Transistor manufacturing technology has advanced several times in the last 47 years without resetting the product development clock. Carbon nanotube transistors represent yet another change in manufacturing technology of something that we know quite well how to use. Once we refine the technique, sophisticated applications for it are just around the corner. Thankfully in this case we don't need to unlearn.
I too was intrigued by the solar tower project when I first saw it, but the thing is truly a monstrosity of an eye sore and a MAJOR technological hurdle in terms of contstruction and maintenance - and for the amount of square footage it covers and materials that go into its makeup, these Stirling Engines with collector dishes are a MUCH more attractive alternative that maximizes the land and construction resource utilization.
I also found an amateur's theoretical "solar tower "degisn that doesn't use a tower to generate the up-draft. It requires a significant amount of additional land area, but doesn't require ANY advanced construction techniques. The concept uses a LARGE area of land covered in black sands that collect and radiate solar energy as heat. Surrounding this space with white sands causes the outside air to be of a lower temperature, so when heated air rises in the center, cooler air is drawn in from the sides. On a massive scale (several square miles in the center section) this creates a powerful up-draft. By placing a shaft right in the center with a buried conduit leading to the perimeter, the up-draft will use the venturi effect to draw air through the conduit. The guy proposed putting a 40-ft diameter wind turbine within the conduit. I think it sounds like a great idea, personally. Now all I need are a few square miles of flat, vacant desert land that I can cover with dissimilar sands to radiate and reflect solar heat and dig a BIG tunnel for my million-dollar turbine to be installed into... but if you think about it, it does make a lot of sense for locations that have a lot of hot, otherwise useless, arid land (Mexico? Northern Africa?) to dispose of.
Now that figure is what I was looking for. If 100W/sqft is the peak energy potential at the equator then there's no way this other thing grabs 116W/sqft anywhere on the planet. So the projected numbers I mentioned are wrong - thank you!
Not a steam engine, a steam turbine. A steam engine contains reciporocating parts like the stirling engine does. A steam turbine is a high-RPM rotational shaft like you might find on a hydro turbine.
... and based on a 37ft dia dish, 20,000 count we're talking 21,504,183 sqft of total collector area. Divide that into 500,000,000W, the projected peak output of the installation, and you end up with around 23W per sqft.
Now I could swear I've seen a higher efficiency per sqft specified using a related but different technology: steam turbines. I can't find the link right now, but I was hoping to build one of these things one day myself to take some real world measurements. The projections I read admittedly may have been inaccurate which is why I want to build my own to find out, but the project site was claiming the potential to pull approaximately 3KW of usable power out of a steam turbine from a 6 ft diameter parabolic dish.
There are a few completed collector dishes out there in this size and they are making between 600-1100 deg fahrenheit at the focus where a heat exchanger is placed to boil water into steam pressure which drives a turbine. The only thing that leaves me questioning the accuracy of the projections is that the turbine is a somewhat unconventional one, called a "Tesla Turbine".
Nonetheless, if the figures are remotely accurate, you'll find that a 6ft dish putting out 3KW is worth over 100W per sqft. I believe this possibility alone makes it well worth examining the potential for higher thermal conversion efficiency than the sterling engine model because it could potentially reduce the size of this installation to 25%... or quadruple the output!
Regardless, both approaches are quite fascinating because they're so simple - it's mind numbing that nothing like this is yet operational. It's so technologically unsophisticated that it could be built and installed nearly anywhere. Even the sun tracking circuit can be done on the cheap for about $25US in bits & pieces.
"Avila clearly intended to operate a business from his website because he used the.com domain suffix, the "commercial level domain," rather than.net.' You just can't make this stuff up."
It's been a LONG time since the.com TLD was exclusively used for U.S. commercial businesses. How many people do you know with theirownname.com who just operate a blog or family connection site?.com receives such a heavy marketing push, it's the first thing that occurs to most web-newb's who want to register a domain name, no matter what their objective.
So I think there's also grounds for argument here on just how "clear" it is that the guy intends on capitalizing on the FedEx trademark with a commercial venture.
"Why should they be liable for a risk you knowingly assume?"
The very act of engaging in business begets liability in a multitude of forms. If an employee burns their hand on a coffee pot in the workplace, the employer is liable for damages regardless of whether the employee knowingly assumed the risk of contacting a potentially hot surface. This is the way it works, carpal tunnel in the workplace is no different.
Is it right? I don't think so. The U.S. is WAY too attached to lawsuits. It's considered "The American Way", but I find it deplorable. People sue for everything from physical injuries to emotional distress. Personally, I think opportunists suck.
Why is it important to make the code beautiful if the objective is merely to publish content for legible consumption? Why not just use Word's HTML export capability and dump the results into your web page and be done with it? Your content will be published and who cares what the code looks like if nobody's going to be doing any significant editing to it..?
Just curious. Personally, unless the document is too big for consideration, I'll usually recode the thing by hand if I need the code to be precise - I haven't met a code-generator that I like yet.
... but it seems like a fair portion of their problems are heat-related and melting parts. Is this just because they don't care about breaking things now and are only interested in taking measurements pre-breakage?
Anyway, I'm curious how/if this type of thing would benefit from the use of ceramics rather than metals. If I'm understanding right it's just a matter of finding the perfect shape to tune the exhaust output. If they can come up with that perfect, static shape, then I would think that shape could be made out of anything, high temperature ceramics not excluded. Then perhaps they could do away with these pesky cooling systems.
That or the right to the pursuit of happiness. Outside of employeers mandating a certain dress code and that you don't come to work intoxicated and given that you are not in breach of confidentiality or other legally enforcible contract, I don't see that employers have any business in your life whatsoever.
I personally like the sound of this i-RAM - it's built on a concept that I've been pondering for some time now, but I think they should package it in a standard 3.5" or 5.25" drive form-factor and use a PCI bus power adapter to bring the 3.3v over for charging. This would allow them significantly more working space for packing in RAM modules for which they are currently space limited.
But since they are in a PCI slot, I also think they made a mistake by making the interface SATA2. They should have made the thing a PCI-based ATA/SCSI compatible port. Then any O/S with support for ATA (what, like ALL of them?) would be able to detect the RAM drive through the ATA port and they would have the full bandwidth of the PCI bus at their disposal. That would be real head-turning performance. Remember: the ATA interface is not the bottleneck for ATA performance, it's the drives themselves.
I wouldn't spend the hundred bucks on the thing until they made improvements such as these to make it work closer to its potential. I think they've made a great head start, but this seems more like an R&D sample board than a commercially ready product.
"Quick formatting" is spiffy and all, but simply writing out partition and file allocation tables, etc does not exercize the entire drive's media surface and give the drive the opportunity to mark bad sectors. This is increasingly important on new drives that are over 250GB in size; drives like this represent increasing bit density on the disk surface without significant advances in control and precision technology - this means that the big drives are more error prone on this front. In fact, the drive manufacturers are counting on it: why else do you think they have MANY MB worth of space reserved for flagging dead sectors?
The bottom line is that if you're feeling lucky and can stand to lose data from time to time on your drive, then by all means: quick format it. Otherwise, new drives should be fully formatted at least once.
"Any electricity which can be used to generate hydrogen can now be stored in batteries with a higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas and yes, with negligible degradation."
But the entire world does not and will not operate from rechargable batteries. Take a home in rural Anytown, U.S.A which has no connection to the power grid, in the middle of the woods so that solar and wind power are out and the only power they get is from a low-output hydro-power generator from a dammed up creek on the property. Rechargable batteries are not the best option for powering their water heater.
The best solution is a comustible gas supply and gas-powered appliances. We have such a model in place today in the form of natural gas and propane services. Hydrogen is nearly a drop-in substitute for those systems, but has the versatility to be ran through a fuel cell to generate electricity as well. Rechargable batteries do not have the option to be used for a combustion-type heat source.
I think this does not invalidate the usefulness of batteries, but that it does illustrate that rechargable batteries are not the end-all solution to stored energy and that there are cases where we have a need for a transportable, combustible fuel.
You call me brainless and then paraphrase exactly what I stated? The only difference is that you think paranoia and competition are the only forces capable of driving progress and innovation. Maybe one day you will realize differently. I do find it amusing though that you make a shining example of competetiveness in your attempt to slash me down with insults. How typically, animalistically human of you.
to responsibly deal with itself, much less regulate the exploitation of "space." It's sickening to think of our pathetic political strggles escaping the confines of our planet. By and large, up to now, space has been the domain of unity, cooperation in the face of adversity. But I suppose the U.S. broke into space politics the minute we decided to put a man on the moon, not in the name of science, but in the name of "neener neener neener" to one-up Russia's Sputnik. As a registered American voter, I promise to watch out for those with a political agenda in space. All things considered, humans may never be ready for peaceful coexistence without genetic alteration. That, my friends, is a crying shame.
"Modern English spelling is an old and crufty system."
Perhaps you would be interested in the writings of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). Take his following piece, for example:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by "Mark Twain"
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s," and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g / j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c," "y," and "x" - bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez - tu riplais "ch," "sh," and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
There are other such wonderful ideas on reform of the English language too. Perhaps you can support their causes.
As for me, I'm perfectly content with English; I much prefer it to the conjugations found in other European tongues.
Some of these "mistakes" are contingent upon where one receives their education. I, for example, have been repeatedly instructed to always include punctuation within a trailing quote. An example of this in use where the reader should recognize it does not affect the meaning of the quoted text is:
"Say hello," he demanded coldly, "to my little friend!"
Without the narrative interruption in the middle, the quote would read, "Say hello to my little firend!" Note the absence of the comma from the uninterrupted quote? The comma does not change the meaning of the quoted text any more than the trailing punctuation does.
Even so, I believe your "Start." example is simply a misuse of quotes, bad grammar/punctuation, if you will, in that it should not have been at the end of a sentence, or should have used some other means such as italicizing to represent the quoted text.
That aside, I would just like to add that about as common (and distracting) as spelling/grammatical errors are bastardizations of common phrases. "I could care less," for example. The phrase is, "I couldn't care less." People just seem to carelessly throw around words without thinking before they speak(/write).
Perhaps the movement for political correctness was born out of this mess.
What you lost was potential income. If just 1% of those people had bought the CD, thats $3,000. But hey, thats just 3% of your profits, right? Well, its 3% of your gross profits. But it cost you $10,000 to print the CD's, $10,000 for the studio time, $10,000 for the designers and producers, etc. until you have $70,000 in expenses. All of which you had to pay up front. So now that $100,000 gross is $30,000 net, and that 1% of sales you lost meant 10% more money you would have made.
Bingo. It's called "lost profits." Americans sue for lost profits every day of every year with the exception of national holidays and possibly Sundays. The problem with the lost profits argument which has been pointed out before in piracy discussions here on/. is the big "if" that goes along with it: IF those 100 pirates had bought the CD rather than downloaded it there would have been X amount of profit which we now consider lost. The trouble is that there is no guarantee that those 100 pirates WOULD purchase the CD in the absence of the free option. The pirates I know, for example, hoarde tens of thousands of MP3 tracks -- $thousnds worth in potential CD purchases -- and there's no way in hell they would have spent that money at a store if the MP3's didn't exist. No way. I expect that the same is true of a lot of pirate activity.
So lost profits is highly speculative and the court tends to give them the benefit of the doubt every time a verdict is in their favor.
"why do companies insist on believing that by denying access to the specs, they somehow gain an advantage?"
I've worked for a couple hardware manufacturers and the reasoning behind avoiding open source and open specification support seems to vary slightly from place to place, but I thought I'd add these two points which I've personally experienced. While I don't agree with their justifications, I do understand their reasoning:
1) Closed specifications help hardware manufacturers hide flaws in their hardware design. Flaws that can be quite costly to resolve in hardware can be much more cost effectively addressed with software work-arounds that avoid triggering the flaw. Not wanting to admit to engineering imperfect hardware, the mfr. would rather keep both the flaw and the work-around a secret. They will list the new version as a "bug fix", but the public will never know exactly what the cause of the bug was. In the mfr's eyes, bugs are expected by the public and can be addressed with patches without raising any eyebrows, but known hardware defects can yield a weak opinion of the mfr's product line and overall capability.
2) Closed specifications help hardware manufacturers maintain control over their product's public image/reputation and support. The mfr would rather have a reputation for not being open-source-friendly than to have a reputation for having hardware which works questionably due to arbitrary programmers from around the world writing shakey code which causes the product not to perform up to par with specifications. The mfr also avoids getting stuck with answering questions from end-users who "downloaded such-and-such driver which should work, but doesn't - why?" The mfr is able to save money by not providing support for platforms that it does not specifically develop for, and is able to maintain their product's reputation by consistently demonstrating its full functionality and performance in the relatively controlled environment of supported platforms.
So is there something to gain? Yes: PR damage control, and a lower bottom line through reduced development and/or support overhead.
"It is probably not possible to get a pair of files that will collide in all three of those hashes."
Not impossible, just less probable. Combining algorithms effectively increases the size of your fingerprint. The probability of a duplicate is a function of original data size and its proportion to the fingerprint data size. The closer those two data sizes are, the lower the probability of duplicates.
It may seem difficult to pull off now, but eventually someone will make a nice, clever script to do it and then the script-kiddies will have a field day.
Slashdot Mirror
Transistor manufacturing technology has advanced several times in the last 47 years without resetting the product development clock. Carbon nanotube transistors represent yet another change in manufacturing technology of something that we know quite well how to use. Once we refine the technique, sophisticated applications for it are just around the corner. Thankfully in this case we don't need to unlearn.
I too was intrigued by the solar tower project when I first saw it, but the thing is truly a monstrosity of an eye sore and a MAJOR technological hurdle in terms of contstruction and maintenance - and for the amount of square footage it covers and materials that go into its makeup, these Stirling Engines with collector dishes are a MUCH more attractive alternative that maximizes the land and construction resource utilization.
I also found an amateur's theoretical "solar tower "degisn that doesn't use a tower to generate the up-draft. It requires a significant amount of additional land area, but doesn't require ANY advanced construction techniques. The concept uses a LARGE area of land covered in black sands that collect and radiate solar energy as heat. Surrounding this space with white sands causes the outside air to be of a lower temperature, so when heated air rises in the center, cooler air is drawn in from the sides. On a massive scale (several square miles in the center section) this creates a powerful up-draft. By placing a shaft right in the center with a buried conduit leading to the perimeter, the up-draft will use the venturi effect to draw air through the conduit. The guy proposed putting a 40-ft diameter wind turbine within the conduit. I think it sounds like a great idea, personally. Now all I need are a few square miles of flat, vacant desert land that I can cover with dissimilar sands to radiate and reflect solar heat and dig a BIG tunnel for my million-dollar turbine to be installed into... but if you think about it, it does make a lot of sense for locations that have a lot of hot, otherwise useless, arid land (Mexico? Northern Africa?) to dispose of.
Now that figure is what I was looking for. If 100W/sqft is the peak energy potential at the equator then there's no way this other thing grabs 116W/sqft anywhere on the planet. So the projected numbers I mentioned are wrong - thank you!
Not a steam engine, a steam turbine. A steam engine contains reciporocating parts like the stirling engine does. A steam turbine is a high-RPM rotational shaft like you might find on a hydro turbine.
... and based on a 37ft dia dish, 20,000 count we're talking 21,504,183 sqft of total collector area. Divide that into 500,000,000W, the projected peak output of the installation, and you end up with around 23W per sqft.
Now I could swear I've seen a higher efficiency per sqft specified using a related but different technology: steam turbines. I can't find the link right now, but I was hoping to build one of these things one day myself to take some real world measurements. The projections I read admittedly may have been inaccurate which is why I want to build my own to find out, but the project site was claiming the potential to pull approaximately 3KW of usable power out of a steam turbine from a 6 ft diameter parabolic dish.
There are a few completed collector dishes out there in this size and they are making between 600-1100 deg fahrenheit at the focus where a heat exchanger is placed to boil water into steam pressure which drives a turbine. The only thing that leaves me questioning the accuracy of the projections is that the turbine is a somewhat unconventional one, called a "Tesla Turbine".
Nonetheless, if the figures are remotely accurate, you'll find that a 6ft dish putting out 3KW is worth over 100W per sqft. I believe this possibility alone makes it well worth examining the potential for higher thermal conversion efficiency than the sterling engine model because it could potentially reduce the size of this installation to 25%... or quadruple the output!
Regardless, both approaches are quite fascinating because they're so simple - it's mind numbing that nothing like this is yet operational. It's so technologically unsophisticated that it could be built and installed nearly anywhere. Even the sun tracking circuit can be done on the cheap for about $25US in bits & pieces.
"Avila clearly intended to operate a business from his website because he used the .com domain suffix, the "commercial level domain," rather than .net.' You just can't make this stuff up."
.com TLD was exclusively used for U.S. commercial businesses. How many people do you know with theirownname.com who just operate a blog or family connection site? .com receives such a heavy marketing push, it's the first thing that occurs to most web-newb's who want to register a domain name, no matter what their objective.
It's been a LONG time since the
So I think there's also grounds for argument here on just how "clear" it is that the guy intends on capitalizing on the FedEx trademark with a commercial venture.
"Why should they be liable for a risk you knowingly assume?"
The very act of engaging in business begets liability in a multitude of forms. If an employee burns their hand on a coffee pot in the workplace, the employer is liable for damages regardless of whether the employee knowingly assumed the risk of contacting a potentially hot surface. This is the way it works, carpal tunnel in the workplace is no different.
Is it right? I don't think so. The U.S. is WAY too attached to lawsuits. It's considered "The American Way", but I find it deplorable. People sue for everything from physical injuries to emotional distress. Personally, I think opportunists suck.
Why is it important to make the code beautiful if the objective is merely to publish content for legible consumption? Why not just use Word's HTML export capability and dump the results into your web page and be done with it? Your content will be published and who cares what the code looks like if nobody's going to be doing any significant editing to it..?
Just curious. Personally, unless the document is too big for consideration, I'll usually recode the thing by hand if I need the code to be precise - I haven't met a code-generator that I like yet.
... but it seems like a fair portion of their problems are heat-related and melting parts. Is this just because they don't care about breaking things now and are only interested in taking measurements pre-breakage?
Anyway, I'm curious how/if this type of thing would benefit from the use of ceramics rather than metals. If I'm understanding right it's just a matter of finding the perfect shape to tune the exhaust output. If they can come up with that perfect, static shape, then I would think that shape could be made out of anything, high temperature ceramics not excluded. Then perhaps they could do away with these pesky cooling systems.
That or the right to the pursuit of happiness. Outside of employeers mandating a certain dress code and that you don't come to work intoxicated and given that you are not in breach of confidentiality or other legally enforcible contract, I don't see that employers have any business in your life whatsoever.
What do you suppose Burt Rutan could have done with that kind of funding? This is a disgrace.
I personally like the sound of this i-RAM - it's built on a concept that I've been pondering for some time now, but I think they should package it in a standard 3.5" or 5.25" drive form-factor and use a PCI bus power adapter to bring the 3.3v over for charging. This would allow them significantly more working space for packing in RAM modules for which they are currently space limited.
But since they are in a PCI slot, I also think they made a mistake by making the interface SATA2. They should have made the thing a PCI-based ATA/SCSI compatible port. Then any O/S with support for ATA (what, like ALL of them?) would be able to detect the RAM drive through the ATA port and they would have the full bandwidth of the PCI bus at their disposal. That would be real head-turning performance. Remember: the ATA interface is not the bottleneck for ATA performance, it's the drives themselves.
I wouldn't spend the hundred bucks on the thing until they made improvements such as these to make it work closer to its potential. I think they've made a great head start, but this seems more like an R&D sample board than a commercially ready product.
"Quick formatting" is spiffy and all, but simply writing out partition and file allocation tables, etc does not exercize the entire drive's media surface and give the drive the opportunity to mark bad sectors. This is increasingly important on new drives that are over 250GB in size; drives like this represent increasing bit density on the disk surface without significant advances in control and precision technology - this means that the big drives are more error prone on this front. In fact, the drive manufacturers are counting on it: why else do you think they have MANY MB worth of space reserved for flagging dead sectors?
The bottom line is that if you're feeling lucky and can stand to lose data from time to time on your drive, then by all means: quick format it. Otherwise, new drives should be fully formatted at least once.
Frog in a blender (You have no balls!)
:^) tsk tsk.
Oh and there's no "pee" in "hamster"
"Any electricity which can be used to generate hydrogen can now be stored in batteries with a higher energy density than compressed hydrogen gas and yes, with negligible degradation."
But the entire world does not and will not operate from rechargable batteries. Take a home in rural Anytown, U.S.A which has no connection to the power grid, in the middle of the woods so that solar and wind power are out and the only power they get is from a low-output hydro-power generator from a dammed up creek on the property. Rechargable batteries are not the best option for powering their water heater.
The best solution is a comustible gas supply and gas-powered appliances. We have such a model in place today in the form of natural gas and propane services. Hydrogen is nearly a drop-in substitute for those systems, but has the versatility to be ran through a fuel cell to generate electricity as well. Rechargable batteries do not have the option to be used for a combustion-type heat source.
I think this does not invalidate the usefulness of batteries, but that it does illustrate that rechargable batteries are not the end-all solution to stored energy and that there are cases where we have a need for a transportable, combustible fuel.
You call me brainless and then paraphrase exactly what I stated? The only difference is that you think paranoia and competition are the only forces capable of driving progress and innovation. Maybe one day you will realize differently. I do find it amusing though that you make a shining example of competetiveness in your attempt to slash me down with insults. How typically, animalistically human of you.
You're using the wrong name for the force.
Well then just where exactly do midichlorians fit in?
to responsibly deal with itself, much less regulate the exploitation of "space." It's sickening to think of our pathetic political strggles escaping the confines of our planet. By and large, up to now, space has been the domain of unity, cooperation in the face of adversity. But I suppose the U.S. broke into space politics the minute we decided to put a man on the moon, not in the name of science, but in the name of "neener neener neener" to one-up Russia's Sputnik. As a registered American voter, I promise to watch out for those with a political agenda in space. All things considered, humans may never be ready for peaceful coexistence without genetic alteration. That, my friends, is a crying shame.
"One difference I just noticed is that the Stephen King books use double-quotes, while the Canadian and British books use single-quotes."
:^)
I only use double-quotes if the text is interpreted; using single-quotes makes it literal.
Perhaps you would be interested in the writings of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens). Take his following piece, for example:
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s," and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g / j" anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c," "y," and "x" - bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez - tu riplais "ch," "sh," and "th" rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
There are other such wonderful ideas on reform of the English language too. Perhaps you can support their causes.
As for me, I'm perfectly content with English; I much prefer it to the conjugations found in other European tongues.
Some of these "mistakes" are contingent upon where one receives their education. I, for example, have been repeatedly instructed to always include punctuation within a trailing quote. An example of this in use where the reader should recognize it does not affect the meaning of the quoted text is:
"Say hello," he demanded coldly, "to my little friend!"
Without the narrative interruption in the middle, the quote would read, "Say hello to my little firend!" Note the absence of the comma from the uninterrupted quote? The comma does not change the meaning of the quoted text any more than the trailing punctuation does.
Even so, I believe your "Start." example is simply a misuse of quotes, bad grammar/punctuation, if you will, in that it should not have been at the end of a sentence, or should have used some other means such as italicizing to represent the quoted text.
That aside, I would just like to add that about as common (and distracting) as spelling/grammatical errors are bastardizations of common phrases. "I could care less," for example. The phrase is, "I couldn't care less." People just seem to carelessly throw around words without thinking before they speak(/write).
Perhaps the movement for political correctness was born out of this mess.
With the Russians' recent track record for space exploration, this could easily be sped along to 50 years by the end of the first mission. :^)
What you lost was potential income. If just 1% of those people had bought the CD, thats $3,000. But hey, thats just 3% of your profits, right? Well, its 3% of your gross profits. But it cost you $10,000 to print the CD's, $10,000 for the studio time, $10,000 for the designers and producers, etc. until you have $70,000 in expenses. All of which you had to pay up front. So now that $100,000 gross is $30,000 net, and that 1% of sales you lost meant 10% more money you would have made.
/. is the big "if" that goes along with it: IF those 100 pirates had bought the CD rather than downloaded it there would have been X amount of profit which we now consider lost. The trouble is that there is no guarantee that those 100 pirates WOULD purchase the CD in the absence of the free option. The pirates I know, for example, hoarde tens of thousands of MP3 tracks -- $thousnds worth in potential CD purchases -- and there's no way in hell they would have spent that money at a store if the MP3's didn't exist. No way. I expect that the same is true of a lot of pirate activity.
Bingo. It's called "lost profits." Americans sue for lost profits every day of every year with the exception of national holidays and possibly Sundays. The problem with the lost profits argument which has been pointed out before in piracy discussions here on
So lost profits is highly speculative and the court tends to give them the benefit of the doubt every time a verdict is in their favor.
"why do companies insist on believing that by denying access to the specs, they somehow gain an advantage?"
I've worked for a couple hardware manufacturers and the reasoning behind avoiding open source and open specification support seems to vary slightly from place to place, but I thought I'd add these two points which I've personally experienced. While I don't agree with their justifications, I do understand their reasoning:
1) Closed specifications help hardware manufacturers hide flaws in their hardware design. Flaws that can be quite costly to resolve in hardware can be much more cost effectively addressed with software work-arounds that avoid triggering the flaw. Not wanting to admit to engineering imperfect hardware, the mfr. would rather keep both the flaw and the work-around a secret. They will list the new version as a "bug fix", but the public will never know exactly what the cause of the bug was. In the mfr's eyes, bugs are expected by the public and can be addressed with patches without raising any eyebrows, but known hardware defects can yield a weak opinion of the mfr's product line and overall capability.
2) Closed specifications help hardware manufacturers maintain control over their product's public image/reputation and support. The mfr would rather have a reputation for not being open-source-friendly than to have a reputation for having hardware which works questionably due to arbitrary programmers from around the world writing shakey code which causes the product not to perform up to par with specifications. The mfr also avoids getting stuck with answering questions from end-users who "downloaded such-and-such driver which should work, but doesn't - why?" The mfr is able to save money by not providing support for platforms that it does not specifically develop for, and is able to maintain their product's reputation by consistently demonstrating its full functionality and performance in the relatively controlled environment of supported platforms.
So is there something to gain? Yes: PR damage control, and a lower bottom line through reduced development and/or support overhead.
"It is probably not possible to get a pair of files that will collide in all three of those hashes."
Not impossible, just less probable. Combining algorithms effectively increases the size of your fingerprint. The probability of a duplicate is a function of original data size and its proportion to the fingerprint data size. The closer those two data sizes are, the lower the probability of duplicates.
It may seem difficult to pull off now, but eventually someone will make a nice, clever script to do it and then the script-kiddies will have a field day.