The extra costs are passed to consumers who still buy the stuff at the so-inflated prices.
If prices and restrictions exceed a certain reasonable level, people will think twice before buying stuff. This will shrink the market space, reduce sales, increase price, cause people to think thrice, etc.
The entertainment industry is doing a mighty fine job setting itself up for suicide, the war against P2P is only a distraction from their internal/legacy issues.
My parents once had a game device called "Multiscore" (I think). The device had two "game pads" with one knob which people rotated to move their on-screen paddle. That was 20+ years ago.
My mom also owned a radio clock whose time could be set by rotating the adjustment knob some 10+ years ago, probably the most intuitive clock I have ever reset the time on and the only digital clock I know of that ever allowed "scrolling" backwards when adjusting time.
As far as I am concerned, the scroll wheel that appeared on mice 5+ years ago should also qualify as rotational input... and so would my Logitech Trackman Marble.
Scrolling is an universal concept and a rotating input device is an obviously intuitive way of doing it and should not be patentable even by M$.
If you have all of the following: 1) bill with vendor address on which the Windows copy in question is present 2) the Windows certificate 3) the Windows CD
Then there is not much else Microsoft could ask for. Keeping bills is good practice to collect insurance in case of theft, flooding, fire, etc. Windows certificates and CDs should be kept for as long as the copies in question are going to be used. There is no good reason for people not to be able to produce at least these three pieces of evidence... unless the vendor did not provide them in the first place, which would be awfully suspicious.
In a guided tour of some Northern Telecom (now Nortel) facilities in the '80s, I saw some CAD stations with quad-button mice. This was a few years before I got my first PC (1988, 3-button Logitec brick included), so 1985 would be roughly it.
What I find funny is that the Macs' stock mouse still has only one button and is still overpriced when adding an extra button or two makes nearly no difference on the parts+assembly cost. Has Apple upgraded its stock mouse from rubber ball to optical yet?
The "having more than one button is confusing" argument (I think this is/was the official Apple line) sounds like an insult to intelligence for me: having to press key combinations to emulate extra buttons is much more confusing for anyone new to Macs.
I wonder what proportion of Mac actually do replace their mouse for a multi-button one, I am guessing a surprisingly low amount do for reasons other than replacing a dead rodent though.
And just like the shepherd, the government keeps its sheep alive and well to: 1) shear them 2) skin them 3) eat them
With more laws favourising businesses over people, people get treated increasingly more like sheep.
Well, this lack of long-term vision will eventually backfire and cause damage far worse than they may be imagining now. The digital age was supposed to mean convergence... but with all the proprietary DRM, media formats and incompatible platforms, it looks more like an age of divergence.
There is a difference between "generating current" and "generating current pulses".... but generating current pulses is really a matter of shaping the applied voltage to obtain the required current rise, sustain and fall times. Now, doing this with mega-joules of stored energy with a mega-amps target must require some interesting bits of kit.
(For a rough idea of what kind of damage 1MJ can do, imagine a 1kg brick flung at 1400m/s... the testing room itself probably has some interesting safety measures built into it too.)
Current is only a measure of how fast charges are exchanged across two bodies of different electrical potential. Provide a discharge path from two such bodies and you will have "generated" a current. A consequence cannot be generated, only the conditions that lead to it can be.
From a power distribution perspective, generating energy means providing energy to the grid. Atlas draws energy from the grid so it should have beeen something like "for the 10us it operates, Atlas _uses_ energy equivalent to four times the worldwide production."
Well, even if the report's wording has multiple flaws, successfully switching capacitor banks worth over 1MJ to sustain a 19MA pulse for some microseconds is still impressive.
The public will educate itself once DRM starts breaking stuff and get in the way of most of what Joe Sixpack usually does.
After this happens, the publishers will get an educative round of their own when sales start to suffer from restricted fair use while the costs of handling complaints flare up.
It is only at that point that the content industry might realize that the cost of DRM outweights the benefits... but they could decide to put up with reduced DRM'd sales as a matter of principle.
DRM will polarize the market towards extremes... either fully locked-up and secure (give or take some transient buffer overflow exploits) or fully open. I wonder how much of an impact DRM and TCPA will have on GNU and other's uptake.
Wireless routers should not ship enabled to force people to read the Quick-Start sheet (which would include security tips and appropriate warnings) at least once.
The SSID might give a hint about wether or not the network is intentionally open but beyond this, there is no telling... "locks keep honest people out."
Re:current == power?
on
19 million Amps
·
· Score: 5, Informative
From later in TFA: "During the few milionths of a second that it operates, Atlas generates electrical energy roughly four times the Earth's entire energy production."
This is almost technically right except for "Atlas generates"... Atlas is only a huge capacitor bank, it does not magically "generate" energy, it only stores existing energy.
Now, if worldwide production is something like 25GW and the pulse lasts 10us, we have 25GW * 4 * 10us = 1MJ, a balievable finite quantity.
If I sell you a non-transferable license that allows you to use my code in your proprietary commercial software then this license and related rights have some value only for as long as you are in business.
What is a non-transferable license worth in a bankrupty? Not much. Even if the licenses are transferable, they often have clauses that need to be re-assed before the transfer can be approved. If Novell only licensed SCO to use its code, all SCO owns is a license and its own (if any) contributions... unless Novell has pulled an SCO on SCO by including an "All your bases are belong to us" clause in the license. (IIRC, SCO licensees are required to grant SCO unlimited rights to any enhancements... such as IBM's JFS and NUMA work.)
M$ does not need to sue companies... simply asking for royalties is intimidating enough. If the patent has some undeniable value, the smaller players are more likely to pay up than risk a much more expensive case that is likely not going to go their way.
At least, I feel better after reading the mass USPTO exodus story. I hope this is really caused (directly or otherwise) by software patents. That would show the powers that be how defective and inadequate the patent system is. If software patents can kill the patent system, they certainly could kill the whole industry.
Novell says it never transferred any copyrights to SCO but SCO is saying it owns the said rights. SCO is also claiming ownership or other similar rights on a bunch of stuff that is known to be from external sources such as IBM.
If Novell still owns most of the copyrights and third parties like IBM own the real rights to most of the rest, the actual worth of what rightfully belongs to SCO will not amount to much. These ownerships would most likely have to be sorted out in court before they can be sold off if there are any outstanding challenges or reason to believe there may be any.
New Windows vulnerabilities announced here lead to a rehash of all the FOSS vs closed-source jokes and other stuff while tones mysteriously get more serious when FOSS vulnerabilities are found.
Internet archives are bad and violations of copyright which lawyers will complain loudly about when they have to face incriminating evidence coming from such services... but when internet archives contain evidence needed to close cases, they suddenly become indispensable tools.
N-tuple standards are annoying but that is the world we are in.
It would be sweet if that was really what is happening.
I predicted years ago that the USPTO was doomed from application overdose and that software patents would act as a catalyst... but I was not expecting results so soon.
If software patents can kill the patent system and force a proper patent reform, there may still be hope for common sense. In a way, this would be similar to invalidating laws by proving mass disobedience: overload until the system crumbles.
So they essentially invented XP Starter Second Edition.
WinXP Starter SE: Discover new ways of not being able to do anything useful even without the 800x600 resolution limit, 128MB RAM limit, three processes limit, etc.
This is probably one of the more briliant ideas from M$ in a long time: consumers who get/got screwed by their OEM can trade evidence that their OEM is shifting fraudulent copies of M$ software for legit copies.
1) Let OEMs shift fraudulent copies 2) Get the customers to seek relief from said fraud 3) Collect evidence against OEM 4) Go after said OEM's pockets 5) Profit (fraud + copyright infringement + etc. = most likely more than enough to cover legal costs)
That would cover the vibrations... but is it certified to resist friction from 100-500km/h surface winds and related pressures?
While temperatures go down as we go up in the troposphere, they start going back up afterwards... is Saran Wrap certified for >200C temperatures too?
I am guessing that any wrap that did not pop right off within the first minute or two would melt/burn off instead some more minutes later, probably before booster separation... or even sooner if it catches fire during lift-off.
[Argh,/. fudged up my posting because I used a < in it...]... < -20C in the tank, > 100C saturated water outside -> could rupture the tanks from thermal shock and/or generate an ice crust in seconds.
#define rant... what's the meaning of posting in plain-text when the posts get "reformatted" anyway?!? Annoying and it makes some of my posts read like garbage. #undef rant
On one side of the tank, you have O2 and H2 at 100C saturated water vapour that will surround them seconds after ignition. The thermal shock on naked tanks could rupture them, which would very likely lead to very nasty consequences. Also, in such a water-rich environment, it would take only seconds to grow ice sheets some milimeters thick on a naked tank... even atmospheric moisture would be enough for that over the first few minutes of ascent where atmospheric moisture is still significant.
So, the insulation is necessary before, during and after launch for at least two reasons.
The problem with the insulation and whatever you put on it is that the tanks's temperature drops as the tanks depressurise. This causes the insulation to become stiffer and the tanks to shrink, causing some foam to detach. Vibrations will cause the insulation to crack and shake some pieces off. The foam they use now probably is not the same as 20-30 years ago.
Adding paint on top of it probably only increases the risk of stuff chipping off during lift-off. IIRC, the main reason for painting was for observability. Frozen or simply dried paint is fairly brittle... the reason why these tanks are insulated is to prevent frosting after all.
Slashdot Mirror
+1, Funny
I know I wouldn't trust any eMail related to financial services and would prefer calling over clicking some links for anything worth worrying about.
The extra costs are passed to consumers who still buy the stuff at the so-inflated prices.
If prices and restrictions exceed a certain reasonable level, people will think twice before buying stuff. This will shrink the market space, reduce sales, increase price, cause people to think thrice, etc.
The entertainment industry is doing a mighty fine job setting itself up for suicide, the war against P2P is only a distraction from their internal/legacy issues.
My parents once had a game device called "Multiscore" (I think). The device had two "game pads" with one knob which people rotated to move their on-screen paddle. That was 20+ years ago.
My mom also owned a radio clock whose time could be set by rotating the adjustment knob some 10+ years ago, probably the most intuitive clock I have ever reset the time on and the only digital clock I know of that ever allowed "scrolling" backwards when adjusting time.
As far as I am concerned, the scroll wheel that appeared on mice 5+ years ago should also qualify as rotational input... and so would my Logitech Trackman Marble.
Scrolling is an universal concept and a rotating input device is an obviously intuitive way of doing it and should not be patentable even by M$.
Note: your iStore session expired so the link is dead.
Gotta love sessions and time-outs for the many ways they can be used to prevent deep linking.
If you have all of the following:
1) bill with vendor address on which the Windows copy in question is present
2) the Windows certificate
3) the Windows CD
Then there is not much else Microsoft could ask for. Keeping bills is good practice to collect insurance in case of theft, flooding, fire, etc. Windows certificates and CDs should be kept for as long as the copies in question are going to be used. There is no good reason for people not to be able to produce at least these three pieces of evidence... unless the vendor did not provide them in the first place, which would be awfully suspicious.
Well, Mac users have Diablo and humm...
(Of the three people I know to own Macs, only one plays game(s) on it and Diablo is the only one I have ever seen/heard on/from it.)
In a guided tour of some Northern Telecom (now Nortel) facilities in the '80s, I saw some CAD stations with quad-button mice. This was a few years before I got my first PC (1988, 3-button Logitec brick included), so 1985 would be roughly it.
What I find funny is that the Macs' stock mouse still has only one button and is still overpriced when adding an extra button or two makes nearly no difference on the parts+assembly cost. Has Apple upgraded its stock mouse from rubber ball to optical yet?
The "having more than one button is confusing" argument (I think this is/was the official Apple line) sounds like an insult to intelligence for me: having to press key combinations to emulate extra buttons is much more confusing for anyone new to Macs.
I wonder what proportion of Mac actually do replace their mouse for a multi-button one, I am guessing a surprisingly low amount do for reasons other than replacing a dead rodent though.
And just like the shepherd, the government keeps its sheep alive and well to:
1) shear them
2) skin them
3) eat them
With more laws favourising businesses over people, people get treated increasingly more like sheep.
Well, this lack of long-term vision will eventually backfire and cause damage far worse than they may be imagining now. The digital age was supposed to mean convergence... but with all the proprietary DRM, media formats and incompatible platforms, it looks more like an age of divergence.
There is a difference between "generating current" and "generating current pulses". ... but generating current pulses is really a matter of shaping the applied voltage to obtain the required current rise, sustain and fall times. Now, doing this with mega-joules of stored energy with a mega-amps target must require some interesting bits of kit.
(For a rough idea of what kind of damage 1MJ can do, imagine a 1kg brick flung at 1400m/s... the testing room itself probably has some interesting safety measures built into it too.)
Current is only a measure of how fast charges are exchanged across two bodies of different electrical potential. Provide a discharge path from two such bodies and you will have "generated" a current. A consequence cannot be generated, only the conditions that lead to it can be.
From a power distribution perspective, generating energy means providing energy to the grid. Atlas draws energy from the grid so it should have beeen something like "for the 10us it operates, Atlas _uses_ energy equivalent to four times the worldwide production."
Well, even if the report's wording has multiple flaws, successfully switching capacitor banks worth over 1MJ to sustain a 19MA pulse for some microseconds is still impressive.
The public will educate itself once DRM starts breaking stuff and get in the way of most of what Joe Sixpack usually does.
After this happens, the publishers will get an educative round of their own when sales start to suffer from restricted fair use while the costs of handling complaints flare up.
It is only at that point that the content industry might realize that the cost of DRM outweights the benefits... but they could decide to put up with reduced DRM'd sales as a matter of principle.
DRM will polarize the market towards extremes... either fully locked-up and secure (give or take some transient buffer overflow exploits) or fully open. I wonder how much of an impact DRM and TCPA will have on GNU and other's uptake.
Exactly.
Wireless routers should not ship enabled to force people to read the Quick-Start sheet (which would include security tips and appropriate warnings) at least once.
The SSID might give a hint about wether or not the network is intentionally open but beyond this, there is no telling... "locks keep honest people out."
From later in TFA: "During the few milionths of a second that it operates, Atlas generates electrical energy roughly four times the Earth's entire energy production."
This is almost technically right except for "Atlas generates"... Atlas is only a huge capacitor bank, it does not magically "generate" energy, it only stores existing energy.
Now, if worldwide production is something like 25GW and the pulse lasts 10us, we have 25GW * 4 * 10us = 1MJ, a balievable finite quantity.
If I sell you a non-transferable license that allows you to use my code in your proprietary commercial software then this license and related rights have some value only for as long as you are in business.
What is a non-transferable license worth in a bankrupty? Not much. Even if the licenses are transferable, they often have clauses that need to be re-assed before the transfer can be approved. If Novell only licensed SCO to use its code, all SCO owns is a license and its own (if any) contributions... unless Novell has pulled an SCO on SCO by including an "All your bases are belong to us" clause in the license. (IIRC, SCO licensees are required to grant SCO unlimited rights to any enhancements... such as IBM's JFS and NUMA work.)
M$ does not need to sue companies... simply asking for royalties is intimidating enough. If the patent has some undeniable value, the smaller players are more likely to pay up than risk a much more expensive case that is likely not going to go their way.
At least, I feel better after reading the mass USPTO exodus story. I hope this is really caused (directly or otherwise) by software patents. That would show the powers that be how defective and inadequate the patent system is. If software patents can kill the patent system, they certainly could kill the whole industry.
What IP does SCO own?
Novell says it never transferred any copyrights to SCO but SCO is saying it owns the said rights. SCO is also claiming ownership or other similar rights on a bunch of stuff that is known to be from external sources such as IBM.
If Novell still owns most of the copyrights and third parties like IBM own the real rights to most of the rest, the actual worth of what rightfully belongs to SCO will not amount to much. These ownerships would most likely have to be sorted out in court before they can be sold off if there are any outstanding challenges or reason to believe there may be any.
We live in a world of double standards.
New Windows vulnerabilities announced here lead to a rehash of all the FOSS vs closed-source jokes and other stuff while tones mysteriously get more serious when FOSS vulnerabilities are found.
Internet archives are bad and violations of copyright which lawyers will complain loudly about when they have to face incriminating evidence coming from such services... but when internet archives contain evidence needed to close cases, they suddenly become indispensable tools.
N-tuple standards are annoying but that is the world we are in.
It would be sweet if that was really what is happening.
I predicted years ago that the USPTO was doomed from application overdose and that software patents would act as a catalyst... but I was not expecting results so soon.
If software patents can kill the patent system and force a proper patent reform, there may still be hope for common sense. In a way, this would be similar to invalidating laws by proving mass disobedience: overload until the system crumbles.
So they essentially invented XP Starter Second Edition.
WinXP Starter SE: Discover new ways of not being able to do anything useful even without the 800x600 resolution limit, 128MB RAM limit, three processes limit, etc.
This is probably one of the more briliant ideas from M$ in a long time: consumers who get/got screwed by their OEM can trade evidence that their OEM is shifting fraudulent copies of M$ software for legit copies.
1) Let OEMs shift fraudulent copies
2) Get the customers to seek relief from said fraud
3) Collect evidence against OEM
4) Go after said OEM's pockets
5) Profit (fraud + copyright infringement + etc. = most likely more than enough to cover legal costs)
That would cover the vibrations... but is it certified to resist friction from 100-500km/h surface winds and related pressures?
While temperatures go down as we go up in the troposphere, they start going back up afterwards... is Saran Wrap certified for >200C temperatures too?
I am guessing that any wrap that did not pop right off within the first minute or two would melt/burn off instead some more minutes later, probably before booster separation... or even sooner if it catches fire during lift-off.
[Argh, /. fudged up my posting because I used a < in it...] ... < -20C in the tank, > 100C saturated water outside -> could rupture the tanks from thermal shock and/or generate an ice crust in seconds.
... what's the meaning of posting in plain-text when the posts get "reformatted" anyway?!? Annoying and it makes some of my posts read like garbage.
#define rant
#undef rant
This would not be a good idea.
On one side of the tank, you have O2 and H2 at 100C saturated water vapour that will surround them seconds after ignition. The thermal shock on naked tanks could rupture them, which would very likely lead to very nasty consequences. Also, in such a water-rich environment, it would take only seconds to grow ice sheets some milimeters thick on a naked tank... even atmospheric moisture would be enough for that over the first few minutes of ascent where atmospheric moisture is still significant.
So, the insulation is necessary before, during and after launch for at least two reasons.
The problem with the insulation and whatever you put on it is that the tanks's temperature drops as the tanks depressurise. This causes the insulation to become stiffer and the tanks to shrink, causing some foam to detach. Vibrations will cause the insulation to crack and shake some pieces off. The foam they use now probably is not the same as 20-30 years ago.
Adding paint on top of it probably only increases the risk of stuff chipping off during lift-off. IIRC, the main reason for painting was for observability. Frozen or simply dried paint is fairly brittle... the reason why these tanks are insulated is to prevent frosting after all.