Super. Not Semi. Solid-state superconducters will (probably)conduct anything - but like I said, this is as far out in SF-land as a hydrogen economy or efficient fuel cells are:)
But the Niven accusation is fair enough - the real physical properties of a functioning solid-state superconductor is mostly guesswork so far. It's just that most of the promising results have been in ceramics-based materials, and ceramics have very useful properties wrt. heat - so if the article can hand-wave about practical fusion generators and a hydrogen economy, I can handwave about perfect conductors:P
"Room-temperature" superconductors conduct heat just as well as they conduct electricity - assuming they're made of some kind of miracle material that doesn't lose conductivity with temperature.
Of course, if we HAD room-temperature superconductors and geothermal taps, it would be easier and more efficient to just run the generators off them and slop the resultant electricity onto the grid or something, assuming the grid isn't also superconductors. At that point it becomes an infrastructure problem whether it's cheaper to run power over the lossy grid lines or to replace grid lines with the superconductors.
Of course this is SF-tech, but so is the article's hydrogen economy. And perfect superconductors aren't more of a stretch than perfect fuel cells.
Oh, I dunno. the last time they tried that 'round these parts the Økokrim prosecution got slapped down by the courts. Since it appears to be a solution based around the VC-1 standard, and not using anything proprietary as far as I can tell, the likelyhood of Økokrim trying for a second charge is... well, I'd say low, but not non-existent.
Their chances of getting a conviction if they try approach zero though.
Legit affiliate marketers operating standard ecommerce sites and using the larger affiliate networks to supply them with products worth their advertising space.
'Cause good old 180Solutions and Gator/Claria have the fun habit of hijacking other people's links and referral commissions to themselves.
Well, I guess it's not news to you, but it's still a pet peeve of mine.
That's in the optional course people can register for, in the privacy policy, the terms of use, and in most of the basic books - including the one that doesn't require anything but a click on the cover to download. But if you got any more suggestions for where to put it, I'm game;)
Too bad that affiliate commission stealing trick is what keeps Gator/Gain/Claria, CoolWebSearch, WhenU, 180Solutions. lop.com and others in business - without anyone suing them.
Thiefware is a major problem for anyone involved in affiliate marketing - they are essentially basing their business model on large-scale theft. And they're getting away with it too.
Every few months there's cases around here of some kids running their cash through a scanner and running off a few copies using Dad's laser printer. Fairly easy to detect, but they still do it.
Sea Launch is a limited liability corporation with Headquarters and Home Port facilities in Long Beach, Calif. The company is owned by Boeing of Seattle, Wash. (40%); RSC-Energia of Moscow, Russia (25%); Kvaerner ASA of Oslo, Norway (20%); and SDO Yuzhnoye/PO Yuzhmash of Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine (15%). Financing for the venture is provided by these companies and through debt financing arranged by Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.
You were saying about Boeing and commercial space launch?
Actually, I find it more nervous-making that the current reality is starting to resemble John Titor's "reports" about the future. I mean, yeah, elaborate hoax and all - but the more reality starts resembling that clever extrapolation, the more you have to worry about the Titor Scenario coming true in further particulars, neh?
Funny. Over here and in South Africa and most of eastern Europe, one of the concerns is that American hospitals are poaching qualified health care workers leaving the domestic hospitals and wards understaffed because you guys are already stealing all the graduates.
I would hazard a guess that this perception is severely different from the reality, but I've only seen anecdotal reporting lately. Apart from 60 Minutes who went to a hospital in SA who'd had to close down two AIDS wards because all the nursing staff and a big chunk of the doctors were now working in the US. Dunno how that one worked out either. But face it - there's nothing special about tech. the big employers are squeezing every group of people that can be.
Actually, the spammers I see selling their lists explicity state that they come prefiltered to remove.gov adresses - and most of them can also optionally filter out.edu adresses except I don't see a whole lot of evidence for them actually doing that on my old accounts.
So the presiden't email is probably safe - the spammers tend to have that address on their exclusion lists.
Nothing wrong with designing ecommerce and billing systems, is there?
'Course, it sucks rocks to maintain crufty legacy code on a huge scale, but those jobs are rarer than installing shiny new computerised cash registers.
Much less interesting to install'em than WiFi'ing the local Starbucks of course, but it beats pouring the coffee in the joint.
Of course, he's part of the problem. But a teensy one, compared to that shit - I guesstimate that the fraud loss mentioned at the end should be per day, not per month.
Unfortunately, is seems that currently the most profitable business strategy is "Company policy is to be an asshat" - and you don't wanna know how much information the credit card companies have on you.
And of course the horribly expensive credit card interest rates conspire to keep people in debt slavery - best move if you don't want to be 0wnd by Visa or MasterCard is to pay off your debts - and use cash as much as possible
There is a *very* active business strategy behind some blogs already - particularily in the small business, freelancer and Direct Marketing business communities.
And in the search engine spammer communities, who use autoposting tools to pollute search engines with trillions of inbound links with specific anchor text.
Check out blogger.com's "Recently updated" link - you'll see a *lot* of spamblogs consisting of nothing but automated postings of links to high-money keywords.
Of course, any reasonably sane definition of Hard SF excludes handwavig crap like ST:TNG and (oh god) ST: Voyager - science fantasy, and *bad* science fantasy at that.
'Course, that also applies to Niven in some instances - if you want to be anal about it, hard SF can turn into a small subset of near-future technotrillers without the Tom Clancy handwaving...
I think the difference between hard and soft SF has more to do with the rigourousness of the changelogs - as in: "Given this once change, what *else* will change along with it, and how will that affect humans and society?"
Of course, sooner or later one has to stop with the logic and start with the "It just IS, allright?" to get on with writing the story instead of the backstory notes - but decent Hard SF has usually gone at least a couple levels deep in the changelogic tree before stopping.
Bad SF tends to have nothing of the kind beyond an "ain't it cool" premise.
They have. http://www.fightthepatent.co.nz/ - and they have been building caselaw for bloody years before they took on Dell. They're not gonna be pushovers in court.
Well, I'm from Norway and I could sure use some of your tech toys from the store in your 'sig.
Since I have the capacity to buy from you, and it's an international transacion, you are apparently infringing on this patent.
http://www.fightthepatent.co.nz/ has a lot more on this. And it appears that they HAVE been following the classic strategy of suing small retailers to build up the caselaw in their favour.
Isn't Wandoo a known spamhost? Far as I know, they recently hosted someone who joe-jobbed Ken Evoy of SBI as a lead-in to the rather ridiculous Juiceboosted scam, for example.
Poor buggers who work there can't do jack shit about it either, since company policy is apparently very pink-contract friendly; even if Juiceboosted had to move to a spam-friendly host in China.
Well, they got kicked off the spamhost too, and you know you gotta be doing something wrong if even spamhosts kick you off the network...
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Super. Not Semi. Solid-state superconducters will (probably)conduct anything - but like I said, this is as far out in SF-land as a hydrogen economy or efficient fuel cells are :)
:P
But the Niven accusation is fair enough - the real physical properties of a functioning solid-state superconductor is mostly guesswork so far. It's just that most of the promising results have been in ceramics-based materials, and ceramics have very useful properties wrt. heat - so if the article can hand-wave about practical fusion generators and a hydrogen economy, I can handwave about perfect conductors
"Room-temperature" superconductors conduct heat just as well as they conduct electricity - assuming they're made of some kind of miracle material that doesn't lose conductivity with temperature.
Of course, if we HAD room-temperature superconductors and geothermal taps, it would be easier and more efficient to just run the generators off them and slop the resultant electricity onto the grid or something, assuming the grid isn't also superconductors. At that point it becomes an infrastructure problem whether it's cheaper to run power over the lossy grid lines or to replace grid lines with the superconductors.
Of course this is SF-tech, but so is the article's hydrogen economy. And perfect superconductors aren't more of a stretch than perfect fuel cells.
Oh, I dunno. the last time they tried that 'round these parts the Økokrim prosecution got slapped down by the courts. Since it appears to be a solution based around the VC-1 standard, and not using anything proprietary as far as I can tell, the likelyhood of Økokrim trying for a second charge is ... well, I'd say low, but not non-existent.
Their chances of getting a conviction if they try approach zero though.
Yeah - and you know who else are upset by this?
Legit affiliate marketers operating standard ecommerce sites and using the larger affiliate networks to supply them with products worth their advertising space.
'Cause good old 180Solutions and Gator/Claria have the fun habit of hijacking other people's links and referral commissions to themselves.
Well, I guess it's not news to you, but it's still a pet peeve of mine.
You know, I really wish parent wasn't +5 insightful, but as far as I can tell, out of the above trio at least two are infected with rabid Randites.
That's in the optional course people can register for, in the privacy policy, the terms of use, and in most of the basic books - including the one that doesn't require anything but a click on the cover to download. But if you got any more suggestions for where to put it, I'm game ;)
Too bad that affiliate commission stealing trick is what keeps Gator/Gain/Claria, CoolWebSearch, WhenU, 180Solutions. lop.com and others in business - without anyone suing them.
Thiefware is a major problem for anyone involved in affiliate marketing - they are essentially basing their business model on large-scale theft. And they're getting away with it too.
Oh yes.
Every few months there's cases around here of some kids running their cash through a scanner and running off a few copies using Dad's laser printer. Fairly easy to detect, but they still do it.
http://www.sea-launch.com/organization.htm/
You were saying about Boeing and commercial space launch?
The Human Rights Charter, bucko.
Actually, I find it more nervous-making that the current reality is starting to resemble John Titor's "reports" about the future. I mean, yeah, elaborate hoax and all - but the more reality starts resembling that clever extrapolation, the more you have to worry about the Titor Scenario coming true in further particulars, neh?
Funny. Over here and in South Africa and most of eastern Europe, one of the concerns is that American hospitals are poaching qualified health care workers leaving the domestic hospitals and wards understaffed because you guys are already stealing all the graduates.
I would hazard a guess that this perception is severely different from the reality, but I've only seen anecdotal reporting lately. Apart from 60 Minutes who went to a hospital in SA who'd had to close down two AIDS wards because all the nursing staff and a big chunk of the doctors were now working in the US. Dunno how that one worked out either. But face it - there's nothing special about tech. the big employers are squeezing every group of people that can be.
Didn't someone in that popularity contest you Americans just had mention eBay and community college as the solution to all that?
Yeah. I know - lotsa good that'll do you in getting a real job.
Actually, the spammers I see selling their lists explicity state that they come prefiltered to remove .gov adresses - and most of them can also optionally filter out .edu adresses except I don't see a whole lot of evidence for them actually doing that on my old accounts.
So the presiden't email is probably safe - the spammers tend to have that address on their exclusion lists.
Nothing wrong with designing ecommerce and billing systems, is there?
'Course, it sucks rocks to maintain crufty legacy code on a huge scale, but those jobs are rarer than installing shiny new computerised cash registers.
Much less interesting to install'em than WiFi'ing the local Starbucks of course, but it beats pouring the coffee in the joint.
You have no idea - wanna see how bad it gets in the PPC advertising sector?
Try designing a software tool to catch fraud clicks from a quarter of a million American PC link-clickers.
http://www.stopclickfraud.com/ - grandparent is positively benign compared to that.
Of course, he's part of the problem. But a teensy one, compared to that shit - I guesstimate that the fraud loss mentioned at the end should be per day, not per month.
Yup, that's exactly the kind of asshat jerkoff this policy is designed to counter
If you want to just rent your f'king camping gear, you damn well go to a rental place, you don't "borrow" from your local retailer.
Marketing is one aspect of business strategy.
Unfortunately, is seems that currently the most profitable business strategy is "Company policy is to be an asshat" - and you don't wanna know how much information the credit card companies have on you.
And of course the horribly expensive credit card interest rates conspire to keep people in debt slavery - best move if you don't want to be 0wnd by Visa or MasterCard is to pay off your debts - and use cash as much as possible
There is a *very* active business strategy behind some blogs already - particularily in the small business, freelancer and Direct Marketing business communities.
And in the search engine spammer communities, who use autoposting tools to pollute search engines with trillions of inbound links with specific anchor text.
Check out blogger.com's "Recently updated" link - you'll see a *lot* of spamblogs consisting of nothing but automated postings of links to high-money keywords.
Of course, any reasonably sane definition of Hard SF excludes handwavig crap like ST:TNG and (oh god) ST: Voyager - science fantasy, and *bad* science fantasy at that.
'Course, that also applies to Niven in some instances - if you want to be anal about it, hard SF can turn into a small subset of near-future technotrillers without the Tom Clancy handwaving...
I think the difference between hard and soft SF has more to do with the rigourousness of the changelogs - as in: "Given this once change, what *else* will change along with it, and how will that affect humans and society?"
Of course, sooner or later one has to stop with the logic and start with the "It just IS, allright?" to get on with writing the story instead of the backstory notes - but decent Hard SF has usually gone at least a couple levels deep in the changelogic tree before stopping.
Bad SF tends to have nothing of the kind beyond an "ain't it cool" premise.
Read your FAQ? I thought I did well to RTFA!
They have. http://www.fightthepatent.co.nz/ - and they have been building caselaw for bloody years before they took on Dell. They're not gonna be pushovers in court.
Well, I'm from Norway and I could sure use some of your tech toys from the store in your 'sig.
Since I have the capacity to buy from you, and it's an international transacion, you are apparently infringing on this patent.
http://www.fightthepatent.co.nz/ has a lot more on this.
And it appears that they HAVE been following the classic strategy of suing small retailers to build up the caselaw in their favour.
So MS has better marketing that FOSS.
Well, up until IBM's marketing department took a hand, at least. You know, there's a lesson there, if we but learn it.
Isn't Wandoo a known spamhost? Far as I know, they recently hosted someone who joe-jobbed Ken Evoy of SBI as a lead-in to the rather ridiculous Juiceboosted scam, for example.
Poor buggers who work there can't do jack shit about it either, since company policy is apparently very pink-contract friendly; even if Juiceboosted had to move to a spam-friendly host in China.
Well, they got kicked off the spamhost too, and you know you gotta be doing something wrong if even spamhosts kick you off the network...