Great, except that is not the patent in question, which the first article notes was awarded in 1993. That's my point-- gallium arsenide semiconducting diodes have a lot of prior art before that date. The patent you cite has a different date (1990) than the article notes. You found a patent, and congratulations in doing that, it just wasn't the one mentioned in this article.
"Rothschild was originally issued a U.S. patent in 1993 based on her method of producing wide band-gap semiconductors for LEDs and laser diodes in the blue and ultraviolet end of the light spectrum."
"In particular, the portion of Rothschild's work at issue in the ITC case focuses on using gallium nitride-based semiconductor material." Perhaps this is a later patent that references her earlier one, but I don't see any evidence for that. The article also specifically addresses diodes producing the "blue/UV" end of the spectrum, and that didn't exist until Nakamura created it in 1991. Without using the techniques in the patent you cite, I might add.
So yeah. My point remains. Prior art is easily found.
And if you stop modding me down long enough to actually read the links I posted, you'll note in the interview with Nakamura, he successfully made processes for blue LEDs without the technique described in the patent you do cite, so the argument put forth in one of the original links that GaN semiconductors can't be made without this process is a bit spurious.
If you still believe that despite the differences in dates the patent you cite is the correct one, let me ask you this: since there are multiple methods by which GaN semiconductors can be produced, how was it Rothschild ascertained all these companies were violating her patent? Did she examine all these company's products with a scanning-tunneling electron microscope... while retired? Or did she just assume these products could not be made without her process, despite the fact that Nakamura himself did not use it?
"Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Corporation of Japan demonstrated the first high-brightness blue LED based on InGaN, borrowing on critical developments in GaN nucleation on sapphire substrates and the demonstration of p-type doping of GaN which were developed by I. Akasaki and H. Amano in Nagoya. The existence of the blue LED led quickly to the first white LED, which employed a Y3Al5O12:Ce, or "YAG", phosphor coating to mix yellow (down-converted) light with blue to produce light that appears white. Nakamura was awarded the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize for his invention."
"In 1991, I made n-type gallium nitride. The following year I succeeded making p-type using a thermal annealing technique. Now all gallium nitride researchers use my technique for p-type gallium nitride. Another big breakthrough was making the first single crystal of indium gallium nitride, which we needed for an emitting layer. Finally at the end of 1993, I succeeded in making the first commercial-based blue LEDs."
The invention this woman claims to have done was already done years previous by the true inventor of the blue LED and laser diode, Shuji Nakamura. She is a patent troll, and the fact the FTC is wasting taxpayer money with an investigation into something that could've been resolved by 5 minutes of looking at dates on Wikipedia is sad.
As the summary states, Mozilla has had a beta for Windows Mobile devices for some time. I've used several versions of it, on a Motorola Q (~300mhz CPU, 16mb RAM, WinMo5) and was not especially impressed, especially in comparison to IE or Opera.
First of all, it's incredibly slow. Page renders take a very, very long time. The interface is also pretty bad on a Smartphone, but perhaps is better on a PocketPC. It also is quite buggy, and locks up / crashes frequently. But then, it is a beta.
Really, I don't expect any reasonable port of Mozilla to work on a Smartphone without a massive codebase change. Once you see just how bad the performance is for yourself, I think you'll agree-- it's more or less unusable.
Pocket IE is the speed champ but is somewhat limited. Opera has almost as much capability as Mozilla, while being relatively bug-free and almost on par with IE for speed. Perhaps the problem isn't so much with cellphone providers not wanting to primarily use Mozilla Mobile, but simply with it not being up to par with its desktop counterpart, or other mobile browsers already available.
In the end, Mozilla simply needs to do what it has always done-- offer a better product than anyone else. In the mobile space, they unfortunately have not done so yet. Until substantial improvements are made, I would not expect anyone to be preinstalling it.
The point of Tomorrowland was the use of the imagination to conceptualize something far more than a modern house with a few extra computers. It was an entire arrangement of a community, a radical departure from anything at the time. Remember the hatch from Season 2 of "Lost"? That was based off of Tomorrowland. And it was still cool.
This new "House of the Future" is more about advertising for corporate sponsors, and less about actually showing anything interesting or imaginative. Kind of ironic the set designers for "Lost" did more for the concept than Disney did in recent years.
I think it also says a lot about our failure of imagination if our vision of the future is "a kitchen with a dishwasher... but the dishwasher has a *web browser*!" Even though most of the speculations back in the 1950s-70s were wrong they still were pretty great artistically and spurred development of a lot of technology.
Disney was supposed to be about the imagination and dreaming, not about incremental upgrades. This house is about as exciting as Windows security update, and just as Microsoft-centric.
One theory I've read postulated that ADD/ADHD is increasing due to the impulsive risk-seeking behaviors leading to greater rates of unprotected sexual intercourse, pregnancy, etc. Out of curiosity, did you find anything along these lines, possibly involving the dopamine receptors, transporters, PEA, tyrosine hydroxylase etc that might underlie dysfunctions of the dopamine system?
Uh, in what bizarre historical revisionism were the T-34s better than many of the panzers? The Russian kyatusha rockets also paled in comparison to the panzerfaust. The Germans had many problems on the Eastern Front, but superiority of Russian technology wasn't one of them. The Germans had a massive kill ratio advantage on the Eastern Front, it was only through a lack support / supplies and overwhelming numbers they lost. To state Germany did not have a technological edge is a lie or an ignorant delusion.
I don't think Apple is free from annoying issues either. Case in point: a few years back my roommate had a PPC Macbook or iBook (don't remember). He wanted to use it for college, but none of the Office-type software he found would install on his (older) version of OSX. The problem being, he couldn't upgrade his version of OSX, it flat out didn't support his computer... and this was before Apple switched over to Intel CPUs. So, he eBayed it and got a cheap Intel-based notebook running XP.
Now, say what you will about Microsoft, but I don't see a whole lot like that happening in the PC world. And he can always upgrade his PC notebook to Vista.
I'm sure someone will mention Linux or OpenOffice or something, and I told him to check those options out as well, but I'm not sure he ever did. Regardless, your typical consumer probably wouldn't either.
What? The US didn't do shit to Germany. By the time we got there (on the wrong beach, no less), we fought boys below normal recruitment age and reserve troops in France, most of which were conscripts and weren't even members of the Nazi party. Russia manufactured its own T34 tanks, which were far superior to ours, it had nothing to do with us other than some Americans helped designed them, but it was not an official effort, no more than IBM's automation of the holocaust. Sorry but no, Rosie the riveter wasn't cranking out T34s.
Russia's industrial capacity was tremendous, and they produced tons of T34 tanks, which although being inferior to the types of panzers used on the eastern front in Europe just overwhelmed them in number.
It was Russia where most German troops died, and when Germany's losses became overwhelming, the US and allies sat and did nothing while the Russians took Berlin with tremendous casualties. So yes, after killing children and old men (and they STILL got a better kill ratio than our troops), we sat back and let Russia do all the work (again). Firebombing Dresden and killing women and children is in there somewhere. Then we proceeded to steal scientists and intellectual property from Germany, so the Russians couldn't get them, and then employed members of the Nazi party with evidence of crimes against humanity against Russia. You know, the guys who just did all the work. Then, in the occupied Germany, when there was insurgent activity, we'd go and mass slaughter civilians in whatever towns had insurgents. In one instance we pulled out and just shelled the town until everyone was dead. Wow, that was one of the finest hours in our history.
We did VERY LITTLE in Euorpe in WW2, it was mainly Russia, always has been, and always will be... not to mention Britain, which single-handed foiled Germany's invasion attempts and stopped Germany's string of victories (I'd give Britain credit for Africa, but that was mostly Rommel not getting any gas or supplies because they were being redirected to Russia instead, making him scuttle far more armor than Britain ever destroyed). We made a very significant impact on the war in the Pacific, but enough of this revisionist history crap about the US saving Europe. The most significant thing the US did in Europe then was steal Germany's scientists and their research.
Oh, and Germany's impetus for invading Russia? To "save" Europe from communism.
btw, historical documents have shown Stalin always intended to betray Hitler's non-aggression pact and ultimately invade Germany, and the rest of Europe. So it wasn't entirely just meth-head Hitler being paranoid.
But I suppose you can always ignore history and go watch "Patton" again.
Nuclear batteries have been around for a very, very long time. And they will certainly run for 30+ years continuously. More to the point, tritium is a weak beta emitter, and will degrade whatever material far less than traditional nuclear battery materials. Making the claim the materials would degrade before 30 years is simply incorrect, and there are numerous examples of nuclear batteries that have been in service that long. The nuclear material decays first. Period. (and given tritium's T1/2 you'd have to use a lot of extra tritium to make it viable after 30 years at a certain power output level)
The author makes a point of stating "only 25 watts per kilo". Of course, a laptop draws about 10 watts with good power management. So the nuclear battery, according to his stats, would weigh less than a pound. (I suspect however, that a nuclear battery could not be that light, because tritium simply doesn't emit that much energy. For something more radioactive like Am-241 I could believe it. But you'd need a *lot* of tritium to generate 10 watts, and it would be very expensive. Even condensed as tritiated water under pressure, I'm not sure it'd fit into a practical volume, or be cost-effective.)
Further, stating there's a danger of release of radioactivity is just more typically ignorant anti-nuclear FUD. The battery would be likely sealed and constructed in such a way that it would be almost impossible to break. This isn't difficult; my USB flash drive can handle a semi truck driving over it.
You can certainly sell social activity as a treatment, haven't you ever heard of group therapy? Pharmacy is but one service people provide in the medical field. Just because pharmacy companies exist, therefore therapy doesn't? Don't they call that one a "persecutory delusion" in the DSM-IV-TR?;)
Another finding for risk factors is lack of bright light and a disturbed circadian cycle. Imagine that, locking old people away in a dim room indoors alone all day isn't good for their mental health. Who could've possibly seen that one coming? Meanwhile developing nations and Asian cultures have far lower rates of AD.
Social isolation is also damaging in far more areas than AD. It's actually one of the largest contributors to cardiovascular disease, beyond smoking even. That, and anger.
Anyway, given that the "medical care" services the elderly receive actually are creating many cases of AD, I think your skepticism against pharmacy is unwarranted. Drugs cost VERY little compared to assisted living facilities and actually have to prove they're effective. If anyone ever bothered to enforce that same standard for ALFs, would they even exist, given that the practices within them contribute to depression, cognitive decline, social isolation, etc?
Meanwhile, drugs that are developed and treat symptoms effectively, some of which already exist, allow the individual to have greater freedom, increased quality of living, at a far lower cost.
The way we treat the elderly at times is really kind of sad, and any pharmaceutical development here is a very good thing, not a bad thing. And there are other alternatives, which make more people far more money than medication does, but I think it is ultimately the elderly that pay the price.
Could be due to improper sleep due to artificial lighting / activity, sleep disordered breathing such as sleep apnea, or one of the more elusive things like narcolepsy. Stress, both psychosocial and oxidative, can also take their toll upon the brain and cause sleep issues and fatigue (leading to nasty cycles of hormonal disruption and further fatigue...) I would imagine many IT workers (and Americans) don't sleep well, and any of these problems can be causal or correlative with others. ie, you get stressed, which leads to sleeping problems, which leads to more stress from lack of performance while tired, etc...
There is no "community" in any sense of the term in the post you make, merely individuals. Dividing and "getting back" at imaginary transgressors will do nothing but make yourself feel bad.
Your body can only reduce the metabolism by about 20% (and it rarely ever gets to that point, generally only beneath 10% body fat), but there are post-diet refeeding effects as your bastard hypothalamus likes to maintain a body weight set point (which is actually composed of dynamic factors and isn't fixed, but it's too complex to get into here)
The most difficult thing is always, always the psychological factors. Starvation dieting with minimal protein intake and fruits/veggies etc to maintain lean body mass is actually incredibly effective. However, the adherence rate is quite low. Your brain only has so much self-control, and using self-control in one thing has been shown to diminish it in others in studies, thus making some behavior more impulsive/avoidant, which can certainly cause problems with diet and exercise.
Physiologically though? It can be quite effective. Psychologically, probably quite difficult unless you're railing a lot of coke.
One thing I have learned is that the physiology of weight loss is almost irrelevant; it is all about the psychology. Transforming like of bad food to not like, transforming not like of good food to like, transforming not like of physical exertion to like, transforming like of sedentary activity to not like. But at every turn, the brain itself resists change and makes this a very difficult struggle.
As the saying in KOTOR went, "passion gives me strength." I think passion for what you want, and passion for every step along that path is key, because if you hate it and just want to continue doing what you've always done, you will is going to fail and you won't be able to do it consistently.
But actually creating genuine passion for something you don't like, and diminishing that for what you do like, now that's a bitch.
Nicotine is not the problem, tobacco is!
Most of tobacco's carcinogenic effects come from nitrosamines, which are metabolized to the potent carcinogen NNK in the human body. Not to mention all the other crap that fills your lungs.
So, if you get pure nicotine, can you avoid this? Yes!
So get some patches, gum, lozenges, etc... pure nicotine, without the shit in tobacco that destroys your body. Pure nicotine is addictive, but the "slower" delivery forms make it less so than smoking it, and it isn't going to cause cancer any more than caffeine is.
Nicotine is not evil, bad, etc. It's the tobacco.
In one study, using 7mg/day nicotine patches had equal efficacy in treating ADD as did methylphenidate (Ritalin). (for reference, you absorb about 1mg per cigarette)
God, I don't know why people smoke or use chew, it's completely fucking retarded. All you need is to go to Walmart, and for about $30/month, you can get all the nicotine fix you want, without any of the health risks.
And yeah. SSRIs do suck. They make you tired, fat, apathetic, and have blunted emotion. Personally, I find that to be very depressing.
There's been research on the ratio of your index to ring finger, called the 2D:4D ratio, which is a marker of fetal exposure to androgens, or estrogens from the mother.
One thing these studies have shown is that a longer index finger in males is associated with a higher IQ (ie, slight feminization of the brain), whereas in females, the opposite is true (ie, slight masculinization of the brain), and this also correlates with academic success. Sort of a "hybrid-is-better" thing.
Another finding is that subsequent male children, for whatever reason, start having lower 2D:4D ratios and become more masculinized, which is also a predictor for homosexuality and autism.
So, one possible explanation for this is that the fetal hormonal environment starts changing after the first child, producing more masculinized children at the cost of IQ (in males). I don't know if this holds true for females or not though; if so, it would mean later-born female children have the potential for a higher IQ.
Well, I'm willing to be a lot of people who like Vorbis care, as other people using MP3 means if they copy music (legal or not), it will be MP3 format. There is personal choice... as I know some players can play it, and they weren't very much of commercial successes. Because most people, given the choice, choose MP3; probably for compatibility, but the fact is, it sounds very good with modern encoders, even if they are somewhat less efficient than Vorbis and need a higher bitrate to maintain the same quality.
Personally, I'd trade encoding efficiency for battery life. Vorbis is a significant hit to battery life on the players that support it.
So no, using Vorbis isn't an exceptionally logical choice I'm afraid. Too many drawbacks. I suspect most people using it are doing so out of anger and hatred of the politics surrounding MP3 or patented formats in general. And you know what the Buddhists say about anger and happiness...
Humanity didn't win one. To develop and screen drug candidates, and do human trails (of which a low percentage ever make it past the preliminary stage) is fantastically expensive. The patent protection for drugs is very short-term and among other things, is incentive for the very large costs of developing the drug.
So... sure, in this case, poor people get AIDS drugs. But if the company knows that pouring millions into AIDS drugs is just going to get their work stolen, they're not going to research AIDS drugs in the future, because of the huge, huge costs involved of doing human trials of drugs.
Now, perhaps you could argue the NIH should step in with funding and support research, development, and human trails of AIDS drugs instead. Unfortunately, while the NIH does a lot, that kind of thing is really beyond their ever-decreasing budget.
Do Americans demand better NIH budgets, instead of doing things like... supporting wars? Nope. Americans don't lobby and push for it. And so the only people left to develop AIDS drugs is pharmaceutical corporations.
Further, almost every pharmaco will give drugs away for free if you meet income requirements. If individual poor Brazilians were to fill out the form on their website, their lack of health insurance/coverage and low income would get them drugs for free. This does not, however, apply to governments purchasing drugs. Go to ANY drug company website-- you will find free patent medication forms.
Frankly, the drug companies are the only ones who can develop these drugs until Americans demand better NIH and public health funding (which Americans generally don't do or care about), they give them away for free if you meet income requirements, and need to recoup the huge, massive development costs. If they don't, guess what happens to new drug development?
Humanity didn't win here. Not by a long shot. Nor did capitalism. What won here was greed and ignorance.
Push and lobby for better public health funding, or accept the reality of the situation.
I own both. The PSP has somewhat better sound quality (noticeable with good headphones), and neat visualizations now. It's also much more convenient to dump music to, since you can just plug in the flash card and it uses a folder-based play paradigm.
The Zune is smaller, and holds way, way more music. Ironically, the Zune is more encumbered by DRM than the PSP. The Zune's PC software is particularly horrible.
The PSP's screen is better, and video playback looks a lot better on it. The Zune's autoconversion tends to overcompress.
The XBox 360 will play music from a PSP just fine, btw. I don't own a PS3.
Due to the difference in storage capacity, I'm not sure they're really in the same market.
If things could arise without a cause, then they would be arising without causes all the time. So, there had to be a cause, a reason, for the particular pattern of energy originating the big bang, which was interestingly asymmetric.
Further worrying is Hawking's statement that "forever is a long time". We do not have "forever"; time is but a property, linked to gravity and space, and the universe moves towards entropy. The end of gravity, the end of mass, the end of space, and thus, the end of time, perhaps all reducing itself to a singularity from where it all began, starting the cycle again. Or not. Who knows. The universe is not infinite though, and thus, neither is time.
At some point we just can't know, and this will always be an issue of theory and metaphysics. Still, the idea that the universe arose without a cause is just mind-bogglingly illogical. I can't tell you what that cause was, but if the article is accurate, I have to disagree with Hawking here.
One possibility is that the universe has always existed in some form, and the "big bang" is just the expansion outward after entropy eventually leads to the cessation of all matter, leaving all the energy contained at a single point in space. Another is that it was born from a black hole or some sort of wormhole from another universe (leaving the question of how that one was formed unresolved). Of course, there's the God theory too, with some interpretations seeing God as a humanoid creator, and others, as the totality of existence and then something more, making the very nature of reality itself part of God. (Sufism, Hinduism, Kabbalism, among others). This creates the odd logic trap of making God beyond causality. Which really isn't any more illogical than Hawking's position when you think about it.
Actually, yes, it is true. Studies have shown the number of "close confidants" have decreased dramatically in the past decade or so. The type of relationships formed in online environments-- while friendships-- typically last for shorter periods of time and are less strong of friendships than many "real life" friendships. One reason for this is that face-to-face, mirror neurons in the brain play important functions in empathy and socializing, and thus attachment to the other person, whereas this does not happen online (save for videoconferencing or voice perhaps if both parties are rather exceptional about emotional infliction through voice).
Now, this is important, as the value of these closest confidant relationships has been found to be very powerful psychologically in ensuring an individual's mental well-being... from which stems their very physical well-being.
Are there exceptions to this? Sure. Some people, for a variety of reasons (social anxiety, avoidant personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, etc) do not form close relationships very well to begin with, so online worlds do give them increased social connections and perhaps even practice/desensitization that will hopefully lead to better relationships with others offline as well. And some relationships formed online can be close and can migrate offline as well. The vast majority however, aren't very close or long-lasting.
The vast majority of WoW players, statistically, don't play all that much, so I doubt WoW is especially a "waste of their life" or "social aversion" or whatever. But for those that play obsessively, it can either be a good or bad influence on their social relationships. It just depends upon what they were to begin with. For some, the risks here are indeed real ones and they will suffer as the OP says. But that is not true of all.
If the entire notebook is drawing say, 16.5w, and gets 4 hours of battery life, reducing this to 15.5w buys you an extra 15 minutes of battery life, for a rather high cost. It is likely however that the notebook they ultimately produce will use more watts than that, the standard Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs use 20-34 watts whereas even the new lower power (and lower performance) L-series use 15-7 watts. Add a bright display, and you can see that the hard drive using 1w less isn't that big of a deal. With a beefier CPU and a higher brightness display I'd be surprised if the SSD would give you much beyond 5 extra minutes of battery life.
In fact, Vista's ReadyBoost is a far more economical solution that can significantly reduce drive access, and seems like a better thing to include than a pure SSD from a cost:benefit perspective.
Next, as others have said Fujitsu's subnotebook line is excellent. I have a P1610 myself, and one unique thing is it has a transmissive/reflective screen, enabling outdoor use with the backlight off. Having such a hybrid screen which is still quite usable indoors results in greater power savings than a SSD drive for less cost. It also functions rather nicely as a tablet when you want it to. Granted, it doesn't run MacOS, but I think it's the winner of the small formfactor race and is available today. The slightly larger P7230 doesn't have a tablet or indoor/outdoor screen, but has a larger display, keyboard, better performance, and a swappable optical drive bay battery which adds 10+ hours of battery life.
I love subnotebooks but quite honestly a 12.1" notebook is more of a "thin and light" than a subnotebook. And regarding the "instant on" capability, well, a proper implementation of Stand By (C3? I think it is) barely uses more power than suspend. This has existed for years...
One thing is they now have rather good body armor-- the Interceptor body armor system-- that protects the torso from rifle, handgun fire, and shrapnel. Combined with the helmet, that makes their core relatively safe. Doesn't do much for their limbs, though.
Further, most IEDs explode upward from the ground, thus hitting the legs first.
Yes, which is why I stated it wasn't, in fact, ESP in the title on my post. The quantum eraser cannot be explained by classic electromagnetism, as it involves quantum entanglement and the collapse of two states into objective reality. If you think otherwise, cite your journal sources.
The experimental setup, described in much more detail at [2], is as follows. First, generate a photon and pass it through a double slit apparatus. After the photon goes through slit A or B, a special crystal (one at each slit) uses spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) to convert the photon into two identical entangled photons with 1/2 the frequency of the original photon. One of these photons continues to the target detector, while the other entangled photon is deflected by a prism to bounce off a mirror some distance away. Now, if the second photon (coming from slit A or slit B) is observed, it is known which slit the original photon went through, so the photon behaves like a particle. If the second photon's paths from slit A and B are combined, the which-way path is not observed, and the first photon behaves like a wave. The experimenter can choose to observe or not observe the which-way information by erasing (or detecting) information about the second photon's path.
The results from Kim, et al. have shown that, in fact, observing the second photon's path will determine the particle or wavelike behavior of the first photon at the detector, even if the second photon is not observed until after the first photon arrives at the detector. In other words, the delayed choice to observe or not observe the second photon will change the outcome of an event in the past.
Further, "mind reading" certainly does exist to a limited extent-- as empathy using mirror neurons. Even suppressed, emotions still manifest themselves on the face for brief periods of time. Those adept at reading them are naturally more compassionate and insightful into the mental state of others, and also make good poker players. Dr. Paul Ekman has done most of the research here identifying specific expressions for many emotions: http://www.paulekman.com/
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the notions of telepathy came about from this natural system of seeing, mirroring, and feeling into the emotions of others.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, except that is not the patent in question, which the first article notes was awarded in 1993. That's my point-- gallium arsenide semiconducting diodes have a lot of prior art before that date. The patent you cite has a different date (1990) than the article notes. You found a patent, and congratulations in doing that, it just wasn't the one mentioned in this article.
If you want more evidence for that, here's the USPO link: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4904618.PN.&OS=PN/4904618&RS=PN/4904618
"Rothschild was originally issued a U.S. patent in 1993 based on her method of producing wide band-gap semiconductors for LEDs and laser diodes in the blue and ultraviolet end of the light spectrum."
"In particular, the portion of Rothschild's work at issue in the ITC case focuses on using gallium nitride-based semiconductor material." Perhaps this is a later patent that references her earlier one, but I don't see any evidence for that. The article also specifically addresses diodes producing the "blue/UV" end of the spectrum, and that didn't exist until Nakamura created it in 1991. Without using the techniques in the patent you cite, I might add.
So yeah. My point remains. Prior art is easily found.
And if you stop modding me down long enough to actually read the links I posted, you'll note in the interview with Nakamura, he successfully made processes for blue LEDs without the technique described in the patent you do cite, so the argument put forth in one of the original links that GaN semiconductors can't be made without this process is a bit spurious.
If you still believe that despite the differences in dates the patent you cite is the correct one, let me ask you this: since there are multiple methods by which GaN semiconductors can be produced, how was it Rothschild ascertained all these companies were violating her patent? Did she examine all these company's products with a scanning-tunneling electron microscope... while retired? Or did she just assume these products could not be made without her process, despite the fact that Nakamura himself did not use it?
"Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Corporation of Japan demonstrated the first high-brightness blue LED based on InGaN, borrowing on critical developments in GaN nucleation on sapphire substrates and the demonstration of p-type doping of GaN which were developed by I. Akasaki and H. Amano in Nagoya. The existence of the blue LED led quickly to the first white LED, which employed a Y3Al5O12:Ce, or "YAG", phosphor coating to mix yellow (down-converted) light with blue to produce light that appears white. Nakamura was awarded the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize for his invention."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuji_Nakamura
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6900465.PN.&OS=PN/6900465&RS=PN/6900465
"In 1991, I made n-type gallium nitride. The following year I succeeded making p-type using a thermal annealing technique. Now all gallium nitride researchers use my technique for p-type gallium nitride. Another big breakthrough was making the first single crystal of indium gallium nitride, which we needed for an emitting layer. Finally at the end of 1993, I succeeded in making the first commercial-based blue LEDs."
http://archive.sciencewatch.com/jan-feb2000/sw_jan-feb2000_page4.htm
The invention this woman claims to have done was already done years previous by the true inventor of the blue LED and laser diode, Shuji Nakamura. She is a patent troll, and the fact the FTC is wasting taxpayer money with an investigation into something that could've been resolved by 5 minutes of looking at dates on Wikipedia is sad.
As the summary states, Mozilla has had a beta for Windows Mobile devices for some time. I've used several versions of it, on a Motorola Q (~300mhz CPU, 16mb RAM, WinMo5) and was not especially impressed, especially in comparison to IE or Opera.
First of all, it's incredibly slow. Page renders take a very, very long time. The interface is also pretty bad on a Smartphone, but perhaps is better on a PocketPC. It also is quite buggy, and locks up / crashes frequently. But then, it is a beta.
Really, I don't expect any reasonable port of Mozilla to work on a Smartphone without a massive codebase change. Once you see just how bad the performance is for yourself, I think you'll agree-- it's more or less unusable.
Pocket IE is the speed champ but is somewhat limited. Opera has almost as much capability as Mozilla, while being relatively bug-free and almost on par with IE for speed. Perhaps the problem isn't so much with cellphone providers not wanting to primarily use Mozilla Mobile, but simply with it not being up to par with its desktop counterpart, or other mobile browsers already available.
In the end, Mozilla simply needs to do what it has always done-- offer a better product than anyone else. In the mobile space, they unfortunately have not done so yet. Until substantial improvements are made, I would not expect anyone to be preinstalling it.
The point of Tomorrowland was the use of the imagination to conceptualize something far more than a modern house with a few extra computers. It was an entire arrangement of a community, a radical departure from anything at the time. Remember the hatch from Season 2 of "Lost"? That was based off of Tomorrowland. And it was still cool.
This new "House of the Future" is more about advertising for corporate sponsors, and less about actually showing anything interesting or imaginative. Kind of ironic the set designers for "Lost" did more for the concept than Disney did in recent years.
I think it also says a lot about our failure of imagination if our vision of the future is "a kitchen with a dishwasher... but the dishwasher has a *web browser*!" Even though most of the speculations back in the 1950s-70s were wrong they still were pretty great artistically and spurred development of a lot of technology.
Disney was supposed to be about the imagination and dreaming, not about incremental upgrades. This house is about as exciting as Windows security update, and just as Microsoft-centric.
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good." -Hillary Clinton, on the 2nd Amendment
One theory I've read postulated that ADD/ADHD is increasing due to the impulsive risk-seeking behaviors leading to greater rates of unprotected sexual intercourse, pregnancy, etc. Out of curiosity, did you find anything along these lines, possibly involving the dopamine receptors, transporters, PEA, tyrosine hydroxylase etc that might underlie dysfunctions of the dopamine system?
Uh, in what bizarre historical revisionism were the T-34s better than many of the panzers? The Russian kyatusha rockets also paled in comparison to the panzerfaust. The Germans had many problems on the Eastern Front, but superiority of Russian technology wasn't one of them. The Germans had a massive kill ratio advantage on the Eastern Front, it was only through a lack support / supplies and overwhelming numbers they lost. To state Germany did not have a technological edge is a lie or an ignorant delusion.
I don't think Apple is free from annoying issues either. Case in point: a few years back my roommate had a PPC Macbook or iBook (don't remember). He wanted to use it for college, but none of the Office-type software he found would install on his (older) version of OSX. The problem being, he couldn't upgrade his version of OSX, it flat out didn't support his computer... and this was before Apple switched over to Intel CPUs. So, he eBayed it and got a cheap Intel-based notebook running XP.
Now, say what you will about Microsoft, but I don't see a whole lot like that happening in the PC world. And he can always upgrade his PC notebook to Vista.
I'm sure someone will mention Linux or OpenOffice or something, and I told him to check those options out as well, but I'm not sure he ever did. Regardless, your typical consumer probably wouldn't either.
What? The US didn't do shit to Germany. By the time we got there (on the wrong beach, no less), we fought boys below normal recruitment age and reserve troops in France, most of which were conscripts and weren't even members of the Nazi party. Russia manufactured its own T34 tanks, which were far superior to ours, it had nothing to do with us other than some Americans helped designed them, but it was not an official effort, no more than IBM's automation of the holocaust. Sorry but no, Rosie the riveter wasn't cranking out T34s.
Russia's industrial capacity was tremendous, and they produced tons of T34 tanks, which although being inferior to the types of panzers used on the eastern front in Europe just overwhelmed them in number.
It was Russia where most German troops died, and when Germany's losses became overwhelming, the US and allies sat and did nothing while the Russians took Berlin with tremendous casualties. So yes, after killing children and old men (and they STILL got a better kill ratio than our troops), we sat back and let Russia do all the work (again). Firebombing Dresden and killing women and children is in there somewhere. Then we proceeded to steal scientists and intellectual property from Germany, so the Russians couldn't get them, and then employed members of the Nazi party with evidence of crimes against humanity against Russia. You know, the guys who just did all the work. Then, in the occupied Germany, when there was insurgent activity, we'd go and mass slaughter civilians in whatever towns had insurgents. In one instance we pulled out and just shelled the town until everyone was dead. Wow, that was one of the finest hours in our history.
We did VERY LITTLE in Euorpe in WW2, it was mainly Russia, always has been, and always will be... not to mention Britain, which single-handed foiled Germany's invasion attempts and stopped Germany's string of victories (I'd give Britain credit for Africa, but that was mostly Rommel not getting any gas or supplies because they were being redirected to Russia instead, making him scuttle far more armor than Britain ever destroyed). We made a very significant impact on the war in the Pacific, but enough of this revisionist history crap about the US saving Europe. The most significant thing the US did in Europe then was steal Germany's scientists and their research.
Oh, and Germany's impetus for invading Russia? To "save" Europe from communism.
btw, historical documents have shown Stalin always intended to betray Hitler's non-aggression pact and ultimately invade Germany, and the rest of Europe. So it wasn't entirely just meth-head Hitler being paranoid.
But I suppose you can always ignore history and go watch "Patton" again.
Nuclear batteries have been around for a very, very long time. And they will certainly run for 30+ years continuously. More to the point, tritium is a weak beta emitter, and will degrade whatever material far less than traditional nuclear battery materials. Making the claim the materials would degrade before 30 years is simply incorrect, and there are numerous examples of nuclear batteries that have been in service that long. The nuclear material decays first. Period. (and given tritium's T1/2 you'd have to use a lot of extra tritium to make it viable after 30 years at a certain power output level)
The author makes a point of stating "only 25 watts per kilo". Of course, a laptop draws about 10 watts with good power management. So the nuclear battery, according to his stats, would weigh less than a pound. (I suspect however, that a nuclear battery could not be that light, because tritium simply doesn't emit that much energy. For something more radioactive like Am-241 I could believe it. But you'd need a *lot* of tritium to generate 10 watts, and it would be very expensive. Even condensed as tritiated water under pressure, I'm not sure it'd fit into a practical volume, or be cost-effective.)
Further, stating there's a danger of release of radioactivity is just more typically ignorant anti-nuclear FUD. The battery would be likely sealed and constructed in such a way that it would be almost impossible to break. This isn't difficult; my USB flash drive can handle a semi truck driving over it.
Another finding for risk factors is lack of bright light and a disturbed circadian cycle. Imagine that, locking old people away in a dim room indoors alone all day isn't good for their mental health. Who could've possibly seen that one coming? Meanwhile developing nations and Asian cultures have far lower rates of AD.
Social isolation is also damaging in far more areas than AD. It's actually one of the largest contributors to cardiovascular disease, beyond smoking even. That, and anger.
Anyway, given that the "medical care" services the elderly receive actually are creating many cases of AD, I think your skepticism against pharmacy is unwarranted. Drugs cost VERY little compared to assisted living facilities and actually have to prove they're effective. If anyone ever bothered to enforce that same standard for ALFs, would they even exist, given that the practices within them contribute to depression, cognitive decline, social isolation, etc?
Meanwhile, drugs that are developed and treat symptoms effectively, some of which already exist, allow the individual to have greater freedom, increased quality of living, at a far lower cost.
The way we treat the elderly at times is really kind of sad, and any pharmaceutical development here is a very good thing, not a bad thing. And there are other alternatives, which make more people far more money than medication does, but I think it is ultimately the elderly that pay the price.
Could be due to improper sleep due to artificial lighting / activity, sleep disordered breathing such as sleep apnea, or one of the more elusive things like narcolepsy. Stress, both psychosocial and oxidative, can also take their toll upon the brain and cause sleep issues and fatigue (leading to nasty cycles of hormonal disruption and further fatigue...) I would imagine many IT workers (and Americans) don't sleep well, and any of these problems can be causal or correlative with others. ie, you get stressed, which leads to sleeping problems, which leads to more stress from lack of performance while tired, etc...
There is no "community" in any sense of the term in the post you make, merely individuals. Dividing and "getting back" at imaginary transgressors will do nothing but make yourself feel bad.
Your body can only reduce the metabolism by about 20% (and it rarely ever gets to that point, generally only beneath 10% body fat), but there are post-diet refeeding effects as your bastard hypothalamus likes to maintain a body weight set point (which is actually composed of dynamic factors and isn't fixed, but it's too complex to get into here)
The most difficult thing is always, always the psychological factors. Starvation dieting with minimal protein intake and fruits/veggies etc to maintain lean body mass is actually incredibly effective. However, the adherence rate is quite low. Your brain only has so much self-control, and using self-control in one thing has been shown to diminish it in others in studies, thus making some behavior more impulsive/avoidant, which can certainly cause problems with diet and exercise.
Physiologically though? It can be quite effective. Psychologically, probably quite difficult unless you're railing a lot of coke.
One thing I have learned is that the physiology of weight loss is almost irrelevant; it is all about the psychology. Transforming like of bad food to not like, transforming not like of good food to like, transforming not like of physical exertion to like, transforming like of sedentary activity to not like. But at every turn, the brain itself resists change and makes this a very difficult struggle.
As the saying in KOTOR went, "passion gives me strength." I think passion for what you want, and passion for every step along that path is key, because if you hate it and just want to continue doing what you've always done, you will is going to fail and you won't be able to do it consistently.
But actually creating genuine passion for something you don't like, and diminishing that for what you do like, now that's a bitch.
Nicotine is not the problem, tobacco is! Most of tobacco's carcinogenic effects come from nitrosamines, which are metabolized to the potent carcinogen NNK in the human body. Not to mention all the other crap that fills your lungs. So, if you get pure nicotine, can you avoid this? Yes! So get some patches, gum, lozenges, etc... pure nicotine, without the shit in tobacco that destroys your body. Pure nicotine is addictive, but the "slower" delivery forms make it less so than smoking it, and it isn't going to cause cancer any more than caffeine is. Nicotine is not evil, bad, etc. It's the tobacco. In one study, using 7mg/day nicotine patches had equal efficacy in treating ADD as did methylphenidate (Ritalin). (for reference, you absorb about 1mg per cigarette) God, I don't know why people smoke or use chew, it's completely fucking retarded. All you need is to go to Walmart, and for about $30/month, you can get all the nicotine fix you want, without any of the health risks. And yeah. SSRIs do suck. They make you tired, fat, apathetic, and have blunted emotion. Personally, I find that to be very depressing.
There's been research on the ratio of your index to ring finger, called the 2D:4D ratio, which is a marker of fetal exposure to androgens, or estrogens from the mother.
One thing these studies have shown is that a longer index finger in males is associated with a higher IQ (ie, slight feminization of the brain), whereas in females, the opposite is true (ie, slight masculinization of the brain), and this also correlates with academic success. Sort of a "hybrid-is-better" thing.
Another finding is that subsequent male children, for whatever reason, start having lower 2D:4D ratios and become more masculinized, which is also a predictor for homosexuality and autism.
So, one possible explanation for this is that the fetal hormonal environment starts changing after the first child, producing more masculinized children at the cost of IQ (in males). I don't know if this holds true for females or not though; if so, it would mean later-born female children have the potential for a higher IQ.
Well, I'm willing to be a lot of people who like Vorbis care, as other people using MP3 means if they copy music (legal or not), it will be MP3 format. There is personal choice... as I know some players can play it, and they weren't very much of commercial successes. Because most people, given the choice, choose MP3; probably for compatibility, but the fact is, it sounds very good with modern encoders, even if they are somewhat less efficient than Vorbis and need a higher bitrate to maintain the same quality.
Personally, I'd trade encoding efficiency for battery life. Vorbis is a significant hit to battery life on the players that support it.
So no, using Vorbis isn't an exceptionally logical choice I'm afraid. Too many drawbacks. I suspect most people using it are doing so out of anger and hatred of the politics surrounding MP3 or patented formats in general. And you know what the Buddhists say about anger and happiness...
Humanity didn't win one. To develop and screen drug candidates, and do human trails (of which a low percentage ever make it past the preliminary stage) is fantastically expensive. The patent protection for drugs is very short-term and among other things, is incentive for the very large costs of developing the drug. So... sure, in this case, poor people get AIDS drugs. But if the company knows that pouring millions into AIDS drugs is just going to get their work stolen, they're not going to research AIDS drugs in the future, because of the huge, huge costs involved of doing human trials of drugs. Now, perhaps you could argue the NIH should step in with funding and support research, development, and human trails of AIDS drugs instead. Unfortunately, while the NIH does a lot, that kind of thing is really beyond their ever-decreasing budget. Do Americans demand better NIH budgets, instead of doing things like... supporting wars? Nope. Americans don't lobby and push for it. And so the only people left to develop AIDS drugs is pharmaceutical corporations. Further, almost every pharmaco will give drugs away for free if you meet income requirements. If individual poor Brazilians were to fill out the form on their website, their lack of health insurance/coverage and low income would get them drugs for free. This does not, however, apply to governments purchasing drugs. Go to ANY drug company website-- you will find free patent medication forms. Frankly, the drug companies are the only ones who can develop these drugs until Americans demand better NIH and public health funding (which Americans generally don't do or care about), they give them away for free if you meet income requirements, and need to recoup the huge, massive development costs. If they don't, guess what happens to new drug development? Humanity didn't win here. Not by a long shot. Nor did capitalism. What won here was greed and ignorance. Push and lobby for better public health funding, or accept the reality of the situation.
I own both. The PSP has somewhat better sound quality (noticeable with good headphones), and neat visualizations now. It's also much more convenient to dump music to, since you can just plug in the flash card and it uses a folder-based play paradigm.
The Zune is smaller, and holds way, way more music. Ironically, the Zune is more encumbered by DRM than the PSP. The Zune's PC software is particularly horrible.
The PSP's screen is better, and video playback looks a lot better on it. The Zune's autoconversion tends to overcompress.
The XBox 360 will play music from a PSP just fine, btw. I don't own a PS3.
Due to the difference in storage capacity, I'm not sure they're really in the same market.
I hear the PSP can play games, too...
Further worrying is Hawking's statement that "forever is a long time". We do not have "forever"; time is but a property, linked to gravity and space, and the universe moves towards entropy. The end of gravity, the end of mass, the end of space, and thus, the end of time, perhaps all reducing itself to a singularity from where it all began, starting the cycle again. Or not. Who knows. The universe is not infinite though, and thus, neither is time.
At some point we just can't know, and this will always be an issue of theory and metaphysics. Still, the idea that the universe arose without a cause is just mind-bogglingly illogical. I can't tell you what that cause was, but if the article is accurate, I have to disagree with Hawking here.
One possibility is that the universe has always existed in some form, and the "big bang" is just the expansion outward after entropy eventually leads to the cessation of all matter, leaving all the energy contained at a single point in space. Another is that it was born from a black hole or some sort of wormhole from another universe (leaving the question of how that one was formed unresolved). Of course, there's the God theory too, with some interpretations seeing God as a humanoid creator, and others, as the totality of existence and then something more, making the very nature of reality itself part of God. (Sufism, Hinduism, Kabbalism, among others). This creates the odd logic trap of making God beyond causality. Which really isn't any more illogical than Hawking's position when you think about it.
Actually, yes, it is true. Studies have shown the number of "close confidants" have decreased dramatically in the past decade or so. The type of relationships formed in online environments-- while friendships-- typically last for shorter periods of time and are less strong of friendships than many "real life" friendships. One reason for this is that face-to-face, mirror neurons in the brain play important functions in empathy and socializing, and thus attachment to the other person, whereas this does not happen online (save for videoconferencing or voice perhaps if both parties are rather exceptional about emotional infliction through voice).
Now, this is important, as the value of these closest confidant relationships has been found to be very powerful psychologically in ensuring an individual's mental well-being... from which stems their very physical well-being.
Are there exceptions to this? Sure. Some people, for a variety of reasons (social anxiety, avoidant personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, etc) do not form close relationships very well to begin with, so online worlds do give them increased social connections and perhaps even practice/desensitization that will hopefully lead to better relationships with others offline as well. And some relationships formed online can be close and can migrate offline as well. The vast majority however, aren't very close or long-lasting.
The vast majority of WoW players, statistically, don't play all that much, so I doubt WoW is especially a "waste of their life" or "social aversion" or whatever. But for those that play obsessively, it can either be a good or bad influence on their social relationships. It just depends upon what they were to begin with. For some, the risks here are indeed real ones and they will suffer as the OP says. But that is not true of all.
SSD drives use 0.5w instead of 1.5w and cost $500 more.
For reference, here are some power utilization figures for Apple notebooks: http://www.girr.org/mac_stuff/laptop_power.html
If the entire notebook is drawing say, 16.5w, and gets 4 hours of battery life, reducing this to 15.5w buys you an extra 15 minutes of battery life, for a rather high cost. It is likely however that the notebook they ultimately produce will use more watts than that, the standard Core 2 Duo mobile CPUs use 20-34 watts whereas even the new lower power (and lower performance) L-series use 15-7 watts. Add a bright display, and you can see that the hard drive using 1w less isn't that big of a deal. With a beefier CPU and a higher brightness display I'd be surprised if the SSD would give you much beyond 5 extra minutes of battery life.
In fact, Vista's ReadyBoost is a far more economical solution that can significantly reduce drive access, and seems like a better thing to include than a pure SSD from a cost:benefit perspective.
Next, as others have said Fujitsu's subnotebook line is excellent. I have a P1610 myself, and one unique thing is it has a transmissive/reflective screen, enabling outdoor use with the backlight off. Having such a hybrid screen which is still quite usable indoors results in greater power savings than a SSD drive for less cost. It also functions rather nicely as a tablet when you want it to. Granted, it doesn't run MacOS, but I think it's the winner of the small formfactor race and is available today. The slightly larger P7230 doesn't have a tablet or indoor/outdoor screen, but has a larger display, keyboard, better performance, and a swappable optical drive bay battery which adds 10+ hours of battery life.
I love subnotebooks but quite honestly a 12.1" notebook is more of a "thin and light" than a subnotebook. And regarding the "instant on" capability, well, a proper implementation of Stand By (C3? I think it is) barely uses more power than suspend. This has existed for years...
One thing is they now have rather good body armor-- the Interceptor body armor system-- that protects the torso from rifle, handgun fire, and shrapnel. Combined with the helmet, that makes their core relatively safe. Doesn't do much for their limbs, though.
Further, most IEDs explode upward from the ground, thus hitting the legs first.
Yes, which is why I stated it wasn't, in fact, ESP in the title on my post. The quantum eraser cannot be explained by classic electromagnetism, as it involves quantum entanglement and the collapse of two states into objective reality. If you think otherwise, cite your journal sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantu m_eraser
The experimental setup, described in much more detail at [2], is as follows. First, generate a photon and pass it through a double slit apparatus. After the photon goes through slit A or B, a special crystal (one at each slit) uses spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) to convert the photon into two identical entangled photons with 1/2 the frequency of the original photon. One of these photons continues to the target detector, while the other entangled photon is deflected by a prism to bounce off a mirror some distance away. Now, if the second photon (coming from slit A or slit B) is observed, it is known which slit the original photon went through, so the photon behaves like a particle. If the second photon's paths from slit A and B are combined, the which-way path is not observed, and the first photon behaves like a wave. The experimenter can choose to observe or not observe the which-way information by erasing (or detecting) information about the second photon's path.
The results from Kim, et al. have shown that, in fact, observing the second photon's path will determine the particle or wavelike behavior of the first photon at the detector, even if the second photon is not observed until after the first photon arrives at the detector. In other words, the delayed choice to observe or not observe the second photon will change the outcome of an event in the past.
Further, "mind reading" certainly does exist to a limited extent-- as empathy using mirror neurons. Even suppressed, emotions still manifest themselves on the face for brief periods of time. Those adept at reading them are naturally more compassionate and insightful into the mental state of others, and also make good poker players. Dr. Paul Ekman has done most of the research here identifying specific expressions for many emotions: http://www.paulekman.com/
I wouldn't be surprised if many of the notions of telepathy came about from this natural system of seeing, mirroring, and feeling into the emotions of others.