You can't really directly compare the EV1 and the Volt. After all, the EV1 was all-electric (The Wiki page does list a hybrid variant, but I don't think that ever got into production, did it?)
In any case, for an all-electric vehicle, you would *absolutely* need a higher range than for a hybrid design like this. The article that/. linked to in the root post indicates that 40 Miles was chosen as a tradeoff between having *enough* battery for most drivers, while keeping weight and cost down. Time will tell if 40 Miles is the right target, but it does seem reasonable with a car of this sort of design to not put in more battery than most people have a daily use for.
It might be nice, though, to have an 'option' at the time of purchasing the car, to get a larger battery which maybe takes the range up to 60 or 80 mi. If you happen to be someone who has a longer drive than 40 mi. each day, you might wish to get a slightly larger battery. Still, the argument can be made that, let's say you do have to drive 60 mi. every day - at least the first 40 of it will be on battery, so you've reduced your gasoline consumption down to just driving 20 miles on gas - and at approx. 50Mpg while running on gas, that means you're only using a gallon of gas every 2-3 days. Not too shabby.
*If* plugin cars become popular (which may not happen), then I would expect to see 'charging' stations start appearing at businesses (so people can charge up while they are at work), malls, public parking garages, on-street parking, and private parking lots (like the one at the back of my apartment building - not exactly a private drive, but not on-street parking, either). Basically, an electric plug, plus a meter, plus some sort of billing/payment system, all integrated into a single unit. In places where there are parking meters, it could even integrate into the parking meter.
For now, though, there are enough people who do have private garages and driveways that Chevy has a market, even though there are millions of people who don't have any place to charge up, there are also many millions who do.
"New technologies almost always target the high-end first"
Which is why I have to ask, why are we subsidizing it? I bet there are plenty of rock stars, pro athletes, Hollywood celebrities, corporate executives, and other rich folk who wouldn't blink at spending $40k on a car. (Well, they might blink if only because $40k would be *too* cheap - some folks won't look at a car unless it costs at *least* $200k)
Instead of putting this new technology into a mid-range sedan or coupe, they should have started this Volt tech in high-end luxury/sports models, selling it for >= $100k each, then used that money to build the economies of scale necessary to bring it down to also being available in the $40k range that some in the middle class like to buy (the BMW/Lexus/Cadillac class), then maybe 5 or 10 years from now, they'd be able to introduce a mid-range $20k-$30k car, then a few years after that, a $10k-$20k coupe/sedan for the masses.
I just am really confused by the economics of this - why subsidize something that expensive, making it a money loser (which, I should think, would almost guarantee that it will fail in the long run). instead of making it an expensive 'status' item with high margins?
I tend to lean towards the viewpoint expressed by the parent. For a *business*, I am always kind of left wondering, if the email address is an aol, yahoo, gmail, or hotmail/msn account (always kind of left wondering if a business with such an address is just a fly-by-night scam), but for peoples' personal email, at least to me, it doesn't really matter much. Of course, I'm not in a position where I hire anyone, so I guess what I think doesn't currently matter.
How do we know if the LHC has failed? I confess, I don't really know hardly anything about the experiments they are conducting at the LHC, but I know they are trying to find a quantum particle called the Higgs Boson, right? Well, one could potentially say that, even if they don't find it, doesn't prove it doesn't exist, it just means the experiment may have been flawed. Are the experiments designed rigorously enough that a failure to find the particle after some set of experiments essentially 'proves' the non-existence?
Why on Earth would you download a 'bank' app from anyone other than *YOUR BANK*? I'm only gonna do online banking from the website or apps provided to me directly from my bank. I'm not gonna download anything from the Android market, from some random user, and do banking with it. Who thinks that it's a good idea to do 'banking' with an app by a random developer? I mean, *maybe*, maybe if it was someone large and established, like IBM, Google, Microsoft, or Apple, I *might* consider using third party software, but certainly not anyone I've never heard of before.
Lot's of people figure you can't negotiate with a cell or cable company, but that might not be true. I have relatives who use Sprint. They've been using Sprint for a few years, and had upgraded to a more premium voice & data package for 2 phones. They were generally happy with Sprint, but the coverage at their house was crappy. They talked to Sprint about this, basically told them they weren't going to pay additional monthly fees on top of the premium package fees they were already paying, but were unhappy with reception at their house, and were able to get Sprint to sell them the femtocell device at a slight discount and wave all monthly fees.
I don't know if AT&T will negotiate, but sometimes with things like this (which are basically add-ons), cell companies *want* to charge if they think they can get away with it, but if you tell them you won't pay and *additional* $10-20/mo on top of normal cell service fees and Internet access fees, just to get service, they might back down.
Well, yes, it won't work at *every single possible* Wifi hotspot, but it will work at most. As for the power issue, if I'm at a location where my cell access sucks, I'm willing to make that tradeoff. My point is, that UMA phones will benefit at lots of locations, potentially, whereas femtocells only benefit you at a fixed location. Most people and businesses don't have femtocells installed, but a great many (at least in the U.S.) do have Wifi.
Man, I completely don't remember, now, where I saw this, but I remember seeing a clip at the beginning of a comedy movie from like the 1940 or 1950's or something, where one guy is sent out by his wife to sell pies, and he meets a friend, and they get to talking (while the 'friend' starts eating the pies that are supposed to be sold), and they start up a discussion where they talk about starting a pie company.
As the discussion goes along, the guy who was gonna start the pie company decides that, in order to keep his costs down, and to generate additional revenue streams, he's gonna buy steel mills (for the metal to make the pie tins from), flour mills, wheat farms and sugar cane plantations, a paper company, a printer (to print labels and advertising), railroads (cheaper shipping around the country), telephone companies, banks - basically, the guy decides he needs to buy the whole economy so that he can get the best price on every product and service which is even peripherally associated with making and selling pies.
Google Energy, LLC just brought that to mind. Not saying it's a bad idea, but by the time they're done, Google is either going to be broke, or buy everything.
You know, T-Mobile, a few years back, introduced UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) with some of their phones (which T-Mo has subsequently marketted under 3 different names, you know, to confuse their customers, I guess), but none of the other carriers picked up on it, and T-Mo pretty quickly abandoned it - I believe their network still supports it, and some/all of their Blackberries support it, but they pretty quickly stopped advertising it, none of the Android phones support it, and T-Mo has quietly gotten rid of every non-Blackberry phone that used to have the UMA feature.
It's really kind of a shame - UMA is a great idea: basically, any WiFi hotspot that you can connect to become a "cell tower" (well, it routes cell phone traffic over a tunnel on the Internet, to T-Mo's network, so it basically becomes VoIP). This Femtocell idea is something that some of the other carriers are sort of testing (I have some relatives on Sprint who got one because there is very poor reception at their house). But, I think UMA is a superior solution to these femtocells, because a) with UMA, you need a phone with UMA support, but you had to get a phone anyway, so adding UMA to phones would have been almost 'free' from the customer perspective, with the only other equipment needed being something you *probably* already have, and if you don't, you can get dirt cheap at Microcenter, Best Buy, Fry's, etc., and B) the femtocell will *only* work at your own location where you put it, whereas UMA would work with any Internet connection and most Wifi hotspots, which means that I could take advantage of it at other locations if they have WiFi (relatives or friends houses, school, work, shopping, etc) too.
Now, I think with the Android phones, you can now do some VoIP calling, but the advantage with UMA was that calls would seamlessly transfer between wifi and the cell network (if you left Wifi range, or entered Wifi range). It's really a damn shame that the cell phone industry didn't adopt UMA as a feature, because to me, it seems like a vastly superior approach than femtocells.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that UMA could rise from the ashes, but at this point, it seems kinda dead. More's the pity.
I suspect this may be about generating publicity for the novel. Sort of a 'reverse Streisand effect' - draw attention to what you want to promote by threatening legal action. Yes, it risks backlash, but it also generates a lot more media coverage than 'positive publicity' would. I mean, do you think/. would have posted a story called "Dick estate says honored to be recognized by Google"? Slashdot *might* have, but I bet *this* story (about a threatened lawsuit) gets to CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, NYT, Wa. Post, etc, and I'm sure that even *if* the other news outlets gave any coverage to a 'positive publicity' story at all, it would be buried in a very minor blurb or headline scroller at the bottom of the TV newscast, where it wouldn't have gotten much attention from hardly anyone.
Because of this story, a lot more people will know that Google named their phone after a character in that novel, and some of them may get curious and decide to buy a copy (or at least inquire at their public library, who might need to buy additional copies to deal with a sudden increase in people trying to check out that novel [or to replace lost or stolen copies]).
Well, I didn't exactly pull that number out of my ass - I remember reading or hearing the findings of some study which suggested there were good reasons, based on a number of factors, including how much land use is required to feed, clothe, house, and generally support a population of that size, why that was a pretty good number (but, no, I don't have a citation handy). As for the happiness of people who will never be born, that makes very little sense.
Now, it's possibly true that with changes to society and infrastructure, you could house more people with the same land and resource usage (for example, more people could live in tall multi-family residences, which would reduce land use for housing - basically, stack our houses on top of each other; innovations in farming could lead to the ability to produce more food with less land, etc), so there is probably some elasticity in that figure.
But, the point is, there is some 'balance point' value somewhere, where human population is indefinitely sustainable, but when there's more population than that, we start to tip the balance to the point where we are consuming resources and damaging ecosystems faster than the planet is replacing/repairing.
First? Is there some reason we need to serialize the problems? I agree that humanity needs to try to level off population growth, and maybe even try to gradually decline it, over the course of a few generations, down to 4-6 Billion. Does that mean we have to wait until the population is lower to try to find the energy necessary for things like Water desalination/purification, air conditioning, refrigeration, etc?
I think these are problems that can, and must, be solved in parallel. Even if we could flatten population growth tomorrow, we still need more/cheaper energy. Also, we are in a race to ensure we have enough energy to just sustain *current levels* as oil production will likely gradually decline as we move into the future. Right now, the only thing we seem to have enough of to replace oil with is coal, but that produces lots of problems too - like radioactive waste emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.
Hence, current interest in solar and wind power. I tend to have some sympathy to the argument that, in addition to solar and wind projects, we need to look into developing the Integral Fast Reactor concept - because it solves 2 problems at once: what to do with radioactive "waste" we've already created and have tons of sitting in storage at reactors around the country and how to generate lots of power for the future.
My gut instinct is that the environmental impact would be nothing - after all, hot air is rising from the desert in columns, naturally, *all the time*. They aren't adding any additional energy that wouldn't be there anyhow - all they are doing is trapping the hot air which would be rising *anyhow* up into the atmosphere, and *extracting* some of the energy from it.
On the note of momentum - if you are using the air to drive turbines, wouldn't you actually be significantly *reducing* the momentum? After all, as the air rises, and then collides with the turbines, it is imparting some of it's momentum into the turbines.
This is just a guess. . . but I suppose the theory is something like this:
Natural downdrafts occur all the time. . . The Sun heats up the earth, which then transfers heat to air near the ground, creating an updraft, but eventually, when the air gets high enough up, it loses some of that heat, and then cold air drops down to the ground to replace the air which is updrafting. What goes up, must come down - air is constantly rising from the surface of the earth, but other air is constantly falling down to replace it.
So, instead of generating electricity from the thermal energy of warm air, this other tower concept sounds like it generates electricity, I guess, from the gravitational potential energy of the cold air up high. I think the water at the top of the tower is just to sort of initialize the downdraft, but once it was started, it would probably continue for awhile - like poking a whole somewhere near the bottom of the water tank, once the whole is poked, you don't have to do anything to keep the water flowing out - gravity takes care of that.
Seems like you could design a plant which contains the entire cycle inside of the plant, and generates electricity both as the hot air rises, and as it falls again after it has cooled - like a giant loop or arch with turbines on both sides.
The tablet does not need to do the following: - download automatic updates
I actually disagree on this point. It's almost certain that someone will find some sort of security exploit in the networking software in the device, at some point, or in the browser, or mediaplayer, or whatever. I think *any* device which has net access needs an automatic update facility for patching security holes.
"- cost more than $200 ($300 in 2011, $500 in 2012 to account for inflation)"
Wow - that's some major inflation you're allowing for there. That's almost 50% inflation year after year. Inflation (in the U.S., at least) has historically been less than 10% most years (see this graph for example). Higher inflation is, I suppose, always a possiblity, but I'm not sure there's much basis to predict that much inflation in the next 3 year? Electronics, anyhow, usually go opposite of inflation of all other product prices. They tend to be cheaper 3 years after release, rather than more expensive.
Re:120fps vs 60fps is like night and day
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"For a high speed game like Quake even 60fps is totally unplayable and there's a massive difference between 90fps and 120fps."
Which raises an interesting point - maybe the games shouldn't be designed to be quite that high-speed to begin with, or the games should be designed to allow them to run at the necessary higher speed? Certainly with a console game, the game should be designed for the limits of the platform, yes? The problem seems to be that game designers are designing games that *should* be played at 60fps (because they are designed to be high speed play), but then they are designing the graphics of the game such that the console can only run it at 20-30fps.
Take as a counter-example, the game Oblivion. That was a game which focused on having pretty killer graphics, but the design of the game is such that you don't really need high frame rates - reaction times do matter somewhat in Oblivion (it's sort of a cross between an FPS and an RPG), but the nature of the game is that reaction times (and thus framerates) do not need to be nearly as high as Quake, MW2, or any other first-person shooter. But, if you are designing a first person shooter, framerates should be a top priority, trumping graphics quality where necessary. A lot of people passed over Crysis when it came out a couple years back, because even though it has superb graphics, it just wasn't playable on their computers.
You know, I guess what it must have been is that the support is there, but nobody really advertises it? Maybe I'm just mis-remembering, but it seems like back at the launch of the G1, I was trying to find out if it play vorbis or not, and I was never able to find any definite answer in any of the G1 'tech specs' that they posted on the t-mo website. I'm not really surprised, I guess, that the phone supports more functionality than T-mo actually advertised - after all, outside of the Linux/Gnu/BSD 'community', not many people seem to even know that a thing called Ogg Vorbis *exists* (well, I have seen it used in a few commercial games, fwiw), so I guess T-Mo wouldn't waste money trying to sell people on a feature they don't know they need.
I have a followup question to this: Is the universe now, or did it ever, expand at or faster than the speed of light, as space itself expanded? The whole notion of looking 'back in time' to see a galaxy that close to the big bang has me a little bit puzzled. What I mean is, my understanding of this whole idea of 'looking back in time' with a telescope is that light travels at the speed of light, and if we know a galaxy is X billion light-years away from Earth, then we say that the images we see *now* originally left that galaxy X billion years ago (well, ok, there's probably some sort of calculus needed to adjust for the fact that the universe is expanding, and the points in space are getting farther away from each other *even as the light travels between galaxies*).
But, it still seems to me strange that we could 'see' back in time to.6 or.8 Billion years after the big bang, when there has subsequently been 13.2 to 13.4 Billion years. The only way I can conceptually make that work out is if the Universe is expanding at nearly the speed of light. My reasoning is this: at.6 to.8 Billion years after the big bang, the 'diameter' of the Universe would have to have been less-than-or-equal.6 or.8 Billion light years, wouldn't it? That is based upon the presumption that no two bits of matter in the Universe can ever move away from each other at or faster than the speed of light (so, the radius of the Universe would be constrained to expanding at 1/2 C, wouldn't it?). I would think that the *diametric* expansion of the universe would have been something less than the speed of light - maybe like 1/2-2/3 C (so, the radius would have only expanded at something like 1/4 - 1/3 C)? (The only real basis I have for that is simply that I've never heard of anything other than light, and sub-atomic particles, moving at any significant fraction of the speed of light, but I really have no idea here - help me out).
Anyhow, getting back to my point - if the Universe was less than 1 Billion light-years between the farthest points of space *at that time*, how is it possible that it took 13+ Billion years for the light to reach Earth from that time? The mathematics of the situation makes no sense to me. I mean, I *do* get that even as the light travels, the distance it needs to travel to reach us is constantly increasing, but it would seem like the light travels so much faster than anything else, that it wouldn't take that long.
I mean, let's say, for example, that we start at the year 1 Billion ABB (After the Big Bang). Let's say, for example, the Universe was.5 Billion light-years in diameter, and the diameter was increasing at a rate of.5 Bn light years every 1 Bn years (in other words, the diameter is expanding at 1/2 C). Ok, so a bunch of photons leave Galaxy A to travel to Galaxy B which is at the furthest possible point in the Universe. After travelling for.5 Bn years the photons reach the point where Galaxy B *used to be*, but Galaxy B has kept moving, and is now.25 Bn light years farther away than it started. So the photons travel on for another.25 Bn years, but once again Galaxy B has moved on, and is now.125 Bn light years away. As we can see, this progression keeps halving the distance and halving the time travelled by the light. I haven't calculated out the exact time it would take for the light to finally reach Galaxy B, but because of this progression of halving, I think it's going to be somewhere around the year 2 Bn?
So, getting back to my original question, how is it possible that we could ever 'look back' *that far* in time. I could buy that we could look back 5, or maybe even 7 Billion years, but I don't see how it's possible to see back farther than that?
It occurs to me that even if they do have different models of the phone for different carriers, you could potentially just swap phones when you swap carriers. If you want to leave T-Mo and Go to AT&T, there's probably plenty of other people that would want to make the switch in the other direction. Could maybe use Ebay or something similar to sell the phone for the old carrier, and buy the model for the new carrier. Granted, this isn't ideal, as doing something like that, you risk getting a 'new' phone that isn't in as good of a condition as the seller claimed. Still, you could probably move all your data and settings from the old phone to the new phone by simply swapping the SIM and SD cards into the new phone, right?
Seems like that situation, while not ideal, is one I could live with. It would be better if the phone had a chip/radio that could work on any carrier, and that might even happen, eventually. Who knows.
I noticed on the tech specs page that Nexus One supports Ogg Vorbis audio. Do other Android phones support Ogg Vorbis playback? I mean, it would seem like that would be a feature of the base Android platform, but IIRC, when the G1 launched, Ogg support wasn't included? I know - it's been over a year since the G1 launched, and a lot has changed in newer versions of Android. Still, have any of the other *currently released* Android phones come with Ogg decoder?
Ok, I'll bite. What the heck is all-hardware encryption? Granted, I'm sure it's possible to implement decryption algorithms in silicon, instead of as software, but what's to prevent some enterprising programmer from creating a *software* implementation of the decryption algo? How can you *force* encryption/decryption to be all-hardware?
You still haven't explained how a derivative work is created. You make an appeal to authority where you have none, period. (See, wasn't that easy?)
Copyright law governs the distribution of copies of a protected work. That's all. It doesn't govern use (although, sometimes, contracts are used as part of the licensing agreement to receive a copy for proprietary software, which can add further restrictions). But the GPL is not a contract, it is a license, and only covers the work it was applied to, and any *derivative works*.
The thing is, even though the linked library or EXE uses the API, it doesn't *contain* the API. So, the argument can be made that where there is no copying, there is no copyright violation. Put another way, there is a very logical argument that a dynamically linked work is completely separate from the executable or library it links against. Think of a book or magazine article, or even an article on a website, which directs the reader to go read something else, then come back and finish reading the text of the article. Is the article a derivative work of the work it references/links to?
Hence, even though the library or exe *depends* upon the other work, it may not be a derivative because it does not *contain* the other work (or, perhaps the courts will decide that it *is* in fact, a derivative, but no one really knows for sure). See, like I said, we can argue about this all day, but the question is still not settled in law. The law, so far as I know, *does not* address the question of dynamically linking computer programs in any statute or court precedent.
"Your argument is like saying oral sex is not sex."
No, it's not. It's nice you're so opinionated, but that makes no sense.
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You can't really directly compare the EV1 and the Volt. After all, the EV1 was all-electric (The Wiki page does list a hybrid variant, but I don't think that ever got into production, did it?)
In any case, for an all-electric vehicle, you would *absolutely* need a higher range than for a hybrid design like this. The article that /. linked to in the root post indicates that 40 Miles was chosen as a tradeoff between having *enough* battery for most drivers, while keeping weight and cost down. Time will tell if 40 Miles is the right target, but it does seem reasonable with a car of this sort of design to not put in more battery than most people have a daily use for.
It might be nice, though, to have an 'option' at the time of purchasing the car, to get a larger battery which maybe takes the range up to 60 or 80 mi. If you happen to be someone who has a longer drive than 40 mi. each day, you might wish to get a slightly larger battery. Still, the argument can be made that, let's say you do have to drive 60 mi. every day - at least the first 40 of it will be on battery, so you've reduced your gasoline consumption down to just driving 20 miles on gas - and at approx. 50Mpg while running on gas, that means you're only using a gallon of gas every 2-3 days. Not too shabby.
*If* plugin cars become popular (which may not happen), then I would expect to see 'charging' stations start appearing at businesses (so people can charge up while they are at work), malls, public parking garages, on-street parking, and private parking lots (like the one at the back of my apartment building - not exactly a private drive, but not on-street parking, either). Basically, an electric plug, plus a meter, plus some sort of billing/payment system, all integrated into a single unit. In places where there are parking meters, it could even integrate into the parking meter.
For now, though, there are enough people who do have private garages and driveways that Chevy has a market, even though there are millions of people who don't have any place to charge up, there are also many millions who do.
"New technologies almost always target the high-end first"
Which is why I have to ask, why are we subsidizing it? I bet there are plenty of rock stars, pro athletes, Hollywood celebrities, corporate executives, and other rich folk who wouldn't blink at spending $40k on a car. (Well, they might blink if only because $40k would be *too* cheap - some folks won't look at a car unless it costs at *least* $200k)
Instead of putting this new technology into a mid-range sedan or coupe, they should have started this Volt tech in high-end luxury/sports models, selling it for >= $100k each, then used that money to build the economies of scale necessary to bring it down to also being available in the $40k range that some in the middle class like to buy (the BMW/Lexus/Cadillac class), then maybe 5 or 10 years from now, they'd be able to introduce a mid-range $20k-$30k car, then a few years after that, a $10k-$20k coupe/sedan for the masses.
I just am really confused by the economics of this - why subsidize something that expensive, making it a money loser (which, I should think, would almost guarantee that it will fail in the long run). instead of making it an expensive 'status' item with high margins?
I tend to lean towards the viewpoint expressed by the parent. For a *business*, I am always kind of left wondering, if the email address is an aol, yahoo, gmail, or hotmail/msn account (always kind of left wondering if a business with such an address is just a fly-by-night scam), but for peoples' personal email, at least to me, it doesn't really matter much. Of course, I'm not in a position where I hire anyone, so I guess what I think doesn't currently matter.
How do we know if the LHC has failed? I confess, I don't really know hardly anything about the experiments they are conducting at the LHC, but I know they are trying to find a quantum particle called the Higgs Boson, right? Well, one could potentially say that, even if they don't find it, doesn't prove it doesn't exist, it just means the experiment may have been flawed. Are the experiments designed rigorously enough that a failure to find the particle after some set of experiments essentially 'proves' the non-existence?
Why on Earth would you download a 'bank' app from anyone other than *YOUR BANK*? I'm only gonna do online banking from the website or apps provided to me directly from my bank. I'm not gonna download anything from the Android market, from some random user, and do banking with it. Who thinks that it's a good idea to do 'banking' with an app by a random developer? I mean, *maybe*, maybe if it was someone large and established, like IBM, Google, Microsoft, or Apple, I *might* consider using third party software, but certainly not anyone I've never heard of before.
Lot's of people figure you can't negotiate with a cell or cable company, but that might not be true. I have relatives who use Sprint. They've been using Sprint for a few years, and had upgraded to a more premium voice & data package for 2 phones. They were generally happy with Sprint, but the coverage at their house was crappy. They talked to Sprint about this, basically told them they weren't going to pay additional monthly fees on top of the premium package fees they were already paying, but were unhappy with reception at their house, and were able to get Sprint to sell them the femtocell device at a slight discount and wave all monthly fees.
I don't know if AT&T will negotiate, but sometimes with things like this (which are basically add-ons), cell companies *want* to charge if they think they can get away with it, but if you tell them you won't pay and *additional* $10-20/mo on top of normal cell service fees and Internet access fees, just to get service, they might back down.
Well, yes, it won't work at *every single possible* Wifi hotspot, but it will work at most. As for the power issue, if I'm at a location where my cell access sucks, I'm willing to make that tradeoff. My point is, that UMA phones will benefit at lots of locations, potentially, whereas femtocells only benefit you at a fixed location. Most people and businesses don't have femtocells installed, but a great many (at least in the U.S.) do have Wifi.
Man, I completely don't remember, now, where I saw this, but I remember seeing a clip at the beginning of a comedy movie from like the 1940 or 1950's or something, where one guy is sent out by his wife to sell pies, and he meets a friend, and they get to talking (while the 'friend' starts eating the pies that are supposed to be sold), and they start up a discussion where they talk about starting a pie company.
As the discussion goes along, the guy who was gonna start the pie company decides that, in order to keep his costs down, and to generate additional revenue streams, he's gonna buy steel mills (for the metal to make the pie tins from), flour mills, wheat farms and sugar cane plantations, a paper company, a printer (to print labels and advertising), railroads (cheaper shipping around the country), telephone companies, banks - basically, the guy decides he needs to buy the whole economy so that he can get the best price on every product and service which is even peripherally associated with making and selling pies.
Google Energy, LLC just brought that to mind. Not saying it's a bad idea, but by the time they're done, Google is either going to be broke, or buy everything.
You know, T-Mobile, a few years back, introduced UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) with some of their phones (which T-Mo has subsequently marketted under 3 different names, you know, to confuse their customers, I guess), but none of the other carriers picked up on it, and T-Mo pretty quickly abandoned it - I believe their network still supports it, and some/all of their Blackberries support it, but they pretty quickly stopped advertising it, none of the Android phones support it, and T-Mo has quietly gotten rid of every non-Blackberry phone that used to have the UMA feature.
It's really kind of a shame - UMA is a great idea: basically, any WiFi hotspot that you can connect to become a "cell tower" (well, it routes cell phone traffic over a tunnel on the Internet, to T-Mo's network, so it basically becomes VoIP). This Femtocell idea is something that some of the other carriers are sort of testing (I have some relatives on Sprint who got one because there is very poor reception at their house). But, I think UMA is a superior solution to these femtocells, because a) with UMA, you need a phone with UMA support, but you had to get a phone anyway, so adding UMA to phones would have been almost 'free' from the customer perspective, with the only other equipment needed being something you *probably* already have, and if you don't, you can get dirt cheap at Microcenter, Best Buy, Fry's, etc., and B) the femtocell will *only* work at your own location where you put it, whereas UMA would work with any Internet connection and most Wifi hotspots, which means that I could take advantage of it at other locations if they have WiFi (relatives or friends houses, school, work, shopping, etc) too.
Now, I think with the Android phones, you can now do some VoIP calling, but the advantage with UMA was that calls would seamlessly transfer between wifi and the cell network (if you left Wifi range, or entered Wifi range). It's really a damn shame that the cell phone industry didn't adopt UMA as a feature, because to me, it seems like a vastly superior approach than femtocells.
I suppose it's theoretically possible that UMA could rise from the ashes, but at this point, it seems kinda dead. More's the pity.
Antibiotics will prevent us from ever tapping into the force by killing off all our Midichlorians. . .
I suspect this may be about generating publicity for the novel. Sort of a 'reverse Streisand effect' - draw attention to what you want to promote by threatening legal action. Yes, it risks backlash, but it also generates a lot more media coverage than 'positive publicity' would. I mean, do you think /. would have posted a story called "Dick estate says honored to be recognized by Google"? Slashdot *might* have, but I bet *this* story (about a threatened lawsuit) gets to CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, NYT, Wa. Post, etc, and I'm sure that even *if* the other news outlets gave any coverage to a 'positive publicity' story at all, it would be buried in a very minor blurb or headline scroller at the bottom of the TV newscast, where it wouldn't have gotten much attention from hardly anyone.
Because of this story, a lot more people will know that Google named their phone after a character in that novel, and some of them may get curious and decide to buy a copy (or at least inquire at their public library, who might need to buy additional copies to deal with a sudden increase in people trying to check out that novel [or to replace lost or stolen copies]).
Well, I didn't exactly pull that number out of my ass - I remember reading or hearing the findings of some study which suggested there were good reasons, based on a number of factors, including how much land use is required to feed, clothe, house, and generally support a population of that size, why that was a pretty good number (but, no, I don't have a citation handy). As for the happiness of people who will never be born, that makes very little sense.
Now, it's possibly true that with changes to society and infrastructure, you could house more people with the same land and resource usage (for example, more people could live in tall multi-family residences, which would reduce land use for housing - basically, stack our houses on top of each other; innovations in farming could lead to the ability to produce more food with less land, etc), so there is probably some elasticity in that figure.
But, the point is, there is some 'balance point' value somewhere, where human population is indefinitely sustainable, but when there's more population than that, we start to tip the balance to the point where we are consuming resources and damaging ecosystems faster than the planet is replacing/repairing.
First? Is there some reason we need to serialize the problems? I agree that humanity needs to try to level off population growth, and maybe even try to gradually decline it, over the course of a few generations, down to 4-6 Billion. Does that mean we have to wait until the population is lower to try to find the energy necessary for things like Water desalination/purification, air conditioning, refrigeration, etc?
I think these are problems that can, and must, be solved in parallel. Even if we could flatten population growth tomorrow, we still need more/cheaper energy. Also, we are in a race to ensure we have enough energy to just sustain *current levels* as oil production will likely gradually decline as we move into the future. Right now, the only thing we seem to have enough of to replace oil with is coal, but that produces lots of problems too - like radioactive waste emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.
Hence, current interest in solar and wind power. I tend to have some sympathy to the argument that, in addition to solar and wind projects, we need to look into developing the Integral Fast Reactor concept - because it solves 2 problems at once: what to do with radioactive "waste" we've already created and have tons of sitting in storage at reactors around the country and how to generate lots of power for the future.
My gut instinct is that the environmental impact would be nothing - after all, hot air is rising from the desert in columns, naturally, *all the time*. They aren't adding any additional energy that wouldn't be there anyhow - all they are doing is trapping the hot air which would be rising *anyhow* up into the atmosphere, and *extracting* some of the energy from it.
On the note of momentum - if you are using the air to drive turbines, wouldn't you actually be significantly *reducing* the momentum? After all, as the air rises, and then collides with the turbines, it is imparting some of it's momentum into the turbines.
This is just a guess. . . but I suppose the theory is something like this:
Natural downdrafts occur all the time. . . The Sun heats up the earth, which then transfers heat to air near the ground, creating an updraft, but eventually, when the air gets high enough up, it loses some of that heat, and then cold air drops down to the ground to replace the air which is updrafting. What goes up, must come down - air is constantly rising from the surface of the earth, but other air is constantly falling down to replace it.
So, instead of generating electricity from the thermal energy of warm air, this other tower concept sounds like it generates electricity, I guess, from the gravitational potential energy of the cold air up high. I think the water at the top of the tower is just to sort of initialize the downdraft, but once it was started, it would probably continue for awhile - like poking a whole somewhere near the bottom of the water tank, once the whole is poked, you don't have to do anything to keep the water flowing out - gravity takes care of that.
Seems like you could design a plant which contains the entire cycle inside of the plant, and generates electricity both as the hot air rises, and as it falls again after it has cooled - like a giant loop or arch with turbines on both sides.
Hey, let's not forget "Plays For Sure" and the Zune.
I generally agree with the parent, but:
I actually disagree on this point. It's almost certain that someone will find some sort of security exploit in the networking software in the device, at some point, or in the browser, or mediaplayer, or whatever. I think *any* device which has net access needs an automatic update facility for patching security holes.
"- cost more than $200 ($300 in 2011, $500 in 2012 to account for inflation)"
Wow - that's some major inflation you're allowing for there. That's almost 50% inflation year after year. Inflation (in the U.S., at least) has historically been less than 10% most years (see this graph for example). Higher inflation is, I suppose, always a possiblity, but I'm not sure there's much basis to predict that much inflation in the next 3 year? Electronics, anyhow, usually go opposite of inflation of all other product prices. They tend to be cheaper 3 years after release, rather than more expensive.
"For a high speed game like Quake even 60fps is totally unplayable and there's a massive difference between 90fps and 120fps."
Which raises an interesting point - maybe the games shouldn't be designed to be quite that high-speed to begin with, or the games should be designed to allow them to run at the necessary higher speed? Certainly with a console game, the game should be designed for the limits of the platform, yes? The problem seems to be that game designers are designing games that *should* be played at 60fps (because they are designed to be high speed play), but then they are designing the graphics of the game such that the console can only run it at 20-30fps.
Take as a counter-example, the game Oblivion. That was a game which focused on having pretty killer graphics, but the design of the game is such that you don't really need high frame rates - reaction times do matter somewhat in Oblivion (it's sort of a cross between an FPS and an RPG), but the nature of the game is that reaction times (and thus framerates) do not need to be nearly as high as Quake, MW2, or any other first-person shooter. But, if you are designing a first person shooter, framerates should be a top priority, trumping graphics quality where necessary. A lot of people passed over Crysis when it came out a couple years back, because even though it has superb graphics, it just wasn't playable on their computers.
You know, I guess what it must have been is that the support is there, but nobody really advertises it? Maybe I'm just mis-remembering, but it seems like back at the launch of the G1, I was trying to find out if it play vorbis or not, and I was never able to find any definite answer in any of the G1 'tech specs' that they posted on the t-mo website. I'm not really surprised, I guess, that the phone supports more functionality than T-mo actually advertised - after all, outside of the Linux/Gnu/BSD 'community', not many people seem to even know that a thing called Ogg Vorbis *exists* (well, I have seen it used in a few commercial games, fwiw), so I guess T-Mo wouldn't waste money trying to sell people on a feature they don't know they need.
I have a followup question to this: Is the universe now, or did it ever, expand at or faster than the speed of light, as space itself expanded? The whole notion of looking 'back in time' to see a galaxy that close to the big bang has me a little bit puzzled. What I mean is, my understanding of this whole idea of 'looking back in time' with a telescope is that light travels at the speed of light, and if we know a galaxy is X billion light-years away from Earth, then we say that the images we see *now* originally left that galaxy X billion years ago (well, ok, there's probably some sort of calculus needed to adjust for the fact that the universe is expanding, and the points in space are getting farther away from each other *even as the light travels between galaxies*).
But, it still seems to me strange that we could 'see' back in time to .6 or .8 Billion years after the big bang, when there has subsequently been 13.2 to 13.4 Billion years. The only way I can conceptually make that work out is if the Universe is expanding at nearly the speed of light. My reasoning is this: at .6 to .8 Billion years after the big bang, the 'diameter' of the Universe would have to have been less-than-or-equal .6 or .8 Billion light years, wouldn't it? That is based upon the presumption that no two bits of matter in the Universe can ever move away from each other at or faster than the speed of light (so, the radius of the Universe would be constrained to expanding at 1/2 C, wouldn't it?). I would think that the *diametric* expansion of the universe would have been something less than the speed of light - maybe like 1/2-2/3 C (so, the radius would have only expanded at something like 1/4 - 1/3 C)? (The only real basis I have for that is simply that I've never heard of anything other than light, and sub-atomic particles, moving at any significant fraction of the speed of light, but I really have no idea here - help me out).
Anyhow, getting back to my point - if the Universe was less than 1 Billion light-years between the farthest points of space *at that time*, how is it possible that it took 13+ Billion years for the light to reach Earth from that time? The mathematics of the situation makes no sense to me. I mean, I *do* get that even as the light travels, the distance it needs to travel to reach us is constantly increasing, but it would seem like the light travels so much faster than anything else, that it wouldn't take that long.
I mean, let's say, for example, that we start at the year 1 Billion ABB (After the Big Bang). Let's say, for example, the Universe was .5 Billion light-years in diameter, and the diameter was increasing at a rate of .5 Bn light years every 1 Bn years (in other words, the diameter is expanding at 1/2 C). Ok, so a bunch of photons leave Galaxy A to travel to Galaxy B which is at the furthest possible point in the Universe. After travelling for .5 Bn years the photons reach the point where Galaxy B *used to be*, but Galaxy B has kept moving, and is now .25 Bn light years farther away than it started. So the photons travel on for another .25 Bn years, but once again Galaxy B has moved on, and is now .125 Bn light years away. As we can see, this progression keeps halving the distance and halving the time travelled by the light. I haven't calculated out the exact time it would take for the light to finally reach Galaxy B, but because of this progression of halving, I think it's going to be somewhere around the year 2 Bn?
So, getting back to my original question, how is it possible that we could ever 'look back' *that far* in time. I could buy that we could look back 5, or maybe even 7 Billion years, but I don't see how it's possible to see back farther than that?
It occurs to me that even if they do have different models of the phone for different carriers, you could potentially just swap phones when you swap carriers. If you want to leave T-Mo and Go to AT&T, there's probably plenty of other people that would want to make the switch in the other direction. Could maybe use Ebay or something similar to sell the phone for the old carrier, and buy the model for the new carrier. Granted, this isn't ideal, as doing something like that, you risk getting a 'new' phone that isn't in as good of a condition as the seller claimed. Still, you could probably move all your data and settings from the old phone to the new phone by simply swapping the SIM and SD cards into the new phone, right?
Seems like that situation, while not ideal, is one I could live with. It would be better if the phone had a chip/radio that could work on any carrier, and that might even happen, eventually. Who knows.
I noticed on the tech specs page that Nexus One supports Ogg Vorbis audio. Do other Android phones support Ogg Vorbis playback? I mean, it would seem like that would be a feature of the base Android platform, but IIRC, when the G1 launched, Ogg support wasn't included? I know - it's been over a year since the G1 launched, and a lot has changed in newer versions of Android. Still, have any of the other *currently released* Android phones come with Ogg decoder?
Ok, I'll bite. What the heck is all-hardware encryption? Granted, I'm sure it's possible to implement decryption algorithms in silicon, instead of as software, but what's to prevent some enterprising programmer from creating a *software* implementation of the decryption algo? How can you *force* encryption/decryption to be all-hardware?
You still haven't explained how a derivative work is created. You make an appeal to authority where you have none, period. (See, wasn't that easy?)
Copyright law governs the distribution of copies of a protected work. That's all. It doesn't govern use (although, sometimes, contracts are used as part of the licensing agreement to receive a copy for proprietary software, which can add further restrictions). But the GPL is not a contract, it is a license, and only covers the work it was applied to, and any *derivative works*.
The thing is, even though the linked library or EXE uses the API, it doesn't *contain* the API. So, the argument can be made that where there is no copying, there is no copyright violation. Put another way, there is a very logical argument that a dynamically linked work is completely separate from the executable or library it links against. Think of a book or magazine article, or even an article on a website, which directs the reader to go read something else, then come back and finish reading the text of the article. Is the article a derivative work of the work it references/links to?
Hence, even though the library or exe *depends* upon the other work, it may not be a derivative because it does not *contain* the other work (or, perhaps the courts will decide that it *is* in fact, a derivative, but no one really knows for sure). See, like I said, we can argue about this all day, but the question is still not settled in law. The law, so far as I know, *does not* address the question of dynamically linking computer programs in any statute or court precedent.
"Your argument is like saying oral sex is not sex."
No, it's not. It's nice you're so opinionated, but that makes no sense.