Seems T-Mobile might is trying to act the evil (/good depends on point of view) sys-admin here.
I guess some people will like that, and it will probably increase security for the phone, third party network applications would include all kinds of malware if I understand it correctly.
Anyhow the problem with "sys-admins" is that if they start bothering the boss because he can not play whatever little game used to play and things like this they don't last for long in the job. Only problem is that costumers are not employees here, in that sense they are all bosses so of course T-mobile is also going to loose some costumers on this.
I don't think it will be that big a percent of costumers they loose, I personally don't use my phone for anything than talking and those pesky SMS-messages. I don't think the use of WAP is all that widespread yet, so the earlier the better to try and implement a strategy like this, before people begin getting to happy with different third party apps. Perhaps this is going to count in the positive direction for T-mobile in the long run when malware gets more and more widespread on phones, it will make T-mobile different from other network providers which might be a good thing (at least outside Germany where they have the advantage of being the biggest player).
I guess Quigo's approach to this means I will be able to earn less from the ad blocks I place on some of my websites.
Quigo allows the advertisers to choose which sites they want to have their ads on and where to bid the prices up, that is an advantage to the bigger players and a disadvantage for the smaller sites. No two players are going to bid each other up for being places on my little website whereas they might bid each other up for some kind of keyword where I am also represented.
I may be wrong though, there might be flowing more cash into the contextual ad business if advertisers are given more control over which ads are places where and that even though it will mean more income for the big sites it might also mean more income for me.
Sorry for my spelling, English is not my native language and when I am typing fast errors flourish.
I have just read TFA actually it seems that AT&T did take the stance of agreeing to the MS lawyer that software patents should not be possible and would accept loosing this specific case if Microsoft agrees to this. This whole patent thing is a bit of a cold war as it has been mentioned in some of the other discussions, seems that at least AT&T would rather spend their time and other resources developing real software instead of applying for software patents.
The stories showing how sick the software patent system in the US is just want stop it seems. It was about time that this also has reached the courts.
The person(s) within Microsoft that decided to make this appeal might very well not be too popular with Ballmer right now (that is if he wasn't involved in taking the decision himself). According to the article it actually was the Microsoft lawyer that brought the entire topic of software patents in general up, I somehow have the feeling he was acting on his own here and might have to look for another client soon.
This is one of the stories that I hope there will be an follow up on. If the supreme court suddenly decided that software patents are not actually a possibility anymore then that really could turn the tide in the "patent wars". I would think Microsoft is going to put everything into this trial now, if they loose this one they only have their two money cows left and really no bright future ahead of them at all, even investors should be able to see that.
I wonder how the other big holders of patents will react to such a decision, I have a feeling the only one of the big patent holders that will want to avoid that the entire idea of software patents is given up is Microsoft, them an entire legion of lawyers who will have to find something else to make money on.
I wonder how Balmer thinks that they are going to sue something that no one owns, that no one made.
Is he going to sue anyone who uses this? Is he going to sue those who hoste the code?
From the article it seems it is mostly the Linux vendors that Ballmer wants to target.
The US is, as far as I know, the only country that has implented all these sick software patent laws until now, how are they going to sue a UK based company?
With the current state of things the worst that could happen is that companies stop using Linux in the US, I don't see how they want to sue anyone based in Europe? Would the US government then start supporting Microsoft in trade wars?
This whole software patent thing is beyond my understanding, I wonder if anyone out there really get the idea behind this?
The way you put this, sounds like Torvals has some kind of severe autism.
I don't know the man, so I can't say if that is true. HOwever I do think that assuming he has some degree of autism isn't unlikely, I myself suffer from quite serios mental disorders and I seem to find that autism and other mental disorders (or what you like to call them, doesn't matter much) is much more common in "the geek community" than in the world surrounding us. Probably has a lot to do with that the commputer is really a big help to people like me who have problems handling social situations.
But then again I do not know Linus at all, I just know that he is important to the Linux Kernel and I would like for the kernel to keep on developing, if I have to bow and jump around to please Linus I would do that as I know he is much better at doing what he does than I am and even if I were more skilled being humble and appreciating what Linus has done would let things run more smoothly.
Thank you for this, I have forwarded the link to my sister.
In Denmark we have something called anti-piratgruppen instead of RIAA, but they do the same thing as far as I know. This could very well prove useful if my sister has not already found it, even if US and Danish law is probably pretty different.
I really think that Linus is a cool guy no doubt about that, sending in those patches to the Gnome community sure was the way to prove who is the over-geek here and how to get something done instead of wasting valuable time arguing over something as unimportant as Gnome (pun intented), if Linus is right.
But Linus does really seem to have a bit of an attitude problem at times. Which is many times good if you are a boss for employees, but the problem just is that is not what Linus is, he is the boss of volenteers, they can quit if they don't like their boss.
I can't help but get a little worried, had it been anyone else but Linus I wouldn't mind, let people have their strange ways as long as they do not bother me or anyone else to much.
I am just worried for Linus, I sure hope he does take care of himself and stay mentally fit, that flamewars like the one he appearently had with the Gnome people here does not bring him out of balance somehow.
If Linus somehow gets sick and overloaded then it will lead to a whole lot of mess with the development of the Linux Kernel which really would not be nice.
So please Gnome people start behaving, be humble, accept the patches and do not upset Linus, we really need him, even if he isn't always the nicest person around;)
True. She is allowed to share general information that is available to anyone on this, she told me nothing more than what I could have learned from studying different kinds of public available information. Also I have no clue who her client is. The reason I don't know about the outcome of this case could be because it is somehow not public information, perhaps it will be at some point, I don't know.
My sister is a lawyer, I imagine she is not the only one that has dealt with something related to this.
Right now she has a client that is being sued for quite an amount of money by the music industry for downloading lots of music through P2P services. He claims he never did this, that he never listens to music on his computer.
It turns out that he lives in an apartment block, knows very little about computers in general, but thought that this things with wireless network was really fancy. I think you can figure out the rest of that story, my sister has quite a few troubles convincing the music industry what is obvious, I don't know what the outcome of this case is and if it has been taken to court yet.
According to Danish law he probably has some responsibility and will, even if my sister successfully proves that he did not do the illegal downloading, still somehow get punished for this.
I think there are many interesting legal issues in this.
Well many seismometers are constantly on and have very long periods of this noise recorded. So with enough stacking you can pretty much detect as low frequencies as you want if only the amplitude is strong enough to be detected by the seismometers, so my guess is that the limiting factor is not the 1 Hz, but lies in how small amplitudes these seismometers detect.
These suggested waves would hold quite an amount of energy so it does make sense that they are able to detect these to me.
I agree, it is a good thing that businesses use OS software and that money also get involved in this.
To me the example of how Daniel Robbins, the man who made Gentoo Linux and did a fantastic job at it, ended up with a huge depth because he put all his time aside for the development of this OS stands as a very good example. He ended up being hired by MS for some kind of Open Source analyzing group because they offered to pay his depths for him if he would accept the job offer. Thankfully Daniel Robbins and his family was able to life a life with few enough expenses to make Gentoo a living project that when he left the project was able to live on and is still thriving. I remember how the we as a community tried to raise the money to pay Daniels depths, we were able to raise something like 10000$, but having devoted all his time for Gentoo for years his depth was 20 times that high. It is great when companies hire developers and pay them for doing what they do best, instead of Microsoft being able to hire the best guys of the business to do nothing valuable, because they have to make a living somehow. So lets get more money flowing in the Open Source community and lets have more paid developers, I have a hard time seeing the evil in that.
A side note is that Daniel the way just on his way back as a Gentoo developer after he left Microsoft again, as far as I understand because he did not feel he was really listened to.
I would just like to thank the person modding the parent of this comment "flamebait" for inspiring me to do a blog post and making me think twice about that word.
I am kind of curios what this comment will be modded now, having a good enough karma to not have to care all that much is really a blessing;)
Thank you, I never thought of this, but of course this effect has to be there.
Do you know if any research has been done into this and if so has it been possible to establish a record of C12/C14 ratio from the tree rings?
Actually we do have tree ring data from even further back, there are all these tree that have been found in swamps and also some older buildings where they have been conserved, I think a tree ring record has been pretty much establish for 10000 years based on this. I guess doing C12/C14 can be a bit difficult as it requires a decently sized sample that has not been contaminated with other living (or maybe rather once living) organisms (which probably does happen when they are conserved in a swamp). I never thought this could be used for anything but estimating how good a growth season it had been.
Does this estimate of 10% to 30% due to cosmic rays include or not include a positive feedback due to water vapor?
I am not totally certain, but I seem to recall that the the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere did not have the big effect as this is pretty much constant through the atmosphere after a short time interval and therefore this created both high and low clouds, where the high clouds actually decrease warming of the atmosphere, as a lot of the energy they absorb are transferred "to the rest of the universe" instead of to the lower atmosphere and they at the same time reflect a big portion of the light that hits them.
The important effect of this is the clouds that are formed over the sea surface where the amount of moisture in the air is always close to 100%.
But then again this is a pretty new developed theory, I don't think enough modeling of this has been made to give you a conclusive answer, the 10% to 30% is only an estimate and no where conclusive.
I have had some classes on this theory at university.
This being a somewhat new theory everything is still quite uncertain how much effect this has on the heating of the earth.
I think the estimates we saw in class a year ago was that this could explain from 10% to maybe 30% of the heating that has happened in the last 30 years.
We don't have measurements of the amount of cosmic radiation from more than something like 30 years so it is hard to go further back to check this theory. We have CO2 measurements from somewhat longer, but not that much longer, but we have trapped air in the ice cores which give us information almost 100K years back which gives the evidence of CO2 and methane quite strong support. Cosmic radiation does is not "trapped" anywhere in the geologic layers to my knowledge.
I am no saying Svensmarks theory is wrong, it most likely has an effect, but how big this effect is is very hard to say by now. Anyhow I think the critique of the UN-report is justified, if this theory is not part of the report. Not taking this theory into account and then saying there is a 90% certainty that humans have caused global warming is not scientific.
I think the post is a bit misleading, energy is not stored by cooling down something, actually energy is taken away, but never mind.
As far as I can figure what is being done is to cool down these refrigeration rooms more when there is more power beeing produced because of the strong wind and then you don't have to run the refrigeration systems when there is little wind for a time as they slowly heat until some level.
I would think that even more power could be saved if the energy was used to freeze water and the ice then was taken to melt in the a frame used as insulation for the freezing houses.
I don't see this as much of a new idea though, it is something that has been talked about a lot here in Denmark, there are many other places where the use of energy can be spared when there is lot's of production from windmills, for example local heating plants, smaller refrigerators in homes (would require some kind of online connection to tell them when there is cheap electricity, but I think these intelligent freezers already exist), electric cars, pretty much anything with an attached battery really.
This can to a large degree be controlled by letting the prices vary on the market and let the consumer feel these variances also, that way it pays of to use energy when there is plenty of it.
Using the power when it is produced sure is more efficient than using the extra energy to produce hydrogen, but still that is still something that I think should be still done. The two things doesn't oppose each other as such, if we are to bring down our CO2 release we sure need a lot of windmills.
I can't help but smile a bit that MSN weather in this test turns out to be the absolutely worst when it comes to accuracy in almost all categories.
I would think there is a lot of difference on how the forecasts are made in the different channels, some of them probably do get a lot of their information from meteorologist working on their own stations. I wouldn't wonder if MSN doesn't have a meteorologist (or maybe only one) working to provide their forecasts. Computers and simulations play a big role in predicting the weather today, but human eyes are worth a lot still.
I don't myself live in the USA, so my primary use of these are to check on when there is severe weather in areas where I know someone. I have gotten used to check on weather underground for this information, I haven't checked on many other weather channel, but I feel quite well capable of following what is going on in the USA with tornadoes and such here from Denmark.
For a long time we only had one weather forecast service here in Denmark, a national institute. Since a primarily private TV station (TV2) a few years ago started their own weather forecast service, I really feel the national institute have been pulling themselves together and have provided many services that they didn't provide until now. So even though some of the services provides terrible accuracy they might still serve a good purpose in giving the other services competition and thereby forcing them to improve also.
When I am really dependent on the forecast I tend to study the information behind the simple prediction of the given weather, that way I am also much better prepared for possible scenarios, knowing which front move where and can better "read the skies".
Well they still have some way to go before they reach Minority Report levels.
As for interrogating people I guess it would not so much be their intentions as if whether they are telling the truth or not that is interesting. A scanning would probably take quite some time and involve people being questioned at the same time. Of course there are big ethical questions in this, I guess the anti-terror people in CIA and FBI would be quite interested in getting their hands on this technique, that is if they don't already use it.
One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
The intention part would also efficiently could be used for directing different robotics, as for example a fighter plane, which I seem to recall they have been working with something like this for the pilots for quite some time, to save the reaction time from the hand brain to pushing the button or whatever. I do remember some sci-fi movie about this at some point, but it is about to become reality also it seems.
As a comment on my blog also points out the pdf linked to above is not all that scientific, for example it does not cite it's sources.
I have not read this through yet but I would suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in this subject should take a closer look at this pdf which sure does look much more worked through and authoritative on the subject.
I think this very interesting article has a very good point when it says that it would be nice if contributers were allowed to recieve credit for their work. Especially if this credit would result in being allowed to have a link from your name like it does here on/. (the part with the link is my addition to what the article talks about)
I know and agree that in the perfect world it shouldn't matter, but this world is not perfect. For those with a steady income and a good job they are happy with it doesn't matter so much, but for someone like me a link to my homepage often means the difference between if take the time to contribute or not. Traffic on a homepage equals income, at least for me and I do at times have to count the cents. I would really like to contribute with something worthwhile now and then and the link to my homepage justifies that I do spend the time on doing so.
Right now I do not live from my web pages, I don't know if I want to, but with my present job status those returning visitors I do have on my webpage and blog are quite valuable to me as they might be the start of what I may have to turn to make a living, at least for a time, if no geophysics work shows up here soon.
It wasn't out of ill intend that I twisted the story to sound as if the romans were "happy mercenaries", to me that was also what the news sites I read about this gave me a bit of the impression that this was what had happened. I did not come upon this information in my (admittedly scarce) research for this posting, I am thankful for you bringing this up to me. I will at least correct my blog (no editing is allowed in/., good thing your comment already is modded +5).
If Microsoft get this patent, which from previous granted software patents doesn't seem unlikely, this again shows that software patents do not deserve the name "patent". A patent used to be something that had invented something new, if whatever they had come up with was already out in the open and common knowledge then there a patent could not be granted.
So many things have been patented late, as far as I know these patents did now show up until a few years ago, yet all kinds of things that has been out in the open has been patented. Software patents doesn't seem to have anything to do with who invented anything, it is about who first comes up with patenting something and get the application in.
So far I have never heard a sensible argument for why software patents is a good thing. It doesn't look like the big companies that keep on filing these patents would stop developing because there was no such thing as a software patent, they did so long before software patents would ever show up. I haven't heard of a single case where the lone programmer (inventor?) gets a patent for some smart code he invented and the big companies will pay him for his efforts. All that I heard of is big companies (or maybe small companies that invent nothing but has made it their business to file patents for things that already exist) that have asked money from another big company because of these patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems T-Mobile might is trying to act the evil (/good depends on point of view) sys-admin here.
I guess some people will like that, and it will probably increase security for the phone, third party network applications would include all kinds of malware if I understand it correctly.
Anyhow the problem with "sys-admins" is that if they start bothering the boss because he can not play whatever little game used to play and things like this they don't last for long in the job.
Only problem is that costumers are not employees here, in that sense they are all bosses so of course T-mobile is also going to loose some costumers on this.
I don't think it will be that big a percent of costumers they loose, I personally don't use my phone for anything than talking and those pesky SMS-messages. I don't think the use of WAP is all that widespread yet, so the earlier the better to try and implement a strategy like this, before people begin getting to happy with different third party apps. Perhaps this is going to count in the positive direction for T-mobile in the long run when malware gets more and more widespread on phones, it will make T-mobile different from other network providers which might be a good thing (at least outside Germany where they have the advantage of being the biggest player).
I guess Quigo's approach to this means I will be able to earn less from the ad blocks I place on some of my websites.
Quigo allows the advertisers to choose which sites they want to have their ads on and where to bid the prices up, that is an advantage to the bigger players and a disadvantage for the smaller sites. No two players are going to bid each other up for being places on my little website whereas they might bid each other up for some kind of keyword where I am also represented.
I may be wrong though, there might be flowing more cash into the contextual ad business if advertisers are given more control over which ads are places where and that even though it will mean more income for the big sites it might also mean more income for me.
Sorry for my spelling, English is not my native language and when I am typing fast errors flourish.
I have just read TFA actually it seems that AT&T did take the stance of agreeing to the MS lawyer that software patents should not be possible and would accept loosing this specific case if Microsoft agrees to this.
This whole patent thing is a bit of a cold war as it has been mentioned in some of the other discussions, seems that at least AT&T would rather spend their time and other resources developing real software instead of applying for software patents.
The stories showing how sick the software patent system in the US is just want stop it seems. It was about time that this also has reached the courts.
The person(s) within Microsoft that decided to make this appeal might very well not be too popular with Ballmer right now (that is if he wasn't involved in taking the decision himself). According to the article it actually was the Microsoft lawyer that brought the entire topic of software patents in general up, I somehow have the feeling he was acting on his own here and might have to look for another client soon.
This is one of the stories that I hope there will be an follow up on.
If the supreme court suddenly decided that software patents are not actually a possibility anymore then that really could turn the tide in the "patent wars". I would think Microsoft is going to put everything into this trial now, if they loose this one they only have their two money cows left and really no bright future ahead of them at all, even investors should be able to see that.
I wonder how the other big holders of patents will react to such a decision, I have a feeling the only one of the big patent holders that will want to avoid that the entire idea of software patents is given up is Microsoft, them an entire legion of lawyers who will have to find something else to make money on.
I wonder how Balmer thinks that they are going to sue something that no one owns, that no one made.
Is he going to sue anyone who uses this?
Is he going to sue those who hoste the code?
From the article it seems it is mostly the Linux vendors that Ballmer wants to target.
The US is, as far as I know, the only country that has implented all these sick software patent laws until now, how are they going to sue a UK based company?
With the current state of things the worst that could happen is that companies stop using Linux in the US, I don't see how they want to sue anyone based in Europe?
Would the US government then start supporting Microsoft in trade wars?
This whole software patent thing is beyond my understanding, I wonder if anyone out there really get the idea behind this?
HOwever I do think that assuming he has some degree of autism isn't unlikely, I myself suffer from quite serios mental disorders and I seem to find that autism and other mental disorders (or what you like to call them, doesn't matter much) is much more common in "the geek community" than in the world surrounding us.
Probably has a lot to do with that the commputer is really a big help to people like me who have problems handling social situations.
But then again I do not know Linus at all, I just know that he is important to the Linux Kernel and I would like for the kernel to keep on developing, if I have to bow and jump around to please Linus I would do that as I know he is much better at doing what he does than I am and even if I were more skilled being humble and appreciating what Linus has done would let things run more smoothly.
Thank you for this, I have forwarded the link to my sister.
In Denmark we have something called anti-piratgruppen instead of RIAA, but they do the same thing as far as I know. This could very well prove useful if my sister has not already found it, even if US and Danish law is probably pretty different.
I really think that Linus is a cool guy no doubt about that, sending in those patches to the Gnome community sure was the way to prove who is the over-geek here and how to get something done instead of wasting valuable time arguing over something as unimportant as Gnome (pun intented), if Linus is right.
;)
But Linus does really seem to have a bit of an attitude problem at times. Which is many times good if you are a boss for employees, but the problem just is that is not what Linus is, he is the boss of volenteers, they can quit if they don't like their boss.
I can't help but get a little worried, had it been anyone else but Linus I wouldn't mind, let people have their strange ways as long as they do not bother me or anyone else to much.
I am just worried for Linus, I sure hope he does take care of himself and stay mentally fit, that flamewars like the one he appearently had with the Gnome people here does not bring him out of balance somehow.
If Linus somehow gets sick and overloaded then it will lead to a whole lot of mess with the development of the Linux Kernel which really would not be nice.
So please Gnome people start behaving, be humble, accept the patches and do not upset Linus, we really need him, even if he isn't always the nicest person around
True. She is allowed to share general information that is available to anyone on this, she told me nothing more than what I could have learned from studying different kinds of public available information. Also I have no clue who her client is.
The reason I don't know about the outcome of this case could be because it is somehow not public information, perhaps it will be at some point, I don't know.
My sister is a lawyer, I imagine she is not the only one that has dealt with something related to this.
Right now she has a client that is being sued for quite an amount of money by the music industry for downloading lots of music through P2P services. He claims he never did this, that he never listens to music on his computer.
It turns out that he lives in an apartment block, knows very little about computers in general, but thought that this things with wireless network was really fancy. I think you can figure out the rest of that story, my sister has quite a few troubles convincing the music industry what is obvious, I don't know what the outcome of this case is and if it has been taken to court yet.
According to Danish law he probably has some responsibility and will, even if my sister successfully proves that he did not do the illegal downloading, still somehow get punished for this.
I think there are many interesting legal issues in this.
Well many seismometers are constantly on and have very long periods of this noise recorded.
So with enough stacking you can pretty much detect as low frequencies as you want if only the amplitude is strong enough to be detected by the seismometers, so my guess is that the limiting factor is not the 1 Hz, but lies in how small amplitudes these seismometers detect.
These suggested waves would hold quite an amount of energy so it does make sense that they are able to detect these to me.
Yes, sorry English is not my native language, another misunderstanding created by Firefox spell check I guess
I agree, it is a good thing that businesses use OS software and that money also get involved in this.
To me the example of how Daniel Robbins, the man who made Gentoo Linux and did a fantastic job at it, ended up with a huge depth because he put all his time aside for the development of this OS stands as a very good example. He ended up being hired by MS for some kind of Open Source analyzing group because they offered to pay his depths for him if he would accept the job offer. Thankfully Daniel Robbins and his family was able to life a life with few enough expenses to make Gentoo a living project that when he left the project was able to live on and is still thriving.
I remember how the we as a community tried to raise the money to pay Daniels depths, we were able to raise something like 10000$, but having devoted all his time for Gentoo for years his depth was 20 times that high.
It is great when companies hire developers and pay them for doing what they do best, instead of Microsoft being able to hire the best guys of the business to do nothing valuable, because they have to make a living somehow.
So lets get more money flowing in the Open Source community and lets have more paid developers, I have a hard time seeing the evil in that.
A side note is that Daniel the way just on his way back as a Gentoo developer after he left Microsoft again, as far as I understand because he did not feel he was really listened to.
I would just like to thank the person modding the parent of this comment "flamebait" for inspiring me to do a blog post and making me think twice about that word.
;)
I am kind of curios what this comment will be modded now, having a good enough karma to not have to care all that much is really a blessing
Thank you, I never thought of this, but of course this effect has to be there.
Do you know if any research has been done into this and if so has it been possible to establish a record of C12/C14 ratio from the tree rings?
Actually we do have tree ring data from even further back, there are all these tree that have been found in swamps and also some older buildings where they have been conserved, I think a tree ring record has been pretty much establish for 10000 years based on this.
I guess doing C12/C14 can be a bit difficult as it requires a decently sized sample that has not been contaminated with other living (or maybe rather once living) organisms (which probably does happen when they are conserved in a swamp).
I never thought this could be used for anything but estimating how good a growth season it had been.
I am not totally certain, but I seem to recall that the the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere did not have the big effect as this is pretty much constant through the atmosphere after a short time interval and therefore this created both high and low clouds, where the high clouds actually decrease warming of the atmosphere, as a lot of the energy they absorb are transferred "to the rest of the universe" instead of to the lower atmosphere and they at the same time reflect a big portion of the light that hits them.
The important effect of this is the clouds that are formed over the sea surface where the amount of moisture in the air is always close to 100%.
But then again this is a pretty new developed theory, I don't think enough modeling of this has been made to give you a conclusive answer, the 10% to 30% is only an estimate and no where conclusive.
I have had some classes on this theory at university.
This being a somewhat new theory everything is still quite uncertain how much effect this has on the heating of the earth.
I think the estimates we saw in class a year ago was that this could explain from 10% to maybe 30% of the heating that has happened in the last 30 years.
We don't have measurements of the amount of cosmic radiation from more than something like 30 years so it is hard to go further back to check this theory.
We have CO2 measurements from somewhat longer, but not that much longer, but we have trapped air in the ice cores which give us information almost 100K years back which gives the evidence of CO2 and methane quite strong support.
Cosmic radiation does is not "trapped" anywhere in the geologic layers to my knowledge.
I am no saying Svensmarks theory is wrong, it most likely has an effect, but how big this effect is is very hard to say by now.
Anyhow I think the critique of the UN-report is justified, if this theory is not part of the report. Not taking this theory into account and then saying there is a 90% certainty that humans have caused global warming is not scientific.
A campaign that is said to actually have made young men think more about keeping the speed down.
Speedbandits
I think the post is a bit misleading, energy is not stored by cooling down something, actually energy is taken away, but never mind.
As far as I can figure what is being done is to cool down these refrigeration rooms more when there is more power beeing produced because of the strong wind and then you don't have to run the refrigeration systems when there is little wind for a time as they slowly heat until some level.
I would think that even more power could be saved if the energy was used to freeze water and the ice then was taken to melt in the a frame used as insulation for the freezing houses.
I don't see this as much of a new idea though, it is something that has been talked about a lot here in Denmark, there are many other places where the use of energy can be spared when there is lot's of production from windmills, for example local heating plants, smaller refrigerators in homes (would require some kind of online connection to tell them when there is cheap electricity, but I think these intelligent freezers already exist), electric cars, pretty much anything with an attached battery really.
This can to a large degree be controlled by letting the prices vary on the market and let the consumer feel these variances also, that way it pays of to use energy when there is plenty of it.
Using the power when it is produced sure is more efficient than using the extra energy to produce hydrogen, but still that is still something that I think should be still done. The two things doesn't oppose each other as such, if we are to bring down our CO2 release we sure need a lot of windmills.
What a nice piece of work.
I can't help but smile a bit that MSN weather in this test turns out to be the absolutely worst when it comes to accuracy in almost all categories.
I would think there is a lot of difference on how the forecasts are made in the different channels, some of them probably do get a lot of their information from meteorologist working on their own stations. I wouldn't wonder if MSN doesn't have a meteorologist (or maybe only one) working to provide their forecasts.
Computers and simulations play a big role in predicting the weather today, but human eyes are worth a lot still.
I don't myself live in the USA, so my primary use of these are to check on when there is severe weather in areas where I know someone.
I have gotten used to check on weather underground for this information, I haven't checked on many other weather channel, but I feel quite well capable of following what is going on in the USA with tornadoes and such here from Denmark.
For a long time we only had one weather forecast service here in Denmark, a national institute. Since a primarily private TV station (TV2) a few years ago started their own weather forecast service, I really feel the national institute have been pulling themselves together and have provided many services that they didn't provide until now. So even though some of the services provides terrible accuracy they might still serve a good purpose in giving the other services competition and thereby forcing them to improve also.
When I am really dependent on the forecast I tend to study the information behind the simple prediction of the given weather, that way I am also much better prepared for possible scenarios, knowing which front move where and can better "read the skies".
Well they still have some way to go before they reach Minority Report levels.
As for interrogating people I guess it would not so much be their intentions as if whether they are telling the truth or not that is interesting.
A scanning would probably take quite some time and involve people being questioned at the same time.
Of course there are big ethical questions in this, I guess the anti-terror people in CIA and FBI would be quite interested in getting their hands on this technique, that is if they don't already use it.
One scary place this could be used was to check religious beliefs, in some countries you are prohibited to believe anything else than what the state dictates.
The intention part would also efficiently could be used for directing different robotics, as for example a fighter plane, which I seem to recall they have been working with something like this for the pilots for quite some time, to save the reaction time from the hand brain to pushing the button or whatever. I do remember some sci-fi movie about this at some point, but it is about to become reality also it seems.
As a comment on my blog also points out the pdf linked to above is not all that scientific, for example it does not cite it's sources.
I have not read this through yet but I would suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in this subject should take a closer look at this pdf which sure does look much more worked through and authoritative on the subject.
I think this very interesting article has a very good point when it says that it would be nice if contributers were allowed to recieve credit for their work. Especially if this credit would result in being allowed to have a link from your name like it does here on /. (the part with the link is my addition to what the article talks about)
I know and agree that in the perfect world it shouldn't matter, but this world is not perfect. For those with a steady income and a good job they are happy with it doesn't matter so much, but for someone like me a link to my homepage often means the difference between if take the time to contribute or not.
Traffic on a homepage equals income, at least for me and I do at times have to count the cents.
I would really like to contribute with something worthwhile now and then and the link to my homepage justifies that I do spend the time on doing so.
Right now I do not live from my web pages, I don't know if I want to, but with my present job status those returning visitors I do have on my webpage and blog are quite valuable to me as they might be the start of what I may have to turn to make a living, at least for a time, if no geophysics work shows up here soon.
Thank you for posting this.
/., good thing your comment already is modded +5).
It wasn't out of ill intend that I twisted the story to sound as if the romans were "happy mercenaries", to me that was also what the news sites I read about this gave me a bit of the impression that this was what had happened.
I did not come upon this information in my (admittedly scarce) research for this posting, I am thankful for you bringing this up to me. I will at least correct my blog (no editing is allowed in
If Microsoft get this patent, which from previous granted software patents doesn't seem unlikely, this again shows that software patents do not deserve the name "patent".
A patent used to be something that had invented something new, if whatever they had come up with was already out in the open and common knowledge then there a patent could not be granted.
So many things have been patented late, as far as I know these patents did now show up until a few years ago, yet all kinds of things that has been out in the open has been patented.
Software patents doesn't seem to have anything to do with who invented anything, it is about who first comes up with patenting something and get the application in.
So far I have never heard a sensible argument for why software patents is a good thing. It doesn't look like the big companies that keep on filing these patents would stop developing because there was no such thing as a software patent, they did so long before software patents would ever show up. I haven't heard of a single case where the lone programmer (inventor?) gets a patent for some smart code he invented and the big companies will pay him for his efforts. All that I heard of is big companies (or maybe small companies that invent nothing but has made it their business to file patents for things that already exist) that have asked money from another big company because of these patents.