Depends on the state. Just as an example, in Pennsylvania there is no court entitled "Small Claims", but there is a "Magisterial Court" that decides similar cases (dollar amounts below a certain threshold). The press often refers to this as "small claims court". Magisterial Court cases are formal trials: you can be represented by counsel, witnesses are called, closing arguments are made and you better make all of your points because the judge doesn't ask follow-up questions like in some states' small claims court.
Why should GM have to disclose how/why they are waiting to implement a new anti-lock braking system if the only reason is because they are waiting to put it on a new uber-cool model that they do not want to tell the market about yet. Having a patent on an anti-lock braking system has nothing whatsoever to do with which models they decide to or not to include the system on. Inventions are patented, not products.
"Realistically speaking, if it truly takes you half the lifespan of the patent to bring a product to market, it is very unlikely that you will ever recoup your initial investment during the patent duration, so you're pretty much screwed either way."
That is so wrong I'm not even quite sure how to respond. Companies actually do this all the time. Inventions don't necessarily take vast amounts of money to develop. Edison said "perspiration" not "large bank accounts". Sometimes the reason you don't use an invention right away has nothing to do with the initial investment made on that investment.
As far as the third point. You realize you would give a company ten years to implement a secret patent. What if another company was working on something similar for the last nine of those years? Don't you think they should have some way of finding out they are wasting their time.
I really don't think you thought this through at all.
You've also created a situation where not only the invention covered by the patent, but every step in the process of bringing the invention to market would have to be disclosed -- process of refining the invention, incorporating it into a larger product, product strategy (maybe the market is not ready to use or pay for the product), marketing decisions, and the list goes on.
What if a company was to invent a great invention but it took eleven years before the production technology matured to where the product made economic sense to actually put on the market? Too bad for them? You shouldn't invent something that's too expensive to sell?
Finally, try to prove you've developed any kind of complex invention "from the ground up", if there is already a published patent covering the invention. You'll see a lot of engineers in internet cafe's using fake IDs to download patent searches.
-Most modern fly-by-wire fighter aircraft are unstable and rely on the computers to maintain stability. F117 is far from unique in this aspect. BTW, F117 looks much more unstable than it is. Its fundamentally a delta wing fighter.
-Its certainly possible to compare a stealth aircraft to non-stealth. You merely state: "if we ignore stealth..."
-I'm not well versed enough in air combat doctrine to know whether F-22 is a "colossal waste of money", but I'm not gonna argue that its a colossal amount of money. To the extent it outperforms other aircraft, it certainly only does so on the back of a ridiculously large cash investment.
-Stealth has never been claimed to be "invisible". That is an invention of the media. Stealth is hardER to track and shoot down. That's it.
-No one has ever claimed F-22 will be "impervious to SAM or AAM attacks". It will be harder to shoot down than a non-stealth plane, and (compared to any current or near future opposing aircraft) will be able to target and shoot down enemy aircraft before being detected by them.
-"I guess the main thing is, if it can cut down their effective range, or enable an easier missile evasion, it's considerably safer for the pilot, and the USAF's pocketbook." -- EXACTLY. But don't forget perhaps the most important factor. While its important to get the pilot and the plane back in one piece, perhaps the most important factor is getting the mission completed. Stealth allows for missions that would otherwise be impossible, or at least missions that would otherwise have too high an odds of failure to be worth attempting.
-"But still, if an opfor (china, maybe?) comes up with an operational analog to the Australian Jindalee Operational Radar Network, the F/A-22, in essence, along with the F-35, B-2, F-117 and any other stealth aircraft the US might develop, will become nothing more than a standard aircraft. The other thing you have to ask yourself is, current radar is absorbed by the F/A-22's RAM coating, among other 'stealthy' characteristics. But what happens if conventional radar changes?" -- This represents a common misconception about stealth. No one has yet developed a radar system that tracks/targets a stealth bird as well as conventional radar. Its not clear that would ever even be possible. It is likely a stealth bird would always have some level of advantage over a conventional bird.
-Detecting gaps in radar is a viable approach to tracking stealth planes. As you note, it already exists. However, it's much less accurate than traditional radar. If you were a pilot, you would much rather be in a stealth plane vs one of those systems, than in a regular plan vs traditional radar system.
-Remember, also, that stealth planes will be operating in an environment where enemy air defenses are being targeted in other ways, as well. Take out a couple emitters in one of those "looking for the gaps" systems, put up a couple jammers, etc. and suddenly stealth starts looking pretty advantageous again.
Its really hard to argue that stealth is not a good thing. The only reasonable question is "at what extra cost is stealth worth it", and I admit to not being knowledgeable enough in air combat to take a position on that subject.
F-22 has a superior radar to anything the Russians have ever even imagined. F-22s radar can scan with low probablity of intercept, can act as a jammer, can act as a high-bandwidth data link and scan enemy communications. These functions can overlap.
The combination of F-22's radar and avionics provides superior target acquisition abilities and superior situational awareness compared to any Russian fighter.
F-22 is capable of supercruise -- sustained supersonic flight without using the afterburner.
F-22 has a higher top speed, higher thrust-to-weight ratio (can accelerate faster) and a higher ceiling than Su-37. As indicated by the supercruise ability, F-22 can sustain top speed for much longer than Su-37.
F-22 can carry a larger weapons load than Su-35 and do so in its internal bays. Additional carrying capacity is available on under-wind hard points.
The only advantage of Su-37 is close-range dog fighting, and that ability has never been demonstrated by anyone other than an extremely skilled test pilot. Its not clear how easy any of those maneuvers would be for a typical front-line pilot to learn or, more importantly, implement in a stressful combat environment.
Extreme maneuverability can be very important to an aircraft, I'll grant you, but Su-37 hardly "outperforms the F/A-22 in every aspect but stealth". Not even close.
Guys, its really easy to argue free speech and all, but don't we need to take drastic measures to try to put a dent in this unprecedented crime wave we've been seeing since violent video games became epidemic.
What in the GPL stops them from doing so? Including a shrinkwrapped copy of Red Hat, for example, would keep them from being considered a propagator under GPLv3, so the license would have no jurisdiction.
In other news today, China announces a "Great Leap Forward".
In addition to new agricultural and industrial processes, all traffic signals will be upgraded so that Red (the color of the People's Revolution) will represent "Go" and Green will represent "Stop".
The Politburo believes that this technological innovation will drive China's economy into the future.
"The goal of the program was to land men at the moon and return them safely; the goal wasn't to develop a certain technology, so this is a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison."
Which was exactly my point, although I think you said it better. They did not need, for example, to make the quantum leap to the Saturn V. Smaller heavy-lift rockets, known to be feasible in 1961, could have lifted the Apollo components separately and they could have mated in space. There was no known physical reason why any of the problems you listed could not be solved. They were sure they could mate two objects in space (although there was debate about the wisdom of relying on such a mating 230,000 miles from Earth), no one was particularly worried about the physics of landing on and taking off from the moon, the only question was which of many options would be the most practical. The problem of keeping the men alive for the period of time was merely a matter of having the lift capability for enough supplies. Except for the wackjobs, by that point they really weren't that worried about the effects of zero-g over that length of time. They were never worried about keeping the air in a capsule (its a lot easier to keep 1 atm of air in a capsule than keep 50 atm out of a submarine).
My comment about the cable was poorly worded. The problem is making a cable of the proper length, quality control and, most difficult from a theoretical point of view, tensile strength. Making nanotubes of proper length (they still need to be much longer than any that have been made so far), controlling the consistency of the process, finding a resin that is strong enough and then creating a process to make the cable in one long operation. Even in steel its not clear how easy it would be to do a cable that long with the manufacturing consistency that would be require (what if there is a flaw found in the middle?) The hardest part, though, is that nanotubes only have the proper tensile strength if you do, indeed, make them 62,000 miles long. Tensile strength drops off dramatically in a composite, because the resin needs to transfer the forces between the nanotubes. Its the resin that would fail, not the nanotubes themselves. Such a resin may not be physically possible. I wouldn't call something an "engineering problem" unless you have real confidence that its solvable. There is not enough friction between the nanotubes to rely on friction to transfer forces between individual tubes, the way friction transfers the force between strands in a steel cable. So we're stuck with finding a really strong resin and/or fusing the nanotubes together some other way. You can directly fuse nanotubes, but they lose tensile strength because they are no longer perfect chicken-wire-looking cylinders.
And that still would only solve the first of a series of problems that would have no workaround:
1) Getting the cable to space and unfurling it through the atmosphere to the base. Not an easy problem. May not, in fact, be practical.
2) Power delivery to climbers. It basically has to be lasers. Too much weight to carry the energy on-board, too much line-loss to transmit electricity up the cable. The only feasible form of electric delivery through the cable would be if the cable was superconducting, and we still don't know if that would be physically possible.
3) How you gonna keep the thing from breaking free (has to be virtually guaranteed not to). Calling this an "engineering problem" really trivializes the issue. It would really suck for it to come crashing down to Earth. There's no workaround if you realize that you can't afford the risk of the thing breaking loose.
But the main problem goes back to your point above. Large scale development projects have been successful when they do not rely on technology bottlenecks. Thinking of the two great 20th Century projects -- the Manhattan Project actually developed two very different weapons using two very different technology paths and Apollo had a multitude of possible methodologies they could
I think you're being a little cavalier about the difference between Apollo and the space elevator program. Apollo relied on developing a lot of technologies, but no one technology was critical to the success of the mission. If any one technology had proven impossible/impractical, there were possible workarounds. I don't know a lot of the nitty-gritty about Apollo, but I'd bet there's a lot of examples where a piece of technology that flew was actually a second or third attempt to solve a problem.
The issue I see with the space elevator is that there aren't really a lot of options if a critically-needed technology simply proves impossible. Only carbon nanotubes are known to even remotely provide the tensile strength we need. What if it is just impossible to make a carbon nanotube cable 62,000 miles long. We'd have to find some other material. Showstopper.
Laser beams are probably the only way to get the needed energy to the client. Its not entirely clear that the laser elements we would need -- high output over long periods of time -- are physically possible.
Wish I had mod points. (To clarify, I'd mod this comment +1, Insightful.)
I believe that the biggest impediment to understanding evolution is that people can't wrap their heads around the time scales involved. Even punctuated equilibrum argues that it takes millenia (thousands of generations) for macro changes to occur.
As recently as the G4 towers, a firmware update required the user to physically depress the Programmer's button (the hardware interrupt button) on the computer itself. This may be different now, although I doubt it. The whole point was to make software-only firmware updates impossible in order to avoid this very threat. The hardware simply will not re-flash the firmware without that button being pressed. So at least some social engineering is required to get users to press that button.
I always assumed all computers worked that way. Otherwise, it would be trivial to get people to ruin their firmware -- just trojan horse the thing.
On the contrary, the lack of Altivec will be noticed mostly up front. Over time, faster processors will offset the lack of Altivec, and it will become less noticeable.
This only applies because we'll be comparing a 2007 Intel processor to a 2005 G5 (had PPCMacs continued, Altivec would have continued to kick ass over SSEx). People replacing their G5 in 2007 will not see a decline in performance. They may not see the performance increase they generally would expect by upgrading, but that's much harder for a person to pin down than actually being slower. "Well, I guess its faster... but I would have expected it to be even more faster" is not anywhere near as bad as "WTF, my new computer transcodes to H.264 [or whatever] more slowly than my old computer" (which is unfortunately what we're seeing today).
"As I see it, if MLB can own the copyright on the video of the game, then they can own the copyright on what happened during the game. The two are one and the same."
Except that they are not one in the same. Its the same thing as being able to own the copyright to a specific movie version of Hamlet, versus owning the copyright to the script.
In this case the script, data, is inherently not copyrightable. I could read the phone book on TV and retain the copyright to the video. Doesn't give me a copyright to the phone book, though.
That's why Apple likes its secrets. Its not vaporware if you cancel/delay a product that no one knows about. You can't deliver less than what was hyped if you wait until delivery to do the hyping. (Well, its still possible that the product doesn't really work as well as advertised, but you won't have the problem of having dropped this or that feature at the last minute, because no one knows that feature was supposed to be there.)
I think you're getting a little paranoid here. They'd still have to correlate you with your IP address, since they only send the AppleID when you actually buy a song in the Music Store. Possible to do if they keep track of your address at the times when you do buy a song, but its not trivial to do. I think you really have to take off the tin-foil hat.
1) How is small droplets of algae in a stream of exhaust different from small bubbles of exhaust in a pool of algae? Surface area is the same either way, isn't it? (Assuming the bubbles and the droplets are roughly the same size.)
2) Surface area between the water and the exhaust is probably not a limiting factor here. I'd be surprised if the water wasn't at equilibrium with the exhaust.
3) I have a hard time in your system imagining how all that happens and still provides the same exposure to sunlight that the bubbling-through-clear-pipes system provides. Remember, this is a solar-powered system.
"it's still unethical for them to abuse their power like that"
Why is it unethical?
What is abusive about it?
The guy called his professor a "cockmaster". He was also very insulting about other students.
If you can't be respectful of professors and fellow students (or superiors and colleagues at a job) then the school (or job) has every right to throw you out. Frankly, I applaud them coming down hard on him. Its totally inappropriate what he did. Freedom of speech does not excuse inappriate behavior and does not require people to keep you around if you are acting inapproprately.
But if I just wrote "dirt" I wouldn't be able to show my superiority by using all those big words.:)
More seriously, the reason I didn't just say dirt is because the evolutionary background includes more than just dirt -- also impure water and uncooked food. Fortuntately, though, those last two probably aren't necessary as a preventative, should the hygene hypothesis be shown to be true. Dirt probably provides enough exposure to offset the hygene problems.
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Depends on the state. Just as an example, in Pennsylvania there is no court entitled "Small Claims", but there is a "Magisterial Court" that decides similar cases (dollar amounts below a certain threshold). The press often refers to this as "small claims court". Magisterial Court cases are formal trials: you can be represented by counsel, witnesses are called, closing arguments are made and you better make all of your points because the judge doesn't ask follow-up questions like in some states' small claims court.
Why should GM have to disclose how/why they are waiting to implement a new anti-lock braking system if the only reason is because they are waiting to put it on a new uber-cool model that they do not want to tell the market about yet. Having a patent on an anti-lock braking system has nothing whatsoever to do with which models they decide to or not to include the system on. Inventions are patented, not products.
"Realistically speaking, if it truly takes you half the lifespan of the patent to bring a product to market, it is very unlikely that you will ever recoup your initial investment during the patent duration, so you're pretty much screwed either way."
That is so wrong I'm not even quite sure how to respond. Companies actually do this all the time. Inventions don't necessarily take vast amounts of money to develop. Edison said "perspiration" not "large bank accounts". Sometimes the reason you don't use an invention right away has nothing to do with the initial investment made on that investment.
As far as the third point. You realize you would give a company ten years to implement a secret patent. What if another company was working on something similar for the last nine of those years? Don't you think they should have some way of finding out they are wasting their time.
I really don't think you thought this through at all.
Way to simplify the patent system.
You've also created a situation where not only the invention covered by the patent, but every step in the process of bringing the invention to market would have to be disclosed -- process of refining the invention, incorporating it into a larger product, product strategy (maybe the market is not ready to use or pay for the product), marketing decisions, and the list goes on.
What if a company was to invent a great invention but it took eleven years before the production technology matured to where the product made economic sense to actually put on the market? Too bad for them? You shouldn't invent something that's too expensive to sell?
Finally, try to prove you've developed any kind of complex invention "from the ground up", if there is already a published patent covering the invention. You'll see a lot of engineers in internet cafe's using fake IDs to download patent searches.
Oops, I meant F117 is NOT as unstable as it looks. Its not particularly more unstable than other fighter designs. It just looks funnier.
-Most modern fly-by-wire fighter aircraft are unstable and rely on the computers to maintain stability. F117 is far from unique in this aspect. BTW, F117 looks much more unstable than it is. Its fundamentally a delta wing fighter.
..."
-Its certainly possible to compare a stealth aircraft to non-stealth. You merely state: "if we ignore stealth
-I'm not well versed enough in air combat doctrine to know whether F-22 is a "colossal waste of money", but I'm not gonna argue that its a colossal amount of money. To the extent it outperforms other aircraft, it certainly only does so on the back of a ridiculously large cash investment.
-Stealth has never been claimed to be "invisible". That is an invention of the media. Stealth is hardER to track and shoot down. That's it.
-No one has ever claimed F-22 will be "impervious to SAM or AAM attacks". It will be harder to shoot down than a non-stealth plane, and (compared to any current or near future opposing aircraft) will be able to target and shoot down enemy aircraft before being detected by them.
-"I guess the main thing is, if it can cut down their effective range, or enable an easier missile evasion, it's considerably safer for the pilot, and the USAF's pocketbook." -- EXACTLY. But don't forget perhaps the most important factor. While its important to get the pilot and the plane back in one piece, perhaps the most important factor is getting the mission completed. Stealth allows for missions that would otherwise be impossible, or at least missions that would otherwise have too high an odds of failure to be worth attempting.
-"But still, if an opfor (china, maybe?) comes up with an operational analog to the Australian Jindalee Operational Radar Network, the F/A-22, in essence, along with the F-35, B-2, F-117 and any other stealth aircraft the US might develop, will become nothing more than a standard aircraft. The other thing you have to ask yourself is, current radar is absorbed by the F/A-22's RAM coating, among other 'stealthy' characteristics. But what happens if conventional radar changes?" -- This represents a common misconception about stealth. No one has yet developed a radar system that tracks/targets a stealth bird as well as conventional radar. Its not clear that would ever even be possible. It is likely a stealth bird would always have some level of advantage over a conventional bird.
-Detecting gaps in radar is a viable approach to tracking stealth planes. As you note, it already exists. However, it's much less accurate than traditional radar. If you were a pilot, you would much rather be in a stealth plane vs one of those systems, than in a regular plan vs traditional radar system.
-Remember, also, that stealth planes will be operating in an environment where enemy air defenses are being targeted in other ways, as well. Take out a couple emitters in one of those "looking for the gaps" systems, put up a couple jammers, etc. and suddenly stealth starts looking pretty advantageous again.
Its really hard to argue that stealth is not a good thing. The only reasonable question is "at what extra cost is stealth worth it", and I admit to not being knowledgeable enough in air combat to take a position on that subject.
F-22 has a superior radar to anything the Russians have ever even imagined. F-22s radar can scan with low probablity of intercept, can act as a jammer, can act as a high-bandwidth data link and scan enemy communications. These functions can overlap.
The combination of F-22's radar and avionics provides superior target acquisition abilities and superior situational awareness compared to any Russian fighter.
F-22 is capable of supercruise -- sustained supersonic flight without using the afterburner.
F-22 has a higher top speed, higher thrust-to-weight ratio (can accelerate faster) and a higher ceiling than Su-37. As indicated by the supercruise ability, F-22 can sustain top speed for much longer than Su-37.
F-22 can carry a larger weapons load than Su-35 and do so in its internal bays. Additional carrying capacity is available on under-wind hard points.
The only advantage of Su-37 is close-range dog fighting, and that ability has never been demonstrated by anyone other than an extremely skilled test pilot. Its not clear how easy any of those maneuvers would be for a typical front-line pilot to learn or, more importantly, implement in a stressful combat environment.
Extreme maneuverability can be very important to an aircraft, I'll grant you, but Su-37 hardly "outperforms the F/A-22 in every aspect but stealth". Not even close.
Effect them in what way? Show me the epidemic of teen violence that can remotely be linked to video games, and we'll talk.
Oh, wait ...
What in the GPL stops them from doing so? Including a shrinkwrapped copy of Red Hat, for example, would keep them from being considered a propagator under GPLv3, so the license would have no jurisdiction.
But in this example, MonopolySoft only manufactures hardware. Red Hat is the software distributor.
In other news today, China announces a "Great Leap Forward".
In addition to new agricultural and industrial processes, all traffic signals will be upgraded so that Red (the color of the People's Revolution) will represent "Go" and Green will represent "Stop".
The Politburo believes that this technological innovation will drive China's economy into the future.
(BTW, is that story true, or just urban legend?)
"The goal of the program was to land men at the moon and return them safely; the goal wasn't to develop a certain technology, so this is a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison."
Which was exactly my point, although I think you said it better. They did not need, for example, to make the quantum leap to the Saturn V. Smaller heavy-lift rockets, known to be feasible in 1961, could have lifted the Apollo components separately and they could have mated in space. There was no known physical reason why any of the problems you listed could not be solved. They were sure they could mate two objects in space (although there was debate about the wisdom of relying on such a mating 230,000 miles from Earth), no one was particularly worried about the physics of landing on and taking off from the moon, the only question was which of many options would be the most practical. The problem of keeping the men alive for the period of time was merely a matter of having the lift capability for enough supplies. Except for the wackjobs, by that point they really weren't that worried about the effects of zero-g over that length of time. They were never worried about keeping the air in a capsule (its a lot easier to keep 1 atm of air in a capsule than keep 50 atm out of a submarine).
My comment about the cable was poorly worded. The problem is making a cable of the proper length, quality control and, most difficult from a theoretical point of view, tensile strength. Making nanotubes of proper length (they still need to be much longer than any that have been made so far), controlling the consistency of the process, finding a resin that is strong enough and then creating a process to make the cable in one long operation. Even in steel its not clear how easy it would be to do a cable that long with the manufacturing consistency that would be require (what if there is a flaw found in the middle?) The hardest part, though, is that nanotubes only have the proper tensile strength if you do, indeed, make them 62,000 miles long. Tensile strength drops off dramatically in a composite, because the resin needs to transfer the forces between the nanotubes. Its the resin that would fail, not the nanotubes themselves. Such a resin may not be physically possible. I wouldn't call something an "engineering problem" unless you have real confidence that its solvable. There is not enough friction between the nanotubes to rely on friction to transfer forces between individual tubes, the way friction transfers the force between strands in a steel cable. So we're stuck with finding a really strong resin and/or fusing the nanotubes together some other way. You can directly fuse nanotubes, but they lose tensile strength because they are no longer perfect chicken-wire-looking cylinders.
And that still would only solve the first of a series of problems that would have no workaround:
1) Getting the cable to space and unfurling it through the atmosphere to the base. Not an easy problem. May not, in fact, be practical.
2) Power delivery to climbers. It basically has to be lasers. Too much weight to carry the energy on-board, too much line-loss to transmit electricity up the cable. The only feasible form of electric delivery through the cable would be if the cable was superconducting, and we still don't know if that would be physically possible.
3) How you gonna keep the thing from breaking free (has to be virtually guaranteed not to). Calling this an "engineering problem" really trivializes the issue. It would really suck for it to come crashing down to Earth. There's no workaround if you realize that you can't afford the risk of the thing breaking loose.
But the main problem goes back to your point above. Large scale development projects have been successful when they do not rely on technology bottlenecks. Thinking of the two great 20th Century projects -- the Manhattan Project actually developed two very different weapons using two very different technology paths and Apollo had a multitude of possible methodologies they could
I think you're being a little cavalier about the difference between Apollo and the space elevator program. Apollo relied on developing a lot of technologies, but no one technology was critical to the success of the mission. If any one technology had proven impossible/impractical, there were possible workarounds. I don't know a lot of the nitty-gritty about Apollo, but I'd bet there's a lot of examples where a piece of technology that flew was actually a second or third attempt to solve a problem.
The issue I see with the space elevator is that there aren't really a lot of options if a critically-needed technology simply proves impossible. Only carbon nanotubes are known to even remotely provide the tensile strength we need. What if it is just impossible to make a carbon nanotube cable 62,000 miles long. We'd have to find some other material. Showstopper.
Laser beams are probably the only way to get the needed energy to the client. Its not entirely clear that the laser elements we would need -- high output over long periods of time -- are physically possible.
Wish I had mod points. (To clarify, I'd mod this comment +1, Insightful.)
I believe that the biggest impediment to understanding evolution is that people can't wrap their heads around the time scales involved. Even punctuated equilibrum argues that it takes millenia (thousands of generations) for macro changes to occur.
Not if you have to hold down option-apple-O-F while booting.
As recently as the G4 towers, a firmware update required the user to physically depress the Programmer's button (the hardware interrupt button) on the computer itself. This may be different now, although I doubt it. The whole point was to make software-only firmware updates impossible in order to avoid this very threat. The hardware simply will not re-flash the firmware without that button being pressed. So at least some social engineering is required to get users to press that button.
I always assumed all computers worked that way. Otherwise, it would be trivial to get people to ruin their firmware -- just trojan horse the thing.
On the contrary, the lack of Altivec will be noticed mostly up front. Over time, faster processors will offset the lack of Altivec, and it will become less noticeable.
... but I would have expected it to be even more faster" is not anywhere near as bad as "WTF, my new computer transcodes to H.264 [or whatever] more slowly than my old computer" (which is unfortunately what we're seeing today).
This only applies because we'll be comparing a 2007 Intel processor to a 2005 G5 (had PPCMacs continued, Altivec would have continued to kick ass over SSEx). People replacing their G5 in 2007 will not see a decline in performance. They may not see the performance increase they generally would expect by upgrading, but that's much harder for a person to pin down than actually being slower. "Well, I guess its faster
Wait, your description would mean that PGP would be incompatible with GPL3. What am I missing?
"As I see it, if MLB can own the copyright on the video of the game, then they can own the copyright on what happened during the game. The two are one and the same."
Except that they are not one in the same. Its the same thing as being able to own the copyright to a specific movie version of Hamlet, versus owning the copyright to the script.
In this case the script, data, is inherently not copyrightable. I could read the phone book on TV and retain the copyright to the video. Doesn't give me a copyright to the phone book, though.
That's why Apple likes its secrets. Its not vaporware if you cancel/delay a product that no one knows about. You can't deliver less than what was hyped if you wait until delivery to do the hyping. (Well, its still possible that the product doesn't really work as well as advertised, but you won't have the problem of having dropped this or that feature at the last minute, because no one knows that feature was supposed to be there.)
I think you're getting a little paranoid here. They'd still have to correlate you with your IP address, since they only send the AppleID when you actually buy a song in the Music Store. Possible to do if they keep track of your address at the times when you do buy a song, but its not trivial to do. I think you really have to take off the tin-foil hat.
But what about the policy of "mutual respect" that you point out. You mention it but then don't address it.
Couple comments:
1) How is small droplets of algae in a stream of exhaust different from small bubbles of exhaust in a pool of algae? Surface area is the same either way, isn't it? (Assuming the bubbles and the droplets are roughly the same size.)
2) Surface area between the water and the exhaust is probably not a limiting factor here. I'd be surprised if the water wasn't at equilibrium with the exhaust.
3) I have a hard time in your system imagining how all that happens and still provides the same exposure to sunlight that the bubbling-through-clear-pipes system provides. Remember, this is a solar-powered system.
"it's still unethical for them to abuse their power like that"
Why is it unethical?
What is abusive about it?
The guy called his professor a "cockmaster". He was also very insulting about other students.
If you can't be respectful of professors and fellow students (or superiors and colleagues at a job) then the school (or job) has every right to throw you out. Frankly, I applaud them coming down hard on him. Its totally inappropriate what he did. Freedom of speech does not excuse inappriate behavior and does not require people to keep you around if you are acting inapproprately.
But if I just wrote "dirt" I wouldn't be able to show my superiority by using all those big words. :)
More seriously, the reason I didn't just say dirt is because the evolutionary background includes more than just dirt -- also impure water and uncooked food. Fortuntately, though, those last two probably aren't necessary as a preventative, should the hygene hypothesis be shown to be true. Dirt probably provides enough exposure to offset the hygene problems.