I think you are exaggerating things. How good must be any deal from Microsoft to be competitive with supposedly better and completely free software ? How come you can convince anybody to pay any, even miniscule price, if one can have a better product without paying a single $ ? M$ simply has much better product for the desktop, period. That is why you see succesfull switch to Linux mostly on the server side around the world but you see very little on the desktop side unless it is used for very limited set of clerk type applications such as City government etc. Most people use OS to run other software and hardware products and in the end they care less what is the underlying OS that allows them to run those. Linux simply cannot compete with quality and quantity of applications and harware products available for Windows.
I think, this is mostly FUD.
- Regarding "regularly" checking license I don't find this any different than current XP. XP does exactly the same when the hardware is modified sufficiently and requires reregistration in order to continue to work.
- Regarding "single copy" why would anyone need more than one copy of their original Vista CD ? I don't even make single copy of my original XP CD. The restriction is maybe real, but be serious, this is not a big deal, but pure FUD.
- Regarding "Defender" everybody seem to not notice little word posted by the professor - "by default". Microsoft actually does a proper social engineering here. They have learnt their lesson with the first iteration (prior to SP2) of the XP firewall, which was OFF by default. Large number of users never switched firewall ON because they had no idea what the firewall is for and how to switch it on. Defender is simply ON by default and those who don't like it can switch it OFF. The default ON will prevent large number of zombies where their owners otherwise would had no idea what the Defender is or does and would leave it in the default OFF state. By setting it to "ON" M$ prevents it.
- As with every other commercial software product M$ is leasing it to the user and therefore reserves all rights not specifically listed in the agreement. This is pretty standard note regarding leasing. Lease a car and read the agreement to see that it is no different. I bet that very similar note is on the XP license.
- And finally that terrible DRM. Please, give me a break. If you don't like DRM in HD or Blue Ray don't buy their disks and DRM will be completely transparent to you. DRM is strictly for those who would like to watch those disks anyway. At least they will be able to do so, unlike Linux or Mac users unless Mac puts DRM into their OS. Linux is probably going to be left in the dark since their users refuse DRM. I consider to have a choice to be a bettter solution thatn not to have a choice. Blame Holywood, not M$.
And no, I do not "love" Microsoft. In fact in the few next years I will not switch to Vista but not for the reasons that professor listed, but because I don't have drivers for many devices I own, I don't want to upgrade many applications I own that might turn out to be incompatible with Vista. In a year or so, when Vista stabilizes and matures I will assess if it is worht the upgrade.
JAM
> Occam's razor simply says that you shouldn't add more assumptions than you need.
But I do but I admit, that I use it in more general sense, than the narrow official usage of the "razor". I just find it amusing that the astrophysicists in their lack of understanding the Universe are now creating theories that require 11 or so space dimensions that cannot be observed or infinite number of parallel universes that - you can guess - cannot be observed to explain antropocentricity of the World we happen to live in. On certain philosophical level I find it very similar to the explanation of nature given by religion. In some sense science will always be on the loosing end when compared to religion since science is simply a description of the cause and effect and as such it will always have a problem to explain the existence of the very initial whatever it is going to be super Universe. Even if we ever manage to reduce all known physics to the single equation / quantity of the Universe, as with every mathematical theory we will simply hit the wall of mathematical axioms that cannot be proven and has to be assumed true on the pure belief basis:-)
How is that going to be different form God except giving it different Politically Correct name ?
JAM
I don't think they have to publish anything. It is their code and they can do whatever they want with it. Microsoft never claimed to be an Open Source software manufactiurer, nor it is realying on Open Source for it's business model. In the extreme case they don't need to publish any API at all. That of course would kill Windows as we know it so they are forced to find the right balance how much they have to publish and how much they don't.
Your argument is nonsensical because if they so called "rely on hidden features" they are the ones who wrote them anyway. They did not steal that code from anybody else. Their competition should stop crying like a bunch of small babies and should write their own "hidden features" instead of trying to steal them from Microsoft through the court system.
I havn't seen any published API by the Adobe to expose how exactly Photoshop has it's interface so different from the regular Windows API. Is that a crime too ?
JAM
Let's create "Society of Responsbile PC Users" or something in that sense. The more sofisticated name we can come up with, the better. Then we can publish whatever BS we want as long as it is attacking the evil corporations. We can then get away with murder.
JAM
> Well, "book learnin'" never was the forté of many a Wal-Mart customer.
Why do you exactly blame Wall Mart for this ? Wall Mart is a company that obviously succesfully responds to the society needs.
JAM
> I'm not going to hide anything, I pirated Matlab and Mathematica in college. But I wasn't selling them or
> making a profit off them, I was simply installing old versions of them so that I could get my homework
> done without having to go to campus and be restricted by lab hours. I have since uninstalled them and
> don't feel wrong for using them to accomplish assignments.
Fact, that you don't feel wrong doesn't make it right. The "nonprofit" excuse is also weak defense here. If we have a contract killer, and nonprofit killer which one is "more" guilty ? My opinion is, you don't like MS policy, stop using their product. Linux is a excellent alternative.
JAM
I happen to agree with you.
You pretty much confirm my point that science is a good tool to describe the world.
It cannot explain it. Most of the people do not see this distinction and confuse one with the other.
JAM
The God of Science if the least tolerant God of all and His followers are the most militant religious fanatics from all western religions !:-)
The problem with scientific approach is that it sooner or later leads to just another religion. Physical sciences are simply statistical observations of relationships in which we find rules between cause and effect. If we observe something to happen all the time (as far as we can tell) than we create a scientific "truth". In order to belive in science you must belive, that what you observed "happen all the time" must in fact happen all the time. Take conservation of energy for example. The fact that the "energy is conserved" is just our observation of the fact that we have never seen the violation of this rule (short of Big Bang of course, which violates all the physical rules, but the scientific world doesn't seem to be bothered by this failure of their religion). Now let's assume for a moment, that the conservation of energy is an absolute truth. Can you please explain me where this rule comes from ? Why this rule exists at all ? If you realize that, than you will understand, that science is incapable and will never be to explain the most fundamental question of all, where the universe comes from and where the most basic rules comes from. If we really belive in scince we must adress this problem that every effect must have underlying cause. So if the scientific rules exist what or "WHO" is the cause of this ? Actually why any rules exist at all ?
If you don't think I'm right, please try your best to explain me scientifically where the most basic physical rules come from and in fact how it is scientifically possible to create whole universe out of aboslute nothingness ? When I mean Universe, I mean the whole Universe, that we can imagine. If you use some "precursor" Universe to explain existence of ours, you just shifting if to the next level with still no explanation. BTW, science also has a serious problem with "forever". Since it is easy to observe, that nothing exists "forever", than claiming otherwise to explain our world has much less to do with science and much more with religion. For example if some super "universe" must exist forever and "baby Universes" are just born and die out from this "super one" that exists "forever". How this belive is less ridiculous that most of the "truths" in other religions ?
If you plan to use math to prove that I'm wrong, please, mention which and how many axioms you are actually using and how axioms (in their basic sense) are different from religion ?
JAM
That is why God was so useful. You did not had to invent xxx:-) Once we got rid of God we are left with inventing ever growing number of unobservable things, that in extreme cases are supposedly created from "nothingness" (including all the laws that govern) in many cases violating all the laws of the science that was meant to explain this mess. Once we got rid of God, Occham razor is no longer needed and ceased to apply.
JAM
By reading the patent it seems to cover only hybrids, that use electric motor in combination with the vehicle transmission to create a sort of CVT by utilizing differential gear. This obviously does not cover many other hybrids where the electric motor is not part of transmission such as Honda Civic. In Honda electric motor sits just on the flywheel and simply adds extra moment to the engine optuput but does not provides for variable transmission gears. Other hybrids have electric motor that drives rear wheels and traditional driveline drives front wheels. Those also are not affected by this patent. The regenerative braking is not part of this patent and obviously cannot be, since such braking is used in electric locomotives since theye were developed in the first half of the previous century. The patent itself might be even stroke down by Toyota, since differential gear exists for over a century and it's purpose was always to allow for either split power , split rotation speed functionality or the opposite to combine two different inputs into one controlled, so in some sense it is obvious solution and previous art. With current Toyota cash reserves it might be easy for Toyota to defeat the patent. But on the other hand they might chose to settle since it might be easier and cheaper.
JAM
You are right about the design but wrong about the resons for the design. The newest safety requirement demands from the vehicle manufacturers in Europe to design cars with an empty space between soft hood exterior surface and rigid components underneath, such as engine block, in order to provide crush zone for the pedestrian head. If this zone cannot be achieved by the static clearances of the design, the law allows for use of the pyrotechnic or other type devices to temporarily raise the hood above the rigid components in the compartment within prescribes time during the crash. Since European compact cars tend to be small econoboxes with the engine packaged tightly against the vehicle hood (especially with the optional, bigger engines) the active pyrotechnic solution tend to be used more often there. But equally good is the solution with enough static clearance that does not require any active devices to raise the hood during the crash. Many US made vehicles designed recnetly such as upcoming restyled Chevy Trailblazer are being designed with this law in mind despite fact that it is not required in the US at this time. The reason for this is obvious. If you don't do this now, you cannot export the vehilce later and it is very expensive to redesign it in the middle of the production cycle. In most US cars or trucks this law can be met without any special devices simply because of the larger space under the hood that already provides required clearance.
The same law also describes required envelope of the front bumper and front end of the vehicle to prevent pedestrian from being toppled forward and being run over by the vehicle. This second section of the law has nothing to do with raising the hood. To prevent pedestrian from being run over, the bumper of the vehicle must hit him below certain height and must have proper shape to then cause the persons body to fall onto the vehicle hood instead of being dragged under the vehicle. This part of the law is also considered by the US manufacturers for the same reason to be able to export their new upcoming models across the world in the future.
JM
It is actually exactly E=mc^2. Rememeber that according to Einstein m grows with speed (relativistic mass). For speeds significantly lower than the speed of light expression (m/2)*v^2 with constant mass is simply a very good approximation of mc^2 where m is relativistic.
JM
The article is biased and written by the anti-SUV people. Besides obvious findings, that heavier, bigger vehicles tend to be significantly safer, it then concludes, that heavier, bigger vehicles should be eliminated from the road because of their perceived unfairness. This is ridiculous argument. By the same logic all large passenger cars are dangerous to the owners of the compact and subcompact cars, subcompact cars are dangerous to the bicyclists and bicyclists are dangerous to the pedestrians. If he same logic is applied, than we should eliminate all vehicles including bicycles. It actually lies about the "stiff" frames. All light trucks have frames with dedicated, designed into the frmae crush zones as required by law. Otherwise they would not pass goverment crash test. Exactly the same logic is used with the body on frame design (sometimes called unibody design) which has soft and rigid zones designed on purpose into the structure. The difference between one and the other is that the cheaper econoboxes are built with the frame simply welded solid to the vehicle body and more expensive vehicles have unique frame structure isolated from the body by the rubber mounts. Almost all luxury vehicles such as more expensive models of BMW, Lexus or Mercedes Benz have front and rear frames (called cradles), softly isolated from the vehicle body. In trucks those cradles are simply connected together into one unit.
The comment:
"The evidence is compelling that body-on-frame light trucks cannot safely coexist with passenger cars under existing conditions."
is a proof of an agenda of the authors of this article. How about 18 wheelers or any other commercial trucks ? Those are not required by law to have any crush zones, or any crash compatibility requirements similar to light trucks.
JM
Why Chevy Tahoe is not a "serious" piece of hardware ? BTW, H2 is based of the 1/2 ton Tahoe. There is no 3/4 ton Tahoe. There is 3/4 Suburban only.
JM
They always have an option to go back to Sahara where they come from. If they are so alienated from European culture, they for sure must be attached to their native African one. Instead of trying to convert the system, they so much dislike, they should chose the option to go back immidietly to the culture they keep in such a high regard. French government instead of wasting money rewarding criminal behaviour should use that money to deliver means of immiediate transportation for all those dissapointed in European social system out of that system back to Islam. Europe for too long was politically correct. Those who dislike European values and are taking violernt actions against it should be expelled immidietly.
JAM
> How do you propose to prove that God spontaneously emerged from nothing? And let's not have
> the "oh he was always there" chickenshit answer - if that can happen with God, it can happen
> with the Universe.
No, it cannot. The idea, that Universe existed "forever" is contrary to science. "Big Bang" is long proven, known scientific fact and belif to contrary is just a religious nonsense. The same applies to the idea that Universe just come to existence from nothing. This is also complete nonsense that can be easily disproven by modern science. It violates practically every law of physics. Please, do not force your atheistic cult full of unscietific nonsense on the society;-)
JAM
Your line of thought is too materialistic. God did not need creator since according to all major religions He is the source of everything. Your line of thought is limited to the materialistic Universe that we are living in, where time exists and therefore timeline of some creation must exist including therefore need to somehow create God. According to Einstein time did not exist before Big Bang so thinking in a realm of "who created God" makes no sense. It is probably difficult to understand what it exactly means, but neither space nor matter nor time existed before Big Bang. If you want science to explain existence of the world then something obviously must caused our Universe to come into being including the time itself out of complete nothingness. Show me one law of physics that allows something to come into existence out of nothing and stay that way. Explanation of the existence of Universe is beyond science. If you think about Big Bang, it violates all our most basic laws of physics such as preservation of energy, entropy, charge, barion number, lepton number etc. What we call science is nothing more, than observation of relationships between the cause and effect. If certain event always causes certain effect it becomes a scientific truth and it can be then extrapolated further into the explanation of systems that use more complicated sets of basic relationships that we already discovered. Those relationships are not even 100% guaranteed. Quantum mechanics makes it a random process in which laws apply only most of the time but not deterministically always. The problem with this scientific approach is that it will never be able to explain existence of whatever is the base of creation of the Universe, and we might not be able to explain the existence of the base relationships within our Universe. Since in scinece something obviously must exist to cause the effect, the origin that exists without the cause is be beyond realm of science. Even "nothingness" that our World supposedly come into existence from must be a realm that somehow exists. How is science going to explain existence of original nothingness that the World somehow came into existence from ? Current cosmology is now forced to assume existence of infinite number of universes that we will never be able to see physically in order to explain anthropocentric nature of our Universe. Biologists are struggling to explain origins of life. If it is so easy, what about Fermi paradox. How it is scientific to claim, that life must be common across the Universe, when in fact we don't have a single proof of any life beyond Earth despite years of search ? Occham razor obviously doesn't apply when it comes to eliminate God at any price:-)
JAM
JAM
You have a full freedom to write your own office package and use it whenever you wish for free. You also have a freedom not to buy any M$ product if you don't like it regardless if open source exists or not. You have a full freedom to use whatever technically inferior product you wish. I grant you freedom to use open source free of charge "Trabant" plans to build your own automobile for free as you personal car instead of paying tons of money to the greedy BMW corporation for a ready to go product:-)
If you really, really want everything to be open source, I suggest you to get familiar and eventually relocate if you find it interesting to one of those countries that do not appreciate greedy market economy (i.e. North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Bielarus).
JAM
Well, if you own a stopwatch, you can quickly prove or disprove the author claim. All it takes is a computer that has Windows XP and Linux installed with dual boot and both office applications.
If you don't like message don't shoot the meesenger unless you can proove that the the messenger is actually lying.
Since when the test financed by some corporation must be always biased ? I know, that some liberals and greenes always suspect "big corporations" of doing nothing else, but this is in most cases totally baseless. And finally why is it in the Intel interest to cheat in order to protect Microsoft ? Intel will probably do as good as today even if everybody would switch to Linux.
JAM
Web site lists 13 MJ/l for the storage. This is still pretty poor when compared to the good old gasoline (or diesel). In oil based fuels energy density is just about 34 MJ/l.
I wonder, what car they were using than can get 500 km from 50 liters of such a low density stuff. On gasoline (or diesel) such car would go 1300 km from the same fuel tank (assuming similar efficiency of the diesel engine and fuel cell especially when one will take into account all the energy needed to extract the hydrogen from the stuff). That calculates roughly to 3.8 l/100 km. If we assume much more realistic 8 l/100 km for a typical mid size passenger car normally used in the city, suddenly you can only go 625 km on a gasoline and just miserable 240 km on the hydrogen pellets which is not that far off from today's battery driven electric cars that GM used to build and sell several years ago.
Another problem is that the stuff is solid! Why is this supposed to be an advantage? Solid fuels require significantly more expensive and cumbersome delivery and refueling infrastructure. It's easy to send liquids over the long distances at low cost using pipelines. Storage tanks, barrels and liquid containers are simple and inexpensive. Pumping liquids is fast, uses relatively inexpensive pumps and hoses/pipes that scale well to different needs and sizes. Imagine all the devices needed to handle small, customer size and large and heavy industrial size amounts of solid stuff even in the powder form. This will require myriad of devices to distribute medium and small amounts of the stuff to the final consumer. Not mentioning that the solid stuff delivery devices do not scale well with the variable load. If the system is build to deliver large amounts of solid product, it becomes very inefficient when the required delivery volume falls to some smaller amounts at times. It's easy to quickly and efficiently significantly vary amounts of stuff send through the pipeline; it is more difficult to do so efficiently with solid type materials. Use your imagination and try to envision devices needed to quickly and efficiently remove 50 kg of used solid pellets from the fuel tank located somewhere in the middle of the vehicle under the trunk and replace it with fresh load of 50 kg new pellets in the same tank. Those devices suppose to be quick, efficient and very durable. They should be safe and simple to operate by the inexperienced, untrained person. They should resist exposure to elements and lack of maintenance/service over long periods of time (think rural gas stations in poor neighborhoods). They should work as expected when exposed to either +50 or -50 degrees Celsius. They should prevent any leakage of the transferred solid fuel to the environment. It's not that simple to replace good old fuel pump at the local gas station.
Besides all this the web page does not mention, how long it takes to charge the stuff with fresh hydrogen? Is there any toxic product in the process either required to produce the stuff or even made during the process of hydrogen extraction that can be considered waste? How much energy is needed just to charge the pellet and later to extract the hydrogen back from it etc? And of course, not by fault of the company that developed the stuff, the main question that is missing from the whole hydrogen economy hype is where and at what energy cost the free hydrogen supposes to come from in the quantities required by the society transportation needs.
JM
Is it just me, or is there anybody else that sees one thing that is very risky in the whole story? I don't want to support one side or the other here, but now we have a governmental body choosing one technical solution over the other based on some non-economical (at least not strictly) criteria that is in it's depth anti capitalistic (and I truly believe therefore very wrong). For example, why government of Massachusetts doesn't demand, that the cars they buy for their state fleet have all blue prints published, all technical solutions stripped from patents and all spare parts allowed to be manufactured by whoever gets the government bid ? The same could apply to anything else state buys. I see a problem with such demand and even deeper problem with governments favoring certain solutions over the other based on some criteria that are not as clear cut as one would think.
What if we find out tomorrow that the same situation was reversed in favor of Microsoft? What are we suppose to do, if 49 other states will decide by governmental FIAT, that Open Source effort is a short lived phenomenon that will eventually loose it's appeal and disappear and as such is too risky to relay on? Based on such "educated" assumption the what if 49 governments will outright forbid any use of Open Source software and Open Source file formats as "too risky" for historical retention of governmental work? Do you think such scenario is ridiculous? If so, what you think about WMD in Iraq or so called AlKaida-Hussain connection to recall just a few propaganda hypes that our politicians are very capable of.
We applaud the decision as long as it is in the Open Source favor, but what happens if some government body will make up criteria, that will eliminate Open Source? Are we going to applaud such decision then?
The reason I'm disturbed by such political approaches is that if we allow one, we might be sorry the next time if somebody else will use the newly given tool to do exactly the opposite what we think is in a public interest.
JM
What you mean steal and patent ? Are you suggesting, that Apple emplyees are dumb idiots that has no clue of the patent process and value to protect their invention ?
JM
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are exaggerating things. How good must be any deal from Microsoft to be competitive with supposedly better and completely free software ? How come you can convince anybody to pay any, even miniscule price, if one can have a better product without paying a single $ ? M$ simply has much better product for the desktop, period. That is why you see succesfull switch to Linux mostly on the server side around the world but you see very little on the desktop side unless it is used for very limited set of clerk type applications such as City government etc. Most people use OS to run other software and hardware products and in the end they care less what is the underlying OS that allows them to run those. Linux simply cannot compete with quality and quantity of applications and harware products available for Windows.
JAM
I think, this is mostly FUD. - Regarding "regularly" checking license I don't find this any different than current XP. XP does exactly the same when the hardware is modified sufficiently and requires reregistration in order to continue to work. - Regarding "single copy" why would anyone need more than one copy of their original Vista CD ? I don't even make single copy of my original XP CD. The restriction is maybe real, but be serious, this is not a big deal, but pure FUD. - Regarding "Defender" everybody seem to not notice little word posted by the professor - "by default". Microsoft actually does a proper social engineering here. They have learnt their lesson with the first iteration (prior to SP2) of the XP firewall, which was OFF by default. Large number of users never switched firewall ON because they had no idea what the firewall is for and how to switch it on. Defender is simply ON by default and those who don't like it can switch it OFF. The default ON will prevent large number of zombies where their owners otherwise would had no idea what the Defender is or does and would leave it in the default OFF state. By setting it to "ON" M$ prevents it. - As with every other commercial software product M$ is leasing it to the user and therefore reserves all rights not specifically listed in the agreement. This is pretty standard note regarding leasing. Lease a car and read the agreement to see that it is no different. I bet that very similar note is on the XP license. - And finally that terrible DRM. Please, give me a break. If you don't like DRM in HD or Blue Ray don't buy their disks and DRM will be completely transparent to you. DRM is strictly for those who would like to watch those disks anyway. At least they will be able to do so, unlike Linux or Mac users unless Mac puts DRM into their OS. Linux is probably going to be left in the dark since their users refuse DRM. I consider to have a choice to be a bettter solution thatn not to have a choice. Blame Holywood, not M$. And no, I do not "love" Microsoft. In fact in the few next years I will not switch to Vista but not for the reasons that professor listed, but because I don't have drivers for many devices I own, I don't want to upgrade many applications I own that might turn out to be incompatible with Vista. In a year or so, when Vista stabilizes and matures I will assess if it is worht the upgrade. JAM
> Occam's razor simply says that you shouldn't add more assumptions than you need. But I do but I admit, that I use it in more general sense, than the narrow official usage of the "razor". I just find it amusing that the astrophysicists in their lack of understanding the Universe are now creating theories that require 11 or so space dimensions that cannot be observed or infinite number of parallel universes that - you can guess - cannot be observed to explain antropocentricity of the World we happen to live in. On certain philosophical level I find it very similar to the explanation of nature given by religion. In some sense science will always be on the loosing end when compared to religion since science is simply a description of the cause and effect and as such it will always have a problem to explain the existence of the very initial whatever it is going to be super Universe. Even if we ever manage to reduce all known physics to the single equation / quantity of the Universe, as with every mathematical theory we will simply hit the wall of mathematical axioms that cannot be proven and has to be assumed true on the pure belief basis :-)
How is that going to be different form God except giving it different Politically Correct name ?
JAM
As long as it is not related to God, Occham razor doesn't apply to science anymore. JAM
I don't think they have to publish anything. It is their code and they can do whatever they want with it. Microsoft never claimed to be an Open Source software manufactiurer, nor it is realying on Open Source for it's business model. In the extreme case they don't need to publish any API at all. That of course would kill Windows as we know it so they are forced to find the right balance how much they have to publish and how much they don't. Your argument is nonsensical because if they so called "rely on hidden features" they are the ones who wrote them anyway. They did not steal that code from anybody else. Their competition should stop crying like a bunch of small babies and should write their own "hidden features" instead of trying to steal them from Microsoft through the court system. I havn't seen any published API by the Adobe to expose how exactly Photoshop has it's interface so different from the regular Windows API. Is that a crime too ? JAM
Let's create "Society of Responsbile PC Users" or something in that sense. The more sofisticated name we can come up with, the better. Then we can publish whatever BS we want as long as it is attacking the evil corporations. We can then get away with murder. JAM
> Well, "book learnin'" never was the forté of many a Wal-Mart customer. Why do you exactly blame Wall Mart for this ? Wall Mart is a company that obviously succesfully responds to the society needs. JAM
> I'm not going to hide anything, I pirated Matlab and Mathematica in college. But I wasn't selling them or > making a profit off them, I was simply installing old versions of them so that I could get my homework > done without having to go to campus and be restricted by lab hours. I have since uninstalled them and > don't feel wrong for using them to accomplish assignments. Fact, that you don't feel wrong doesn't make it right. The "nonprofit" excuse is also weak defense here. If we have a contract killer, and nonprofit killer which one is "more" guilty ? My opinion is, you don't like MS policy, stop using their product. Linux is a excellent alternative. JAM
It is even more difficult to convince about something that become more about political bashing than scientific fact. JAM
I happen to agree with you. You pretty much confirm my point that science is a good tool to describe the world. It cannot explain it. Most of the people do not see this distinction and confuse one with the other. JAM
The God of Science if the least tolerant God of all and His followers are the most militant religious fanatics from all western religions ! :-)
The problem with scientific approach is that it sooner or later leads to just another religion. Physical sciences are simply statistical observations of relationships in which we find rules between cause and effect. If we observe something to happen all the time (as far as we can tell) than we create a scientific "truth". In order to belive in science you must belive, that what you observed "happen all the time" must in fact happen all the time. Take conservation of energy for example. The fact that the "energy is conserved" is just our observation of the fact that we have never seen the violation of this rule (short of Big Bang of course, which violates all the physical rules, but the scientific world doesn't seem to be bothered by this failure of their religion). Now let's assume for a moment, that the conservation of energy is an absolute truth. Can you please explain me where this rule comes from ? Why this rule exists at all ? If you realize that, than you will understand, that science is incapable and will never be to explain the most fundamental question of all, where the universe comes from and where the most basic rules comes from. If we really belive in scince we must adress this problem that every effect must have underlying cause. So if the scientific rules exist what or "WHO" is the cause of this ? Actually why any rules exist at all ?
If you don't think I'm right, please try your best to explain me scientifically where the most basic physical rules come from and in fact how it is scientifically possible to create whole universe out of aboslute nothingness ? When I mean Universe, I mean the whole Universe, that we can imagine. If you use some "precursor" Universe to explain existence of ours, you just shifting if to the next level with still no explanation. BTW, science also has a serious problem with "forever". Since it is easy to observe, that nothing exists "forever", than claiming otherwise to explain our world has much less to do with science and much more with religion. For example if some super "universe" must exist forever and "baby Universes" are just born and die out from this "super one" that exists "forever". How this belive is less ridiculous that most of the "truths" in other religions ?
If you plan to use math to prove that I'm wrong, please, mention which and how many axioms you are actually using and how axioms (in their basic sense) are different from religion ?
JAM
That is why God was so useful. You did not had to invent xxx :-) Once we got rid of God we are left with inventing ever growing number of unobservable things, that in extreme cases are supposedly created from "nothingness" (including all the laws that govern) in many cases violating all the laws of the science that was meant to explain this mess. Once we got rid of God, Occham razor is no longer needed and ceased to apply.
JAM
By reading the patent it seems to cover only hybrids, that use electric motor in combination with the vehicle transmission to create a sort of CVT by utilizing differential gear. This obviously does not cover many other hybrids where the electric motor is not part of transmission such as Honda Civic. In Honda electric motor sits just on the flywheel and simply adds extra moment to the engine optuput but does not provides for variable transmission gears. Other hybrids have electric motor that drives rear wheels and traditional driveline drives front wheels. Those also are not affected by this patent. The regenerative braking is not part of this patent and obviously cannot be, since such braking is used in electric locomotives since theye were developed in the first half of the previous century. The patent itself might be even stroke down by Toyota, since differential gear exists for over a century and it's purpose was always to allow for either split power , split rotation speed functionality or the opposite to combine two different inputs into one controlled, so in some sense it is obvious solution and previous art. With current Toyota cash reserves it might be easy for Toyota to defeat the patent. But on the other hand they might chose to settle since it might be easier and cheaper. JAM
You are right about the design but wrong about the resons for the design. The newest safety requirement demands from the vehicle manufacturers in Europe to design cars with an empty space between soft hood exterior surface and rigid components underneath, such as engine block, in order to provide crush zone for the pedestrian head. If this zone cannot be achieved by the static clearances of the design, the law allows for use of the pyrotechnic or other type devices to temporarily raise the hood above the rigid components in the compartment within prescribes time during the crash. Since European compact cars tend to be small econoboxes with the engine packaged tightly against the vehicle hood (especially with the optional, bigger engines) the active pyrotechnic solution tend to be used more often there. But equally good is the solution with enough static clearance that does not require any active devices to raise the hood during the crash. Many US made vehicles designed recnetly such as upcoming restyled Chevy Trailblazer are being designed with this law in mind despite fact that it is not required in the US at this time. The reason for this is obvious. If you don't do this now, you cannot export the vehilce later and it is very expensive to redesign it in the middle of the production cycle. In most US cars or trucks this law can be met without any special devices simply because of the larger space under the hood that already provides required clearance. The same law also describes required envelope of the front bumper and front end of the vehicle to prevent pedestrian from being toppled forward and being run over by the vehicle. This second section of the law has nothing to do with raising the hood. To prevent pedestrian from being run over, the bumper of the vehicle must hit him below certain height and must have proper shape to then cause the persons body to fall onto the vehicle hood instead of being dragged under the vehicle. This part of the law is also considered by the US manufacturers for the same reason to be able to export their new upcoming models across the world in the future. JM
It is actually exactly E=mc^2. Rememeber that according to Einstein m grows with speed (relativistic mass). For speeds significantly lower than the speed of light expression (m/2)*v^2 with constant mass is simply a very good approximation of mc^2 where m is relativistic. JM
The article is biased and written by the anti-SUV people. Besides obvious findings, that heavier, bigger vehicles tend to be significantly safer, it then concludes, that heavier, bigger vehicles should be eliminated from the road because of their perceived unfairness. This is ridiculous argument. By the same logic all large passenger cars are dangerous to the owners of the compact and subcompact cars, subcompact cars are dangerous to the bicyclists and bicyclists are dangerous to the pedestrians. If he same logic is applied, than we should eliminate all vehicles including bicycles. It actually lies about the "stiff" frames. All light trucks have frames with dedicated, designed into the frmae crush zones as required by law. Otherwise they would not pass goverment crash test. Exactly the same logic is used with the body on frame design (sometimes called unibody design) which has soft and rigid zones designed on purpose into the structure. The difference between one and the other is that the cheaper econoboxes are built with the frame simply welded solid to the vehicle body and more expensive vehicles have unique frame structure isolated from the body by the rubber mounts. Almost all luxury vehicles such as more expensive models of BMW, Lexus or Mercedes Benz have front and rear frames (called cradles), softly isolated from the vehicle body. In trucks those cradles are simply connected together into one unit. The comment: "The evidence is compelling that body-on-frame light trucks cannot safely coexist with passenger cars under existing conditions." is a proof of an agenda of the authors of this article. How about 18 wheelers or any other commercial trucks ? Those are not required by law to have any crush zones, or any crash compatibility requirements similar to light trucks. JM
Why Chevy Tahoe is not a "serious" piece of hardware ? BTW, H2 is based of the 1/2 ton Tahoe. There is no 3/4 ton Tahoe. There is 3/4 Suburban only. JM
They always have an option to go back to Sahara where they come from. If they are so alienated from European culture, they for sure must be attached to their native African one. Instead of trying to convert the system, they so much dislike, they should chose the option to go back immidietly to the culture they keep in such a high regard. French government instead of wasting money rewarding criminal behaviour should use that money to deliver means of immiediate transportation for all those dissapointed in European social system out of that system back to Islam. Europe for too long was politically correct. Those who dislike European values and are taking violernt actions against it should be expelled immidietly. JAM
> How do you propose to prove that God spontaneously emerged from nothing? And let's not have > the "oh he was always there" chickenshit answer - if that can happen with God, it can happen > with the Universe. No, it cannot. The idea, that Universe existed "forever" is contrary to science. "Big Bang" is long proven, known scientific fact and belif to contrary is just a religious nonsense. The same applies to the idea that Universe just come to existence from nothing. This is also complete nonsense that can be easily disproven by modern science. It violates practically every law of physics. Please, do not force your atheistic cult full of unscietific nonsense on the society ;-)
JAM
Your line of thought is too materialistic. God did not need creator since according to all major religions He is the source of everything. Your line of thought is limited to the materialistic Universe that we are living in, where time exists and therefore timeline of some creation must exist including therefore need to somehow create God. According to Einstein time did not exist before Big Bang so thinking in a realm of "who created God" makes no sense. It is probably difficult to understand what it exactly means, but neither space nor matter nor time existed before Big Bang. If you want science to explain existence of the world then something obviously must caused our Universe to come into being including the time itself out of complete nothingness. Show me one law of physics that allows something to come into existence out of nothing and stay that way. Explanation of the existence of Universe is beyond science. If you think about Big Bang, it violates all our most basic laws of physics such as preservation of energy, entropy, charge, barion number, lepton number etc. What we call science is nothing more, than observation of relationships between the cause and effect. If certain event always causes certain effect it becomes a scientific truth and it can be then extrapolated further into the explanation of systems that use more complicated sets of basic relationships that we already discovered. Those relationships are not even 100% guaranteed. Quantum mechanics makes it a random process in which laws apply only most of the time but not deterministically always. The problem with this scientific approach is that it will never be able to explain existence of whatever is the base of creation of the Universe, and we might not be able to explain the existence of the base relationships within our Universe. Since in scinece something obviously must exist to cause the effect, the origin that exists without the cause is be beyond realm of science. Even "nothingness" that our World supposedly come into existence from must be a realm that somehow exists. How is science going to explain existence of original nothingness that the World somehow came into existence from ? Current cosmology is now forced to assume existence of infinite number of universes that we will never be able to see physically in order to explain anthropocentric nature of our Universe. Biologists are struggling to explain origins of life. If it is so easy, what about Fermi paradox. How it is scientific to claim, that life must be common across the Universe, when in fact we don't have a single proof of any life beyond Earth despite years of search ? Occham razor obviously doesn't apply when it comes to eliminate God at any price :-)
JAM
JAM
You have a full freedom to write your own office package and use it whenever you wish for free. You also have a freedom not to buy any M$ product if you don't like it regardless if open source exists or not. You have a full freedom to use whatever technically inferior product you wish. I grant you freedom to use open source free of charge "Trabant" plans to build your own automobile for free as you personal car instead of paying tons of money to the greedy BMW corporation for a ready to go product :-)
If you really, really want everything to be open source, I suggest you to get familiar and eventually relocate if you find it interesting to one of those countries that do not appreciate greedy market economy (i.e. North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Bielarus).
JAM
Well, if you own a stopwatch, you can quickly prove or disprove the author claim. All it takes is a computer that has Windows XP and Linux installed with dual boot and both office applications. If you don't like message don't shoot the meesenger unless you can proove that the the messenger is actually lying. Since when the test financed by some corporation must be always biased ? I know, that some liberals and greenes always suspect "big corporations" of doing nothing else, but this is in most cases totally baseless. And finally why is it in the Intel interest to cheat in order to protect Microsoft ? Intel will probably do as good as today even if everybody would switch to Linux. JAM
Web site lists 13 MJ/l for the storage. This is still pretty poor when compared to the good old gasoline (or diesel). In oil based fuels energy density is just about 34 MJ/l. I wonder, what car they were using than can get 500 km from 50 liters of such a low density stuff. On gasoline (or diesel) such car would go 1300 km from the same fuel tank (assuming similar efficiency of the diesel engine and fuel cell especially when one will take into account all the energy needed to extract the hydrogen from the stuff). That calculates roughly to 3.8 l/100 km. If we assume much more realistic 8 l/100 km for a typical mid size passenger car normally used in the city, suddenly you can only go 625 km on a gasoline and just miserable 240 km on the hydrogen pellets which is not that far off from today's battery driven electric cars that GM used to build and sell several years ago. Another problem is that the stuff is solid! Why is this supposed to be an advantage? Solid fuels require significantly more expensive and cumbersome delivery and refueling infrastructure. It's easy to send liquids over the long distances at low cost using pipelines. Storage tanks, barrels and liquid containers are simple and inexpensive. Pumping liquids is fast, uses relatively inexpensive pumps and hoses/pipes that scale well to different needs and sizes. Imagine all the devices needed to handle small, customer size and large and heavy industrial size amounts of solid stuff even in the powder form. This will require myriad of devices to distribute medium and small amounts of the stuff to the final consumer. Not mentioning that the solid stuff delivery devices do not scale well with the variable load. If the system is build to deliver large amounts of solid product, it becomes very inefficient when the required delivery volume falls to some smaller amounts at times. It's easy to quickly and efficiently significantly vary amounts of stuff send through the pipeline; it is more difficult to do so efficiently with solid type materials. Use your imagination and try to envision devices needed to quickly and efficiently remove 50 kg of used solid pellets from the fuel tank located somewhere in the middle of the vehicle under the trunk and replace it with fresh load of 50 kg new pellets in the same tank. Those devices suppose to be quick, efficient and very durable. They should be safe and simple to operate by the inexperienced, untrained person. They should resist exposure to elements and lack of maintenance/service over long periods of time (think rural gas stations in poor neighborhoods). They should work as expected when exposed to either +50 or -50 degrees Celsius. They should prevent any leakage of the transferred solid fuel to the environment. It's not that simple to replace good old fuel pump at the local gas station. Besides all this the web page does not mention, how long it takes to charge the stuff with fresh hydrogen? Is there any toxic product in the process either required to produce the stuff or even made during the process of hydrogen extraction that can be considered waste? How much energy is needed just to charge the pellet and later to extract the hydrogen back from it etc? And of course, not by fault of the company that developed the stuff, the main question that is missing from the whole hydrogen economy hype is where and at what energy cost the free hydrogen supposes to come from in the quantities required by the society transportation needs. JM
Is it just me, or is there anybody else that sees one thing that is very risky in the whole story? I don't want to support one side or the other here, but now we have a governmental body choosing one technical solution over the other based on some non-economical (at least not strictly) criteria that is in it's depth anti capitalistic (and I truly believe therefore very wrong). For example, why government of Massachusetts doesn't demand, that the cars they buy for their state fleet have all blue prints published, all technical solutions stripped from patents and all spare parts allowed to be manufactured by whoever gets the government bid ? The same could apply to anything else state buys. I see a problem with such demand and even deeper problem with governments favoring certain solutions over the other based on some criteria that are not as clear cut as one would think. What if we find out tomorrow that the same situation was reversed in favor of Microsoft? What are we suppose to do, if 49 other states will decide by governmental FIAT, that Open Source effort is a short lived phenomenon that will eventually loose it's appeal and disappear and as such is too risky to relay on? Based on such "educated" assumption the what if 49 governments will outright forbid any use of Open Source software and Open Source file formats as "too risky" for historical retention of governmental work? Do you think such scenario is ridiculous? If so, what you think about WMD in Iraq or so called AlKaida-Hussain connection to recall just a few propaganda hypes that our politicians are very capable of. We applaud the decision as long as it is in the Open Source favor, but what happens if some government body will make up criteria, that will eliminate Open Source? Are we going to applaud such decision then? The reason I'm disturbed by such political approaches is that if we allow one, we might be sorry the next time if somebody else will use the newly given tool to do exactly the opposite what we think is in a public interest. JM
What you mean steal and patent ? Are you suggesting, that Apple emplyees are dumb idiots that has no clue of the patent process and value to protect their invention ? JM