btw, France silently voted last year a law allowing the very same process to be undertaken: continue using 10 years more the EOL'ed power plants, since they are so nice and this saves plenty of investment need for the responsible company, whose CEO was to leave the year after (ie, now)...
the very same scenario here, with specific laws voted to expand EOL'ed plants by more than 10 years without any improvements, etc. But the most incredible part is, at the time of voting, the surrounding discussions only have addressed the financial part of the trick (giving more value to the private owner), not really the safety...
At present some 15 plants out of a total of some 80 are stopped for repair after (obviously minor) failures, an all-time record here, and the consequence is for the first time in my personal lifetime, predictions for this winter are we'll have to import energy from european neighbors -yet another all-times first... H.
"I doubt you could hide something that big from radar in any useful way" IMHO, a plastic balloon hasjust zero radar signature. Of course the undelying structure needed to attach propellers and cabin may be detectable, but for sure would I be resp. for developing this thing I definitely would propose as an option to our dear military clients something purely plastic/fiberglass or so...
Count me in. I happen to actually support some old-mac users dealing daily with this version of iCab, that indeed was operational well before Classilia was even thought of...
I don't know whether you have a patent or not (I feel you should) but even if you filed, do perform an anteriority research, ie check your idea doesn't just exist already somewhere, be it in the form of another patent or in a published paper.
Only when you have done this will you know if your idea is worth continueing. If there is an anteriority, your filing isn't worth a cent. Have the search done by serious guys, it's not this costly.
I did file various patents with various employers and alone, and believe me, when one year later the anteriority search result comes and you discover they managed to track an obscure, preferently russian or japanese text that just describes 99% of your story, it's fine to know you have another activity to continue on...
In a word: don't bet your whole future on a single new idea without an anteriority check. Not just a patent.
Now you better understand how it sometimes feel to be french...
In my language there's even a specific saying on this topic: "le ridicule tue" ('being ridiculous kills you'), which is regularly reminded on issues like this...
[mandatory related/. sig should be: 'in soviet russia you kill ridiculousness' ]
Contrary to what Amiga Trombone suggests below, I for one was part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan (which was an agreement NASA/ESA, Esa providing the Huygens probe), and my impression was *definitely* that the association was extremely beneficial, not only to share costs, but to respect the schedule. In this kind of NASA/ESA association, none of the two agencies would dare being the first one announcing a delay, so everyone worked like mad.
And while at the present time there seems to be a lot of fuss on the actual details of the Mars mission(s), I'm sure that once actually signed the same will happen. OK Cassini/Huygens was years ago (its development at least*), but mentalities have not evolved here, and I just cant' see any european announcing "I had you investing 500 M$ on that mission, but now I back off" -nor the contrary.
Maybe (to Amiga) the different evolution of the ISS was due to too large a range of cooperating countries and entities. for Cassini/H it was just two, resulting in exactly two teams cooperating. Which I hope is what'll happen on Mars.
I bought one six months ago, and spend some time in selecting which open source OS to run on it. I finally chose one that was a bit bothersome on the phone side but much better on the GPS (using Openstreetmap).
To my knowledge this machine is still the only open-source GPS available on the market, and I was delighted with it. For 15 days. Until by pressing my finger a bit too strongly on the screen I crashed it. Not covered by guarantee, needless to say.
I still don't know if I'll buy the next model, assuming I can check the screen is less fragile. If I do this it'll be not from my french local retailer, given their polar suport...
indeed, am I the only one still using the mac-only, closed-source iCab -but the one that invented ad-filtering 10 years before Adblock, and still updates almost every month (now with e. g. full screen favorite-sites preview...)?
I've very happily used an Openmoko Freerunner last december during about one month, which comes with what I believe i the only open-source GPS hardware (in addition to being linux-based).
I went into Openstreetmap which of course can be both downloaded for offline use and upgraded since you can record paths, and definitely was a happy camper, until a crease appeared in the ubernice touchscreen, soon resulting in 50% of the touch capacity being down (ie the phone is unusable).
I intended to prepare some startupscripts to turn it into just a nice GPS... and never had time to do it:-(
I'd say it's a very nifty GPS, OSM-based, being undertood that it won't feature the tomtom-like autoupgrade of GPS constellation ephemerids which accelerate the first acquisition (in other words: it'll converge more slowly than the average dedicated car-GPS)
In case you're interested I could offer you my broken package for basically the cost of packaging/sending (say 50E?), but be really aware that the touch function of the screen is dead, you must program it ith a keyboard or via SSH...
Indeed. VoIP by Apple. Why do you think they are reworking the iPod touch? Apple has the way to relay from one market to another like noone else. While all others still are working to duplicate iTune store they already switched to micro-application sales (iApps); similarly, they are preparing for a world where internet connections via GSM phones (call it 3G or what) will be more complex than via Wifi. You can bet they'll be running their supersimple, proprietary VoIP solution for months when the others just begin to understand. And at the beginning people will just tell, well, what you just told...
I requested the full paper but... as we are friday afternoon here in Europe I'll probably get it on Monday;-) In the meanwhile, from the abstract I feel this'll be more applicable to say checking remotely life hints in Jupiter's atmosphere here, than getting answers for remote stars tomorrow.
I for one highly doubt, for instance, that just analysing an exoplanet's transit onto its star will bring any measurable polarization. Just remember what you see is star light that passed through the planet's *atmosphere*, not reflected onto its ground (and grass/trees). And as this specific light is moreover buried within the 99,99% of starlight that just didn't cross the planet at all, even with a specifically intense *atmospheric* life (a dense, GREEN atmosphere;-) it'll be very difficult to detect the ppm of added polarization.
Rather, I see this either for
a) a futuristic payload for the (too futuristic) Darwin project from Esa/Nasa ( http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120382_index_0_m.html/ ), when the dozen of years of development (and equal number of euro and dollar billions) will have been invested: if things go well, no more crises, etc., we then will have a way to just switch the starlight off (via destructive interferometry), and see only planet's light. Then maybe you'll measure polarization. But then you'll also measure specific wavelength absorptions, so get directly to molecules (which is the raison d'être of the Darwin project)
b) as said earlier, maybe in nearer times a way to observe our neighboring planets atmospheres, and suddenly discover they may be polarized (or not, and that check will be quick). If they were it'd definitely be fun.
In my space factory there is a breadboard of the Darwin nulling interferometric concept. Nifty. Representing maybe 1% of the required development work. But nifty, definitely: capable of switchig off a star light that is millions of times superior to the planet's reflected light and at the same time leave planet's light in, when planet is just the pixel against the star's one. As they say on Esa's site, capable of seeing a candle light stuck against a lighthouse firewindow, from 1000 km away.
Before Adblock... you had iCab, for ten years, on Macintosh. And still going on;-)
iCab indeed invented ad-filtering. They are mac-only, they are closed, but boy are they an alternate browser.
In this present world where I can't but cry in front of Apple's obvious shift towards locked/signed systems (on iPhone/iPod), and this moreover in a manner that brilliantly works for everybody from devs to users, the presence of iCab is one of those things that keeps me on Macintoshes.
Yes I got a linux MSI Wind for travels. And back home I rush to the mac with iCab and Vienna... (Yes someday linux will also copy an efficient RSS reader too, probably)
I'd agree for better 'default' themes (if and when we can define what better is for the mainstream), OTOH to me it's pretty clear that a picker during install is DEFINITELY 'click the wrong button and you're fucked'.
Sorry, but to me allowing to change theme during install is just the opposite of easier. It's geeky. You are a geek;-)
I'm no at all a geek. I got mine in december, found it definitely usable... and in two weeks a little crease in the screen developed that half-killed the touch function (the display stayed perfectly OK). I then considered using it as a miniature-large-display GPS (thanks to TangoGPS and Openstreetmap) but I never found the time to set things up correctly... TangoGPS on it is definitely brilliant anyhow (really the niftiest of large, color-display, pocket GPS!). If someone around here can tell me how to have it autoload at startup I'd be extremely happy... Otherwise in case someone is interested by the complete set (with broken touch function) I'd say I sell it for E100, everything from practically new battery up to the laser-LED-torch-stylus pen to the nice green greeting card, in the original box... I need this to buy the next one...
tried "show random page" on your site: looks like there are much more spam-ads than inventions, unless I'm very unlucky... You should consider a spam filter like Akismet for instance http://akismet.com/
in this area you already have the theories of Jean-Pierre Luminet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Luminet ), he's done a lot of work on the hypothesis what you see in the sky are various windows back to the same universe only younger or older. I think he even has a criterion to verify it: just find pairs of circles in the sky along which the stars are the same --the only trouble is, to perform this in a meaningful (accurate) way you need an enormous account of computing, since you don't know any centre nor diameter...
I'm almost exactly like you (maybe just poorer;-) but, believe it or not, last time I performed a serious hands-on comparative test in a large store, for compact cameras I ended in discovering that the best low-light imager around was... a camcorder! (of course the costliest of them all). I was so shocked that I didn't buy anything indeed, but if you have the occasion, do test the Canon HF11 -do it only for photos, and tell me... Hervé
't wasn't perchlorate but nitrate IIRC, that destroyed the complete french AZF plant in the city of Toulouse's suburbs, leaving a definitely war-like scenery. Was in sept. 21, 2001 so indeed scary believe me. 29 casualties, countless wounded, explosion was heard 50 miles away. A friend of mines was working kilometres from there in a building whose complete frontage fell down in front of her. So well. Not ammonium perchlorate but ammonium nitrate... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZF?bcsi-ac-ED4481DDE3DE1057=18BDC0EE00000203sh7mtJMzRnjkMofxetcnL1GX+ybEAQAAAwIAAH/ogQAQDgAADQAAAOzTAQA=
Slashdot Mirror
but some of those, like the European I am, still know Darpa :-D
... but that's what comes standard in Europe in all printers! :-)
btw, France silently voted last year a law allowing the very same process to be undertaken: continue using 10 years more the EOL'ed power plants, since they are so nice and this saves plenty of investment need for the responsible company, whose CEO was to leave the year after (ie, now)...
the very same scenario here, with specific laws voted to expand EOL'ed plants by more than 10 years without any improvements, etc.
But the most incredible part is, at the time of voting, the surrounding discussions only have addressed the financial part of the trick (giving more value to the private owner), not really the safety...
At present some 15 plants out of a total of some 80 are stopped for repair after (obviously minor) failures, an all-time record here, and the consequence is for the first time in my personal lifetime, predictions for this winter are we'll have to import energy from european neighbors -yet another all-times first...
H.
seconded :D
on a mac Intaglio will read vector PDFs keeping the vectorial info intact, reedit them, and export to various formats including svg...
http://www.purgatorydesign.com/Intaglio/index.html
(...) those chicken assholes are the tenderest part of the bird.
In France where at least we've known what's tasty for a while, this very part is called 'a fool leaves it in [the plate]' ('le sot l'y laisse')
... seconded
"I doubt you could hide something that big from radar in any useful way"
IMHO, a plastic balloon hasjust zero radar signature. Of course the undelying structure needed to attach propellers and cabin may be detectable, but for sure would I be resp. for developing this thing I definitely would propose as an option to our dear military clients something purely plastic/fiberglass or so...
Count me in.
I happen to actually support some old-mac users dealing daily with this version of iCab, that indeed was operational well before Classilia was even thought of...
Many people here have discussed around patenting.
I don't know whether you have a patent or not (I feel you should) but even if you filed, do perform an anteriority research, ie check your idea doesn't just exist already somewhere, be it in the form of another patent or in a published paper.
Only when you have done this will you know if your idea is worth continueing. If there is an anteriority, your filing isn't worth a cent. Have the search done by serious guys, it's not this costly.
I did file various patents with various employers and alone, and believe me, when one year later the anteriority search result comes and you discover they managed to track an obscure, preferently russian or japanese text that just describes 99% of your story, it's fine to know you have another activity to continue on...
In a word: don't bet your whole future on a single new idea without an anteriority check. Not just a patent.
Now you better understand how it sometimes feel to be french...
In my language there's even a specific saying on this topic: "le ridicule tue" ('being ridiculous kills you'), which is regularly reminded on issues like this...
[mandatory related /. sig should be: 'in soviet russia you kill ridiculousness' ]
Contrary to what Amiga Trombone suggests below, I for one was part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan (which was an agreement NASA/ESA, Esa providing the Huygens probe), and my impression was *definitely* that the association was extremely beneficial, not only to share costs, but to respect the schedule.
In this kind of NASA/ESA association, none of the two agencies would dare being the first one announcing a delay, so everyone worked like mad.
And while at the present time there seems to be a lot of fuss on the actual details of the Mars mission(s), I'm sure that once actually signed the same will happen. OK Cassini/Huygens was years ago (its development at least*), but mentalities have not evolved here, and I just cant' see any european announcing "I had you investing 500 M$ on that mission, but now I back off" -nor the contrary.
Maybe (to Amiga) the different evolution of the ISS was due to too large a range of cooperating countries and entities. for Cassini/H it was just two, resulting in exactly two teams cooperating. Which I hope is what'll happen on Mars.
. ;-)
(*)and now don't start calling me a fossil
I bought one six months ago, and spend some time in selecting which open source OS to run on it. I finally chose one that was a bit bothersome on the phone side but much better on the GPS (using Openstreetmap).
To my knowledge this machine is still the only open-source GPS available on the market, and I was delighted with it.
For 15 days.
Until by pressing my finger a bit too strongly on the screen I crashed it. Not covered by guarantee, needless to say.
I still don't know if I'll buy the next model, assuming I can check the screen is less fragile. If I do this it'll be not from my french local retailer, given their polar suport...
indeed, am I the only one still using the mac-only, closed-source iCab -but the one that invented ad-filtering 10 years before Adblock, and still updates almost every month (now with e. g. full screen favorite-sites preview...)?
I've very happily used an Openmoko Freerunner last december during about one month, which comes with what I believe i the only open-source GPS hardware (in addition to being linux-based).
I went into Openstreetmap which of course can be both downloaded for offline use and upgraded since you can record paths, and definitely was a happy camper, until a crease appeared in the ubernice touchscreen, soon resulting in 50% of the touch capacity being down (ie the phone is unusable).
I intended to prepare some startupscripts to turn it into just a nice GPS... and never had time to do it :-(
I'd say it's a very nifty GPS, OSM-based, being undertood that it won't feature the tomtom-like autoupgrade of GPS constellation ephemerids which accelerate the first acquisition (in other words: it'll converge more slowly than the average dedicated car-GPS)
In case you're interested I could offer you my broken package for basically the cost of packaging/sending (say 50E?), but be really aware that the touch function of the screen is dead, you must program it ith a keyboard or via SSH...
Indeed. VoIP by Apple.
Why do you think they are reworking the iPod touch?
Apple has the way to relay from one market to another like noone else.
While all others still are working to duplicate iTune store they already switched to micro-application sales (iApps); similarly, they are preparing for a world where internet connections via GSM phones (call it 3G or what) will be more complex than via Wifi.
You can bet they'll be running their supersimple, proprietary VoIP solution for months when the others just begin to understand.
And at the beginning people will just tell, well, what you just told...
I requested the full paper but... as we are friday afternoon here in Europe I'll probably get it on Monday ;-)
In the meanwhile, from the abstract I feel this'll be more applicable to say checking remotely life hints in Jupiter's atmosphere here, than getting answers for remote stars tomorrow.
I for one highly doubt, for instance, that just analysing an exoplanet's transit onto its star will bring any measurable polarization. ;-) it'll be very difficult to detect the ppm of added polarization.
Just remember what you see is star light that passed through the planet's *atmosphere*, not reflected onto its ground (and grass/trees).
And as this specific light is moreover buried within the 99,99% of starlight that just didn't cross the planet at all, even with a specifically intense *atmospheric* life (a dense, GREEN atmosphere
Rather, I see this either for
a) a futuristic payload for the (too futuristic) Darwin project from Esa/Nasa ( http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120382_index_0_m.html/ ), when the dozen of years of development (and equal number of euro and dollar billions) will have been invested: if things go well, no more crises, etc., we then will have a way to just switch the starlight off (via destructive interferometry), and see only planet's light.
Then maybe you'll measure polarization. But then you'll also measure specific wavelength absorptions, so get directly to molecules (which is the raison d'être of the Darwin project)
b) as said earlier, maybe in nearer times a way to observe our neighboring planets atmospheres, and suddenly discover they may be polarized (or not, and that check will be quick).
If they were it'd definitely be fun.
In my space factory there is a breadboard of the Darwin nulling interferometric concept. Nifty. Representing maybe 1% of the required development work. But nifty, definitely: capable of switchig off a star light that is millions of times superior to the planet's reflected light and at the same time leave planet's light in, when planet is just the pixel against the star's one. As they say on Esa's site, capable of seeing a candle light stuck against a lighthouse firewindow, from 1000 km away.
Before Adblock... you had iCab, for ten years, on Macintosh. ;-)
And still going on
iCab indeed invented ad-filtering.
They are mac-only, they are closed, but boy are they an alternate browser.
In this present world where I can't but cry in front of Apple's obvious shift towards locked/signed systems (on iPhone/iPod), and this moreover in a manner that brilliantly works for everybody from devs to users, the presence of iCab is one of those things that keeps me on Macintoshes.
Yes I got a linux MSI Wind for travels. And back home I rush to the mac with iCab and Vienna...
(Yes someday linux will also copy an efficient RSS reader too, probably)
I'd agree for better 'default' themes (if and when we can define what better is for the mainstream), OTOH to me it's pretty clear that a picker during install is DEFINITELY 'click the wrong button and you're fucked'.
Sorry, but to me allowing to change theme during install is just the opposite of easier. It's geeky. You are a geek ;-)
I'm no at all a geek. I got mine in december, found it definitely usable... and in two weeks a little crease in the screen developed that half-killed the touch function (the display stayed perfectly OK).
I then considered using it as a miniature-large-display GPS (thanks to TangoGPS and Openstreetmap) but I never found the time to set things up correctly...
TangoGPS on it is definitely brilliant anyhow (really the niftiest of large, color-display, pocket GPS!).
If someone around here can tell me how to have it autoload at startup I'd be extremely happy...
Otherwise in case someone is interested by the complete set (with broken touch function) I'd say I sell it for E100, everything from practically new battery up to the laser-LED-torch-stylus pen to the nice green greeting card, in the original box...
I need this to buy the next one...
tried "show random page" on your site: looks like there are much more spam-ads than inventions, unless I'm very unlucky... You should consider a spam filter like Akismet for instance http://akismet.com/
in this area you already have the theories of Jean-Pierre Luminet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Luminet ), he's done a lot of work on the hypothesis what you see in the sky are various windows back to the same universe only younger or older.
I think he even has a criterion to verify it: just find pairs of circles in the sky along which the stars are the same --the only trouble is, to perform this in a meaningful (accurate) way you need an enormous account of computing, since you don't know any centre nor diameter...
I'm almost exactly like you (maybe just poorer ;-) but, believe it or not, last time I performed a serious hands-on comparative test in a large store, for compact cameras I ended in discovering that the best low-light imager around was... a camcorder!
(of course the costliest of them all).
I was so shocked that I didn't buy anything indeed, but if you have the occasion, do test the Canon HF11 -do it only for photos, and tell me...
Hervé
't wasn't perchlorate but nitrate IIRC, that destroyed the complete french AZF plant in the city of Toulouse's suburbs, leaving a definitely war-like scenery. Was in sept. 21, 2001 so indeed scary believe me. 29 casualties, countless wounded, explosion was heard 50 miles away.
A friend of mines was working kilometres from there in a building whose complete frontage fell down in front of her.
So well. Not ammonium perchlorate but ammonium nitrate...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AZF?bcsi-ac-ED4481DDE3DE1057=18BDC0EE00000203sh7mtJMzRnjkMofxetcnL1GX+ybEAQAAAwIAAH/ogQAQDgAADQAAAOzTAQA=