back then, no programmer would ever sell a thing with one click
The way you say no programmer would ever do it suggests to me that every programmer knew and understood the concept (i.e. the idea was obvious and widespread), but that companies judged it unwise to do so. So maybe Amazon had the courage to try it, but that's not what patents are for. You get a patent for inventing a clever new kind of parachute; you don't get a patent for being the first one to jump with it.
Americans will say that it's more complicated for them because their ballot papers include many offices (president, sheriff, dog-catcher, etc) whereas Canadian ballots only have one office on them.
But I think they are making it complicated because there's no profit in counting the way Canadians do it: by hand, with volunteers from each of the political parties watching. You can make a profit if you make voting machines. The fact that the machines are less trustworthy and verifiable is an unfortunate side effect.
These are not mutually exclusive options. We have to go after both the shoplifters *and* the murderers, at the same time. And just as we need to fight both big and small crimes, we also have to fight both big and small threats to freedom. We have to respond right across the spectrum: protect freedom where it is already doing well, and strengthen it where it is struggling.
When a police officer arrests a shoplifter, that doesn't mean the police department is ignoring murderers. Similarly, someone protecting freedom in the USA (where freedom is perhaps being shoplifted or pick-pocketed) is not necessarily ignoring abuses in China (where it's being murdered). They are fighting at different points on the spectrum, but they are allies fighting for the same thing.
This "non-savvy mom" happens to be a vice-president at Gartner. So it matters not only because her daughter is a target market, but because she is a VP of a big company that tells lots of other big companies what operating system to buy.
And as for her savviness, she does have a lot of "director of marketing" on her CV lately, which is not necessarily a good sign, but she does have an engineering degree so at least she used to be one of the good guys...
What kind of analyst? The kind of analyst who is a vice-president of a large IT research consultancy, certainly would have heard the buzz about Vista, and was probably curious to see how it would perform under real-world conditions being used by a real-life teenager.
And as for being a plant, well, her company organised the conference, and one of the conference sessions was her interviewing Ballmer on stage. So, no, not really a plant, as such, unless Larry King counts as a plant when you appear on his show.
Remember, again, that most world problems today aren't technical, but political.
In your last sentence, you got it, without even realising it! Yes, most world problems are political. Politics is hugely about information and communication, which is exactly what the XO delivers. The kids that get these will grow up in a world of information and communication. They'll be the bloggers and pundits of the new age, on a mobile-and-mesh network that will be difficult for frightened authorities to control. And the kids will think differently from their peers and from the previous generation. They will grow up in a world of interactive, creative problem-solving. They'll expect instant access to information, and to share their ideas and think critically. They'll be used to tinkering with systems to make them work better, and they'll be unafraid to experiment. The lessons they learn tinkering with software systems will transfer to political systems and to every other kind of system, and they will make change. If enough XOs get out into the world, they could be incredibly transformative.
In his novel Rainbow's End, Vernor Vinge describes society in 2025, with wearable computers, ubiquitous network connections, and contact lenses that overlay information on your field of vision in a sort of super heads-up-display. People send avatars to events and the avatars are visible to people who are physically present. People exchange instant-messages as a replacement for old-fashioned whispers, with the advantage that no-one can see that a whisper has taken place. People play games that intertwine virtual-reality and physical-reality: through their contact lenses they see other players who are physically present with changed appearances, as well as game-generated monsters and characters that are entirely virtual, and may have difficulty telling one from the other. In fact, people can change their entire view of reality by what basically amounts to applying a stylesheet to everything in your field of view or skinning your entire view of the world around you.
I didn't actually care for the plot of the novel very much, but it won this year's Hugo for best novel so plenty of people did like it! It is an interesting concept.
Women's battalion? I find it extremely hard to believe that such a thing existed in Europe of the 1700s. Wikipedia says that La Bastille was guarded by "82 invalides (veteran soldiers no longer suitable for service in the field)" and 32 Swiss grenadiers. And contrary to "raping and massacring the female soldiers", Wikipedia seems to say that only seven of the Bastille defenders died -- one in the fighting, and six afterwards.
The US Geological Survey web site linked above has similar photos of eleven glaciers in Glacier National Park, Montana, many from the early 1900s. They say that only a few glaciers there have not significantly changed since the 1930s, and that there were 150 glaciers in 1850, only 26 of which remain today. You might also check out the Wikipedia article Retreat of glaciers since 1850.
Ice that is already sitting in the ocean (like icebergs) won't raise ocean levels when it melts. (You can test this: put some ice cubes in a glass of water and wait for them to melt -- the water level should not change.) But when ice that is currently sitting up on land melts and the water runs into the ocean, or bits of the ice break off and fall into the ocean, then the ocean levels will rise. In Antarctica, the ice on land averages 1.3 miles thick, and in Greenland, it's 0.9 miles thick.
It's true that the population of polar bears has increased in the past 30 years -- but as the article points out, the pack ice has been pretty reliable for those 30 years, too. The bears weren't particularly bothered as the average ice thickness decreased from 3.1 metres in the 1960s and 70s to 1.8 metres in the 1990s. They were still able to go out on the ice and hunt. But the ice has continued to get thinner, and now it is disappearing altogether for parts of the year. For the past 30 years that you speak of, the bears were able to hunt and increase their numbers, but *now* they face a real problem. So people are concerned, not for what happened in the past 30 years, but what will happen in the *next* 30 as their former hunting grounds disappear.
Yes, but Amundsen's 1903 expedition took three years to complete. It was not clear sailing. Until recently, only icebreakers or specially-modified ships could make the trip. The point of this story is that the Passage is now ice-free for part of the summer, so that any ship can make the journey.
Seems odd that they don't just salvage the analog components and connect it to a modern computer
I was just listening to a podcast interview with the original and current Voyager project team leaders, and the current team leader said that they are using newer (larger, 70m dish) antennas than they started with, and "over the years of course the receivers have gotten more sensitive".
Yes, it has been happening for the past 30 years. That's partly why Columbia came down in pieces: NASA had gotten accustomed to repairing a little bit of minor damage after each flight, so it was considered routine. Unfortunately Columbia's damage was worse than earlier flights, and in a location where it couldn't be seen.
NASA has tried to develop a "patch kit", but has not been able to find anything that can easily be applied in vacuum and adhere well without damaging the surrounding tiles, insulates well, and is durable enough to survive re-entry. It's a tricky combination of requirements.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report is unambiguous on this: "a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading
edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8." In Elsewhere, I've seen the size of the foam estimated as 50 cm x 40 cm x 15 cm. The report also says that NASA's decision-making and management processes were broken. (The CAIB report is quite readable and interesting, and has lots of photos -- have a look if you're at all interested in the shuttle.)
It's an amusing story, but of course it is not true. First, the Official Secrets Acts (1911 and 1989) are law, and is enforceable whether the person in question has signed anything or not, just like any other law. "Signing the Official Secrets Act" (or more properly, signing a statement acknowledging that they understand the provisions of the Act) is simply a way of impressing people and reminding them that loose lips sink ships. Second, the Act doesn't say anything about signing it, and of course nothing about not telling people whether you've signed it. (Official Secrets Acts 1911 and 1989)
Apparently I don't know anything about oil-ology, can you explain further? I can't see any reason for oil companies to underestimate the reserves. In fact, I think the incentives for the companies are to overestimate: if you are seeking investors to back an expensive project, or asking your shareholders to approve of it, or asking government to grant you permission to proceed, you have every incentive to hype the resulting benefits (i.e. return on investment) which in this case means to inflate your estimates of the oil that might be extracted. The estimated value of oil reserves is also a contributor to a company's stock price, which companies tend to want to see going up as much as possible. There's really no value to a company to downplay its reserves.
People seeking to prevent drilling, on the other hand, would probably tend to estimate low, in support of an argument that the costs outweigh the benefits.
A tax on gasoline seems to me to be an effective way of taxing road use and funding road construction and maintenance. Gasoline consumption is directly and clearly linked to how much people drive, and it is very cheap to collect gas taxes compared with any form of toll collection or road usage metering schemes. Gas taxes also avoid privacy issues associated with tolls and road usage metering.
First, "currently" in the above post means, "last month". And the news reports clearly stated that the cause was simply sustained strong northeast winds that collected the ice together and pushed it into a dense pack. On the other side of Newfoundland in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the ice has been thinning each year for several years and is at a record low this year -- so thin that the spring seal hunt has been delayed or canceled and the main danger facing baby seals is drowning as their ice floes collapse, rather than the hunter's club.
No, the UK's Freedom of Information Act applies to information held by public authorities only -- governments and government agencies. You can't use FoI to pry information out of a company.
A search on http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.ht ml for "microsoft" in the Assignee Name field turns up 6723 hits, which is less than I expected! And many of which are design patents, which probably wouldn't be relevant for this exercise. Reviewing that many patents and looking for prior art shouldn't be difficult for a large distributed team if enough people can be persuaded to read and decipher patents. (What language is it that patents are written in, anyway? It looks kind of English, but seems designed to convey minimal information with maximal obtusity.)
If enough people were willing to launch a pre-emptive strike by documenting prior art behind MSFT's patents, I think I would support the effort. As others have suggested, it might be a more focused use of energy to wait until MSFT makes some claims with real substance behind them... but there's something appealing about the thought of going through each of their patents one by one and dissecting them...:)
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back then, no programmer would ever sell a thing with one click
The way you say no programmer would ever do it suggests to me that every programmer knew and understood the concept (i.e. the idea was obvious and widespread), but that companies judged it unwise to do so. So maybe Amazon had the courage to try it, but that's not what patents are for. You get a patent for inventing a clever new kind of parachute; you don't get a patent for being the first one to jump with it.
Americans will say that it's more complicated for them because their ballot papers include many offices (president, sheriff, dog-catcher, etc) whereas Canadian ballots only have one office on them.
But I think they are making it complicated because there's no profit in counting the way Canadians do it: by hand, with volunteers from each of the political parties watching. You can make a profit if you make voting machines. The fact that the machines are less trustworthy and verifiable is an unfortunate side effect.
These are not mutually exclusive options. We have to go after both the shoplifters *and* the murderers, at the same time. And just as we need to fight both big and small crimes, we also have to fight both big and small threats to freedom. We have to respond right across the spectrum: protect freedom where it is already doing well, and strengthen it where it is struggling.
When a police officer arrests a shoplifter, that doesn't mean the police department is ignoring murderers. Similarly, someone protecting freedom in the USA (where freedom is perhaps being shoplifted or pick-pocketed) is not necessarily ignoring abuses in China (where it's being murdered). They are fighting at different points on the spectrum, but they are allies fighting for the same thing.
This "non-savvy mom" happens to be a vice-president at Gartner. So it matters not only because her daughter is a target market, but because she is a VP of a big company that tells lots of other big companies what operating system to buy. And as for her savviness, she does have a lot of "director of marketing" on her CV lately, which is not necessarily a good sign, but she does have an engineering degree so at least she used to be one of the good guys...
What kind of analyst? The kind of analyst who is a vice-president of a large IT research consultancy, certainly would have heard the buzz about Vista, and was probably curious to see how it would perform under real-world conditions being used by a real-life teenager.
And as for being a plant, well, her company organised the conference, and one of the conference sessions was her interviewing Ballmer on stage. So, no, not really a plant, as such, unless Larry King counts as a plant when you appear on his show.
Remember, again, that most world problems today aren't technical, but political.
In your last sentence, you got it, without even realising it! Yes, most world problems are political. Politics is hugely about information and communication, which is exactly what the XO delivers. The kids that get these will grow up in a world of information and communication. They'll be the bloggers and pundits of the new age, on a mobile-and-mesh network that will be difficult for frightened authorities to control. And the kids will think differently from their peers and from the previous generation. They will grow up in a world of interactive, creative problem-solving. They'll expect instant access to information, and to share their ideas and think critically. They'll be used to tinkering with systems to make them work better, and they'll be unafraid to experiment. The lessons they learn tinkering with software systems will transfer to political systems and to every other kind of system, and they will make change. If enough XOs get out into the world, they could be incredibly transformative.
In his novel Rainbow's End, Vernor Vinge describes society in 2025, with wearable computers, ubiquitous network connections, and contact lenses that overlay information on your field of vision in a sort of super heads-up-display. People send avatars to events and the avatars are visible to people who are physically present. People exchange instant-messages as a replacement for old-fashioned whispers, with the advantage that no-one can see that a whisper has taken place. People play games that intertwine virtual-reality and physical-reality: through their contact lenses they see other players who are physically present with changed appearances, as well as game-generated monsters and characters that are entirely virtual, and may have difficulty telling one from the other. In fact, people can change their entire view of reality by what basically amounts to applying a stylesheet to everything in your field of view or skinning your entire view of the world around you.
I didn't actually care for the plot of the novel very much, but it won this year's Hugo for best novel so plenty of people did like it! It is an interesting concept.
Women's battalion? I find it extremely hard to believe that such a thing existed in Europe of the 1700s. Wikipedia says that La Bastille was guarded by "82 invalides (veteran soldiers no longer suitable for service in the field)" and 32 Swiss grenadiers. And contrary to "raping and massacring the female soldiers", Wikipedia seems to say that only seven of the Bastille defenders died -- one in the fighting, and six afterwards.
I don't know the answer for all of those glaciers in the 1930s, but here are a few examples of before-and-after photographs: Boulder Glacier 1932-2005, Swiftcurrent glacier 1930-2002, Mendenhall and Hugh Miller glaciers 1937-2005 and 1940-2006, Mount Stanley in Uganda, 1906-1958-1992.
The US Geological Survey web site linked above has similar photos of eleven glaciers in Glacier National Park, Montana, many from the early 1900s. They say that only a few glaciers there have not significantly changed since the 1930s, and that there were 150 glaciers in 1850, only 26 of which remain today. You might also check out the Wikipedia article Retreat of glaciers since 1850.
Ice that is already sitting in the ocean (like icebergs) won't raise ocean levels when it melts. (You can test this: put some ice cubes in a glass of water and wait for them to melt -- the water level should not change.) But when ice that is currently sitting up on land melts and the water runs into the ocean, or bits of the ice break off and fall into the ocean, then the ocean levels will rise. In Antarctica, the ice on land averages 1.3 miles thick, and in Greenland, it's 0.9 miles thick.
It's true that the population of polar bears has increased in the past 30 years -- but as the article points out, the pack ice has been pretty reliable for those 30 years, too. The bears weren't particularly bothered as the average ice thickness decreased from 3.1 metres in the 1960s and 70s to 1.8 metres in the 1990s. They were still able to go out on the ice and hunt. But the ice has continued to get thinner, and now it is disappearing altogether for parts of the year. For the past 30 years that you speak of, the bears were able to hunt and increase their numbers, but *now* they face a real problem. So people are concerned, not for what happened in the past 30 years, but what will happen in the *next* 30 as their former hunting grounds disappear.
Yes, but Amundsen's 1903 expedition took three years to complete. It was not clear sailing. Until recently, only icebreakers or specially-modified ships could make the trip. The point of this story is that the Passage is now ice-free for part of the summer, so that any ship can make the journey.
Verizon calculates like that too!
Seems odd that they don't just salvage the analog components and connect it to a modern computer
I was just listening to a podcast interview with the original and current Voyager project team leaders, and the current team leader said that they are using newer (larger, 70m dish) antennas than they started with, and "over the years of course the receivers have gotten more sensitive".
These are the people who came up with "Space Transportation System" and you're asking about their imagination in naming things?
Yes, it has been happening for the past 30 years. That's partly why Columbia came down in pieces: NASA had gotten accustomed to repairing a little bit of minor damage after each flight, so it was considered routine. Unfortunately Columbia's damage was worse than earlier flights, and in a location where it couldn't be seen.
NASA has tried to develop a "patch kit", but has not been able to find anything that can easily be applied in vacuum and adhere well without damaging the surrounding tiles, insulates well, and is durable enough to survive re-entry. It's a tricky combination of requirements.
See the Columbia Loss FAQ web site.
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board report is unambiguous on this: "a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8." In Elsewhere, I've seen the size of the foam estimated as 50 cm x 40 cm x 15 cm. The report also says that NASA's decision-making and management processes were broken. (The CAIB report is quite readable and interesting, and has lots of photos -- have a look if you're at all interested in the shuttle.)
It's an amusing story, but of course it is not true. First, the Official Secrets Acts (1911 and 1989) are law, and is enforceable whether the person in question has signed anything or not, just like any other law. "Signing the Official Secrets Act" (or more properly, signing a statement acknowledging that they understand the provisions of the Act) is simply a way of impressing people and reminding them that loose lips sink ships. Second, the Act doesn't say anything about signing it, and of course nothing about not telling people whether you've signed it. (Official Secrets Acts 1911 and 1989)
it was almost impossible to work out what open-source was actually costing
They tried to make a comparison but gave up when they kept getting a division by zero error on the acquisition costs line...
Apparently I don't know anything about oil-ology, can you explain further? I can't see any reason for oil companies to underestimate the reserves. In fact, I think the incentives for the companies are to overestimate: if you are seeking investors to back an expensive project, or asking your shareholders to approve of it, or asking government to grant you permission to proceed, you have every incentive to hype the resulting benefits (i.e. return on investment) which in this case means to inflate your estimates of the oil that might be extracted. The estimated value of oil reserves is also a contributor to a company's stock price, which companies tend to want to see going up as much as possible. There's really no value to a company to downplay its reserves.
People seeking to prevent drilling, on the other hand, would probably tend to estimate low, in support of an argument that the costs outweigh the benefits.
A tax on gasoline seems to me to be an effective way of taxing road use and funding road construction and maintenance. Gasoline consumption is directly and clearly linked to how much people drive, and it is very cheap to collect gas taxes compared with any form of toll collection or road usage metering schemes. Gas taxes also avoid privacy issues associated with tolls and road usage metering.
First, "currently" in the above post means, "last month". And the news reports clearly stated that the cause was simply sustained strong northeast winds that collected the ice together and pushed it into a dense pack. On the other side of Newfoundland in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the ice has been thinning each year for several years and is at a record low this year -- so thin that the spring seal hunt has been delayed or canceled and the main danger facing baby seals is drowning as their ice floes collapse, rather than the hunter's club.
No, the UK's Freedom of Information Act applies to information held by public authorities only -- governments and government agencies. You can't use FoI to pry information out of a company.
A search on http://patft.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.ht ml for "microsoft" in the Assignee Name field turns up 6723 hits, which is less than I expected! And many of which are design patents, which probably wouldn't be relevant for this exercise. Reviewing that many patents and looking for prior art shouldn't be difficult for a large distributed team if enough people can be persuaded to read and decipher patents. (What language is it that patents are written in, anyway? It looks kind of English, but seems designed to convey minimal information with maximal obtusity.)
If enough people were willing to launch a pre-emptive strike by documenting prior art behind MSFT's patents, I think I would support the effort. As others have suggested, it might be a more focused use of energy to wait until MSFT makes some claims with real substance behind them... but there's something appealing about the thought of going through each of their patents one by one and dissecting them... :)