Where does the dirt go? Either builds other places higher, or goes into the sea and raises the sea level proportionally... so that one won't work! Nooo, what you want to do is compress the stuff so they're smaller - essentially, you need the weight of MOUNTAINS on them!
Relatively near, sure... but compared to the time it take us to get even from Earth to Mars (length of the word "of"?), 41 km is relatively far. And, with current lifespans, technically unfeasible unless we can work out a way around conventional physics and get something that's FTL. 41 light years may be significantly closer to us than the edge of the universe - but that doesn't mean it's reachable. Imagine a dust mite or bacterium (or whatever's the corresponding scale) that's got enough intent of purpose to crawl the length of the word 'of' - but it takes it a hundred days.
Eh? RC planes require a signal to get from the outside of the plane into the control mechanism, which is presumably housed inside the nice protective CF. However in a commercial aircraft, the control signals aren't coming from outside the plane - they're coming from the inside. The wirelessness is internal, only replacing those internal wires; communication with the outside is unhindered, since they don't use wires to connect themselves to ground control.
Sure, your waveguide point has a, uh, point; you wouldn't be able to directly communicate between say the cockpit and the ailerons, instead needing LoS relays. But it's still very likely to be a lot less complex to maintain than a wire system. A greater concern is that you need to be more careful about the power of your wireless points, since wire gets its power from the source and power-over-wireless still has a loooong way to go. It's the power failure of a relay that'll cause the problems; granted, this is likely to be checked as regularly as wiring is checked, especially since it's easier to status-request power availability than it is to check the physical state of all the wiring around an aircraft.
UK has freer speech than the US; you can complain about the PM. It's certainly less permissive for search laws than the US.
Holland has hugely free speech, and the police aren't allowed to search you without a warrant.
Laws against inciting hatred and violence have sprung up in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark; UK is set to go the same way. However the laws look to be better worded than by the superparanoid US government. I don't know about search laws across europe, but I'm pretty sure that in western europe the cops are certainly more relaxed and civil, with an implication of less restrictive security; I've certainly never come across the stories that you come across for US society in the EU.
Granted, there's a lot of other states, including China, Japan, most of Africa, where there is more government control. The China side is discussed in about 20 other threads at the moment; Japan has fairly strict policing but less crime and so less motivation to search people without good reason. Africa has major problems, sure. Eastern and Central African states have been in conflict and disruption for decades, and more recently the country of South Africa too. But those states are recognisably dictatorial, with conditions bordering on civil war. The US hasn't had significant internal conflict for ages; gang fights and politics don't count. Yet the US, a stable democratic state with an elected leader, still has the restrictions and permissive search laws.
Yeah, I don't live there either. But from here it looks damn strange to hear about some of your laws and the problems you get, the stories and jokes that come up about censorship and so on in the US. There's a lot of focus on allowing the Chinese population to be "free" - but at the same time, the US - bastion of the free world! - has a good range of the problems its residents complain so much about in others.
Usually years, somewhere around 3-4 on average. Stick a random number between 5,500,000 and 7,000,000 (1996-2006, ish) into the USPTO numsearch page and compare the granted date (top right) to the date of filing (usually the last line in the third info-section) if you want to have a play.
It takes such a long time because they have to be reviewed by patent examiners, compared to prior art to make sure they're not infringing, which includes referring to patents not in the patent referral list (you'll see in a lot of patents that the inventor compares and contrasts his application with previous patents, to clarify the differences). It usually has to be sent back and corrected, sits in a waiting queue whenever it's in the patent office's hands, suffer any delays the submitter wants or has; the list goes on. It's a tedious process that I think we saw an article about last week, since the workload of patent reviewers is simply too high; it all contributes to major delays. Compare with older patents - the few around 4M I checked took between a year and two years.
Yes, but the money still goes somewhere, in this case to the workers that supplied whatever the money is being wasted on. If capitalism is shooting itself in the foot there, it's also growing a new foot elsewhere in a system that creates those parts. Maybe the people who are buying the parts are suckers for not conferring - but that just means there's more people further down the chain that are doing better out of that sucker cash. The money just goes round and round; sometimes it gets stuck in some places, sometimes in others.
Remember that until the advent of the telephone and internet, communication was too slow to allow mass innovation. Now we have companies that do nothing but sell innovation, because they can access the resources and attract people from a wide net to bounce ideas and improve them; think tank companies.
Also ask a PhD student or look up for yourself how many citations are going on in academia - I don't know how the scales of academia-innovation and corporate-innovation compare, but even if the second is far more closed-in and impressive, it doesn't mean the former doesn't exist. Maybe academia doesn't work in the same way as capitalism, validating your point; I suspect that's true. But the money is still going somewhere.
While the theory of consortiums is a nice one, there's too many parties interested in keeping the technologies (read: profits) for themselves. Too many people want a slice of the pie, and the people who get these projects started aren't going to divvy out unless those wanting a slice of that pie are willing to invest in them strongly - and then they still want to keep hold of the reins.
However, at least one of the positive aspects of competition is that you don't get stuck in a rut with working on a single design; working on multiple parallel designs leads to better technology, because the people who will buy a working technology will go for the better ones. There's more pressure to do better, or be left behind.
We can hope. Personally, I think the internet age and rising costs of fuel will scrap this project; with free video conferencing improving, the value of face time is no longer such an absolute leader, and will quickly become outweighed by the cost of fast travel. It's an interesting idea - but 2025? I just can't see it staying viable.
Oh, I must have phrased it badly. It's not possible to push the levering tool in to the main body of the pod (only along the side slit) until you've applied levering force; and by that time the leverage has popped the case open. It's surprisingly easy for something that looks so unopenable from the outside.
If someone's going to use something sharp enough to pierce the battery, since that's on top when you open it (either that or the HD, can't remember - both are metal-cased), then I still believe they'd have serious trouble to wrest the iPod in such a way that the case came off while allowing the knife/sharp thing enough residual force to cause any damage. You'd have to lever the case up and be pushing the knifetip down into the guts you expose by doing that.
Sure, it's a step more difficult than sliding the cover off the back of the TV remote and fumbling the batteries out to replace them with new ones. But it's still damned easy.
Heh - the ipods can actually be opened already. Squeeze the case at the sides, and the clips will pop open; apply a little leverage by something that isn't sharp (won't damage the case) and it just comes off, easily. Then you can flip the battery forward; if you want to remove it or replace it with a third-party battery, of which several exist, all you need to do is poke a clip to disconnect it and pull it off the stickypads.
This legislation won't have any effect on the iPods; it may make Apple make the how-to-open information more available, but that's the extent of it. I don't know about minis, nanos and shuffles - but I bet that if you search for a third-party battery seller for those, you'll have included information on how to open each product without damaging it.
Besides which, the city can't take up that much space.
Wha...?! Did you forget what 'city' means?
Btw, digging and excavating a tunnel is vaguely expensive, requiring shoring and roof supports to prevent it from collapsing. Building underground structures is very expensive, but since they usually reach to the surface the structural stability is reduced to a more normal structural problem. Building underground structures underneath things is so vastly expensive it's simply implausable. It's why we expand cities sideways rather than downwards; even with vertical downwards structures the cost is generally prohibitive for anything that's looking to make a profit. There's a range of sunlight-redirection technologies that allow you to pipe natural light into buildings, and underground buildings wouldn't be a problem. Digging sideways to go underneath something is so rampantly expensive it's simple inconceivable to do it. Lay a very expensive car park to preserve another bit of history? It's laughable. Seismic imaging and sampling will have been done to see if it was the same as any of the hundred other ruins in the area, and since it's most likely to have been the same they'll have had the go-ahead to cover it over.
"Wiping out a key piece of history" would indeed be bemoanable; wiping out one of the bits of history that's near-identical to the many others that have already been investigated and dismissed - did you even read the parent post? - is trivial. There's simply too much information about that heritage to need more copies of the same stuff.
I was going to call bullshit on torrenting at all, with or without credit, for similar reasons - but your mention of SUs pulled me up; that's actually a very good idea. Some of these patches are pretty stonkingly big and for the most part the downloading is done within the week with a spike on the first day.
Dammit, I wanted a Woo pedal. Then I could use it when I beat something, or get a good drop, or just need cheering up. Wah pedal just sounds depressing!;)
The problem there is not with the system itself - but with the design of the system; making the information accessible outside the system. That's why these things are being proposed as biometric; if they get stolen, then they should be damn near useless to other people. If it's stealable, then there's a thousand ways to make it unstealworthy. You're not thinking hard enough: have a biscuit! Require a pin, require a password. Encrypt it with a vast key rather than simply the next increment. Make it stupidly secure. Make the only systems able to access the information be those that are supposed to, and make it require you and only you to be able to use it. Then it WORKS. If you don't want people knowing things about you, then don't let them know. Vote with your feet. If you can't, then there's a flaw in that system, and get it fixed. Don't just complain that it'll never work.
While you've put a nice little smiley at the end of your comment, it remains pretty inflammatory. Sure, I'll respond to your troll.
No, I've never broken a speed limit - I'm a cyclist. I haven't had a toke, I don't give a damn about your President since I live in a different country, and you're allowed to complain about your leaders here (It's called "democracy" and "free speech" - funny, hey?). I still don't agree with you, but I also wouldn't do anything to you because you disagree with me. Fascist? Go look up what it means before slinging it around.
Past the personal responses - of course I'm in favour of cutting down crime. I know that speed limits are there for a reason, and having helped out at multiple crash scenes I fully agree with enforcing those speed limits. If you need to get there, then leave earlier. If you're going to play with the rules of the road, then by damn am I going to back you getting fined to try to get you under control before you run someone down. I won't argue about the drugs because I don't have anything to do with them, don't see any reason to have anything to do with them, and being uninterested am fairly uninformed and uncaring so won't argue about it, other than to raise the question: why are they illegal in the first place?
Me? I've got a clean sheet. I don't toe the line because I don't need to toe the line; I've got plenty of other things to do and ways to enjoy myself. As such, I don't give a damn whether anyone watches me or not, and from my hoity-toity high horse I can sneer at the people who vote for the leaders who ban the things they want to enjoy.
Back to your first line - that bit after the insult, about being monitored and controlled. Monitored, sure. Controlled - what do you think they put in those cards that force you to do what they want?
There's been a whole bunch of TV series - they even call them "Big Brother"! - where they watch and allow the general public to watch these people. Occasionally, as part of the game, there's an element of control - kicking people out of the house, assigning tasks to keep them from being bored out of their skulls (which they seem to do all the time anyway). Do you think that's how it will be? Orwell's 1984? That dystopia will never happen. There's too many hurdles between the current governments and that state for its creation to be viable - you would need a force of people bigger than the population you intend to watch to set up the system. Lower levels of monitoring cannot have that control over a community.
There's hundreds of examples of monitoring and control. Use of passports when travelling. Use of travel cards on the intricate London Underground, making sure the train companies get enough revenue to upkeep the utility. Second-hand, in taxes and licenses and so on. Each of those is there for a reason. The passport and travel card are obvious. The taxes oppress you! Sure, and they upkeep the roads you complain about when broken, the health service you rely on when you have a problem; the pool of resources from the community is implemented to help the community, even if it is skewed from the rich towards the poor. That's "Community". The licenses are there for control - a vague example is a hunting license, to prevent the expletion of a resource.
While the examples stray away from the topic at hand, the core is there. These things are put into place for a reason. The intended watch-ees are the criminals; people who don't harm the community simply aren't interesting to the system. Sure, there'll need to be safeguards against abuse. Only in the US are you hauled off to an offshore facility away from the laws of its supporting country for opposing its government. In the UK, in the EU, in Australia, we don't have dictatorships that claim democracy and enforce something else, whatever you want to call it. If you make a thought crime into a real crime, then you get taken into a court and trialled by a jury of your peers. That's being measured up by the community, and if you or a
Why does carrying a card stop you from doing what you want to do? How does it stop you from being 'free'? What does it disable, prevent or otherwise hinder you from doing?
The only answer that comes to my mind is "Crime". And I'm all for a government cutting that down.
Having a tag on you doesn't infringe your civil liberties. It may make you feel watched - but that doesn't prevent your freedom.
The major advantage of this over a wheelchair is conformity to the normal human shape. A wheelchair already has far more motive efficiency - and there's designs with wheel pairs that allow newer-fangled wheelchairs to climb chairs, raise the user, etc. Two legs give a disabled person a more normal appearance; four legs do not.
Wheelchairs aren't even limited with normal pebble surfaces - and if a surface is unstable enough to cause a wheel problems, then it'll cause a robotic leg-replacement problems too.
Unfortunately, transitive trust is dangerous anywhere. The first example that comes to mind is handing your card over to a retailer to swipe; while it's something that's attempting to be addressed, with chip and pin readers, people equipped in the right way (whether script kiddies in the original example or someone in store with a second or tapped cardswiper (or, presumably next wave, same for chip and pin readers) in mine) have the ability to abuse that trust and screw people over for kicks or money.
While the person behind the store is hired by the relevant people and the kiddie isn't, neither are the core system maintainers yet have the ability to leverage the trust of that core system.
They did it to lock people in. The entire model locks people in, as mentioned in the summary - the email does not allow you to access them with third-party clients, and does not allow you to get the mails anywhere where you can access them with third-party clients, unless you do it manually for every single mail you get.
The entire thing will be a serious pain in the ass for anyone with even mediocre IT savvy; the people who are used to using a web client will have no problems and are the easy audience for MS here (with MS hoping to use the structure of Windows Live to keep them as clients when they leave, since then they keep all their contacts etc); and the setup also forces the rest of the students - those who would prefer to do things in any of a variety of other ways - to stoop to using their system. MS are effectively pulling in a pile of easy targets, and then putting a big wall around the hard targets so they are stuck whether they like it or not. As seen in a good thread above, the common language means it does function in FF, but breaks its major featureset. Anyone in firefox will be stuck with a closed interface, and you won't find bets against that improving in a hurry, because it would be a door in that big wall MS are setting up.
Whether or not they're losing lockin elsewhere, they've jumped on the opportunity to get a new generation before that generation gets savvy enough to get up in arms about what's being done to them. Sure, there'll be a few, but not enough until someone writes an interface that shapes packets to enable automation of the features that MS are intentionally leaving out.
IMAP has been around for 20 years; POP3 for 12. The longevity and widespread use of these protocols is vast in terms of the internet and email; 20 years is a vast timespan for this arena. Yet MS have designed something that prevents both. I have no idea how long automatic email forwarding has been around for, but again it's something that MS have left out.
When I saw the summary on the front page, I saw it was tagged 'monopoly'. I initially dismissed that, because I thought that with email you can't get a monopoly so the tag was irrelevant in this case. But when you force, force, force people to use your system with no way of connecting it up to their other systems, and use the weight of an educational institution to enable that lockin, then it is indeed a monopoly. They're not getting any money from it yet (I very much hope an institution wouldn't pay for this system) so the traditional connotations of 'monopoly' aren't there yet - but they're forcing people in while and where they can't do anything about it. Keep the number of people, they'll get their profits, whether it's in systems required to be able to use their services or something further down the line for Windows Live.
Well, I believe "Norton" as a company name (not product name) wrt computing is held by Peter Norton - the guy who wrote the (actually very good) disk analysis and protection software back in well pre-OSX mac days (I think it was mac before PC?). It did nice efficient things to make your hard drive better and was a well-written program that worked. In 1990 it was bought out by Symantec, and since then it's tumbled gently downhill into a steaming pile of crap that intentionally breaks when a new full version is out that you have to buy.
Granted, they'd still be able to change to a different name, just it wouldn't be Norton.
Bullshit straight back at you. My dad had a Mac SE when I was old enough to think coherently, back when Apple was the field leader and MS was a whelp (yeah, it surprised me too, gizmodo came out with a '20 years ago...' post that was quite informative). Since then it was at each point easier to upgrade within the Apple line rather than switch over to Windows, even though Windows took over as market leader; when I got to university and could pick my first computer, I used the nice 25?33?% apple education discount (UK, don't know what it's like in the US) and got myself a flat panel imac. I was used to macs, and though I'd used programs in windows on the school computers, it was never enough to find out what a lot of the subsystem stuff was. Since then I've bought an iBook, using the handy installation process that copies your entire hard drive and filestructure over so there's no effective change between the first computer and the second. When I left uni and got a job, the office I now work in uses Apple computers exclusively, except one PC for the designers when they need to make a Rhino file in the right format for a windows user to recieve.
Sure, I'm a rare occurence. But while I've wandered around the web enough to come across the terms (especially on bash.org), I've never had a need to find out exactly what they do. I think there's a difference between DLL and.dll files, and I think that BIOS is the sublayer you have to drop to when you want to configure new hardware like RAM or partition your hard drive. But while I've come across the term 'flash BIOS', it means jack shit to me. The only context I have it in is a quick wipe, and that's only because other utilities use the term in that way, and it's a complete guess when applying it to the BIOS as I understand it.
You know why I don't know? Because I don't care. I'm a geek who uses macs, and I don't care about the hordes of people who told me I was doing it all wrong when apple were going down the tube, and I still don't care about the hordes of people who think I'm a moron for using macs. I have no need to know anything at all about the windows subsystem, and so when I come across the terms I see them but ignore them completely. I simply have no need to know what they mean, in the same way that when I see arcane sigs here, I can recognise them as being *nix terms or cryptography (I have familiarity but not mastery of the linux stuff, and I've read Cryptonomicon) - but their meaning isn't obvious simply by looking at them, and I don't have a reason to learn the meaning of each and every single one of them by looking them up or figuring them out.
I may have more understanding of what they are than the average Windows user, just like the gpp. But by no means does that mean I understand them completely, nor that I care to know what they do. I don't need to.
You're technically correct, but the action they've taken has exactly the same effect as phishing. The phishers no longer need to try to get the information; it's all there for them to take, and it seems fairly likely that they now have. They can pretend to be a hundred thousand different people now, with a lot of backup detail that they wouldn't have got by normal "This is your bank website really, now enter your password" scams.
While it's not technically illegal, it's still a rampantly stupid thing to do, and vastly enables illegal activities.
Hmm? Yahoo games has hundreds of thousands of people online at once, presumably popcap does too though it doesn't seem to list figures. I'm sure there's other ones out there that are similar. Puzzle pirates has a thousand online per server or so, with a userbase in the hundreds of thousands. Yahoo games doesn't require a subscriptions, neither does popcap; puzzle pirates allows some free play but the number of subscribers plus the amount of cash that's gone into their pay-per-play servers is damn telling for the size of company.
While the graphics push away a chunk of the powerplay gamers that are hooked on top-of-the-line 3D graphics and gameplay (resource hogging, ie the stuff that needs a movie budget to produce, read 'quantity'), the simplicity and addictiveness of popcap/y!games/puzzle pirates and similar, which have simple graphics and low resource cost (I think PP is somewhere in the 1XX MBs now, as opposed to the 4? 5? gigs or so I needed for WoW before I stopped playing a year ago) - these are the games that focus on quality of play.
I realise that Blizzard and the ilk have quality of play too - I played WoW for a long time before I shrugged off the constant peer pressure and gave all my unbound ingame stuff to my guild and left. But so long as each product on the market can provide something different from the expensive high-powered fashionable games; at a lower price they'll have a section of the market.
I played WoW, and it was fun item hunting and playing in groups, but I reverted to d2x after I quit because the item hunting was similar and it costs me nothing; I can play with friends and that's what makes me enjoy it, even though it's now more a retro game. I also play PP, in which the time you spend in game is vaguely irrelevant; the way they run the stat system means it's based on your skill rather than your playtime. Yes, that loses the players who want the time spent playing to be a factor - but that is only one portion of the market, albeit a large one. They also jump ship when the next new shiny thing comes along - the earlier the better so they get an early lead.The market that ISN'T - those who are driven out by always being second to those who spend vast amounts of time in game - will also move away, this time from disaffectation. The games that offer a playstyle or level of addiction that will keep someone hooked, without disaffectation at being left behind, without the $$$/month that spurs that disaffectation, that injects new content often enough to keep interest bubbling - just like PP is now - will build and build their userbase.
Even though I've completed every aspect of PP, it's still a great game to me. Even though I've completed d2 and d2x multiple times, with no goals remaining, it's still a game I can pick up and play at any time. WoW? I don't quite understand why, but I'm completely disillusioned. There's pressure to grind, and it completely lost its fun. I got re-enthused a little when some irc buddies were talking over some new aspect from a patch, but a single simple comment when I thought I might reactivate my subscription - "Are you sure?" - made me think over and know it'd be back to the grind again.
I went on a bit, but in summary my post can be vaguely analogied to: big games are like big budget movies. Everyone sees them once, and then it's on to the next ones. The good games - whether big or small - are like classic movies; the ones people will be entertained with over and over again.
Considering how tough it is to find organic molecules at all - whether organic by courtesy or not - finding a vast cloud of methanol is extraordinary. While finding methanol on earth would at best be vaguely interesting, since in the lifetime of the earth we've managed to significantly bypass the stage of small molecules, remember that if you've got 463 billion km of methanol there's a fair chance that something did it. Whether it's vapour trails from a cosmic express or some strange unforeseen product from the explosion of a star with just the right mass balance to get this kind of ratio of atoms to form the products, it's hugely interesting to find it up there.
The chances of two random atoms interacting is middling to fair. Biatoms will readily form molecules, especially since the simplest atom is hydrogen which will happily pair up with another of itself. The chances of two different molecules interacting closely enough to react is very low. On earth we need dense solutions with a heat source to get a reaction to happen. The chances of interaction to produce a cloud of particles is very low, though with the amount of stuff out there you can understand how it happens. The chance of getting reaction of enough molecules in one way to produce enough of one kind of product to show up on a spectrometer is fantastically small. Note that the article doesn't say "methane and methanol", which would be more expected from reaction with carbon in a hydrogen-rich environment; and if you mix oxygen and methane together in an attempt to get methanol, you'll get the lower-energy products of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water.
Slashdot Mirror
Where does the dirt go? Either builds other places higher, or goes into the sea and raises the sea level proportionally... so that one won't work! Nooo, what you want to do is compress the stuff so they're smaller - essentially, you need the weight of MOUNTAINS on them!
Relatively near, sure... but compared to the time it take us to get even from Earth to Mars (length of the word "of"?), 41 km is relatively far. And, with current lifespans, technically unfeasible unless we can work out a way around conventional physics and get something that's FTL. 41 light years may be significantly closer to us than the edge of the universe - but that doesn't mean it's reachable. Imagine a dust mite or bacterium (or whatever's the corresponding scale) that's got enough intent of purpose to crawl the length of the word 'of' - but it takes it a hundred days.
Then make it crawl 41 km.
Unless Aubrey de Grey gets his way, that message seems likely to stay "goo goo ga ga"...
82 years + Age of message sender must stay Age of reciever who isn't yet senile and/or still cares!
Eh? RC planes require a signal to get from the outside of the plane into the control mechanism, which is presumably housed inside the nice protective CF. However in a commercial aircraft, the control signals aren't coming from outside the plane - they're coming from the inside. The wirelessness is internal, only replacing those internal wires; communication with the outside is unhindered, since they don't use wires to connect themselves to ground control.
Sure, your waveguide point has a, uh, point; you wouldn't be able to directly communicate between say the cockpit and the ailerons, instead needing LoS relays. But it's still very likely to be a lot less complex to maintain than a wire system. A greater concern is that you need to be more careful about the power of your wireless points, since wire gets its power from the source and power-over-wireless still has a loooong way to go. It's the power failure of a relay that'll cause the problems; granted, this is likely to be checked as regularly as wiring is checked, especially since it's easier to status-request power availability than it is to check the physical state of all the wiring around an aircraft.
Huh?
UK has freer speech than the US; you can complain about the PM. It's certainly less permissive for search laws than the US. Holland has hugely free speech, and the police aren't allowed to search you without a warrant. Laws against inciting hatred and violence have sprung up in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark; UK is set to go the same way. However the laws look to be better worded than by the superparanoid US government. I don't know about search laws across europe, but I'm pretty sure that in western europe the cops are certainly more relaxed and civil, with an implication of less restrictive security; I've certainly never come across the stories that you come across for US society in the EU.
Granted, there's a lot of other states, including China, Japan, most of Africa, where there is more government control. The China side is discussed in about 20 other threads at the moment; Japan has fairly strict policing but less crime and so less motivation to search people without good reason. Africa has major problems, sure. Eastern and Central African states have been in conflict and disruption for decades, and more recently the country of South Africa too. But those states are recognisably dictatorial, with conditions bordering on civil war. The US hasn't had significant internal conflict for ages; gang fights and politics don't count. Yet the US, a stable democratic state with an elected leader, still has the restrictions and permissive search laws.
Yeah, I don't live there either. But from here it looks damn strange to hear about some of your laws and the problems you get, the stories and jokes that come up about censorship and so on in the US. There's a lot of focus on allowing the Chinese population to be "free" - but at the same time, the US - bastion of the free world! - has a good range of the problems its residents complain so much about in others.
Usually years, somewhere around 3-4 on average. Stick a random number between 5,500,000 and 7,000,000 (1996-2006, ish) into the USPTO numsearch page and compare the granted date (top right) to the date of filing (usually the last line in the third info-section) if you want to have a play.
It takes such a long time because they have to be reviewed by patent examiners, compared to prior art to make sure they're not infringing, which includes referring to patents not in the patent referral list (you'll see in a lot of patents that the inventor compares and contrasts his application with previous patents, to clarify the differences). It usually has to be sent back and corrected, sits in a waiting queue whenever it's in the patent office's hands, suffer any delays the submitter wants or has; the list goes on. It's a tedious process that I think we saw an article about last week, since the workload of patent reviewers is simply too high; it all contributes to major delays. Compare with older patents - the few around 4M I checked took between a year and two years.
Yes, but the money still goes somewhere, in this case to the workers that supplied whatever the money is being wasted on. If capitalism is shooting itself in the foot there, it's also growing a new foot elsewhere in a system that creates those parts. Maybe the people who are buying the parts are suckers for not conferring - but that just means there's more people further down the chain that are doing better out of that sucker cash. The money just goes round and round; sometimes it gets stuck in some places, sometimes in others.
Remember that until the advent of the telephone and internet, communication was too slow to allow mass innovation. Now we have companies that do nothing but sell innovation, because they can access the resources and attract people from a wide net to bounce ideas and improve them; think tank companies.
Also ask a PhD student or look up for yourself how many citations are going on in academia - I don't know how the scales of academia-innovation and corporate-innovation compare, but even if the second is far more closed-in and impressive, it doesn't mean the former doesn't exist. Maybe academia doesn't work in the same way as capitalism, validating your point; I suspect that's true. But the money is still going somewhere.
While the theory of consortiums is a nice one, there's too many parties interested in keeping the technologies (read: profits) for themselves. Too many people want a slice of the pie, and the people who get these projects started aren't going to divvy out unless those wanting a slice of that pie are willing to invest in them strongly - and then they still want to keep hold of the reins.
However, at least one of the positive aspects of competition is that you don't get stuck in a rut with working on a single design; working on multiple parallel designs leads to better technology, because the people who will buy a working technology will go for the better ones. There's more pressure to do better, or be left behind.
We can hope. Personally, I think the internet age and rising costs of fuel will scrap this project; with free video conferencing improving, the value of face time is no longer such an absolute leader, and will quickly become outweighed by the cost of fast travel. It's an interesting idea - but 2025? I just can't see it staying viable.
Oh, I must have phrased it badly. It's not possible to push the levering tool in to the main body of the pod (only along the side slit) until you've applied levering force; and by that time the leverage has popped the case open. It's surprisingly easy for something that looks so unopenable from the outside.
If someone's going to use something sharp enough to pierce the battery, since that's on top when you open it (either that or the HD, can't remember - both are metal-cased), then I still believe they'd have serious trouble to wrest the iPod in such a way that the case came off while allowing the knife/sharp thing enough residual force to cause any damage. You'd have to lever the case up and be pushing the knifetip down into the guts you expose by doing that.
Sure, it's a step more difficult than sliding the cover off the back of the TV remote and fumbling the batteries out to replace them with new ones. But it's still damned easy.
Heh - the ipods can actually be opened already. Squeeze the case at the sides, and the clips will pop open; apply a little leverage by something that isn't sharp (won't damage the case) and it just comes off, easily. Then you can flip the battery forward; if you want to remove it or replace it with a third-party battery, of which several exist, all you need to do is poke a clip to disconnect it and pull it off the stickypads.
This legislation won't have any effect on the iPods; it may make Apple make the how-to-open information more available, but that's the extent of it. I don't know about minis, nanos and shuffles - but I bet that if you search for a third-party battery seller for those, you'll have included information on how to open each product without damaging it.
Besides which, the city can't take up that much space.
Wha...?! Did you forget what 'city' means?
Btw, digging and excavating a tunnel is vaguely expensive, requiring shoring and roof supports to prevent it from collapsing. Building underground structures is very expensive, but since they usually reach to the surface the structural stability is reduced to a more normal structural problem. Building underground structures underneath things is so vastly expensive it's simply implausable. It's why we expand cities sideways rather than downwards; even with vertical downwards structures the cost is generally prohibitive for anything that's looking to make a profit. There's a range of sunlight-redirection technologies that allow you to pipe natural light into buildings, and underground buildings wouldn't be a problem. Digging sideways to go underneath something is so rampantly expensive it's simple inconceivable to do it. Lay a very expensive car park to preserve another bit of history? It's laughable. Seismic imaging and sampling will have been done to see if it was the same as any of the hundred other ruins in the area, and since it's most likely to have been the same they'll have had the go-ahead to cover it over.
"Wiping out a key piece of history" would indeed be bemoanable; wiping out one of the bits of history that's near-identical to the many others that have already been investigated and dismissed - did you even read the parent post? - is trivial. There's simply too much information about that heritage to need more copies of the same stuff.
I was going to call bullshit on torrenting at all, with or without credit, for similar reasons - but your mention of SUs pulled me up; that's actually a very good idea. Some of these patches are pretty stonkingly big and for the most part the downloading is done within the week with a spike on the first day.
/likes
Dammit, I wanted a Woo pedal. Then I could use it when I beat something, or get a good drop, or just need cheering up. Wah pedal just sounds depressing! ;)
The problem there is not with the system itself - but with the design of the system; making the information accessible outside the system. That's why these things are being proposed as biometric; if they get stolen, then they should be damn near useless to other people. If it's stealable, then there's a thousand ways to make it unstealworthy. You're not thinking hard enough: have a biscuit! Require a pin, require a password. Encrypt it with a vast key rather than simply the next increment. Make it stupidly secure. Make the only systems able to access the information be those that are supposed to, and make it require you and only you to be able to use it. Then it WORKS. If you don't want people knowing things about you, then don't let them know. Vote with your feet. If you can't, then there's a flaw in that system, and get it fixed. Don't just complain that it'll never work.
While you've put a nice little smiley at the end of your comment, it remains pretty inflammatory. Sure, I'll respond to your troll.
No, I've never broken a speed limit - I'm a cyclist. I haven't had a toke, I don't give a damn about your President since I live in a different country, and you're allowed to complain about your leaders here (It's called "democracy" and "free speech" - funny, hey?). I still don't agree with you, but I also wouldn't do anything to you because you disagree with me. Fascist? Go look up what it means before slinging it around.
Past the personal responses - of course I'm in favour of cutting down crime. I know that speed limits are there for a reason, and having helped out at multiple crash scenes I fully agree with enforcing those speed limits. If you need to get there, then leave earlier. If you're going to play with the rules of the road, then by damn am I going to back you getting fined to try to get you under control before you run someone down. I won't argue about the drugs because I don't have anything to do with them, don't see any reason to have anything to do with them, and being uninterested am fairly uninformed and uncaring so won't argue about it, other than to raise the question: why are they illegal in the first place?
Me? I've got a clean sheet. I don't toe the line because I don't need to toe the line; I've got plenty of other things to do and ways to enjoy myself. As such, I don't give a damn whether anyone watches me or not, and from my hoity-toity high horse I can sneer at the people who vote for the leaders who ban the things they want to enjoy.
Back to your first line - that bit after the insult, about being monitored and controlled. Monitored, sure. Controlled - what do you think they put in those cards that force you to do what they want?
There's been a whole bunch of TV series - they even call them "Big Brother"! - where they watch and allow the general public to watch these people. Occasionally, as part of the game, there's an element of control - kicking people out of the house, assigning tasks to keep them from being bored out of their skulls (which they seem to do all the time anyway). Do you think that's how it will be? Orwell's 1984? That dystopia will never happen. There's too many hurdles between the current governments and that state for its creation to be viable - you would need a force of people bigger than the population you intend to watch to set up the system. Lower levels of monitoring cannot have that control over a community.
There's hundreds of examples of monitoring and control. Use of passports when travelling. Use of travel cards on the intricate London Underground, making sure the train companies get enough revenue to upkeep the utility. Second-hand, in taxes and licenses and so on. Each of those is there for a reason. The passport and travel card are obvious. The taxes oppress you! Sure, and they upkeep the roads you complain about when broken, the health service you rely on when you have a problem; the pool of resources from the community is implemented to help the community, even if it is skewed from the rich towards the poor. That's "Community". The licenses are there for control - a vague example is a hunting license, to prevent the expletion of a resource.
While the examples stray away from the topic at hand, the core is there. These things are put into place for a reason. The intended watch-ees are the criminals; people who don't harm the community simply aren't interesting to the system. Sure, there'll need to be safeguards against abuse. Only in the US are you hauled off to an offshore facility away from the laws of its supporting country for opposing its government. In the UK, in the EU, in Australia, we don't have dictatorships that claim democracy and enforce something else, whatever you want to call it. If you make a thought crime into a real crime, then you get taken into a court and trialled by a jury of your peers. That's being measured up by the community, and if you or a
Why does carrying a card stop you from doing what you want to do? How does it stop you from being 'free'? What does it disable, prevent or otherwise hinder you from doing?
The only answer that comes to my mind is "Crime". And I'm all for a government cutting that down.
Having a tag on you doesn't infringe your civil liberties. It may make you feel watched - but that doesn't prevent your freedom.
The major advantage of this over a wheelchair is conformity to the normal human shape. A wheelchair already has far more motive efficiency - and there's designs with wheel pairs that allow newer-fangled wheelchairs to climb chairs, raise the user, etc. Two legs give a disabled person a more normal appearance; four legs do not.
Wheelchairs aren't even limited with normal pebble surfaces - and if a surface is unstable enough to cause a wheel problems, then it'll cause a robotic leg-replacement problems too.
Your sig and your subject go well together...
Unfortunately, transitive trust is dangerous anywhere. The first example that comes to mind is handing your card over to a retailer to swipe; while it's something that's attempting to be addressed, with chip and pin readers, people equipped in the right way (whether script kiddies in the original example or someone in store with a second or tapped cardswiper (or, presumably next wave, same for chip and pin readers) in mine) have the ability to abuse that trust and screw people over for kicks or money.
While the person behind the store is hired by the relevant people and the kiddie isn't, neither are the core system maintainers yet have the ability to leverage the trust of that core system.
They did it to lock people in. The entire model locks people in, as mentioned in the summary - the email does not allow you to access them with third-party clients, and does not allow you to get the mails anywhere where you can access them with third-party clients, unless you do it manually for every single mail you get.
The entire thing will be a serious pain in the ass for anyone with even mediocre IT savvy; the people who are used to using a web client will have no problems and are the easy audience for MS here (with MS hoping to use the structure of Windows Live to keep them as clients when they leave, since then they keep all their contacts etc); and the setup also forces the rest of the students - those who would prefer to do things in any of a variety of other ways - to stoop to using their system. MS are effectively pulling in a pile of easy targets, and then putting a big wall around the hard targets so they are stuck whether they like it or not. As seen in a good thread above, the common language means it does function in FF, but breaks its major featureset. Anyone in firefox will be stuck with a closed interface, and you won't find bets against that improving in a hurry, because it would be a door in that big wall MS are setting up.
Whether or not they're losing lockin elsewhere, they've jumped on the opportunity to get a new generation before that generation gets savvy enough to get up in arms about what's being done to them. Sure, there'll be a few, but not enough until someone writes an interface that shapes packets to enable automation of the features that MS are intentionally leaving out.
IMAP has been around for 20 years; POP3 for 12. The longevity and widespread use of these protocols is vast in terms of the internet and email; 20 years is a vast timespan for this arena. Yet MS have designed something that prevents both. I have no idea how long automatic email forwarding has been around for, but again it's something that MS have left out.
When I saw the summary on the front page, I saw it was tagged 'monopoly'. I initially dismissed that, because I thought that with email you can't get a monopoly so the tag was irrelevant in this case. But when you force, force, force people to use your system with no way of connecting it up to their other systems, and use the weight of an educational institution to enable that lockin, then it is indeed a monopoly. They're not getting any money from it yet (I very much hope an institution wouldn't pay for this system) so the traditional connotations of 'monopoly' aren't there yet - but they're forcing people in while and where they can't do anything about it. Keep the number of people, they'll get their profits, whether it's in systems required to be able to use their services or something further down the line for Windows Live.
Well, I believe "Norton" as a company name (not product name) wrt computing is held by Peter Norton - the guy who wrote the (actually very good) disk analysis and protection software back in well pre-OSX mac days (I think it was mac before PC?). It did nice efficient things to make your hard drive better and was a well-written program that worked. In 1990 it was bought out by Symantec, and since then it's tumbled gently downhill into a steaming pile of crap that intentionally breaks when a new full version is out that you have to buy.
Granted, they'd still be able to change to a different name, just it wouldn't be Norton.
Bullshit straight back at you. My dad had a Mac SE when I was old enough to think coherently, back when Apple was the field leader and MS was a whelp (yeah, it surprised me too, gizmodo came out with a '20 years ago...' post that was quite informative). Since then it was at each point easier to upgrade within the Apple line rather than switch over to Windows, even though Windows took over as market leader; when I got to university and could pick my first computer, I used the nice 25?33?% apple education discount (UK, don't know what it's like in the US) and got myself a flat panel imac. I was used to macs, and though I'd used programs in windows on the school computers, it was never enough to find out what a lot of the subsystem stuff was. Since then I've bought an iBook, using the handy installation process that copies your entire hard drive and filestructure over so there's no effective change between the first computer and the second. When I left uni and got a job, the office I now work in uses Apple computers exclusively, except one PC for the designers when they need to make a Rhino file in the right format for a windows user to recieve.
.dll files, and I think that BIOS is the sublayer you have to drop to when you want to configure new hardware like RAM or partition your hard drive. But while I've come across the term 'flash BIOS', it means jack shit to me. The only context I have it in is a quick wipe, and that's only because other utilities use the term in that way, and it's a complete guess when applying it to the BIOS as I understand it.
Sure, I'm a rare occurence. But while I've wandered around the web enough to come across the terms (especially on bash.org), I've never had a need to find out exactly what they do. I think there's a difference between DLL and
You know why I don't know? Because I don't care. I'm a geek who uses macs, and I don't care about the hordes of people who told me I was doing it all wrong when apple were going down the tube, and I still don't care about the hordes of people who think I'm a moron for using macs. I have no need to know anything at all about the windows subsystem, and so when I come across the terms I see them but ignore them completely. I simply have no need to know what they mean, in the same way that when I see arcane sigs here, I can recognise them as being *nix terms or cryptography (I have familiarity but not mastery of the linux stuff, and I've read Cryptonomicon) - but their meaning isn't obvious simply by looking at them, and I don't have a reason to learn the meaning of each and every single one of them by looking them up or figuring them out.
I may have more understanding of what they are than the average Windows user, just like the gpp. But by no means does that mean I understand them completely, nor that I care to know what they do. I don't need to.
You're technically correct, but the action they've taken has exactly the same effect as phishing. The phishers no longer need to try to get the information; it's all there for them to take, and it seems fairly likely that they now have. They can pretend to be a hundred thousand different people now, with a lot of backup detail that they wouldn't have got by normal "This is your bank website really, now enter your password" scams.
While it's not technically illegal, it's still a rampantly stupid thing to do, and vastly enables illegal activities.
Accessory to theft. Accessory to identity theft.
Hmm? Yahoo games has hundreds of thousands of people online at once, presumably popcap does too though it doesn't seem to list figures. I'm sure there's other ones out there that are similar. Puzzle pirates has a thousand online per server or so, with a userbase in the hundreds of thousands. Yahoo games doesn't require a subscriptions, neither does popcap; puzzle pirates allows some free play but the number of subscribers plus the amount of cash that's gone into their pay-per-play servers is damn telling for the size of company.
While the graphics push away a chunk of the powerplay gamers that are hooked on top-of-the-line 3D graphics and gameplay (resource hogging, ie the stuff that needs a movie budget to produce, read 'quantity'), the simplicity and addictiveness of popcap/y!games/puzzle pirates and similar, which have simple graphics and low resource cost (I think PP is somewhere in the 1XX MBs now, as opposed to the 4? 5? gigs or so I needed for WoW before I stopped playing a year ago) - these are the games that focus on quality of play.
I realise that Blizzard and the ilk have quality of play too - I played WoW for a long time before I shrugged off the constant peer pressure and gave all my unbound ingame stuff to my guild and left. But so long as each product on the market can provide something different from the expensive high-powered fashionable games; at a lower price they'll have a section of the market.
I played WoW, and it was fun item hunting and playing in groups, but I reverted to d2x after I quit because the item hunting was similar and it costs me nothing; I can play with friends and that's what makes me enjoy it, even though it's now more a retro game. I also play PP, in which the time you spend in game is vaguely irrelevant; the way they run the stat system means it's based on your skill rather than your playtime. Yes, that loses the players who want the time spent playing to be a factor - but that is only one portion of the market, albeit a large one. They also jump ship when the next new shiny thing comes along - the earlier the better so they get an early lead.The market that ISN'T - those who are driven out by always being second to those who spend vast amounts of time in game - will also move away, this time from disaffectation. The games that offer a playstyle or level of addiction that will keep someone hooked, without disaffectation at being left behind, without the $$$/month that spurs that disaffectation, that injects new content often enough to keep interest bubbling - just like PP is now - will build and build their userbase.
Even though I've completed every aspect of PP, it's still a great game to me. Even though I've completed d2 and d2x multiple times, with no goals remaining, it's still a game I can pick up and play at any time. WoW? I don't quite understand why, but I'm completely disillusioned. There's pressure to grind, and it completely lost its fun. I got re-enthused a little when some irc buddies were talking over some new aspect from a patch, but a single simple comment when I thought I might reactivate my subscription - "Are you sure?" - made me think over and know it'd be back to the grind again.
I went on a bit, but in summary my post can be vaguely analogied to: big games are like big budget movies. Everyone sees them once, and then it's on to the next ones. The good games - whether big or small - are like classic movies; the ones people will be entertained with over and over again.
Holy moly... all the guy did was quote from Pulp Fiction.
;)
Anyway, we don't eat humans either
Considering how tough it is to find organic molecules at all - whether organic by courtesy or not - finding a vast cloud of methanol is extraordinary. While finding methanol on earth would at best be vaguely interesting, since in the lifetime of the earth we've managed to significantly bypass the stage of small molecules, remember that if you've got 463 billion km of methanol there's a fair chance that something did it. Whether it's vapour trails from a cosmic express or some strange unforeseen product from the explosion of a star with just the right mass balance to get this kind of ratio of atoms to form the products, it's hugely interesting to find it up there.
The chances of two random atoms interacting is middling to fair. Biatoms will readily form molecules, especially since the simplest atom is hydrogen which will happily pair up with another of itself. The chances of two different molecules interacting closely enough to react is very low. On earth we need dense solutions with a heat source to get a reaction to happen. The chances of interaction to produce a cloud of particles is very low, though with the amount of stuff out there you can understand how it happens. The chance of getting reaction of enough molecules in one way to produce enough of one kind of product to show up on a spectrometer is fantastically small. Note that the article doesn't say "methane and methanol", which would be more expected from reaction with carbon in a hydrogen-rich environment; and if you mix oxygen and methane together in an attempt to get methanol, you'll get the lower-energy products of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water.