Beating heart donors => brain dead, on life support, zero chance of survival. They have to harvest the material before the disconnection of life support for it to be viable, that's all. The person is already dead for all practical purposes.
About 65-70% in practice, actually, on a per-gallon basis with E85. So yes, there's a rather modest cost in convenience (or you just have to build cars with 19 gallon tanks instead of 15 gallon tanks).
But all of this is irrelevant. The fuel:air ratio in modern car engines is an electronically controlled parameter. FFV engines already exist, and cost only a modicum more than standard gasoline engines. They detect ethanol/gasoline mixtures and automatically adjust the combustion ratio appropriately. See the Wikipedia article for a summary.
Since the vast majority of engines in passenger vehicles and fueling stations currently support gasoline, telling people to get an FFV for their new car is actually much easier than telling them to get a diesel. And in fact, some people already have FFV cars and don't even know it (the car manufacturers sell them to comply with legislation and get tax breaks, even when people don't know their car can use ethanol).
Okay, but technical issues and filthy, dirty aesthetics of a borked namespace aside (and those two will stop this dead in the water), saying "www." in front of a web address is 4 syllables, vs. ".com" afterwards, which is two. Why the hell would anybody think that is an improvement? Sorry, this is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.
Nobody except corn farmers has ever proposed using corn ethanol as a fuel on a meaningful scale. That is just a farming subsidy scam and a straw man used by confused or malevolent opponents of ecologically sound fuels, or those with political agendas in line with the fossil fuel industry.
Bioethanol is ethanol made from cellulose feedstocks. These should, in practice, be much lower in terms of energy input required than corn or similar crops used for human consumption. The economics of bioethanol produced by SSF (simultaneous sacharination and fermentation) bears almost nothing in common with corn ethanol.
Furthermore, if you get rid of farm subsidies from the equations, then the market should take care of making sure energy costs are fully reflected in all prices. Carbon impact is another story, but shouldn't be too hard to measure (and probably is closely correlated with the portion of costs attributable to energy use).
As for biodiesel - I am under the impression that the major costs are associated with the feedstock itself, not with the acid used in processing. From memory, I think that the feedstock cost is responsible for at least 60-70% of the final cost of biodiesel, so I wouldn't expect a 10x reduction in acid costs to save more than a few percent in total cost. Genetically engineered bacteria seem to provide the most reasonable way to make an oil feedstock for bioethanol production efficiently. The reason that some people think biodiesel is cheaper than diesel is that in Europe they get huge tax breaks on biodiesel, so they are comparing apples to oranges.
Bioethanol is by far the most promising alternative fuel available today, with attractive envrionmental impact and economic characteristics, and only modest incremental cost to make Flexible Fuel Vehicle engines that can burn either ethanol or gasoline. It's too bad there is zero governmental support for this here in the US. We could greatly reduce our foreign oil dependence within 5-10 years with just a bit of political willpower.
No, you are the one thinking like a technologist. Normal people need a cue that they are supposed to type something into their web browser as an internet address. "Dot com" serves as that cue (and to a lesser extent, dot org and dot net).
If normal people heard "Go to getfirefox" they would say "Where am I supposed to go to get this foxfire thing?".
Normal people don't google something as their first course of action. I do, and you probably do, but most people don't. I find most people are amazed when they email me or ask me questions and I answer them within seconds just by searching on Google or comparable search engine.
It's just the same old game of whack-a-mole. By the time they put the nails in Napster's coffins, everyone had migrated away too. The vanguard (Slashdot user types) go first, and it takes a year or two for the rest of the non-technerati to catch up. By then, the new P2P network gets swollen with users, and within a few months the RIAA's paid goons are flooding that network with crap fake songs. The vanguard slink off to start their own quiet, new P2P network (like eDonkey originally was - remember how hard to use that damned thing was before eMule? The whole point was to keep the plebs out!). And then the lawsuits start arriving.
And thus the cycle begins again. Don't worry, P2P won't be dead anytime soon.
Perhaps I was in a grumpy and curt mood when I posted that, but your attitude is no better. You are both wrong and misleading (in that I never said preferred shares are debt). Perhaps like most VCs, you don't have the patience or requisite brain cells to read more than a 1 page executive summary. Clearly I should have said "like debt" and "like equity" to be more clear. Or maybe you are just intentionally misreading to be argumentative?
Liquidation preference is a debt-like seniority feature that is a part of most preferred shares. Bank debt is going to be senior to preferreds in a liquidation, of course. And interest on debt is non-deferrable (failure to pay leads to default and all the consequences thereof), unlike preferred dividends. Re: conversion features, most preferreds used by VCs have conversion terms of some sort in them. I guess I had to say all of that to clarify. My original point was of course that VCs want upside and control along with as senior a status in a company's capital structure as they can get.
Oh, and as you reference yourself, convertible notes are often used for seed stage investments by angels and very early stage VC firms, to avoid attaching a fixed valuation to a firm that's too early to accurately value. Though you are right that handing out debt isn't the primary purpose of a VC firm, I never said it was.
BTW, I have been an entrepreneur (and raised capital from VCs in three separate rounds) and have done private deals at a hedge fund, though I principally invest in public equities.
Re:Isn't there a word ...
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It seems related to a behavioral finance effect calling anchoring, which I believe was part of Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel-winning work. From Wikipedia:
As a second example, according to Daniel Kahneman if an audience is asked firstly to memorise the last 4 digits of their social security number and then to estimate the number of physicians in New York the correlation between the two numbers is around 0.4--far beyond what would be expected by chance. The simple act of thinking of the first number strongly influences the second, even though there is no logical connection between them.
Basically, people often don't have any absolute framework for judging what is reasonable in a particular situation, so their mind subconsciously focuses or anchors on the first number they see, even if there is no rational basis or relationship between the number presented and the judgment call being asked for.
Sorry, but you don't seem to understand what the word "evolution" means, since you start talking about cosmology and galactic formation shortly after introducing the subject of evolution. This is a straw man of creationists.
As a physicist who has done research in astronomy and astrophysics, I can tell you beyond a reasonable doubt that what you are referring to as "evolution" is actually the grand total sum of scientific knowledge about the historical development of our universe. This comes from scientific work in diverse fields, with entirely separate bodies of evidence and so on.
The only thing these different fields of knowledge have in common is that they happened in the past and we make inferences about them from present observation. Oh, and that they all happen to contradict a literalist interpretation of the Bible, and thus piss of the same yahoos who reject evolution on that basis, even if they wrap themselves in the cloth of "Intelligent Design".
Furthermore, the demand for "incontrovertable proof of evolution from start to finish" is absurd and represents a complete lack of understanding of the scientific process. That's just not how science works. Theories are falsifiable, not exhaustively provable. And different theories are supported by more or less evidence. Which is why lumping together entirely disparate areas of knowledge under the heading of an intentionally inflammatory word ('evolution') which are backed by entirely different bodies of evidence is itself incredibly intellectually dishonest.
Please don't share your opinion when you don't know what you are talking about. VCs use convertible debentures, preferred shares, and convertible preferreds regularly. VCs love to use instruments that give them liquidation preference (debt) as well as upside (equity) as long as they can get both without paying a premium for it.
The whole "evolution is perfect and complete" thing is a straw man created by creationists. Likewise with the "6 components of evolution" in which they lump big bang cosmology, speciation and a whole bunch of other crap they don't like from science together under the inflammatory heading "evolution" so they can reject it all at once with one spurious argument usually surrounding the whole "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" schtick or other 150 year old mumbo jumbo.
To do otherwise would be to face an overwhelming landslide of evidence that they are just plain wrong.
Check out this article from back in 1999. 6 years ago - and this guy said he was going to be raking in millions in profits by 2000.
There may be anomolous results this guy has seen, but that doesn't mean his claims or explanations for his observations are all correct. But hey, I'd be first in line to party as soon as somebody actually builds a free-energy machine. Just show me and 20 friends (all physicists of course), allowing for free inspection of the apparatus, and I'll concede this one.
You are way off base. Every theory backed by sufficient evidence has to be subsumed in future theories (i.e. they have to explain those results as well). Nobody ever "disproved" Newtonian physics, they just came up with more complete theories that reduce to the old Newtonian physics for most normal, human scales (i.e. quantum mechanics and all that came from it for the very small stuff, and general relativity, for the very big stuff).
So if you have a new theory that explains otherwise unexplainable results, great, but it better also explain why my toaster over, and my CRT, and my LCD, and my computer, and my car and so forth all work too, or else it's worthless.
BTW, a huge amount of very useful physics is still done using Newtonian mechanics. To think that physicists "discarded" a useful theory because there were more accurate ones for other domains is foolish. I think most physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is useful and accurate, but I am sure most will tell you that they don't think it's "right" in the sense of being complete and correct. That's old news. If this guy has something that's more complete and correct in that it explains all the old stuff and some new stuff too, I am certain physicists will embrace it, though it will probably take somewhere between a few years and a decade to convince themselves that it all works out (similar things happened with GR and QM).
Also, not every new discovery is "revolutionary". Plenty are simply minor modifications to the existing theories to account for new results. That seems plausible here to me. That or this guy is defrauding investors big time. Which seems to still be the most likely explanation.
I do agree that the incentives for lawyers in civil suits are a big problem in that they promote class action lawsuits and over-the-top rewards. This is fairly easily achievable, we just need the will as a society to pass some appropriate legislation. And perhaps it would be better if lawyers saw their first duty to justice, and their second duty to their clients (to achieve this effectively requires incentives that match obligations - so lawyers would need to be remunerated for pursuing justice, not just representing clients needs - this is done in other countries, where lawyer's fees for criminal cases are generally set by law and lawyers are compensated out of state funds, not private pockets). This is conceivable to achieve, but less likely.
Unfortunately, the part about laws that are always clear, never conflict with each other and have no unclear "corner cases" is a pipe dream. No society has ever figured out how to do that. The more heterogenous and complex your society is, the more complicated the laws needed to run things are, and that's why the US has a more complicated body of laws than many other countries. I really don't think it's possible to radically simplify, though there is undoubtedly "cruft" in terms of law and jurisprudence.
Way to cite a demo done with 3+ year old technology. The "burning AMD" syndrome was ages ago - the Athlon XPs did run hot relative to their Intel counterparts back in the day, and they definitely did not fail gracefully. However, I'm fairly sure that Athlon 64's don't suffer from the same problem - first, they *are* much lower power than comparable Intel processors these days, second, I believe (though not sure) that they have built-in thermal monitoring and autoshutdown capabilities.
He's rapidly moved from an idealist, visionary, out to make a better and more accessible world for the masses into a profiteer, who is out to appeal with the obvious.
You'd be surprised how much better and more accessible the world seems with 3 billion dollars of cash in hand. That's not a small sum of money for even a very rich dude.
I call BS on this. When you put what you think is an audio CD in your CD ROM drive and click on the drive icon, you don't expect to be giving permission to anybody to install a rootkit.
Furthermore, your argument is simply insane, even if applied to software CDs. Do I give permission to any software vendor to install anything they want when I run the installer executable? Do I give them permission to wipe my hard drive? Install malicious, intentionally uninstallable programs? Monitor my activities when not using their software?
Even the most ardent proponent of EULAs couldn't make the claim that you give such permissions by default. Unless they specifically ask, they don't have permission to do anything that isn't specifically part of the product as a reasonable person would perceive it to be.
It's a Pentium M 1.5Ghz. Not comparable to a P4 1.5Ghz at all, so saying "1.5Ghz is pretty slow" is misleading. I thought people here on Slashdot knew this stuff. 512MB of RAM is more than enough for everything I've ever done except playing Battlefield 2.
It's reasonably speedy for the application (ultra lightweight laptop). I have the X41 (non-tablet version) and the processor is fine for heavy Excel work, light/occasional programming/stats work and the like. The harddrive is slow, and startup is a bit tedious compared to my desktop (a brand new Athlon 64 X2 3800), but as long as you don't expect a desktop replacement/gaming rig/software development machine, you should be pretty happy. The other business users I know who have the X41 seem incredibly happy with it as well. As for resolution, you wouldn't want any higher than 1024x768 on a 12" screen - IBM offers plenty of laptops with higher resolution if that's what you want.
Battery life is much better than other laptops I've had and Lenovo (previously IBM) makes a solid little machine.
As for the tablet version, I didn't go for it, but I'm sure it's fine if you really want to use it as a tablet.
You sir, are an idiot. Did you even bother to read the letter? This is all about pressuring Kansas to change it's mind, not about keeping scientific knowledge out of the hands of children. I can only assume you are trolling - I would sure as hell refuse to have any copyrighted material I owned used as part of such a despicable attempt to undermine the teaching of the scientific method in science classes.
You missed the key word: "intermittent". The point is that most of the firms and people you cite need that kind of computing power regularly, not intermittently. If they need it more than 4 or 5 weeks a year, it makes more sense to buy than to rent from Sun. And several of the applications you describe already have niche service providers offering applications experience AND rentable computing power, which provides customers with a lot more value than Sun is.
Does Australia have the concept of a contract of adhesion? A contract is a contract because it is negotiated between two people. An agreement that your telephone, cable or other service provider sends you with a bunch of small print on it is considered a contract of adhesion because the recipient isn't provided with an opportunity to negotiate terms, they just have to accept them or give up access to the service entirely.
Under US law, contracts of adhesion can't contain unconscionable terms, like many of these referenced terms (i.e. giving up your right to a chargeback - clearly unconscionable and unenforceable). The problem is some court cases that incorrectly have ruled that EULAs are magically different from contracts of adhesion, and should not be subject to the same standard, but instead should be considered as fully negotiated, true contracts.
Actually, I just found this page which indicates that Australia lacks much in the way of case law dealing with this issue.
I always got the feeling that this kind of clause is just put in for evil effect - to scare the bejesus out of the reader. It seems to be pretty effective.
What's a court going to do, order you to give a blow job to the CEO on demand for the rest of your life?
Oh please. Forgive me if I find your explanation of the article and its headline to be difficult to believe. Something tells me there were probably several pieces of nuance you are neglecting to mention, and a substantially less idiotic headline than you implying.
Why must you angry right-wing nutjobs flap your arms about misrepresenting liberals as a bunch of idiots to make yourselves look right? You are so obviously attacking a straw man, it's not even funny.
And I fail to see what high prison occupancy or low crime rates could have to do with Bush in any case - these things happened long before Bush was president, so it would be pretty hard for there to be a causal relationship there.
Ummm... that was the entire point of the original MIT experiment. They proved that it was quite possible to focus enough mirrors in one spot to generate enough heat to set wood on fire. That is a proven point.
Whether confounding factors such as the water content of a vessel in the ocean would invariably prevent this from working in practice against a ship at anchor (i.e. in a naval siege) is still an open issue.
The more significant question is "why" - it seems much simpler to just put 10 archers with flaming arrows to work shooting at the ship, than to set up a big array of mirrors to accomplish the same goal of setting the ship on fire. I presume the only reason somebody would actually have done this in ancient times would be the psychological effect it would have seeing a beam of light cause your ship to set aflame. I would think that could destroy the morale of an attacking army who might see it as a sign from the gods or similar.
I still doubt such a thing was ever put into practice in reality, but I'm guessing there was some prototype in ancient times that served as inspiration for this story.
Slashdot Mirror
Beating heart donors => brain dead, on life support, zero chance of survival. They have to harvest the material before the disconnection of life support for it to be viable, that's all. The person is already dead for all practical purposes.
About 65-70% in practice, actually, on a per-gallon basis with E85. So yes, there's a rather modest cost in convenience (or you just have to build cars with 19 gallon tanks instead of 15 gallon tanks).
But all of this is irrelevant. The fuel:air ratio in modern car engines is an electronically controlled parameter. FFV engines already exist, and cost only a modicum more than standard gasoline engines. They detect ethanol/gasoline mixtures and automatically adjust the combustion ratio appropriately. See the Wikipedia article for a summary.
Since the vast majority of engines in passenger vehicles and fueling stations currently support gasoline, telling people to get an FFV for their new car is actually much easier than telling them to get a diesel. And in fact, some people already have FFV cars and don't even know it (the car manufacturers sell them to comply with legislation and get tax breaks, even when people don't know their car can use ethanol).
Okay, but technical issues and filthy, dirty aesthetics of a borked namespace aside (and those two will stop this dead in the water), saying "www." in front of a web address is 4 syllables, vs. ".com" afterwards, which is two. Why the hell would anybody think that is an improvement? Sorry, this is one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.
Nobody except corn farmers has ever proposed using corn ethanol as a fuel on a meaningful scale. That is just a farming subsidy scam and a straw man used by confused or malevolent opponents of ecologically sound fuels, or those with political agendas in line with the fossil fuel industry.
Bioethanol is ethanol made from cellulose feedstocks. These should, in practice, be much lower in terms of energy input required than corn or similar crops used for human consumption. The economics of bioethanol produced by SSF (simultaneous sacharination and fermentation) bears almost nothing in common with corn ethanol.
Furthermore, if you get rid of farm subsidies from the equations, then the market should take care of making sure energy costs are fully reflected in all prices. Carbon impact is another story, but shouldn't be too hard to measure (and probably is closely correlated with the portion of costs attributable to energy use).
As for biodiesel - I am under the impression that the major costs are associated with the feedstock itself, not with the acid used in processing. From memory, I think that the feedstock cost is responsible for at least 60-70% of the final cost of biodiesel, so I wouldn't expect a 10x reduction in acid costs to save more than a few percent in total cost. Genetically engineered bacteria seem to provide the most reasonable way to make an oil feedstock for bioethanol production efficiently. The reason that some people think biodiesel is cheaper than diesel is that in Europe they get huge tax breaks on biodiesel, so they are comparing apples to oranges.
Bioethanol is by far the most promising alternative fuel available today, with attractive envrionmental impact and economic characteristics, and only modest incremental cost to make Flexible Fuel Vehicle engines that can burn either ethanol or gasoline. It's too bad there is zero governmental support for this here in the US. We could greatly reduce our foreign oil dependence within 5-10 years with just a bit of political willpower.
No, you are the one thinking like a technologist. Normal people need a cue that they are supposed to type something into their web browser as an internet address. "Dot com" serves as that cue (and to a lesser extent, dot org and dot net).
If normal people heard "Go to getfirefox" they would say "Where am I supposed to go to get this foxfire thing?".
Normal people don't google something as their first course of action. I do, and you probably do, but most people don't. I find most people are amazed when they email me or ask me questions and I answer them within seconds just by searching on Google or comparable search engine.
It's just the same old game of whack-a-mole. By the time they put the nails in Napster's coffins, everyone had migrated away too. The vanguard (Slashdot user types) go first, and it takes a year or two for the rest of the non-technerati to catch up. By then, the new P2P network gets swollen with users, and within a few months the RIAA's paid goons are flooding that network with crap fake songs. The vanguard slink off to start their own quiet, new P2P network (like eDonkey originally was - remember how hard to use that damned thing was before eMule? The whole point was to keep the plebs out!). And then the lawsuits start arriving.
And thus the cycle begins again. Don't worry, P2P won't be dead anytime soon.
Perhaps I was in a grumpy and curt mood when I posted that, but your attitude is no better. You are both wrong and misleading (in that I never said preferred shares are debt). Perhaps like most VCs, you don't have the patience or requisite brain cells to read more than a 1 page executive summary. Clearly I should have said "like debt" and "like equity" to be more clear. Or maybe you are just intentionally misreading to be argumentative?
Liquidation preference is a debt-like seniority feature that is a part of most preferred shares. Bank debt is going to be senior to preferreds in a liquidation, of course. And interest on debt is non-deferrable (failure to pay leads to default and all the consequences thereof), unlike preferred dividends. Re: conversion features, most preferreds used by VCs have conversion terms of some sort in them. I guess I had to say all of that to clarify. My original point was of course that VCs want upside and control along with as senior a status in a company's capital structure as they can get.
Oh, and as you reference yourself, convertible notes are often used for seed stage investments by angels and very early stage VC firms, to avoid attaching a fixed valuation to a firm that's too early to accurately value. Though you are right that handing out debt isn't the primary purpose of a VC firm, I never said it was.
BTW, I have been an entrepreneur (and raised capital from VCs in three separate rounds) and have done private deals at a hedge fund, though I principally invest in public equities.
It seems related to a behavioral finance effect calling anchoring, which I believe was part of Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel-winning work. From Wikipedia:
As a second example, according to Daniel Kahneman if an audience is asked firstly to memorise the last 4 digits of their social security number and then to estimate the number of physicians in New York the correlation between the two numbers is around 0.4--far beyond what would be expected by chance. The simple act of thinking of the first number strongly influences the second, even though there is no logical connection between them.
Basically, people often don't have any absolute framework for judging what is reasonable in a particular situation, so their mind subconsciously focuses or anchors on the first number they see, even if there is no rational basis or relationship between the number presented and the judgment call being asked for.
And what do you call this act?
The Aristocrats!
Sorry, but you don't seem to understand what the word "evolution" means, since you start talking about cosmology and galactic formation shortly after introducing the subject of evolution. This is a straw man of creationists.
As a physicist who has done research in astronomy and astrophysics, I can tell you beyond a reasonable doubt that what you are referring to as "evolution" is actually the grand total sum of scientific knowledge about the historical development of our universe. This comes from scientific work in diverse fields, with entirely separate bodies of evidence and so on.
The only thing these different fields of knowledge have in common is that they happened in the past and we make inferences about them from present observation. Oh, and that they all happen to contradict a literalist interpretation of the Bible, and thus piss of the same yahoos who reject evolution on that basis, even if they wrap themselves in the cloth of "Intelligent Design".
Furthermore, the demand for "incontrovertable proof of evolution from start to finish" is absurd and represents a complete lack of understanding of the scientific process. That's just not how science works. Theories are falsifiable, not exhaustively provable. And different theories are supported by more or less evidence. Which is why lumping together entirely disparate areas of knowledge under the heading of an intentionally inflammatory word ('evolution') which are backed by entirely different bodies of evidence is itself incredibly intellectually dishonest.
Please don't share your opinion when you don't know what you are talking about. VCs use convertible debentures, preferred shares, and convertible preferreds regularly. VCs love to use instruments that give them liquidation preference (debt) as well as upside (equity) as long as they can get both without paying a premium for it.
The whole "evolution is perfect and complete" thing is a straw man created by creationists. Likewise with the "6 components of evolution" in which they lump big bang cosmology, speciation and a whole bunch of other crap they don't like from science together under the inflammatory heading "evolution" so they can reject it all at once with one spurious argument usually surrounding the whole "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" schtick or other 150 year old mumbo jumbo.
To do otherwise would be to face an overwhelming landslide of evidence that they are just plain wrong.
Check out this article from back in 1999. 6 years ago - and this guy said he was going to be raking in millions in profits by 2000.
There may be anomolous results this guy has seen, but that doesn't mean his claims or explanations for his observations are all correct. But hey, I'd be first in line to party as soon as somebody actually builds a free-energy machine. Just show me and 20 friends (all physicists of course), allowing for free inspection of the apparatus, and I'll concede this one.
You are way off base. Every theory backed by sufficient evidence has to be subsumed in future theories (i.e. they have to explain those results as well). Nobody ever "disproved" Newtonian physics, they just came up with more complete theories that reduce to the old Newtonian physics for most normal, human scales (i.e. quantum mechanics and all that came from it for the very small stuff, and general relativity, for the very big stuff).
So if you have a new theory that explains otherwise unexplainable results, great, but it better also explain why my toaster over, and my CRT, and my LCD, and my computer, and my car and so forth all work too, or else it's worthless.
BTW, a huge amount of very useful physics is still done using Newtonian mechanics. To think that physicists "discarded" a useful theory because there were more accurate ones for other domains is foolish. I think most physicists would tell you that quantum mechanics is useful and accurate, but I am sure most will tell you that they don't think it's "right" in the sense of being complete and correct. That's old news. If this guy has something that's more complete and correct in that it explains all the old stuff and some new stuff too, I am certain physicists will embrace it, though it will probably take somewhere between a few years and a decade to convince themselves that it all works out (similar things happened with GR and QM).
Also, not every new discovery is "revolutionary". Plenty are simply minor modifications to the existing theories to account for new results. That seems plausible here to me. That or this guy is defrauding investors big time. Which seems to still be the most likely explanation.
I do agree that the incentives for lawyers in civil suits are a big problem in that they promote class action lawsuits and over-the-top rewards. This is fairly easily achievable, we just need the will as a society to pass some appropriate legislation. And perhaps it would be better if lawyers saw their first duty to justice, and their second duty to their clients (to achieve this effectively requires incentives that match obligations - so lawyers would need to be remunerated for pursuing justice, not just representing clients needs - this is done in other countries, where lawyer's fees for criminal cases are generally set by law and lawyers are compensated out of state funds, not private pockets). This is conceivable to achieve, but less likely.
Unfortunately, the part about laws that are always clear, never conflict with each other and have no unclear "corner cases" is a pipe dream. No society has ever figured out how to do that. The more heterogenous and complex your society is, the more complicated the laws needed to run things are, and that's why the US has a more complicated body of laws than many other countries. I really don't think it's possible to radically simplify, though there is undoubtedly "cruft" in terms of law and jurisprudence.
Way to cite a demo done with 3+ year old technology. The "burning AMD" syndrome was ages ago - the Athlon XPs did run hot relative to their Intel counterparts back in the day, and they definitely did not fail gracefully. However, I'm fairly sure that Athlon 64's don't suffer from the same problem - first, they *are* much lower power than comparable Intel processors these days, second, I believe (though not sure) that they have built-in thermal monitoring and autoshutdown capabilities.
He's rapidly moved from an idealist, visionary, out to make a better and more accessible world for the masses into a profiteer, who is out to appeal with the obvious.
You'd be surprised how much better and more accessible the world seems with 3 billion dollars of cash in hand. That's not a small sum of money for even a very rich dude.
I call BS on this. When you put what you think is an audio CD in your CD ROM drive and click on the drive icon, you don't expect to be giving permission to anybody to install a rootkit.
Furthermore, your argument is simply insane, even if applied to software CDs. Do I give permission to any software vendor to install anything they want when I run the installer executable? Do I give them permission to wipe my hard drive? Install malicious, intentionally uninstallable programs? Monitor my activities when not using their software?
Even the most ardent proponent of EULAs couldn't make the claim that you give such permissions by default. Unless they specifically ask, they don't have permission to do anything that isn't specifically part of the product as a reasonable person would perceive it to be.
It's a Pentium M 1.5Ghz. Not comparable to a P4 1.5Ghz at all, so saying "1.5Ghz is pretty slow" is misleading. I thought people here on Slashdot knew this stuff. 512MB of RAM is more than enough for everything I've ever done except playing Battlefield 2.
It's reasonably speedy for the application (ultra lightweight laptop). I have the X41 (non-tablet version) and the processor is fine for heavy Excel work, light/occasional programming/stats work and the like. The harddrive is slow, and startup is a bit tedious compared to my desktop (a brand new Athlon 64 X2 3800), but as long as you don't expect a desktop replacement/gaming rig/software development machine, you should be pretty happy. The other business users I know who have the X41 seem incredibly happy with it as well. As for resolution, you wouldn't want any higher than 1024x768 on a 12" screen - IBM offers plenty of laptops with higher resolution if that's what you want.
Battery life is much better than other laptops I've had and Lenovo (previously IBM) makes a solid little machine.
As for the tablet version, I didn't go for it, but I'm sure it's fine if you really want to use it as a tablet.
You sir, are an idiot. Did you even bother to read the letter? This is all about pressuring Kansas to change it's mind, not about keeping scientific knowledge out of the hands of children. I can only assume you are trolling - I would sure as hell refuse to have any copyrighted material I owned used as part of such a despicable attempt to undermine the teaching of the scientific method in science classes.
You missed the key word: "intermittent". The point is that most of the firms and people you cite need that kind of computing power regularly, not intermittently. If they need it more than 4 or 5 weeks a year, it makes more sense to buy than to rent from Sun. And several of the applications you describe already have niche service providers offering applications experience AND rentable computing power, which provides customers with a lot more value than Sun is.
Does Australia have the concept of a contract of adhesion? A contract is a contract because it is negotiated between two people. An agreement that your telephone, cable or other service provider sends you with a bunch of small print on it is considered a contract of adhesion because the recipient isn't provided with an opportunity to negotiate terms, they just have to accept them or give up access to the service entirely.
Under US law, contracts of adhesion can't contain unconscionable terms, like many of these referenced terms (i.e. giving up your right to a chargeback - clearly unconscionable and unenforceable). The problem is some court cases that incorrectly have ruled that EULAs are magically different from contracts of adhesion, and should not be subject to the same standard, but instead should be considered as fully negotiated, true contracts.
Actually, I just found this page which indicates that Australia lacks much in the way of case law dealing with this issue.
I've seen that clause in several NDAs before.
I always got the feeling that this kind of clause is just put in for evil effect - to scare the bejesus out of the reader. It seems to be pretty effective.
What's a court going to do, order you to give a blow job to the CEO on demand for the rest of your life?
Oh please. Forgive me if I find your explanation of the article and its headline to be difficult to believe. Something tells me there were probably several pieces of nuance you are neglecting to mention, and a substantially less idiotic headline than you implying.
Why must you angry right-wing nutjobs flap your arms about misrepresenting liberals as a bunch of idiots to make yourselves look right? You are so obviously attacking a straw man, it's not even funny.
And I fail to see what high prison occupancy or low crime rates could have to do with Bush in any case - these things happened long before Bush was president, so it would be pretty hard for there to be a causal relationship there.
Ummm... that was the entire point of the original MIT experiment. They proved that it was quite possible to focus enough mirrors in one spot to generate enough heat to set wood on fire. That is a proven point.
Whether confounding factors such as the water content of a vessel in the ocean would invariably prevent this from working in practice against a ship at anchor (i.e. in a naval siege) is still an open issue.
The more significant question is "why" - it seems much simpler to just put 10 archers with flaming arrows to work shooting at the ship, than to set up a big array of mirrors to accomplish the same goal of setting the ship on fire. I presume the only reason somebody would actually have done this in ancient times would be the psychological effect it would have seeing a beam of light cause your ship to set aflame. I would think that could destroy the morale of an attacking army who might see it as a sign from the gods or similar.
I still doubt such a thing was ever put into practice in reality, but I'm guessing there was some prototype in ancient times that served as inspiration for this story.