...except it's not going to work. Democracy has failed a big time in the US. The elections have no meaning. The true elections happen behind the scenes, when the candidates are choosen. Then, what is handed to the People, is a big show and ballots filled with dopplegangers. They may look different, talk differently, promise different stuff, but once elected, they follow exactly the same route the opponent would.
The US shuttle could in theory be modified to support unmanned flight, but can't lower its landing gear automatically -- the astronauts wanted there to always be a function that would require a human to be physically there. So the only switch that can lower the gear is the one on the pilot's side of the main control panel, right near the rotational hand controller.
So, say, they all go unconscious during the descent, because something went wrong and deceleration, vibrations, some fumes from overheating installations or something like that happened, ground control switches the shuttle remotely to automatic, guides the shuttle to the landing strip and shouts in the speakers "Wake up! Wake up! Open the landing gear!" and then "crash" just because it couldn't be automatically opened? Way smart, you brave American boys!
1) NOT tax-refundable. Simply the idea must be so novel, original and VALUABLE that it allows you to earn this kind of money. Actually, this could be counted AS tax! Well, patents are sometimes ALL that companies posess. They are considered VERY valuable by some. Why not tax them? 2) Possibly include another field: "Expected patent value". Your fee (increasing) would depend on it, but you would be able to claim only so-and-so much in court for patent infringement, and you would be obligated to sell the patent to anyone willing to buy it for no more than some fixed X times the "expected value". If you think your patent will earn you $10bln/year, pay up $100mln up front and be assured of your monopoly because nobody will shell out 100 times that. If you expect it to bring more like $1000/year, keep paying your $10, $20, $40, $80 yearly till some software giant decides to come and buy it from you for $100k. 3) if over 3 (5?) years you didn't manage to earn enough on your patent to keep it, it wasn't good enough. The whole idea is that costs of retaining the patent should follow closely (but at a reasonable distance) the curve of profit from a good patent. If in year 8 you are supposed to earn $20mln/year, and in year 9 you expect it doubled, you should gladly pay $8mln in year 8 to retain your position. But if this thing doesn't bring you expected profits, rethink it and drop your monopoly, maybe somebody will innovate and do this better. Or maybe you ought to innovate, patent the innovation, drop v1.0 to public domain and start selling "New, better" v2.0? 4) With 3-5 good patents, it makes perfect sense and is affordable for everyone. But if your company wants to keep a portfolio of 1000 patents, it suddenly becomes horribly expensive and you must drop 950 of them just to keep remaining 50. Or drop the value of the 950 to level affordable by all the startups...
Reasons why Russians flew Buran just once? A successful unmanned flight? (something US shuttles aren't capable of!)
1) To prove they can (cold war thing) 2) To waste no more money on a failed conception.
In the US, the shuttles are a pet of the military, government and different agencies. NASA would gladly retire them a long time ago, but they aren't allowed to. Russians recognized that Buran, despite being way better than the US shuttles, is still a bad design - too much redundant mass to be lifted into the orbit, too many parts that may fail, costs saved on reuse of the shuttle totally obliterated by costs of extra fuel, preparation and rebuilding non-reusable parts. Shuttles as such are a failed design and should be abandonned.
What we need is: - a dedicated human transport vehicle. Something like the shuttle, just WAY smaller. Less weight, less energy wasted, less parts. 4-6 people, to orbit and back. Maybe launched from a plane, maybe from the ground, like a shuttle. - a versatile orbital transport vehicle. Never meant to reenter the atmosphere, possibly docked to the space station most of the time. Automatic repairs, repairs on spacewalks, readjusting orbits of satellites, etc. refuelled with supplies delivered from Earth, but not much fuel required really. - a cargo transport rocket. No need to limit thrust to grant human survival like in case of shuttles. Just transport cargo to orbit. Parts reusable in "best effort" manner, that is, drop on a parachute, if it's damaged/destroyed - no biggie. Cheap transport into space. - emergency landers. Like the Soyuz capsules. Say, the human transport got damaged on launch and is incapable of reentry. Leave it on the orbit as another orbital transport, send the crew back in capsules.
> You got a nice buffer overflow going on there. That strzTemp should be 4 tchars wide to fit in the string terminator.
Thank you for reporting this. This issue exists in our database with ticket Q3579550. It's meant to be that way. Some applications depend on this behaviour.
Yes, it would. Alternative: Incremental renewal fee. If this patent is worth to you more than $1mln to keep it for the next year after first 3, pay $1mln. Then worth $2mln for another year? $4mln for sixth year? $8mln for seventh? The most useless patents would get released really fast.
clearly, a contract is agreed upon BEFORE the transaction not after.
Sorry, but lawyers are paid to be smarter than that. Accepting the EULA -is- the final step of the transaction. Even though you paid for a box with Microsoft software in it at the cash register, even though you got the bill, paid the money and said "good-bye" to the shopkeeper, you haven't finished the purchase. With anything else, consumer electronics, food, cars - you did. Not with software. Not until you clicked "I Agree". And if you don't, you have full right to return the software for a full refund, essentially cancelling the process of transaction.
The downside is that browsers don't give programmers full access to a computer's resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space. This is a bottleneck the engineer sees being removed in future, although he thinks the simplicity of the current Web browsing experience needs to be maintained.
One thing where MSIE excels over Firefox is exactly providing totally unrestricted access to all the system resources of the client's system, for any website developer/programmer, even without need for confirmation from the user. Although Microsoft swears by God that this feature will be removed from IE7...
For about the same reason Linux/x86 is immune to Windows viruses:P They may use the same family of CPUs, but somehow I doubt Cisco routers run some kind of MacOS derivative - and the flaw is in software, not in the CPU core. HIBT?
"Philips will do something similiar to a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) by switching the fluorescent backlight on and off at a rapid pace."...thus eliminating the only real advantage of LCD over CRT.
The designers will have a serious laugh off you all suggesting that the GPS is unnecessary and over-the-top, if a huge asteroid strikes Earth, tilts it by some 30 degrees off its original axis and the devices will just readjust themselves for new location and continue to function;D
There's way more to successful formats than the structure. But let me name two essentials. What use is a format of data if the data itself is useless? How can a format take off when only few have access to publishing in it? That's the way Gopher went. Only admins could add pages. Meantime, most of people with access to the net, were able to create their own ~/public_html Now RSS is the big thing. People add RSS to everything. Where are MSIE's "channels"? Spamvertisment available to the chosen few. Revolutionary video tape technologies competetive to VHS: None in shops, few movies available. And so on, and so on...
Pain-killers that is, when the vinyl goes exploding around the room, scattering shrapnels in all directions, spewing death and destruction... Better than Russian Roulette!
Rotational motor of a DVD will run way too fast and generate too little torque. Just think of spin-up speed of a CD, and compare mass of a CD to mass of the turntable. Head movement motor would be much better, but I'm afraid still too slow or too jerky (depending whether you include the gears or attach it directly).
The only reasonable option I see here: Attach the turntable directly to the floppy motor, detach motor from the floppy electronics, then drive it through a microcontroller with several DAC outputs, performing very precise micro-stepping for driving it - increasing the resolution about 256 times:)
In the good old times when 8 bits was the data word size, I got a vinyl record with songs of some band. And the last track was a program for ZX Spectrum - a quiz about the band. To use it you had to copy the track to tape and then load in the tape-recorder of the computer. Never got around to do this, but I still have the record somewhere. Not booting, but...
People, keep engineering stuff away from Inkscape! We need a decent vector gfx ARTISTIC program! XFig is for tech vector drawings, add this kind of stuff there!
These are two completely different programs. While Inkscape is aimed at artists, for drawing clip art, chrome, posters, this kind of stuff (generally - Corel Draw audience), XFig is a technical drawing software, for techie people who draw schemes for papers, figures for tech books etc. Drawing a cute smiling girl in XFig will be just as hard (and inappropriate) as drawing a rotational stress graph of a railway car in Inkscape.
Groovy that I'll have yet another operating system choice...but when I'm running Mac OS on my ATX mobo and my garage-sale monitor, *what* advantage will Mac have left over other OSs?
The Choice. Between yet another friggin' slow, sucky cheapo system you can run on garage sale ATX mobo, and a state of the art system running on state of the art hardware. With Intel CPUs. Don't worry, it will be the same way as XBox - sure you can run Windows apps, Linux or whatever on XBox, it's just a PC. Sure you can run XBox Media Center or any XBox game on generic Windows computer. But to have XBox games run 100% like the designers meant them, with maximum stability, optimum performance, no unexpected glitches, you need XBox. It's "we fly what we test" thing, MacOS being optimized for Intel Macs, and running -barely- on anything else, and anything running on Intel Macs, with effort.
It's the same as our everyday's installing Linux on your grandma's toaster, or launching emulated arcade games on your standard issue PC, only a bit less so. It can be made to work, but don't expect the toasts will taste better than with original manufacturer's firmware.
Slashdot Mirror
True.
And to build bigger structures like interplanetary vessels.
Could be an extension of the Space Station.
...except it's not going to work.
Democracy has failed a big time in the US. The elections have no meaning. The true elections happen behind the scenes, when the candidates are choosen. Then, what is handed to the People, is a big show and ballots filled with dopplegangers. They may look different, talk differently, promise different stuff, but once elected, they follow exactly the same route the opponent would.
The US shuttle could in theory be modified to support unmanned flight, but can't lower its landing gear automatically -- the astronauts wanted there to always be a function that would require a human to be physically there. So the only switch that can lower the gear is the one on the pilot's side of the main control panel, right near the rotational hand controller.
So, say, they all go unconscious during the descent, because something went wrong and deceleration, vibrations, some fumes from overheating installations or something like that happened, ground control switches the shuttle remotely to automatic, guides the shuttle to the landing strip and shouts in the speakers "Wake up! Wake up! Open the landing gear!" and then "crash" just because it couldn't be automatically opened?
Way smart, you brave American boys!
In Soviet Russia ...space shuttle flies you around all by itself ;)
1) NOT tax-refundable. Simply the idea must be so novel, original and VALUABLE that it allows you to earn this kind of money. Actually, this could be counted AS tax! Well, patents are sometimes ALL that companies posess. They are considered VERY valuable by some. Why not tax them?
2) Possibly include another field: "Expected patent value". Your fee (increasing) would depend on it, but you would be able to claim only so-and-so much in court for patent infringement, and you would be obligated to sell the patent to anyone willing to buy it for no more than some fixed X times the "expected value". If you think your patent will earn you $10bln/year, pay up $100mln up front and be assured of your monopoly because nobody will shell out 100 times that. If you expect it to bring more like $1000/year, keep paying your $10, $20, $40, $80 yearly till some software giant decides to come and buy it from you for $100k.
3) if over 3 (5?) years you didn't manage to earn enough on your patent to keep it, it wasn't good enough. The whole idea is that costs of retaining the patent should follow closely (but at a reasonable distance) the curve of profit from a good patent. If in year 8 you are supposed to earn $20mln/year, and in year 9 you expect it doubled, you should gladly pay $8mln in year 8 to retain your position. But if this thing doesn't bring you expected profits, rethink it and drop your monopoly, maybe somebody will innovate and do this better. Or maybe you ought to innovate, patent the innovation, drop v1.0 to public domain and start selling "New, better" v2.0?
4) With 3-5 good patents, it makes perfect sense and is affordable for everyone. But if your company wants to keep a portfolio of 1000 patents, it suddenly becomes horribly expensive and you must drop 950 of them just to keep remaining 50. Or drop the value of the 950 to level affordable by all the startups...
Reasons why Russians flew Buran just once? A successful unmanned flight? (something US shuttles aren't capable of!)
1) To prove they can (cold war thing)
2) To waste no more money on a failed conception.
In the US, the shuttles are a pet of the military, government and different agencies. NASA would gladly retire them a long time ago, but they aren't allowed to. Russians recognized that Buran, despite being way better than the US shuttles, is still a bad design - too much redundant mass to be lifted into the orbit, too many parts that may fail, costs saved on reuse of the shuttle totally obliterated by costs of extra fuel, preparation and rebuilding non-reusable parts. Shuttles as such are a failed design and should be abandonned.
What we need is:
- a dedicated human transport vehicle. Something like the shuttle, just WAY smaller. Less weight, less energy wasted, less parts. 4-6 people, to orbit and back. Maybe launched from a plane, maybe from the ground, like a shuttle.
- a versatile orbital transport vehicle. Never meant to reenter the atmosphere, possibly docked to the space station most of the time. Automatic repairs, repairs on spacewalks, readjusting orbits of satellites, etc. refuelled with supplies delivered from Earth, but not much fuel required really.
- a cargo transport rocket. No need to limit thrust to grant human survival like in case of shuttles. Just transport cargo to orbit. Parts reusable in "best effort" manner, that is, drop on a parachute, if it's damaged/destroyed - no biggie. Cheap transport into space.
- emergency landers. Like the Soyuz capsules. Say, the human transport got damaged on launch and is incapable of reentry. Leave it on the orbit as another orbital transport, send the crew back in capsules.
Oh, but the "No open box policy" is a clear violation of EULA.
Or maybe the other way around?
> You got a nice buffer overflow going on there. That strzTemp should be 4 tchars wide to fit in the string terminator.
Thank you for reporting this. This issue exists in our database with ticket Q3579550. It's meant to be that way. Some applications depend on this behaviour.
Sincerely
Microsoft debug dept.
Yes, it would.
Alternative: Incremental renewal fee. If this patent is worth to you more than $1mln to keep it for the next year after first 3, pay $1mln. Then worth $2mln for another year? $4mln for sixth year? $8mln for seventh?
The most useless patents would get released really fast.
clearly, a contract is agreed upon BEFORE the transaction not after.
Sorry, but lawyers are paid to be smarter than that. Accepting the EULA -is- the final step of the transaction. Even though you paid for a box with Microsoft software in it at the cash register, even though you got the bill, paid the money and said "good-bye" to the shopkeeper, you haven't finished the purchase. With anything else, consumer electronics, food, cars - you did. Not with software. Not until you clicked "I Agree". And if you don't, you have full right to return the software for a full refund, essentially cancelling the process of transaction.
Somehow I find it disturbing: it has a cheesy look and a fishy smell.
The downside is that browsers don't give programmers full access to a computer's resources such as memory, process power and hard disk space. This is a bottleneck the engineer sees being removed in future, although he thinks the simplicity of the current Web browsing experience needs to be maintained.
One thing where MSIE excels over Firefox is exactly providing totally unrestricted access to all the system resources of the client's system, for any website developer/programmer, even without need for confirmation from the user. Although Microsoft swears by God that this feature will be removed from IE7...
For about the same reason Linux/x86 is immune to Windows viruses :P
They may use the same family of CPUs, but somehow I doubt Cisco routers run some kind of MacOS derivative - and the flaw is in software, not in the CPU core.
HIBT?
"Philips will do something similiar to a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) by switching the fluorescent backlight on and off at a rapid pace." ...thus eliminating the only real advantage of LCD over CRT.
The designers will have a serious laugh off you all suggesting that the GPS is unnecessary and over-the-top, if a huge asteroid strikes Earth, tilts it by some 30 degrees off its original axis and the devices will just readjust themselves for new location and continue to function ;D
You know, using thermonuclear fusion to desalinize water in oceans and use it for watering agricultural terrains is pretty old too. It's called rain.
There's way more to successful formats than the structure. But let me name two essentials.
What use is a format of data if the data itself is useless?
How can a format take off when only few have access to publishing in it?
That's the way Gopher went. Only admins could add pages. Meantime, most of people with access to the net, were able to create their own ~/public_html
Now RSS is the big thing. People add RSS to everything. Where are MSIE's "channels"? Spamvertisment available to the chosen few. Revolutionary video tape technologies competetive to VHS: None in shops, few movies available. And so on, and so on...
Nope, it was a Polish band. Sorry, don't remember the name (I can check when back home, if you want, though)
Pain-killers that is, when the vinyl goes exploding around the room, scattering shrapnels in all directions, spewing death and destruction...
Better than Russian Roulette!
Rotational motor of a DVD will run way too fast and generate too little torque. Just think of spin-up speed of a CD, and compare mass of a CD to mass of the turntable. Head movement motor would be much better, but I'm afraid still too slow or too jerky (depending whether you include the gears or attach it directly).
:)
The only reasonable option I see here: Attach the turntable directly to the floppy motor, detach motor from the floppy electronics, then drive it through a microcontroller with several DAC outputs, performing very precise micro-stepping for driving it - increasing the resolution about 256 times
In the good old times when 8 bits was the data word size, I got a vinyl record with songs of some band. And the last track was a program for ZX Spectrum - a quiz about the band. To use it you had to copy the track to tape and then load in the tape-recorder of the computer. Never got around to do this, but I still have the record somewhere.
Not booting, but...
Which of these Sybians is being used by Nokia?
NSFW.
People, keep engineering stuff away from Inkscape! We need a decent vector gfx ARTISTIC program! XFig is for tech vector drawings, add this kind of stuff there!
These are two completely different programs.
While Inkscape is aimed at artists, for drawing clip art, chrome, posters, this kind of stuff (generally - Corel Draw audience), XFig is a technical drawing software, for techie people who draw schemes for papers, figures for tech books etc. Drawing a cute smiling girl in XFig will be just as hard (and inappropriate) as drawing a rotational stress graph of a railway car in Inkscape.
Groovy that I'll have yet another operating system choice...but when I'm running Mac OS on my ATX mobo and my garage-sale monitor, *what* advantage will Mac have left over other OSs?
The Choice.
Between yet another friggin' slow, sucky cheapo system you can run on garage sale ATX mobo, and a state of the art system running on state of the art hardware. With Intel CPUs. Don't worry, it will be the same way as XBox - sure you can run Windows apps, Linux or whatever on XBox, it's just a PC. Sure you can run XBox Media Center or any XBox game on generic Windows computer. But to have XBox games run 100% like the designers meant them, with maximum stability, optimum performance, no unexpected glitches, you need XBox. It's "we fly what we test" thing, MacOS being optimized for Intel Macs, and running -barely- on anything else, and anything running on Intel Macs, with effort.
It's the same as our everyday's installing Linux on your grandma's toaster, or launching emulated arcade games on your standard issue PC, only a bit less so. It can be made to work, but don't expect the toasts will taste better than with original manufacturer's firmware.