One way to do it would be to pay a tax for everything that you want to keep under copyright. This could be a token tax even as low as â1 per work per year, but not paying the tax would place the work in the public domain. These folks are so keen to sue whenever they see someone violating their copyrights they ought to know what copyrights they own. This way the government has a tax record that can tell everyone who owns what.
Well, that was pretty much what they tried to do with Ultima IX, judging from what should have been the original plot. Blackthorn returns, backed by the Guardian, wreaking havoc on Britannia by influencing its people to interpret the Virtues into subtle mockeries of their true meaning, similar to Ultima V. With Lord British enfeebled, various factions are sending the land close to civil war. It's an interesting read.
Due to manhandling by Electronic Arts the final release of Ultima IX was a much-watered down version of this that failed to do justice to what was arguably the greatest RPG series of the 20th century.
Ultima VII was arguably the peak of the Ultima series, which was never again surpassed, and its world modeling puts even many modern RPGs to shame (is there today any RPG out there that will allow you to bake bread, from harvesting the wheat to the finished product?). It was also the beginning of the end, as you say. Ultima VII was produced at around the time Origin was in the process of being acquired by Electronic Arts, and there are many allusions in the game to how none of them were very happy with that state of affairs. The square, sphere, and tetrahedron generators used by the Guardian in his plot to take over Britannia are a rather transparent reference to the old Electronic Arts logo used at the time. Ultima VII also abounds in ways to kill Lord British, more than any other Ultima before or since, and one of the more interesting ways to do it would be to click on a sign above the doors leading to his throne room during a time when he is standing right below it. The sign falls on his head and kills him. This is said to allude to an incident where Richard Garriott was similarly beaned by a falling sign while Origin relocated corporate headquarters at EA's behest (it was not fatal though).
Well, it the hydrogen bomb was a bomb that could be scaled up to as large an explosion as one wanted, as the Soviet Union proved with the Tsar Bomba. They replaced the U-238 tamper with lead, and still got an explosion of 50 megatons or so, the largest man-made explosion in history. Had they kept the uranium, it would have been around 100 megatons. Unlike fission weapons, where the fission of the uranium or plutonium in a chain reaction will cause the supercritical mass to blow apart after only a fraction of the material has fissioned (up to perhaps only 20% fission for implosion-type weapons, as low as 1% for gun-type weapons like the Little Boy bomb used on Hiroshima), limiting the size of the explosion, a hydrogen bomb can become as big as one would like, provided the raw materials are available.
Seems like a poor choice for a name for such a system. My first thought on hearing that was this:
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Qu'on me donne six lignes ï½crites de la main du plus honnï½te homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre. -- Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac. If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. It is even more true today than it was in the 17th century, especially when places like Google have way, way more than six lines typed by your hand.
Differential GPS gets accuracy to up to 10 cm, which is just above 4 inches I think. It seems that it is possible to obtain even sub-millimeter accuracy from GPS, although I gather the techniques used aren't real-time, and as such unsuitable for mobile robotics.:( They work well enough for surveying though.
Well, at least Diaspora wasn't designed from the ground up to facilitate this sort of spying, and has as one of its design goals attempting to prevent such unwanted breaches of privacy. They may not always be successful, but such efforts I consider a fair sight better than Facebook, which was on the other hand designed from the ground up to convert its users' privacy into revenue.
Really, Freedombox? I'd never heard of that project before now, but I have most definitely heard of Professor Eben Moglen. I know him as the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, providing legal assistance to non-profit Free/Open Source Software developers, including among its clients the FSF (Moglen worked on drafting the GPLv3 for one), Wine, BusyBox, and Plone among others. I do think that this is a much more significant thing to mention about him.
And yes, he is absolutely right about Facebook and modern social media. All of the things he's said are obvious to anyone.
Some years ago, Richard Stallman would have supported that idea. But now, with the changes in the world lately, he sings a rather different tune. There's that pesky distinction between source and object code to think about and the fact that the copyright licenses for Free Software are also used as a defense against software patents.
I suppose it's the same Jean-Louis Gassée? who used to work at Apple in the 1980s and created BeOS after that. It seems he got into the tech blogging world in between his work at that Silicon Valley VC firm he's in today.
Presumably they're talking about the Meissner Effect, since they're also talking about superconductors. Flux pinning is another phenomenon also related to the Meissner Effect. The Casimir Effect doesn't seem to have any relationship to the levitation mentioned (and the phenomenon doesn't seem to have had much in the way of applications outside of nanotechnology).
It's not like Microsoft gets really penalized for every patent suit that fails. From reading the article they managed to get one patent to stick, and that's all they need to collect royalties from whoever they sued. Sounds a lot like success to me. The only way that Microsoft or any other patent troll could really fail is if all their claims are thrown out.
Calibration is one thing, and actually seeing shit is something else. Maybe they just wanted to make calibration easy with a big easy target to calibrate against.
Well, from reading the article, I gather that it's because they might have needed something bigger because the resolution on their spy satellites is not that good. FTFA: "The calibration targets are larger than might have been expected, he said, suggesting that the satellite cameras they are being used to calibrate have surprisingly poor ground resolution."
Apple's bringing of patent lawsuits against Android manufacturers was apparently one of Steve's last acts before his death. "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs said. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." Try to tell me that those words are a call to something other than the storm of patent lawsuits they unleashed on the industry recently. Don't try to tell me Steve took Apple with him: if anything, his influence is still guiding the company's hand, and I can only hope that his successors will be less competent.
Your conversion is not quite right, 200 PW is 2e17 W. Over a trillionth of a second, that's 200,000 joules. This really isn't a lot of energy. It is about the energy released by the combustion of only four grams/5mL of gasoline (200,000 joules), or approximately one-fourth the food energy of a typical candy bar (about 1 million joules). A kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million joules, so the energy used is 0.056 kilowatt-hours of energy. My household consumes more than a hundred times that amount in a typical day.
Stardust is exactly right. Most of the heavy elements (non-hydrogen or helium) were produced, if not by the mechanism described in the article, in the death throes of heavy stars that go supernova. All the Big Bang gave us was a lot of hydrogen, a small amount of helium, and a negligible quantity of everything else. The rest had to wait for the stars and stellar nucleosynthesis to be produced.
Note that this is the entire system, so building Ice Cream Sandwich from source is just like rebuilding an entire Linux distribution from scratch from the ground up, from the kernel down to the user tools and the windowing system, etc. If you've ever used Gentoo, this should sound familiar. I wonder if some of the tools that Gentoo users are familiar with to help speed along
compilation, such as distcc, could help with this.
I think your estimate is a little too high. Several million tesla is comparable to the magnetic field of a typical neutron star (magnetars are even more so...). Such a field would not just wipe every hard disk in the house and cause forks to fly, such a powerful field would probably wipe every magnetic storage device on the earth. Remember that even 1 T is already a ridiculously high unit of magnetic flux density... In order to achieve the claimed effects you'd still need a pretty strong magnetic field, probably at about 100 T, still not small potatoes (given that the world record for a continuous magnetic field is only 45 T, and a non-destructive pulsed magnetic field is 91 T), and yes, such a field would not just send forks flying and cause hallucinations: it'd probably be more than enough to cause everyone in the house to levitate.
Chocobos are a species of giant, normally flightless bird sort of like ostriches or large chickens, that have basically appeared in one form or another in every Final Fantasy since Final Fantasy II (and now XIV should have them too). They are most often used as mounts, but some have magical abilities as well. One example of their appearance is in Final Fantasy VII, where the party has to capture a chocobo which they can ride across a swamp inhabited by a swift and deadly serpent monster. Crossing the swamp on foot without getting attacked by the serpent is all but impossible, and the serpent is too powerful to be defeated at the levels your characters are when they reach that point, but mounted on a chocobo your party can move fast enough to escape the serpent and reach the caves beyond.
All of this thanks primarily to one executive in HP and later SGI in the mid-late nineties: Rick Belluzzo. He got a plum position at Microsoft in 2002 to reward him for his efforts in destroying HP-UX, IRIX, PA-RISC, and MIPS in favor of NT and Itanium at both companies. As an aside, the parallel to today's Nokia and Stephen Elop are unmissable, I think.
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One way to do it would be to pay a tax for everything that you want to keep under copyright. This could be a token tax even as low as â1 per work per year, but not paying the tax would place the work in the public domain. These folks are so keen to sue whenever they see someone violating their copyrights they ought to know what copyrights they own. This way the government has a tax record that can tell everyone who owns what.
Well, that was pretty much what they tried to do with Ultima IX, judging from what should have been the original plot. Blackthorn returns, backed by the Guardian, wreaking havoc on Britannia by influencing its people to interpret the Virtues into subtle mockeries of their true meaning, similar to Ultima V. With Lord British enfeebled, various factions are sending the land close to civil war. It's an interesting read.
Due to manhandling by Electronic Arts the final release of Ultima IX was a much-watered down version of this that failed to do justice to what was arguably the greatest RPG series of the 20th century.
Ultima VII was arguably the peak of the Ultima series, which was never again surpassed, and its world modeling puts even many modern RPGs to shame (is there today any RPG out there that will allow you to bake bread, from harvesting the wheat to the finished product?). It was also the beginning of the end, as you say. Ultima VII was produced at around the time Origin was in the process of being acquired by Electronic Arts, and there are many allusions in the game to how none of them were very happy with that state of affairs. The square, sphere, and tetrahedron generators used by the Guardian in his plot to take over Britannia are a rather transparent reference to the old Electronic Arts logo used at the time. Ultima VII also abounds in ways to kill Lord British, more than any other Ultima before or since, and one of the more interesting ways to do it would be to click on a sign above the doors leading to his throne room during a time when he is standing right below it. The sign falls on his head and kills him. This is said to allude to an incident where Richard Garriott was similarly beaned by a falling sign while Origin relocated corporate headquarters at EA's behest (it was not fatal though).
Well, it the hydrogen bomb was a bomb that could be scaled up to as large an explosion as one wanted, as the Soviet Union proved with the Tsar Bomba. They replaced the U-238 tamper with lead, and still got an explosion of 50 megatons or so, the largest man-made explosion in history. Had they kept the uranium, it would have been around 100 megatons. Unlike fission weapons, where the fission of the uranium or plutonium in a chain reaction will cause the supercritical mass to blow apart after only a fraction of the material has fissioned (up to perhaps only 20% fission for implosion-type weapons, as low as 1% for gun-type weapons like the Little Boy bomb used on Hiroshima), limiting the size of the explosion, a hydrogen bomb can become as big as one would like, provided the raw materials are available.
Seems like a poor choice for a name for such a system. My first thought on hearing that was this:
Qu'on me donne six lignes ï½crites de la main du plus honnï½te homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre. -- Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac. If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. It is even more true today than it was in the 17th century, especially when places like Google have way, way more than six lines typed by your hand.
Differential GPS gets accuracy to up to 10 cm, which is just above 4 inches I think. It seems that it is possible to obtain even sub-millimeter accuracy from GPS, although I gather the techniques used aren't real-time, and as such unsuitable for mobile robotics. :( They work well enough for surveying though.
Well, at least Diaspora wasn't designed from the ground up to facilitate this sort of spying, and has as one of its design goals attempting to prevent such unwanted breaches of privacy. They may not always be successful, but such efforts I consider a fair sight better than Facebook, which was on the other hand designed from the ground up to convert its users' privacy into revenue.
Really, Freedombox? I'd never heard of that project before now, but I have most definitely heard of Professor Eben Moglen. I know him as the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, providing legal assistance to non-profit Free/Open Source Software developers, including among its clients the FSF (Moglen worked on drafting the GPLv3 for one), Wine, BusyBox, and Plone among others. I do think that this is a much more significant thing to mention about him.
And yes, he is absolutely right about Facebook and modern social media. All of the things he's said are obvious to anyone.
Some years ago, Richard Stallman would have supported that idea. But now, with the changes in the world lately, he sings a rather different tune. There's that pesky distinction between source and object code to think about and the fact that the copyright licenses for Free Software are also used as a defense against software patents.
I suppose it's the same Jean-Louis Gassée? who used to work at Apple in the 1980s and created BeOS after that. It seems he got into the tech blogging world in between his work at that Silicon Valley VC firm he's in today.
Presumably they're talking about the Meissner Effect, since they're also talking about superconductors. Flux pinning is another phenomenon also related to the Meissner Effect. The Casimir Effect doesn't seem to have any relationship to the levitation mentioned (and the phenomenon doesn't seem to have had much in the way of applications outside of nanotechnology).
It's not like Microsoft gets really penalized for every patent suit that fails. From reading the article they managed to get one patent to stick, and that's all they need to collect royalties from whoever they sued. Sounds a lot like success to me. The only way that Microsoft or any other patent troll could really fail is if all their claims are thrown out.
Calibration is one thing, and actually seeing shit is something else. Maybe they just wanted to make calibration easy with a big easy target to calibrate against.
Well, from reading the article, I gather that it's because they might have needed something bigger because the resolution on their spy satellites is not that good. FTFA: "The calibration targets are larger than might have been expected, he said, suggesting that the satellite cameras they are being used to calibrate have surprisingly poor ground resolution."
The title of Shor's original paper on his algorithm was "Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer.
Apple's bringing of patent lawsuits against Android manufacturers was apparently one of Steve's last acts before his death. "I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong," Jobs said. "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this." Try to tell me that those words are a call to something other than the storm of patent lawsuits they unleashed on the industry recently. Don't try to tell me Steve took Apple with him: if anything, his influence is still guiding the company's hand, and I can only hope that his successors will be less competent.
Your conversion is not quite right, 200 PW is 2e17 W. Over a trillionth of a second, that's 200,000 joules. This really isn't a lot of energy. It is about the energy released by the combustion of only four grams/5mL of gasoline (200,000 joules), or approximately one-fourth the food energy of a typical candy bar (about 1 million joules). A kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million joules, so the energy used is 0.056 kilowatt-hours of energy. My household consumes more than a hundred times that amount in a typical day.
Stardust is exactly right. Most of the heavy elements (non-hydrogen or helium) were produced, if not by the mechanism described in the article, in the death throes of heavy stars that go supernova. All the Big Bang gave us was a lot of hydrogen, a small amount of helium, and a negligible quantity of everything else. The rest had to wait for the stars and stellar nucleosynthesis to be produced.
Note that this is the entire system, so building Ice Cream Sandwich from source is just like rebuilding an entire Linux distribution from scratch from the ground up, from the kernel down to the user tools and the windowing system, etc. If you've ever used Gentoo, this should sound familiar. I wonder if some of the tools that Gentoo users are familiar with to help speed along compilation, such as distcc, could help with this.
Since when was Meego a Microsoft product? Last time I checked Nokia N9 is the first, and probably, one of the last Meego handsets.
I think your estimate is a little too high. Several million tesla is comparable to the magnetic field of a typical neutron star (magnetars are even more so...). Such a field would not just wipe every hard disk in the house and cause forks to fly, such a powerful field would probably wipe every magnetic storage device on the earth. Remember that even 1 T is already a ridiculously high unit of magnetic flux density... In order to achieve the claimed effects you'd still need a pretty strong magnetic field, probably at about 100 T, still not small potatoes (given that the world record for a continuous magnetic field is only 45 T, and a non-destructive pulsed magnetic field is 91 T), and yes, such a field would not just send forks flying and cause hallucinations: it'd probably be more than enough to cause everyone in the house to levitate.
Chocobos are a species of giant, normally flightless bird sort of like ostriches or large chickens, that have basically appeared in one form or another in every Final Fantasy since Final Fantasy II (and now XIV should have them too). They are most often used as mounts, but some have magical abilities as well. One example of their appearance is in Final Fantasy VII, where the party has to capture a chocobo which they can ride across a swamp inhabited by a swift and deadly serpent monster. Crossing the swamp on foot without getting attacked by the serpent is all but impossible, and the serpent is too powerful to be defeated at the levels your characters are when they reach that point, but mounted on a chocobo your party can move fast enough to escape the serpent and reach the caves beyond.
So by that definition, fractional reserve banking is also a Ponzi scheme?
All of this thanks primarily to one executive in HP and later SGI in the mid-late nineties: Rick Belluzzo. He got a plum position at Microsoft in 2002 to reward him for his efforts in destroying HP-UX, IRIX, PA-RISC, and MIPS in favor of NT and Itanium at both companies. As an aside, the parallel to today's Nokia and Stephen Elop are unmissable, I think.