There's (figuratively) tons of software things which should be patented because they require extremely clever thinking and/or a lot of work to design and get working. There are things out there that the average programmer would *NEVER* come up with, eg. the BWT transform used for bzip compression.
OTOH that's only a tiny fraction of software patents. Most of it ispurejunk
That would just mean that the "laws", aren't - in the same way that Newton's "laws" turned out to be not quite right when you're moving quickly.
And science would be cool about it. Excited about it, even.
Public imagination aside, scientists tend to celebrate when they're find out they were wrong (especially if it took big/expensive machines to do it...)
DNA doesn't break until you get into the UV-light range of electromagnetic waves, cell phone frequencies are orders of magnitude away from being able to do it....but don't let the pesky facts get in the way of anecdotes and scaremongering.
The way I see it you'll have a big problem with fuel efficiency. The reason the upper shaft slows down when you spin up the bottom shaft is that you're throwing the power away.
A more traditional CVT isn't as robust but it never throws power into the void.
The 'doubts' the inventor has aren't with the mechanics or the gearbox mechanism, they're with fuel efficiency.
Spinning up the bottom shaft throws away the energy from the engine (it's like injecting mechanical 'grease' into the gearbox). ie. The car engine is running at full power when you're sat at a traffic light but all the energy is being thrown away.
You can obviously reduce the throttle to eliminate waste, reduce the engine RPM when idle, increase it when accelerating hard, etc., but figuring out if this will work out to be more efficient than a traditional engine isn't easy. A lot depends on the engine management systems and they're never been used this way.
Another problem is driver acceptance. I once owned a car with CVT and it's weird to drive because the engine sound doesn't doesn't give any cues as to what the car's doing.
The torque from the main engine is applied at *both ends* of the lower shaft but in opposite directions. This means the 'bottom' shaft hardly requires any power to turn it. Your control motor only has to overcome the inertia of the shaft.
Ummm, "consumers" are free to buy non-Apple products.
If we think this through, and if what Adobe is saying is correct (that consumers really really really want flash), then Apple is shooting itself in the foot. All Adobe has to do is sit and wait.
Of course the real problem is that Apple is helping to push the world to HTML5, which makes Adobe obsolete and also improves life for the 'consumers' that Adobe is claiming will be hurt.
The world has to choose between a dog-slow proprietary plug-in which is under the control of Adobe, or new, open standards. I for one hope they do the right thing.
If you'll bother to read the article (yes, I know...) you'll see that the customer was only given a demonstration of the software by a sales rep and the sales contract said "no money back".
If your software has a free trial period and/or you allow refunds then you're OK - people can try before they buy.
If I highlight the Wikipedia article on 'plastique' you can personally garantee that I won't ever be getting a visit from the feds or be placed on any kind of watch list?
Because if you can't, well... we should just ban curtains and envelopes and get it over with.
DRM is futile because customers need to have the 'secret' deciding key inside their machine to see the content. Combine this with a PC where you can look into the RAM and mess with it and you've got fail with a capital F.
Security isn't a product, it's a process. The problem isn't the security it's getting ordinary people to follow the process.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty soon Google will be the only thing keeping Usenet alive.
PS: Did your old-fashioned Usenet servers ever have *old* postings? What use is a discussion forum which only keeps 90 days worth of discussion?
But I guess that doesn't count - no binaries.
Seriously though, who needs binary groups with all the free pron and torrents out there?
There's (figuratively) tons of software things which should be patented because they require extremely clever thinking and/or a lot of work to design and get working. There are things out there that the average programmer would *NEVER* come up with, eg. the BWT transform used for bzip compression.
OTOH that's only a tiny fraction of software patents. Most of it is pure junk
They're just talking about 'looks'
Assuming Microsoft has some stupid patent on a line of that code, they can sue for whichever they think is more likely to stick.
That would just mean that the "laws", aren't - in the same way that Newton's "laws" turned out to be not quite right when you're moving quickly.
And science would be cool about it. Excited about it, even.
Public imagination aside, scientists tend to celebrate when they're find out they were wrong (especially if it took big/expensive machines to do it...)
+1 Insightful, came here to say the same thing.
DNA doesn't break until you get into the UV-light range of electromagnetic waves, cell phone frequencies are orders of magnitude away from being able to do it....but don't let the pesky facts get in the way of anecdotes and scaremongering.
... to ask for more money for 'further research'.
There isn't enough oxygen in the water to metabolize all that oil in time to prevent a disaster.
}"substantially worse than estimates that the government and BP have given"
Was there ever any doubt that it would be worse...?
How come Intel sells more GPUs than ATI and NVIDIA combined?
Because they sell them to people who've moved out of their parent's basement...
Yes, I think it probably is.
The way I see it you'll have a big problem with fuel efficiency. The reason the upper shaft slows down when you spin up the bottom shaft is that you're throwing the power away.
A more traditional CVT isn't as robust but it never throws power into the void.
The 'doubts' the inventor has aren't with the mechanics or the gearbox mechanism, they're with fuel efficiency.
Spinning up the bottom shaft throws away the energy from the engine (it's like injecting mechanical 'grease' into the gearbox). ie. The car engine is running at full power when you're sat at a traffic light but all the energy is being thrown away.
You can obviously reduce the throttle to eliminate waste, reduce the engine RPM when idle, increase it when accelerating hard, etc., but figuring out if this will work out to be more efficient than a traditional engine isn't easy. A lot depends on the engine management systems and they're never been used this way.
Another problem is driver acceptance. I once owned a car with CVT and it's weird to drive because the engine sound doesn't doesn't give any cues as to what the car's doing.
The torque from the main engine is applied at *both ends* of the lower shaft but in opposite directions. This means the 'bottom' shaft hardly requires any power to turn it. Your control motor only has to overcome the inertia of the shaft.
Ummm, "consumers" are free to buy non-Apple products.
If we think this through, and if what Adobe is saying is correct (that consumers really really really want flash), then Apple is shooting itself in the foot. All Adobe has to do is sit and wait.
Of course the real problem is that Apple is helping to push the world to HTML5, which makes Adobe obsolete and also improves life for the 'consumers' that Adobe is claiming will be hurt.
The world has to choose between a dog-slow proprietary plug-in which is under the control of Adobe, or new, open standards. I for one hope they do the right thing.
If you'll bother to read the article (yes, I know...) you'll see that the customer was only given a demonstration of the software by a sales rep and the sales contract said "no money back".
If your software has a free trial period and/or you allow refunds then you're OK - people can try before they buy.
Umm, maybe the web site changed ...
News to me.
If I highlight the Wikipedia article on 'plastique' you can personally garantee that I won't ever be getting a visit from the feds or be placed on any kind of watch list?
Because if you can't, well ... we should just ban curtains and envelopes and get it over with.
Haven't the military got some super satellite-busting weapon they've been dying to test?
This attack requires that badware is already running inside the machine it's trying to attack.
If badware is already running then ... um, how exactly does this attack up the ante?
Do you need a snorkel and flippers to swap a network cable?
You mean like using std::vector and std::string instead of malloc, smart pointers instead of raw pointers and manual memory management?
We did all that years ago...it's only the uneducated C hackers who keep giving C++ a bad name.
DRM is futile because customers need to have the 'secret' deciding key inside their machine to see the content. Combine this with a PC where you can look into the RAM and mess with it and you've got fail with a capital F.
Security isn't a product, it's a process. The problem isn't the security it's getting ordinary people to follow the process.
Real robots have Gatling guns and lasers.