficient to cause structural failure and bring the plane down.
Actually, that should not be the goal. And it is that mistaken basis that causes all this strife.
All of this security stuff began after 9/11. 9/11 wasn't about terrorists destroying planes - it was about terrorists using planes to destroy other things. Planes are expensive, and they carry lots of people. Just like malls, cars, stadiums, and restaurants. But the goal is not to find every possible gathering of people and prevent bombs from getting in. That's impossible, and doesn't scale. The goal is to prevent terrorists from taking over planes, because planes can be turned into WMDs.
We are in this debate over millimeter wave scanners and body cavity searches because we, Americans, forgot what we were trying to prevent. One of the best bosses I ever worked for will often listen to a suggestion and reply with "What problem are we trying to solve?"
Funny thing is, I also have graphite lodged under my skin. It was an accident when I was in...4th grade if I remember correctly. I just turned around and another kid was holding a pencil horizontal and it nicked my finger. I've been amazed that 20 years later it is still there and noticeable. But no harm done.
They already do. Some years ago, the FCC mandated that all cell phones send location information when the phone dials 911. It is somewhat of a necessity anyway, since if I am in California but my billing address is in New York, you don't want the New York 911 dispatcher to get my call. There was an uproar over this ruling, because it doesn't prevent the from sending this location information when other calls are made.
It is secret in the same way that Area 51 and the Pentagon are secret. Everyone who cares can hop in a car and see them. They are secret in that we don't know exactly what they do.
A lot of this is perspective...
GM caught a lot of flak for how it behaved after the law was repealed (destroying all EV1s), but they weren't the root cause despite what popular documentaries say.
GM did a lot of other things to make the EV1 look bad. They probably had some valid reasons - the car was expensive to build, and battery technology was not where it is today, although it isn't that far different.
In the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? they interview a man who was a higher-up assigned to the EV1 project. Throughout the documentary, he points out ways that GM intentionally thwarted the project while assigning him to make it look like they were trying to promote the car but failing. I can't remember his name though.
...arguing that hybrid vehicles (powered by gas but with batteries to sustain them at idle and to enable regenerative braking)
They really argued for hydrogen-powered cars, which they knew then, and know now, are not going to happen any time soon. IMHO, their main goal was not to get time to innovate.
All the conspiracy theories about GM blocking the electric vehicle hinge on one assumption - that an electric vehicle is cost-competitive with gasoline vehicles right now.
True, but I think the comparison would be a lot more fair if you stop assuming that people need to transport 5 people and 200lbs of luggage 250 miles per trip. Gasoline cars can do that, and electric cars cannot. So you are right that they aren't apples-for-apples competitive.
if California wants to encourage new technologies by drafting legal requirements, then pulls a double-cross by dropping the requirements before companies can recoup the money spent creating those new technologies, why should the companies be obligated to let California benefit from said technologies?
I have to grant you this is a hell of a point - I never thought of it that way.
From the article:
Final Thoughts: Taking power (and space) from free DIMM slots is certainly a novel idea, and is beneficial to overly cramped installations. I can easily see these being used for embedded and other custom systems where high storage performance is needed without the wasted space.
So the entire purpose of this hyper-expensive convoluted creation is to save a power cable...? The whole article reads more like an advertisement + some benchmarks. I see no benefit to this thing whatsoever. Unless I am missing something, it sounds more like Viking was trying to make a non-volatile memory chip (that would be kinda cool) and realized it wasn't going to work, so they had the engineers rip out everything novel about it and just use the DIMM slot to save a power cord.
Fewer and fewer phones are coming with connectors for external antennas.