My complaint with the industries involved is that each wants to claim its product is less bad, and the other is worse.
Both are sugars, and need to be limited. But we, as individuals, need to pay attention to our diet and choose what is best for us. If you want to buy processed foods, ok, but know the ingredients. If you prefer to prepare your own, well, you'll know what's going in them.
I consciously choose to avoid fructose in all forms except fresh fruit. It isn't easy. I'm also trying to limit my intake of other sugars, and finally I'm preferring to drink real juices and such instead of 'diet' soda. My wife is convinced aspartame is evil, but I think it's just another ingredient that does me little good, if not some harm that is either annoying me or killing me very slowly.
SyFy is losing steam because they are running made-for-SyFy movies that are mostly bug hunts or mutant creature stupidity, and have the same cast over and over, as if they have these poor souls on some contract to do xx minutes of screen work each year.
Kinda sad.
But I bought into Caprica, especially explaining the whole Cylon creation thing. It's just starting to gather some momentum now, with Daniel encouraging his wife/avatar to think for itself, and telling it that his 'real' wife would have walked out the door. Once he succeeds in making the wife/avatar think for itself, it will choose its own way. And neglect all the socially responsible humanity-preserving stuff. Cylons wil evolve from this, probably when the code gets into a military unit, and they will think for themselves, literally, and of course war will ensue. Them against us, not a new plot.
Woops, I guess Caprica has lost its appeal for me after all. Darn.
But yes, taking a few months off makes a mess of the audience captivity, and there ya go.
Yeahm but a Sansa Clip+ isn't as much fun as even my Gigabeat.
DAT copy flags weren't as much trouble as they seemed, though you had to go analog to a CD unless you pumped it through a PC and had something that didn't repect the flag. And at the time, PCs often didn't have digital audio... I know. My MinDisc had a similar problem that was 'fixed'.
Ok, so basically, you're not knocking 2160p or 4320p, which are on the horizon.
But compression is a cheat. All you get are shinier artifacts.
HD is a half-lie. Nice resolution if your cable company bothers to deliver a signal that has a modest data rate and doesn't pixellate when the scene changes or their translation engines decide to have a decaf latte.
Satellite is marginally better, if the box doesn't puke all over your screen.
Over-the-air is usually better than all of the above. I may buy an decent antenna yet.
Internet streaming is still a work-in-progress, since the data rate is just as challenging to the ISPs as torrents, and will eventually suffer the same fate unless you pay your ISP more money for reception, or they get into the streaming business and re-establish their monopolies on video no matter the source.
Whoever thinks consumers have any power in this are deluded. Maybe the FCC can require Internet carriers to act like the common carriers they are or let them filter and throttle so long as they admit that they deliver 'Internet' like AOL used to deliver 'Internet', that is, partly, mostly, whatever they want to.
No we didn't. We traded lossless for lossy to accomodate inadequate storage space. This is no longer an excuse, but most products and systems persist in delivering us the painful, cruel, and audibly harmful 128K MP3s, instead of at least WAVs, and of course most products ignore FLAC and other alternatives so that they can impose DRM on even the music I OWN and want to convert.
A pox on them all. I rip at 320+, I just can't stand 192 and lower.
And yes, that means I pretty much have given up on FM radio.
30 years go Seagate Technologies released the ST-506, and later the ST-412. These pretty much defined the interface, which was initially called the ST412/506 interface, and later was most often called MFM when RLL drives came out. My old boss had both a 412 and 506 on his desk, gifts from me when I had two that failed. I told him it was a little piece of history, and both would spin up and format at the time, but had well over 20% bad sectors and weren't likely to last more than a few hours in operation. Such were the days. Back then I didn't bother to carry spares in the winter,since a cold drive was a dead drive. And I had to carry them in suspension to avoid damage in the trunk of the car. No parking heads back then. I also tended to keep a small stock, since carrying a drive in a car for a month pretty much guaranteed it was useless.
25 years ago the ST-225 and ST-238 were pretty popular, and more reliable than the 412/506. The ST-2038 and some other models in the 40MB range improved reliability more, though this was the series, along with the ST-138(?) IDE drives were the drives that had the infamous stiction problems, which Conner, Miniscribe, Microscience, and other makers avoided. Stiction was caused by the lubricant used on the platters being a little to 'sticky' and preventing the spindle motor from starting up.
If you have had two drives fail in 20 years, you are either improbably lucky, didn't keep any of them more than 24 months, or have forgotten a few. While being a service tech for so long has left me with hundreds of stories of drive failures, I've easily had a dozen drives fail in my own machines over the past 25 years. I've had as many as 5 machines at home at one time, and sometimes a server might have had 5 drives in it.
All the claims of MTBF and operating life are just guesses and statistical indulgences, in my experience. I see Seagate is quoting reliability as 'Annual Failure Rate'. Well, I still think drives can only be relied upon for a finite amount of time, mostly power-on time, but I think everything has gotten a bit more reliable. Still, if I were in the field, I would recommend clients change their server drives at least every 5 years, preferably 4, and if a second drive failed in an array I would recommend swapping them all out. Customers that don't have downtime are happy customers. And I'd rather choose my service time than get called out on a Friday night.
But I agree that SSD has a ways to go to show reliability even close to megnetic drives. I'm sure they will get there in a few years, maybe 7, but until then SSD is a speed choice or just vanity. Even noise can be dealt with cheaper and more reliably with magnetics. The problems of wear leveling etc are at least as difficult as interface problems and some of the physical issues were similarly notable 15 years ago.
And MacBook Air is not driving the PC industry to SSDs. I suspect form factor will be the driving force.
Just remembering and poking around, I found these guys that were running wireless Linux routers in October 98.
The Open-WRT project was soliciting ideas at least in 1999.
Someone at HP was working on this in 1996. I don't know how far they got before 1998.
I'm suspecting there were other projects back then making good progress. But I can't tell how applicable these are. The HP project is sure interesting.
At the core of this is the assumption that any nation that posseses nuclear weapons has at least the intention to use them if 'necessary'.
But more important than their intention is perhaps the nation's 'investment' in peace or war. More accurately, their cultural investment in survival and in peace.
Nations such as the U.S., Russia, France, the U.K., etc. all have a substantial investment in peace and survivial. They would lose a great deal in a nuclear exchange. This makes Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) a feasible doctrine, since it would require very serious circumstances indeed to spark an exchange among these nations.
India and Pakistan may or may not have the same investment towards the previously named nations, but they do actually have substantial investments in each other, and an exchange between them would have devastating consequences for both. So for them, MAD is a working deterrent, and they have managed fairly well. The previously named nations just don't have sufficient reason to threaten either India or Pakistan and even risk an exchange with them, no matter the capabilities of any party.
North Korea seems to be using their nuclear threat to maintain relevance. They have nothing to gain by attacking anyone, and everything to lose. But they need aid from the rest of the world, and rattling the nuclear dagger they have gets our attention.
China is incrutable. But they are so heavily invested in the world economy now that a nuclear threat seems unthinkable. Besides, they have the heavy metals trade to threaten us with, a much more immediate problem, and one that has the deniability of intent to harm that a nuke just doesn't have. Unfortunately, China may be operating with a worldview that considers decades of opportunity, and we will find them a different adversary in 30 years than they are now.
But Iran, that is a problem. Does Iran have the necessary investment in peace to not use their nuclear arsenal, if and when they possess it, in pursuit of their national goals? Mind you, Iran is a theocracy, and their national goals are influenced by their interpretation of Islam. It should not take much imagination for logical and rational obververs to conceive of a situation where Iran would not just threaten to use a nuclear weapon against another nation, the U.S. being the safest target since we would incur the scorn of much of the world in a nuclear response no matter the provocation. But what about Israel? If Iran could create or take advantage of a situation where Israel was either politically (or militarily?) isolated from most or all of its allies, would Iran find some justification for an attack? My own opinion is that this question cannot be answered with anything but 'quite likely'. In this scenario, Iran needs to be more confident of its position in the geopolitical arena. Saudi Arabia doesn't seem to be an unconditional ally. All other Arab states in the Middle East, even together, do not solve that problem. So Iran needs more powerful allies to survive the attack, both politically and physically. This is where the U.N. Security Council can prevent such a situation from coming to reality, but I have no confidence in them.
And Israel, of course, will be compelled to keep their nuclear arsenal the open secret it is today, as a deterrent. If Israel were to receive a nuclear attack by an Islamic state, the only question would be the intensity of the response. And perhaps the specific target. In the case of Iran, Tehran would be a logical target, but would Israel widen the response, since such a situation would probably involve several states either calling for an assault or at least not objecting? Would Israel also attack Iran's supporters in that scenario? Depends, I think, on their isolation, and the actual resolve of their allies. Emphasis on 'actual'.
There are several methods to assess the willingness of a nuclear state to actually use their arsenal. We need to also consider the state's investment in peace, not just their rhetoric or perceived benefits to them.
Both my asthma and rhinitis are histamine responses, in particular by mast cells . Histamines trigger the inflammatory response, which is the immune system kicking in. IgE antibodies inspire the mast cell release, apparently, and I have IgE antibodies that are extremely sensitive to Eastern White Pine, English Plantain, and several other grasses and trees. Not so much ragweed, go figure.
I have particularly aggressive H1 receptors, which are primarily found (from Wikipedia) in "smooth muscle, endothelium, and central nervous system tissue"
Since these receptors are found in my lungs, in the brnchial tubes, it is rational to beleive that transplanting my lungs to someone else will give them my receptors. and since the receptors will generate histamine when triggered by allergens. And I would expect histamine to work the same in the recipient as it did in me, though I have not quite understood the role of IgE antibodies, and if they cause or are the result of the mast cell triggering. It is a safe bet that some of my antibodies will accompany a transplanted lung (or both), so the recipient will get some, and how those survive the transplant process is unknown to me.
Um, the concept that she should not have experienced a reaction since her immune system was not sensitive to peanuts beforehand is flawed.
I enjoy chronic mild asthma, and the cause is my bronchial tubes' reaction to exercise and various allergens. If my lungs were transplanted to someone, I would expect that they would also have asthma, since it is my bronchi that are reacting.
This case is an example of a not very well thought out transplant process. Implanting the lungs of a anaphylactic shock victim into someone doesn't ensure at all that the recipient will not also be subsceptible to shock. It guarantees it.
Wow. what a great mistake. We learned something here that we should have already known.
"If you're a conservative, you worry about it killing us; if you're a liberal, you worry about us killing it."
And you were doing so well. Leave the politics at the door, and try working on actual space problems, eh?
"why don't we modify life... including the human genome... so it's better suited to [Mars]?"
How about we figure out how to live on Mars instead? Basically, Mars is a very, very high plain, at an altitude where atmosphere is insufficient for humans to survive on the air alone. How hard is it to drag around a supply of air to breathe? hard? I don't think so. Cold is pretty simple to solve. Go to L.L. Bean before you leave. It's really about getting there, with enough supplies to establish ourselves, and a way to maintain sustainable resources like food.
"Worden also thinks we should go to the moons of Mars first, where we can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. "I think we'll be on the moons of Mars by 2030 or so."
We're doing telerobotics ALREADY ON MARS. Are you aware of that? Sheesh.
"Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, 'Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?' So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price."
We were ALWAYS in an argument over the price. So we still are.
I really expect better from NASA. Am I being too harsh? Did I miss something?
I'm guessing they didn't use the engines, that saves a few parts.
But if they preserved the cockpit, woot! Not likely, the instruments were probably worth more than the fuselage. But a working radar disk would be fun, just to point it at visitors. Actuators also are worth more in reuse/salvage than to just be left on parts. Imagine the fun of hydraulic leaks when you tweak the flaps for ventilation...
Well, phones mostly use arperture antennas, which are very good. The arperture on an iPhone4 is the slot you short out with your left-hand palm. I stopped studying antennas a long time ago, before these came into popularity, so I'm still fascinated by them.
Wireless ISPs would find arrays useful to improve range, but the expense might make them more useful for higher-value links, like business connections and backhaul. At the extreme of utiilization, an array could allow a mesh to also be self-healing, re-focusing to a 'good' link and continuing operation.
Same issues; relative freedom vs closed architecture, centralized v distributed, perceived quality v perceived user experience, bandwagon v meme.
I suspect the end result is still in doubt for both confrontations.
Jobs isn't running his mouth because he is afraid of Android. He can't help but make it a competitive situation and sell his product at the expense of the competition.
Ask him, he'll tell you. Catch a few episodes of his show, and you'll know that.
As a businessman, clearly he doesn't want people usign his product for free when he wants to sell it instead.
So of course he speaks out against piracy, real, imagined, significant, or insignificant.
And of course he will sue the pants off anyone that diminishes or devalues his business.
Unless it is bad for business. Then he won't.
Simple. Nothing much to see here.
Oh, and I bet he has enough money to cause a little bit of trouble for some of the providers involved with Anonymous, and maybe ensnare some of the not so smart ones involved. It takes more than money to catch the clever.
This is not new or even especially clever compared to some antenna designs. And it does actually work and has benefits.
Aegis cruisers use a phased-array radar set that solves a multitude of problems - flat panel does not need to be physically articulated or rotated, it 'aims' virtually instananeously, allowing the system to track multiple targets with high precision, and I bet it consumes substantially less power than a moving dish or other types of antennae.
Replacing various reflectors with an array, one managed by a dedicated logic device, sounds like a very cleaver solution. Among the advantages:
- Flat-panel mounting on the side of your building. Neighbors might like the look better.
- Simplified aiming. Let the chip make the adjustments. Might even get an aiming aid built into the array some day, making ti a lot simpler than it has been.
- Possibly, just maybe, this would be a dual-purpose antenna, supporting satellite video and neighborhood WiFi or the equivalent. That's a play some ISPs might be interested in. Probably not your cable company.
The most obvious disadvantages to me are potentially fragile electronics and longevity, same coin different sides.
My point. If the criteria is as I took the liberty to assume, Token-Ring works fine. So does ArcNet, though speed might be an issue. Appletalk I dunno. The InterPlanetary Network might present some challenges.
The Smart Grid project seems to still be working out the PHY layer.
That would depend on the requirements, wouldn't it?
You seem to be assuming that IP is the only choice for device communication. That's not even true or useful today. There is a whole lot of world out there that doesn't use IP and for good reasons.
Let's start with the requirements, ok? Secure, efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable, and interoperable?
Wow. Token-Ring meets those criteria, along with many, many others.
The chiropractor I visit provides me relief and improved health. He studies new techniques and gains new knowledge regularly, even monthly. He gets a lot more ongoing education than any 'gardener' I'm aware of, even the professional applicator I know well - that's pesticide and herbicide sprayer, for those of you who haven't needed to hire one.
The stereotype of chiropractors as quacks is out of date by at least 30 years in my personal experience, and probably 100 years in reality.
I never beleived in them either, but this one is a lot more helpful to me than the allopath I used to see for a sore back, and my chiropractor doesn't prescribe or recommend medication either. Nor supplements. Exercise is his preferred response to preventing my back from getting worse, and he's right so far.
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My complaint with the industries involved is that each wants to claim its product is less bad, and the other is worse.
Both are sugars, and need to be limited. But we, as individuals, need to pay attention to our diet and choose what is best for us. If you want to buy processed foods, ok, but know the ingredients. If you prefer to prepare your own, well, you'll know what's going in them.
I consciously choose to avoid fructose in all forms except fresh fruit. It isn't easy. I'm also trying to limit my intake of other sugars, and finally I'm preferring to drink real juices and such instead of 'diet' soda. My wife is convinced aspartame is evil, but I think it's just another ingredient that does me little good, if not some harm that is either annoying me or killing me very slowly.
Either way, simpler is better.
SyFy is losing steam because they are running made-for-SyFy movies that are mostly bug hunts or mutant creature stupidity, and have the same cast over and over, as if they have these poor souls on some contract to do xx minutes of screen work each year.
Kinda sad.
But I bought into Caprica, especially explaining the whole Cylon creation thing. It's just starting to gather some momentum now, with Daniel encouraging his wife/avatar to think for itself, and telling it that his 'real' wife would have walked out the door. Once he succeeds in making the wife/avatar think for itself, it will choose its own way. And neglect all the socially responsible humanity-preserving stuff. Cylons wil evolve from this, probably when the code gets into a military unit, and they will think for themselves, literally, and of course war will ensue. Them against us, not a new plot.
Woops, I guess Caprica has lost its appeal for me after all. Darn.
But yes, taking a few months off makes a mess of the audience captivity, and there ya go.
I didn't see in TFA if there was in fact a box for 'none of the above'.
It wouldn't surprise me that there not only isn't one, but that once you select a box, you must select at least ONE.
You still can't make this stuff up. Electonic voting is even less evolved than the TI-99/4A.
Well, actually, the 99/4A was pretty slick. E-voting is as evolved as, well, crayons on Jell-O.
Yeahm but a Sansa Clip+ isn't as much fun as even my Gigabeat.
DAT copy flags weren't as much trouble as they seemed, though you had to go analog to a CD unless you pumped it through a PC and had something that didn't repect the flag. And at the time, PCs often didn't have digital audio... I know. My MinDisc had a similar problem that was 'fixed'.
Ok, so basically, you're not knocking 2160p or 4320p, which are on the horizon.
But compression is a cheat. All you get are shinier artifacts.
HD is a half-lie. Nice resolution if your cable company bothers to deliver a signal that has a modest data rate and doesn't pixellate when the scene changes or their translation engines decide to have a decaf latte.
Satellite is marginally better, if the box doesn't puke all over your screen.
Over-the-air is usually better than all of the above. I may buy an decent antenna yet.
Internet streaming is still a work-in-progress, since the data rate is just as challenging to the ISPs as torrents, and will eventually suffer the same fate unless you pay your ISP more money for reception, or they get into the streaming business and re-establish their monopolies on video no matter the source.
Whoever thinks consumers have any power in this are deluded. Maybe the FCC can require Internet carriers to act like the common carriers they are or let them filter and throttle so long as they admit that they deliver 'Internet' like AOL used to deliver 'Internet', that is, partly, mostly, whatever they want to.
It's not getting better. Just faster.
No we didn't. We traded lossless for lossy to accomodate inadequate storage space. This is no longer an excuse, but most products and systems persist in delivering us the painful, cruel, and audibly harmful 128K MP3s, instead of at least WAVs, and of course most products ignore FLAC and other alternatives so that they can impose DRM on even the music I OWN and want to convert.
A pox on them all. I rip at 320+, I just can't stand 192 and lower.
And yes, that means I pretty much have given up on FM radio.
30 years go Seagate Technologies released the ST-506, and later the ST-412. These pretty much defined the interface, which was initially called the ST412/506 interface, and later was most often called MFM when RLL drives came out. My old boss had both a 412 and 506 on his desk, gifts from me when I had two that failed. I told him it was a little piece of history, and both would spin up and format at the time, but had well over 20% bad sectors and weren't likely to last more than a few hours in operation. Such were the days. Back then I didn't bother to carry spares in the winter,since a cold drive was a dead drive. And I had to carry them in suspension to avoid damage in the trunk of the car. No parking heads back then. I also tended to keep a small stock, since carrying a drive in a car for a month pretty much guaranteed it was useless.
25 years ago the ST-225 and ST-238 were pretty popular, and more reliable than the 412/506. The ST-2038 and some other models in the 40MB range improved reliability more, though this was the series, along with the ST-138(?) IDE drives were the drives that had the infamous stiction problems, which Conner, Miniscribe, Microscience, and other makers avoided. Stiction was caused by the lubricant used on the platters being a little to 'sticky' and preventing the spindle motor from starting up.
If you have had two drives fail in 20 years, you are either improbably lucky, didn't keep any of them more than 24 months, or have forgotten a few. While being a service tech for so long has left me with hundreds of stories of drive failures, I've easily had a dozen drives fail in my own machines over the past 25 years. I've had as many as 5 machines at home at one time, and sometimes a server might have had 5 drives in it.
All the claims of MTBF and operating life are just guesses and statistical indulgences, in my experience. I see Seagate is quoting reliability as 'Annual Failure Rate'. Well, I still think drives can only be relied upon for a finite amount of time, mostly power-on time, but I think everything has gotten a bit more reliable. Still, if I were in the field, I would recommend clients change their server drives at least every 5 years, preferably 4, and if a second drive failed in an array I would recommend swapping them all out. Customers that don't have downtime are happy customers. And I'd rather choose my service time than get called out on a Friday night.
But I agree that SSD has a ways to go to show reliability even close to megnetic drives. I'm sure they will get there in a few years, maybe 7, but until then SSD is a speed choice or just vanity. Even noise can be dealt with cheaper and more reliably with magnetics. The problems of wear leveling etc are at least as difficult as interface problems and some of the physical issues were similarly notable 15 years ago.
And MacBook Air is not driving the PC industry to SSDs. I suspect form factor will be the driving force.
I'm pretty sure my Sharp MDS-702 plays better then most MP3 players. Your DAT deck is, of course, lossless, and similarly unappreciated.
Just remembering and poking around, I found these guys that were running wireless Linux routers in October 98.
The Open-WRT project was soliciting ideas at least in 1999.
Someone at HP was working on this in 1996. I don't know how far they got before 1998.
I'm suspecting there were other projects back then making good progress. But I can't tell how applicable these are. The HP project is sure interesting.
The ONLY reason I pay the prices to see movies in a theatre is to saturate my popcorn with advanced butter substitute. Oh, and that cheese powder.
If they screw up the popcorn, I would just as soon go to Redbox or Netflix.
And I might, just might, live an extra year. Then again, maybe not, since at home I can have a brot instead.
At the core of this is the assumption that any nation that posseses nuclear weapons has at least the intention to use them if 'necessary'.
But more important than their intention is perhaps the nation's 'investment' in peace or war. More accurately, their cultural investment in survival and in peace.
Nations such as the U.S., Russia, France, the U.K., etc. all have a substantial investment in peace and survivial. They would lose a great deal in a nuclear exchange. This makes Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) a feasible doctrine, since it would require very serious circumstances indeed to spark an exchange among these nations.
India and Pakistan may or may not have the same investment towards the previously named nations, but they do actually have substantial investments in each other, and an exchange between them would have devastating consequences for both. So for them, MAD is a working deterrent, and they have managed fairly well. The previously named nations just don't have sufficient reason to threaten either India or Pakistan and even risk an exchange with them, no matter the capabilities of any party.
North Korea seems to be using their nuclear threat to maintain relevance. They have nothing to gain by attacking anyone, and everything to lose. But they need aid from the rest of the world, and rattling the nuclear dagger they have gets our attention.
China is incrutable. But they are so heavily invested in the world economy now that a nuclear threat seems unthinkable. Besides, they have the heavy metals trade to threaten us with, a much more immediate problem, and one that has the deniability of intent to harm that a nuke just doesn't have. Unfortunately, China may be operating with a worldview that considers decades of opportunity, and we will find them a different adversary in 30 years than they are now.
But Iran, that is a problem. Does Iran have the necessary investment in peace to not use their nuclear arsenal, if and when they possess it, in pursuit of their national goals? Mind you, Iran is a theocracy, and their national goals are influenced by their interpretation of Islam. It should not take much imagination for logical and rational obververs to conceive of a situation where Iran would not just threaten to use a nuclear weapon against another nation, the U.S. being the safest target since we would incur the scorn of much of the world in a nuclear response no matter the provocation. But what about Israel? If Iran could create or take advantage of a situation where Israel was either politically (or militarily?) isolated from most or all of its allies, would Iran find some justification for an attack? My own opinion is that this question cannot be answered with anything but 'quite likely'. In this scenario, Iran needs to be more confident of its position in the geopolitical arena. Saudi Arabia doesn't seem to be an unconditional ally. All other Arab states in the Middle East, even together, do not solve that problem. So Iran needs more powerful allies to survive the attack, both politically and physically. This is where the U.N. Security Council can prevent such a situation from coming to reality, but I have no confidence in them.
And Israel, of course, will be compelled to keep their nuclear arsenal the open secret it is today, as a deterrent. If Israel were to receive a nuclear attack by an Islamic state, the only question would be the intensity of the response. And perhaps the specific target. In the case of Iran, Tehran would be a logical target, but would Israel widen the response, since such a situation would probably involve several states either calling for an assault or at least not objecting? Would Israel also attack Iran's supporters in that scenario? Depends, I think, on their isolation, and the actual resolve of their allies. Emphasis on 'actual'.
There are several methods to assess the willingness of a nuclear state to actually use their arsenal. We need to also consider the state's investment in peace, not just their rhetoric or perceived benefits to them.
But maybe, just maybe, we adjust the corporate Alternative Minimum Tax to .02% of worldwide revenue?
Google would have paid $4.7M on 2009 revenues of $23.651B.
Naw, not enough. How about 2%? $473M taxes? Seems like not a lot.
But wait. From their own results report for Q409:
"Income Taxes - Our effective tax rate was 23% for the fourth quarter of 2009."
Yeah, and someone's nose grew.
Evil. Not any different than any other corporation, just bigger.
Actually, we will never fix this. Corporations don't pay taxes, this is just an expense to them. Their customers pay the taxes.
Both my asthma and rhinitis are histamine responses, in particular by mast cells . Histamines trigger the inflammatory response, which is the immune system kicking in. IgE antibodies inspire the mast cell release, apparently, and I have IgE antibodies that are extremely sensitive to Eastern White Pine, English Plantain, and several other grasses and trees. Not so much ragweed, go figure.
I have particularly aggressive H1 receptors, which are primarily found (from Wikipedia) in "smooth muscle, endothelium, and central nervous system tissue"
Since these receptors are found in my lungs, in the brnchial tubes, it is rational to beleive that transplanting my lungs to someone else will give them my receptors. and since the receptors will generate histamine when triggered by allergens. And I would expect histamine to work the same in the recipient as it did in me, though I have not quite understood the role of IgE antibodies, and if they cause or are the result of the mast cell triggering. It is a safe bet that some of my antibodies will accompany a transplanted lung (or both), so the recipient will get some, and how those survive the transplant process is unknown to me.
BTW, the story is two years old...
Um, the concept that she should not have experienced a reaction since her immune system was not sensitive to peanuts beforehand is flawed.
I enjoy chronic mild asthma, and the cause is my bronchial tubes' reaction to exercise and various allergens. If my lungs were transplanted to someone, I would expect that they would also have asthma, since it is my bronchi that are reacting.
This case is an example of a not very well thought out transplant process. Implanting the lungs of a anaphylactic shock victim into someone doesn't ensure at all that the recipient will not also be subsceptible to shock. It guarantees it.
Wow. what a great mistake. We learned something here that we should have already known.
"If you're a conservative, you worry about it killing us; if you're a liberal, you worry about us killing it."
And you were doing so well. Leave the politics at the door, and try working on actual space problems, eh?
"why don't we modify life ... including the human genome ... so it's better suited to [Mars]?"
How about we figure out how to live on Mars instead? Basically, Mars is a very, very high plain, at an altitude where atmosphere is insufficient for humans to survive on the air alone. How hard is it to drag around a supply of air to breathe? hard? I don't think so. Cold is pretty simple to solve. Go to L.L. Bean before you leave. It's really about getting there, with enough supplies to establish ourselves, and a way to maintain sustainable resources like food.
"Worden also thinks we should go to the moons of Mars first, where we can do extensive telerobotics exploration of the planet. "I think we'll be on the moons of Mars by 2030 or so."
We're doing telerobotics ALREADY ON MARS. Are you aware of that? Sheesh.
"Larry [Page] asked me a couple weeks ago how much it would cost to send people one way to Mars and I told him $10 billion, and his response was, 'Can you get it down to 1 or 2 billion?' So now we're starting to get a little argument over the price."
We were ALWAYS in an argument over the price. So we still are.
I really expect better from NASA. Am I being too harsh? Did I miss something?
I'm guessing they didn't use the engines, that saves a few parts.
But if they preserved the cockpit, woot! Not likely, the instruments were probably worth more than the fuselage. But a working radar disk would be fun, just to point it at visitors. Actuators also are worth more in reuse/salvage than to just be left on parts. Imagine the fun of hydraulic leaks when you tweak the flaps for ventilation...
I wish I could afford to do this. Wicked fun...!
Well, phones mostly use arperture antennas, which are very good. The arperture on an iPhone4 is the slot you short out with your left-hand palm. I stopped studying antennas a long time ago, before these came into popularity, so I'm still fascinated by them.
Wireless ISPs would find arrays useful to improve range, but the expense might make them more useful for higher-value links, like business connections and backhaul. At the extreme of utiilization, an array could allow a mesh to also be self-healing, re-focusing to a 'good' link and continuing operation.
But none of that makes anything cheaper...
Didn't see that coming.
So it begins.
iPhone v Android = Microsoft v Linux
Same issues; relative freedom vs closed architecture, centralized v distributed, perceived quality v perceived user experience, bandwagon v meme.
I suspect the end result is still in doubt for both confrontations.
Jobs isn't running his mouth because he is afraid of Android. He can't help but make it a competitive situation and sell his product at the expense of the competition.
And Google isn't in this just for fun, either.
Ask him, he'll tell you. Catch a few episodes of his show, and you'll know that.
As a businessman, clearly he doesn't want people usign his product for free when he wants to sell it instead.
So of course he speaks out against piracy, real, imagined, significant, or insignificant.
And of course he will sue the pants off anyone that diminishes or devalues his business.
Unless it is bad for business. Then he won't.
Simple. Nothing much to see here.
Oh, and I bet he has enough money to cause a little bit of trouble for some of the providers involved with Anonymous, and maybe ensnare some of the not so smart ones involved. It takes more than money to catch the clever.
This is not new or even especially clever compared to some antenna designs. And it does actually work and has benefits.
Aegis cruisers use a phased-array radar set that solves a multitude of problems - flat panel does not need to be physically articulated or rotated, it 'aims' virtually instananeously, allowing the system to track multiple targets with high precision, and I bet it consumes substantially less power than a moving dish or other types of antennae.
Replacing various reflectors with an array, one managed by a dedicated logic device, sounds like a very cleaver solution. Among the advantages:
- Flat-panel mounting on the side of your building. Neighbors might like the look better.
- Simplified aiming. Let the chip make the adjustments. Might even get an aiming aid built into the array some day, making ti a lot simpler than it has been.
- Possibly, just maybe, this would be a dual-purpose antenna, supporting satellite video and neighborhood WiFi or the equivalent. That's a play some ISPs might be interested in. Probably not your cable company.
The most obvious disadvantages to me are potentially fragile electronics and longevity, same coin different sides.
But this stuff does work.
Now to get it micro-sized to fit into a phone.
My point. If the criteria is as I took the liberty to assume, Token-Ring works fine. So does ArcNet, though speed might be an issue. Appletalk I dunno. The InterPlanetary Network might present some challenges.
The Smart Grid project seems to still be working out the PHY layer.
A lot of it looks pretty generic to me. We have time to see how it goes, apparently.
That would depend on the requirements, wouldn't it?
You seem to be assuming that IP is the only choice for device communication. That's not even true or useful today. There is a whole lot of world out there that doesn't use IP and for good reasons.
Let's start with the requirements, ok? Secure, efficient, fault-tolerant, scalable, and interoperable?
Wow. Token-Ring meets those criteria, along with many, many others.
(I'm hoping ARCNet doesn't get on the list...)
The chiropractor I visit provides me relief and improved health. He studies new techniques and gains new knowledge regularly, even monthly. He gets a lot more ongoing education than any 'gardener' I'm aware of, even the professional applicator I know well - that's pesticide and herbicide sprayer, for those of you who haven't needed to hire one.
The stereotype of chiropractors as quacks is out of date by at least 30 years in my personal experience, and probably 100 years in reality.
I never beleived in them either, but this one is a lot more helpful to me than the allopath I used to see for a sore back, and my chiropractor doesn't prescribe or recommend medication either. Nor supplements. Exercise is his preferred response to preventing my back from getting worse, and he's right so far.
Get into modern times, friend.