Java: Microsoft did not develop.Net, until Sun sued them for license issues, effectively stopping them developing on Java.... and others.
This is what Microsoft tried to do to Sun to get rid of their Java: Embrace -- Extend -- Extinguish
This is the sworn expert testimony in court in case Comes vs Microsoft of a mr. Ronald Alepin on 5 january 2007, about Microsoft's strategy in 1995:
Groklaw transcript of Comes vs Microsoft document (page down a bit for the transcript).
(please read the whole thing for yourself. this quote here on/. is too short to really inform).
...
Q. Before I do this, though, sir, in relation to Microsoft's employment of Java and use of Java, when you testified about Microsoft's Java interface extensions --
A. Yes.
Q. -- do those interface extensions tie the applets or applications to the Windows operating system?
A. They tie them. Another phrase is they bind the applications or they lock them into the Windows platform. That's correct.
Q. Okay. Thank you, sir.
It's long ago, but maybe it can still be illuminating to read if you care about Microsoft's plans with their.NET platform and interoperability e.g. with Mono (I personally don't use.NET so I don't care, but your comment "..until Sun sued them for license issues.." nagged me as only partially true:-).
Standardization is for wimps, and goes against the freedom to innovate (by forcing everyone to buy my newest voltage outlet).
Oops forgot the <sarcasm> tag again.
This discussion is about liquid helium (b.p. 4 K, -269 gr. C). Are you sure you're not confusing it with liquid nitrogen (b.p. 77 K, -196 gr. C)? Liquid nitrogen is much easier to make, and can be stored for a short period in a Dewar bucket (basically a thermos but with an evacuated glass wall), but for liquid helium you need a so-called cryostat to make it, and the only storage of it I've ever seen was an NMR machine taking up most of a room (like this picture).
A short google brought me this:liquid helium tanks
"These cryostats comprise an internal casing for storing liquid helium between 1.6 K and 4 K, multi-layer vacuum insulation (MLI) and an external casing subject to the external environment. Heat screens can be added to increase cryostat performance thereby ensuring that the Helium is kept at low temperature for several years in orbit."
OK, it's for space use, but this doesn't sound like it would cost $4 to $10 per liter?
This is a famous fragment of the Dutch national (NOS) TV news programme from several years back: news reader Harmen Siezen reading a report about a new saddle that gives your balls room to hang in the fresh breeze (Selle Bassano):
Harmen Siezen - zadelpijn (in Dutch) (unfortunately, they don't show the saddle itself in the clip).
quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet,
Farmers don't manually mix soil and humus on a daily basis. They don't spend huge amounts of energy aerating their soil. They just make sure that worms live happily in it, the worms increase at an exponential rate, and they do (most of) the work of tilling the soil.
I think that if you approach the problems of space colonization from a point of view that you have to do it all by yourself, with only the available energy that you have when you start your Moon or Mars colony, that you're doing it wrong:-)
Also I think developing a toolkit for space colonization is very intellectually stimulating and exciting.
There should be an X-prize for a solar cell production facility that operates only on sunlight.
And another one for finding lichens that (veeeeeery slowly) weather Lunar regolith.
And another one for airtight cement locally produced from excavated asteroid bits.
Etc. etc. (you get the idea).
Unfortunately, we really need to get our shit together on this planet before we start thinking about colonizing others.
I couldn't follow you very well.. I guess you're talking about that we'd better not waste the Phosphates in our shit on "spaceship Earth", or any smaller spaceship's ecosystem. Agreed!
A reduction in EU greenhouse gas emissions of at least 20% below 1990 levels
20% of EU energy consumption to come from renewable resources
A 20% reduction in primary energy use compared with projected levels, to be achieved by improving energy efficiency.
Now here comes my "radical lefty euro-communist hippy" claim;-) :
Implementing this "20-20-20" policy will not lead to any harm to our EU economies. It may be insufficient to mitigate global warming though. But it will allow more time for EU societies and industries to adjust to a post-peak-cheap-oil era.
That was an interesting graph, but from what I could read (it went past really quickly), it showed that the current "hockey stick" is nothing compared to much larger fluctuations *in a single location in central Greenland*.
What is the current viewpoint on the relationship between temperatures at a single location, and the global warming which is the issue we're talking about?
It seems to me, that global changes are much slower and can only be influenced by large events (such as producing 21 billion tonnes of CO2 per year from burning fossil fuels), whereas local changes can be influenced by smaller-scale catastrophic events (think lakes drying up, or Pompeii's local temperature changing from to 23 C to 250 C in August 79)
No.. not really what I meant.. more that, if everything would die, the composition and spectrum of our planet's atmosphere would become more boring, more like most planets, as it quickly goes to chemical equilibrium.
What you're saying, that we are all connected, is a bit more in line with James Lovelock's Gaia theory. I don't really know what to think of that. I think there is some ecological idea about "keystone" species of ecosystems, maybe we're one of them.
I think it was Maturana and Varela, but I can't for the life of me figure out where I left that book, who had the hypothesis that life has a tendency to modify its surroundings, so that the surroundings are subsequently more suitable for that life to exist.
Think about worms; they eat the earth, but in the process they make the earth more aerated and more suitable for worms to live in, as anyone with a compost heap can attest.
I think this ties in nicely with the idea of Ilya Prigogine that life is a process which is thermodynamically far out-of-equilibrium, i.e. a steady state: as long as you feed a lifeform (e.g. sunlight if it is a plant) it lives, but when it has no more food it dies, i.e. reverts to chemical equilibrium.
If you combine both ideas, you can get to the point I want to make:
Life on earth is in a constant state outside of (chemical) equilibrium
Life on earth modifies its surroundings to better suit it (20% Oxygen atmosphere and flammable plants!)
Therefore, a spectrogram of an planetary atmosphere with a composition that is out of chemical equilibrium is an indicator of life on that planet
It seems the gist of this article is a bit how occultation gives a good opportunity to take the spectrogram of a planet, but I think they missed saying why finding an out-of-equilibrium atmosphere is an indicator of possible extraterrestrial life.
To be honest though, that can be seen as an *advantage* of the natural gas plant in some circumstances, e.g. when it is burning bio-gas made from cowshit: it enters the atmosphere either as CO2 or CH4, and CH4 is a much more potent greenhouse gas.
See for example projects in Europe in the field of biogas and combined heat & power.
Welcome to Slashdot!:-) It can be somewhat harsh sometimes.
I was not the AC who called you asshole, just to clear that up.
I don't know why my posting was marked funny, maybe I made a mistake in it (getting rusty). I understand and agree with your explanation that the "where" is 3-D space and the superposition of n different orthogonal wavefunctions Psi(x,y,z) = \sum_i^n C_i psi_i(x,y,z) is a "point coordinate" in n-D (function-)space, all I wanted to whine about in my original posting is, that for a student learning the basics of quantum mechanics this sudden jump in perspective from the familiar "space" space to n-dimensional function space can be baffling. Well it was for me.
There is another point that I wanted to convey, and that is that when you managed to calculate a result out of your first crude estimation of the ground-state energy of a Hydrogen atom with 1 GTO orbital, and it's only one order of magnitude out of whack with the real value, only *then* you start to get the idea that maybe you are getting somewhere with this quantum thingy. There is a strong sense of empowerment the first time you get something useful with your own brain (and a calculator or computer); comparable to writing your first working "hello world" in a for you unfamiliar computer language. I think maybe you can convey a sense of awe and wonder for QM without use of maths, but I doubt it will be as strong as when the students realize they can calculate things *themselves* that are crude approximations of molecules and spectra *in the observable world*. Otherwise it's a bit of a spectator sport.
Why do you want new elements??
Lessee..
C, H, O, N, P, K, S, Mg for food and oxygen production
Si for energy (amorphous Silicon solar cells)
Fe, Al for construction
Si, Ca, Na for glass (UV-shielded greenhouse)
I probably missed a lot, e.g. how to keep it isolated from the cold.
And then you have a very slow, but large & comfy and *VERY* well radiation-shielded, Mars spaceship:
Mars crossers that are also Earth-crossers or grazers
C'mon! Don't tell me this hasn't crossed any of the Slashdotters' minds!
The only missing link AFAICS is how to purify the materials using only solar cells of the spaceship for energy.
I had a truly marvellous idea but unfortunately this Slashdot article is too narrow to contain it (and it might just be stupid...).
I think it's pretty easy to explain the concept of a Hilbert space with absolutely no knowledge of calculus, because it's just geometry and common sense.
I don't know about you, but lacking a background in Physics, I found it *very* confusing to jump from integration in 3-D over a Hydrogen probability density wavefunction, to suddenly talking about the *infinite-dimensional* Hilbert function space. Besides, if the students have a problem visualising that if a < b then a+x < b+x, they may also lack the basic tricks of integrating exponential and trigonometric functions. Maybe you only need those in quantum chemistry, not in quantum physics.. dunno..
If he says he's against ACTA, it's almst guaranteed to pass because no one wants to look like they're siding with a complete nut job.
Yes. You're absolutely right. In fact, most decisions in government are made in such a way that that government isn't perceived as "uncool" by siding with a complete nut job from among either their own population or the rest of the 6 billion people.
Uhuh.
AFAIK, the US Supreme Court is currently working on the "In Re Bilski" case which *could* lead to software patents ceasing to exist, so that the heavy arm of US dept. of trade (TRIPS and ACTA) no longer leans on the rest of the world to accept those things.
After all, it would be a bit hypocritical to tell the rest of the world "harmonize with us, believe in our bloody software patents" and then cancel them yourself because they're bad for your economy:-)
In this light, I for one would like to know if the new judge joins in this case, and if so if that changes the likely outcomes, or if her predecessor works on this case and she'll only start on new cases.
With no viable alternatives to sustain our current economy and way of life, those who will pay are normal citizens, not Exxon shareholders.
I think you have your answer there--if there exist viable alternatives, but Exxon is not in a position to profit from them as much as their competitors are, then Exxon's shareholders would pay (suffer). Maybe Shell or BP are better situated to benefit from the transition to alternative energy sources, and the companies who can't compete on this new market use their money to buy PR and politicians instead, so as to delay the inevitable transition from oil company to diversified-energy-production company.
There's a very positive conclusion from your words: there *ARE* viable alternatives to sustain our current economy, otherwise Exxon wouldn't bother trying to suppress them:-)
Slashdot Mirror
This is what Microsoft tried to do to Sun to get rid of their Java: Embrace -- Extend -- Extinguish /. is too short to really inform).
This is the sworn expert testimony in court in case Comes vs Microsoft of a mr. Ronald Alepin on 5 january 2007, about Microsoft's strategy in 1995: Groklaw transcript of Comes vs Microsoft document (page down a bit for the transcript).
(please read the whole thing for yourself. this quote here on
It's long ago, but maybe it can still be illuminating to read if you care about Microsoft's plans with their .NET platform and interoperability e.g. with Mono (I personally don't use .NET so I don't care, but your comment "..until Sun sued them for license issues.." nagged me as only partially true :-).
Standardization is for wimps, and goes against the freedom to innovate (by forcing everyone to buy my newest voltage outlet).
Oops forgot the <sarcasm> tag again.
A short google brought me this:liquid helium tanks
OK, it's for space use, but this doesn't sound like it would cost $4 to $10 per liter?
This is a famous fragment of the Dutch national (NOS) TV news programme from several years back: news reader Harmen Siezen reading a report about a new saddle that gives your balls room to hang in the fresh breeze (Selle Bassano):
Harmen Siezen - zadelpijn (in Dutch) (unfortunately, they don't show the saddle itself in the clip).
Farmers don't manually mix soil and humus on a daily basis. They don't spend huge amounts of energy aerating their soil. They just make sure that worms live happily in it, the worms increase at an exponential rate, and they do (most of) the work of tilling the soil. :-)
I think that if you approach the problems of space colonization from a point of view that you have to do it all by yourself, with only the available energy that you have when you start your Moon or Mars colony, that you're doing it wrong
Also I think developing a toolkit for space colonization is very intellectually stimulating and exciting.
There should be an X-prize for a solar cell production facility that operates only on sunlight.
And another one for finding lichens that (veeeeeery slowly) weather Lunar regolith.
And another one for airtight cement locally produced from excavated asteroid bits.
Etc. etc. (you get the idea).
I couldn't follow you very well.. I guess you're talking about that we'd better not waste the Phosphates in our shit on "spaceship Earth", or any smaller spaceship's ecosystem. Agreed!
Good idea. Let's take this as a starting point then.
European Energy policy has this so-called "20-20-20" concept for starters, to be achieved by 2020:
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/climate_action.htm
Now here comes my "radical lefty euro-communist hippy" claim ;-) :
Implementing this "20-20-20" policy will not lead to any harm to our EU economies. It may be insufficient to mitigate global warming though. But it will allow more time for EU societies and industries to adjust to a post-peak-cheap-oil era.
Comments?
That was an interesting graph, but from what I could read (it went past really quickly), it showed that the current "hockey stick" is nothing compared to much larger fluctuations *in a single location in central Greenland*.
What is the current viewpoint on the relationship between temperatures at a single location, and the global warming which is the issue we're talking about?
It seems to me, that global changes are much slower and can only be influenced by large events (such as producing 21 billion tonnes of CO2 per year from burning fossil fuels), whereas local changes can be influenced by smaller-scale catastrophic events (think lakes drying up, or Pompeii's local temperature changing from to 23 C to 250 C in August 79)
No.. not really what I meant.. more that, if everything would die, the composition and spectrum of our planet's atmosphere would become more boring, more like most planets, as it quickly goes to chemical equilibrium.
What you're saying, that we are all connected, is a bit more in line with James Lovelock's Gaia theory. I don't really know what to think of that. I think there is some ecological idea about "keystone" species of ecosystems, maybe we're one of them.
Think about worms; they eat the earth, but in the process they make the earth more aerated and more suitable for worms to live in, as anyone with a compost heap can attest.
I think this ties in nicely with the idea of Ilya Prigogine that life is a process which is thermodynamically far out-of-equilibrium, i.e. a steady state: as long as you feed a lifeform (e.g. sunlight if it is a plant) it lives, but when it has no more food it dies, i.e. reverts to chemical equilibrium.
If you combine both ideas, you can get to the point I want to make:
It seems the gist of this article is a bit how occultation gives a good opportunity to take the spectrogram of a planet, but I think they missed saying why finding an out-of-equilibrium atmosphere is an indicator of possible extraterrestrial life.
To be honest though, that can be seen as an *advantage* of the natural gas plant in some circumstances, e.g. when it is burning bio-gas made from cowshit: it enters the atmosphere either as CO2 or CH4, and CH4 is a much more potent greenhouse gas.
See for example projects in Europe in the field of biogas and combined heat & power.
Glow, baby, glow!
Careful.. it's just after Midsommar.. could be a disguised Nixie instead!
Welcome to Slashdot! :-) It can be somewhat harsh sometimes.
I was not the AC who called you asshole, just to clear that up.
I don't know why my posting was marked funny, maybe I made a mistake in it (getting rusty). I understand and agree with your explanation that the "where" is 3-D space and the superposition of n different orthogonal wavefunctions Psi(x,y,z) = \sum_i^n C_i psi_i(x,y,z) is a "point coordinate" in n-D (function-)space, all I wanted to whine about in my original posting is, that for a student learning the basics of quantum mechanics this sudden jump in perspective from the familiar "space" space to n-dimensional function space can be baffling. Well it was for me.
There is another point that I wanted to convey, and that is that when you managed to calculate a result out of your first crude estimation of the ground-state energy of a Hydrogen atom with 1 GTO orbital, and it's only one order of magnitude out of whack with the real value, only *then* you start to get the idea that maybe you are getting somewhere with this quantum thingy. There is a strong sense of empowerment the first time you get something useful with your own brain (and a calculator or computer); comparable to writing your first working "hello world" in a for you unfamiliar computer language. I think maybe you can convey a sense of awe and wonder for QM without use of maths, but I doubt it will be as strong as when the students realize they can calculate things *themselves* that are crude approximations of molecules and spectra *in the observable world*. Otherwise it's a bit of a spectator sport.
Why do you want new elements??
Lessee..
C, H, O, N, P, K, S, Mg for food and oxygen production
Si for energy (amorphous Silicon solar cells)
Fe, Al for construction
Si, Ca, Na for glass (UV-shielded greenhouse)
I probably missed a lot, e.g. how to keep it isolated from the cold.
And then you have a very slow, but large & comfy and *VERY* well radiation-shielded, Mars spaceship:
Mars crossers that are also Earth-crossers or grazers
C'mon! Don't tell me this hasn't crossed any of the Slashdotters' minds!
The only missing link AFAICS is how to purify the materials using only solar cells of the spaceship for energy.
I had a truly marvellous idea but unfortunately this Slashdot article is too narrow to contain it (and it might just be stupid...).
I don't know about you, but lacking a background in Physics, I found it *very* confusing to jump from integration in 3-D over a Hydrogen probability density wavefunction, to suddenly talking about the *infinite-dimensional* Hilbert function space. Besides, if the students have a problem visualising that if a < b then a+x < b+x, they may also lack the basic tricks of integrating exponential and trigonometric functions. Maybe you only need those in quantum chemistry, not in quantum physics.. dunno..
You tell 'em, you "villain", you!
Those all sound American. I'm guessing you are, too. Don't you ever read news from sources from outside your own country? Just asking, not trolling..
I just *knew* it was Obama's fault, because the Slashdot advertisement at the top right corner says "BP Spill -- Blame Obama? -- Vote here now" :-)
That reminds me of a Loesje slogan:
(Apologies.. It's untranslateable Dutch):
"Streef onbekommert naar het ideale"
Yes. You're absolutely right. In fact, most decisions in government are made in such a way that that government isn't perceived as "uncool" by siding with a complete nut job from among either their own population or the rest of the 6 billion people.
Uhuh.
So did the Klein Orkest - Over 100 jaar :-)
Warning: site looks like it's lousy with adware.
AFAIK, the US Supreme Court is currently working on the "In Re Bilski" case which *could* lead to software patents ceasing to exist, so that the heavy arm of US dept. of trade (TRIPS and ACTA) no longer leans on the rest of the world to accept those things. After all, it would be a bit hypocritical to tell the rest of the world "harmonize with us, believe in our bloody software patents" and then cancel them yourself because they're bad for your economy :-)
In this light, I for one would like to know if the new judge joins in this case, and if so if that changes the likely outcomes, or if her predecessor works on this case and she'll only start on new cases.
I think you have your answer there--if there exist viable alternatives, but Exxon is not in a position to profit from them as much as their competitors are, then Exxon's shareholders would pay (suffer). Maybe Shell or BP are better situated to benefit from the transition to alternative energy sources, and the companies who can't compete on this new market use their money to buy PR and politicians instead, so as to delay the inevitable transition from oil company to diversified-energy-production company. :-)
There's a very positive conclusion from your words: there *ARE* viable alternatives to sustain our current economy, otherwise Exxon wouldn't bother trying to suppress them