Ok, first of all, this will not stand up in court, ever. Virtual desktops have been around forever so it could be easy to argue that they have failed to try to enforce their patent, meaning it should be declared void. Then it is most likely prior art, obviousness, etc...
Here comes the catch. It doesn't matter that they will lose. It is a patent troll company, it doesn't mind going bankrupt. All it cares about is a) a small chance of having people settle out of court b) causing damage to the company they sue, either because of their legal costs, or by scaring investors away. This is one example of how the patent system is broken, you can set up a shell company and use it to cause damage to your competitors without any valid claim at all. If you filibuster the case it will cause them to have to waste a load of cash, it will add uncertainty to their business, etc... The only drawback would be if you get caught with the hand sufficiently far down the cookie jar that you could get sued/tried for corruption, but as we all know, that won't happen.
Wiki is just running out of things to document. They literally have almost anything you can think of. I'm a computer science major and I've wiki'd some really advanced topics that appear on there but hardly anywhere else on the internet.
Sure, but when I want to find the volume isotope shift of Gallium-69 II's hyperfine structure for the 4s5p triplet S_0 - 4s5p triplet P_0 transition, then I'm out of luck. So no, Wikipedia isn't running out of things to document, us geeks just haven't had the time to upload the solutions to all our coursework yet ; )
The term comes from Solid State physics, which in some circles ( i.e my university it seems ) is sloppily used as a synonym for "quantum physics of semiconductors" (There is actually quite a bit more to solid state physics than that, but that is a different matter).
Flash memory exploits Quantum-tunneling ( i.e because particles do not have a certain position they can "tunnel" through a barrier ) in order to store information in small cells, while a traditional harddrive rearranges the magnetic domains of a ferro-magnetic film on the disk. My guess is solid-state storage was just a more "user-friendly" term than TITRRAM (Tunnel Injection - Tunnel Release Random access memory ). However, I have to admit that as it would probably be pronounced as TITRAM, the potential for jokes about Random Access juxtapositioned with TIT would have been much more entertaining ; )
So you are telling me, that despite Windows being pushed with every new OEM computer sold, despite Microsoft's inflated "sales" prices, and despite Linux systems obviously not showing up consistently in "market share" numbers, despite people dual booting to play their games... Linux market share still more than DOUBLED last year? Increasing by 0.5 percentage points from 0.31% to 0.8%.
Greater than unity exponential growth rates Redmond! It's the Penguin, and by the looks of it this will be big...
While i agree that Apple should be forced to sell unlocked phones, modifying a product in a non-approved way DOES invalidate your waranty. Why should the vendor be held reliable if YOU break his software?
a)Apple deliberately made the update brick the phone if third party applications were installed. There is no technical reason for this, other than to prevent people from unlocking their phone. It is not a matter of the customer doing something incompatible, it is a matter of Apple releasing a patch that deliberately destroys the devices of people who have done something they didn't like.
b)While I can agree that they can make their warranty subject to what you do with the phone, this doesn't absolve them from responsibility if there are unrelated defects. As an example, if touch-screen is made from an inferior material and scratches easily, saying "well you modified the software, so tough luck" is not acceptable.
Bad car analogy: If you send your car in for an oil-change and the mechanic notes you have used tieres from a competitor, then it is not acceptable for the mechanic to disable your engine to punish you. Also, if the fuel tank suffers from a design flaw causing it to catch fires in the case of a crash, then saying "you changed the tires, no warranty" is not an acceptable excuse.
Basically this lawyer is throwing up a lot of stuff to see what sticks, in my opinion some of it should.
Based on my experience with Ubuntu, I'd say that the biggest issue is by far hardware vendors. When given ideal hardware Linux will pretty much "just work" but there is a lot of hardware that is not just less than ideal, but quite frankly unusable. I eventually bought a new PCI wireless card because I couldn't get my existing one to work, even with ndiswrapper.
Unfortunately there really isn't a whole lot the developers can do to change this unless hardware vendors start opening their specs. The good news is that a lot of vendors do realize that having the FLOSS community write the drivers is pretty much the cheapest way to outsource development. As a bonus these drivers tend to be a lot more stable as well.
a)Most users don't realize it is easy to copy the flash movies from your/tmp ( or whatever the equivalent is on windows ) and thus it acts as a weak form of DRM, forcing people to return to the site since they don't know how to download a permanent copy.
b)Flash stores data on the client computer ( a bit like cookies ) which is used to snoo... errr... automatically obtain customer feedback.
c)Flash lets you have all kinds of annoying banners, clickable monkeys, advert overlays, etc...
So in short: Control, Data mining, Money
It won't end as such, but eventually competitors that offer a better/different type of service will appear. The old sites won't go away thou, because some people won't care about the adds and continue to use them. Sort of like you get tabloids, magazines and newspapers. At the end of the day, pick the ones you like and ignore the crap. I'm sure there is some firefox plugin which lets you block flash on all pages except the ones you explicitly whitelist ( will somebody link it since I'm ignorant about it ? ).
The article is basically just talking about bandwidth and how it may not be sufficient for video and television. The only solution other than stuff that essentially boils down to "increase bandwidth" is this one:
The equipment analyzes Web traffic to discern whether it is an email, a movie or a phone call and then carves out the bandwidth needed for transmission.
So the solution is to start having ISPs analyze my network traffic ? How about NO ? No thanks. I'd rather they just implement multicast, and don't use lack of bandwidth as an excuse to start spying on the users. Heck, traffic analysis obviously won't work with encrypted content, so shall we have to choose between privacy and quality of service? I for one do NOT welcome our existing overlords snooping more on what we do, and I would prefer it if they stick to net-neutrality and actually implement protocols like multicast, that have been designed to deal with the bandwidth issues.
Well at 19keV the Q value is quite sufficient to put the radiation energies above what you would want in large quantities. Naaa, the reason tritium is harmless is the same reason why it is useless for a battery. Its low decay energy means you need quite a lot of it to get any reasonable punch out.
You mentioned Pu-238, but that is not beta-voltaics, RTGs operate on the thermal energy generated from alpha-decay ( which is higher than beta emission ). Of course, alpha radiation is also a lot more dangerous if you were to ingest a high intensity alpha-emitter, but if you use it to power a pacemaker this is probably not your greatest concern if the device breaks...
Also, while beta-voltaics is perfectly possible, the issue is if it would be practical to draw large amounts of power from them. To do so you would need high energies and large intensities, which would give you trouble with radiation. If you tried to use tritium you would, because of its low decay energy, need a very large quantity, and tritium is not exactly cheap... Also, you are wrong about it not being detectable by any other means than a liquid scintillation counter. At sufficient intensities you would notice it, but typical concentrations of tritium you would encounter by accident are so small that the signal will be overshadowed by noise (of course, if you use a detector with a threshold energy above the incoming radiation you won't see a thing, but that would be true even if you stuck it next to a beam with high enough intensity to melt the detector ).
Basically, the energy you can get out of a radioactive sample is directly proportional to the decay energy, as is the damage the radiation will cause if you ingest or inhale the emitter ( thou other things like biological half-life come into play as well ). So while Polonium-208 with a decay energy hundreds of times that of tritium could give you more battery power, it would be correspondingly more toxic if ingested.
(If he were still alive consumers could also mail them to Ronald Reagan, who stated at one point that if properly processed a year's worth of nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant could be stored under a desk...)
Which is perfectly true. A nuclear reactor produces about 1 cubic meter of high level waste per gigawatt year. Thus depending a bit on the reactor, if you bother to include low-level waste, and what size of desk you are talking about, it could definitely fit under a desk, without trouble. So while Reagan was a bit nutty in a number of ways, on that particular issue he was pretty much spot on ( and no doubt he was probably quoting some scientists who told him that ).
It is just too bad that politics and people who think they are doing the environment a favor keep getting in the way. Had these projects not been repeatedly cancelled on politicall grounds, we would probably have solved the waste issue by now. Luckily killing such an obviously benevolent technology is difficult, so we can still expect actinide transmutation to be comercialised before 2030 or so. As it happens, one of the few sane things Bush has done [probably by accident] was to support the GNEP allowing the US to join , France, Japan, Canada, China , Russia, South Korea and a few other countries in developing these technologies.
From a danger standpoint, anything with an energy density that high is risky.
This is another of those hard to die myths that will have to be debunked over and over again. Consider:
a)Butter has a higher energy density than a laptop battery b)The hydrogen in a cup of water, if fusioned all the way to iron, would release enough energy to flatten a city ( or power it for our entire lifetime). c)A lithium battery holding 0 charge is just as flamable and dangerous as a fully charged one.
I think this myth came about because people figured nuclear = dangerous, and Li-ion = dangerous. In reality things are far from that simple. It is not the energy density of Li-ion batteries that cause them to explode, as an example, it is the fact that they contain lithium, which is a very reactive alkali metal. As I already mentioned, a completely depleted Li-ion battery could still catch fire, and if you pulverised it and poured water on it, it would literarely explode as the liberated hydrogen ignited.
For a car, you could vitrify an isotope like Plutonium-238, forming a very inert ceramic rod which would produce heat at a perfectly predictable rate. It would also be very safe since even if the ZOMG terrorists tried to use it in a dirty bomb, the inert nature of the ceramic would keep the plutonium contained, and as a pure alpha-emitter enclosed in a ceramic, there would be virtually no mentionable radiation release. To give you an idea of how safe such a device could be. They have been used to power pacemakers.
It would also be absolutely useless for a nuclear weapon, even if the pure Pu-238 could be recovered, since weapons need very pure Pu-239. Just the heat generated from Pu-238 would make a fission weapon virtually impossible, and the neutronic properties make it absolutely useless.
The only reasonable risk I could see from such a device would be if it was left in a very enclosed space so that the heat generated would start a fire. This is however a fairly limited engineering problem which is not unique to RTGs. Similar precautions are needed for electric heaters and engines.
Main disadvantage is the ( at present ) fairly high price of Pu-238. Producing it in quantity is a fairly complex process, and it would probably be a lot cheaper to just use regular battery electric vehicles.
Face it, thereis no way to encapsulate high-powerd radiological substances so nobody can get at them. But if people can get at them, the same stuff that lets it produce energy also will kill humans when finely distributed into air, water or the like. For this reason, no such battery will ever be available on the open market.
Tritium is chemically indistinguishable from the hydrogen in water. Now because water molecules exchange hydrogen atoms all the time a sample of tritium in water will be rapidly diluted to harmless concentrations. Similarly, if you happen to ingest or drink some of it, the cure is literarely to go down to the pub and have a number of pints, as that will drive a lot of water through your system, taking the tritium with it.
Really, we encounter more dangerous substances every day. If someone wanted to poison the water, pouring dissolved lead from an old car battery into it would cause much greater problems. The irrational fear of radiation is a bit similar to the retarded safety routines at your local airport. Nail scissors with 1cm blunt blades are prohibited, but there is nothing wrong with buying 3 glass bottles of highly flamable vodka, cigarette lighters, and a number of napkins at the tax free. Heck, my local airport even sells hair-spray which uses propane and butane as propelants.
You have similar irrational behavior when it comes to anything with even a remote chance of causing cancer. Latest one over in Europe was concerns about Titanium dioxide particles in sun-block. Following a headline some people stopped using sun-block, thus exposing themself to the sun's UV rays... and don't get me started on how the signal strength of cellphones would be reduced if the antennae were closer together...
The problem with that logic is that as beta radiation is stopped, the electrons ( beta particles ) emit bremsstrahlung, more commonly known as X-rays. Thus even if you can easily stop the beta radiation itself, the secondary X-rays could be an issue. This is not much of a problem for a small sample of beta-emitter, but if you have enough of it to power a laptop, then it starts becoming a concern.
If you are going to generate large quantities of energy from radioactive decay, then ideally you want a sample which emits a lot of alpha radiation, does not produce large amounts of gamma or bremsstrahlung , and is readily produced in quantities. Perhaps a bit ironicly, one of the safest compounds to use for this is Plutonium-238, which is almost a pure alpha-emitter, produces a lot of energy per decay, and has a halflife in the region where it is readily useful.
Of course, because people will confuse it with Plutonium-239 ( which unlike Pu-238 can be used for nuclear weapons ), and because there is a good old myth that "plutonium is the most toxic compound on earth", it is rather unlikely that Plutonium-238 will ever go into consumer electronics. Doesn't stop NASA from using it in satellites and their Mars probes however. Gotta love politics...
Some improvements that could help: a)The default action for opening a document ( double click ) should not be the same as the default action for executing a binary ( double click ) and installing software ( yep, another double click ). b)Don't offer the option to execute binaries when you hit a link in the web browser. If the user wants to run a binary it goes: download -> execute ( again, not double click ). c)Try to avoid a situation which encourages the user to hit "Allow" without thinking.
Oh, and finally, when it becomes apparent that a program is full of bugs because "features" were pushed in favor of bug fixes... "BAD PROJECT MANAGER! NO BISCUIT!"
The idea here seems to be to force universities and public institutions to use Microsoft as otherwise people will not be able to access their documents from Microsoft's servers. If this is not a good reason to move away from Microsoft's document formats I don't know what is. Sure, today you can just use your stand-alone version of Office, but will Office 2010 make a subscription mandatory? Will Office 2013 still allow you to store your documents locally ? Really, if you thought Google doing "software as a service" was scary, Imagine what happens when the Windows API suddenly starts to display a lot of "bugs" that cause software that is NOT software as a [Microsoft] service to fail... They will never do it? Just like windows update would "only notify you" about new patches. Just like WGA would "let users know they have a genuine copy" ? They have no qualms trying to corrupt the ISO, they have no qualms installing software on your machine without your consent. It is a BadIdea(TM) to trust them with anything of any level of importance.
It would probably work the same way as it does for mobile phones. I.e, you restrict the signal strength so any given transmitter / receiver pair only covers a fairly small area. That way if you have sufficiently many access points you can use the same frequency many many times, in different geographical locations. There are numerous other games you can play ( as all ISPs do ) with regards to contention, traffic shaping etc... With sufficiently smart access points you could give priority to clients that use little bandwidth overall, but want a very rapid burst every now and then. You can also implement various protocols that save bandwidth, like multicast. Basically, after throwing a few "hacks" into the network you can get a remarkably efficient use of that 15MB/s, effectively meaning you use the full 15MB/s rather than having it idle for 90% of the time and then suddenly get choked by a peak in demand. Sad thing is that because this will work much better for unencrypted data ( since you can analyze it better ) it will basically mean that if users are pressured into encrypting their traffic because a couple of players *cough* just can't help but violating people's privacy, then that will negatively impact the performance of the network. Now, the network maintainers obviously won't like that, and thus you can expect to see users who care about their privacy being penalized for encrypting their data. Either actively ( connections dropped, port blocks, subscriptions canceled etc... ) or passively ( encrypted traffic gets lower priority... ).
Excuse me, but how are healthcare and education externalities? Externalities are costs or benefits arising from an economic activity that affect somebody other than the people engaged in the economic activity. I do not see how a person's healthcare or his education is an externality.
Diseases spread, leaving poor people without treatment makes them much more likely to go ill which can in turn infect other people etc... Furthermore sick people are less able to work, and most work benefits society one way or another. Education reduces crime and accidents and increases customer awareness and customers being well informed is a necessity in a free market system.
There cannot be a coercive monopoly in a free market. By definition, one party cannot coerce another into trading (unless you go with the Hayekean definition of coercion) in a 'free' market. Only the state can coerce someone into a transaction. That is why every monopoly that ever existed in the world did so with the assistance of the state.
This is disputed at best. As an example, because resources are scarce it can be perfectly possible for a single player of sufficient size to buy all of them. A phone company could buy all the available phone lines in country, so unless you are going to consider it realistic for competitors to start building a completely new network, you then get a monopoly. The claim that monopolies are impossible in a completely free market is purely hypothetical, because in practice there can be huge barriers to entry which means it would take a very long time for markets to adjust. In some cases it might even be impossible. Imagine a situation where a single company has bought every single Oil well on the planet as an example. The idea that a free market makes monopolies impossible simply doesn't apply when you have barriers to entry, especially not when the resources being traded are essential and sufficiently scarce for a single player to controll all of them. You do however have a point that many monopolies are state sanctioned, I did mention some examples ( copyright , patents ).
ethics was never a component of capitalism, we should not be surprised when companies realize that its more profitable to ignore them.
Ok, for the love of god, stop calling the US economic system capitalism, it isn't, at least not in the way Adam Smith, or even Friedman talked about it. Capitalism assumes that the government limit regulation only to account for externalities ( pollution, healthcare, education etc... ) while simultaneously ensuring that you don't get coercive monopolies. Does this sound like the US today? AT&T is a problem precisely BECAUSE you don't have any meaningful competition. Virtually all of the problems in the US are caused by corrupt decisions that run directly against the idea of utilizing competition in a free market to balance prices. Copyright , Patents, Farmer Subsidies, Trade barriers... you name it.
It appears to me that you have two very common naive interpretations of capitalism. The first is the "libertarian" viewpoint in which the free market is a magical solution to all problems and government intervention is the source of all evil. The second is what I like to call the "hippie" interpretation which blames all problems on capitalism no matter what. I've heard people seriously trying to argue that capitalism is the root cause of homophobia, apparently due to how corporations favor "the nuclear family" or something (I was tempted to suggest that the nuclear family should be banned on environmental concerns because radiation causes cancer, but I figured it was a bad idea. ).
Really, stop blaming every single problem on capitalism ( or communism for that matter ). Reality is that the government is corrupt, which will cause you trouble in a planned economy as well as a market based one. Much of this is the consequence of a bad electoral system which favors only two very similar parties, but thinking that the problem would somehow go away if the US had a more socialistic system is naive at best. It would merely substitute government agencies for corporations. To really deal with it you would have to overhaul the electoral system, but that is not going to happen any time soon.
Biodiesel doesn't contribute to global warming. At all. The "bio" part means the hydrocarbons were synthesized from plant matter; the carbon in those hydrocarbons came from airborne Co2. As long as you plant biofuel crops, process them, and burn them, the total amount of airborne Co2 will never increase. Every ounce of carbon added to the air is matched by an ounce of carbon removed from the air by the fuel plantation.
This is true if and only if you don't chop down a bunch of trees in order to make room for the bio-fuel producing crops. As it happens, deforestation causes CO2 emissions similar in magnitude to fossil fuel use. Thus rather than starting to grow bio-fuel crops, you would be much better of planting trees. This is especially true if you simultaneously retrofit fossil fuel plants with carbon capture and storage technology and start expanding the use of nuclear, solar,wind geothermal and tidal power.
Having said that, if you could find a way to economically grow these algae in water tanks in the dessert or something, then you might have a fairly decent energy source, thou I suspect it would just be a very inefficient solar plant.
It sort of pains me to see all these touted solutions to fuel and energy when we have perfectly valid (and economical ) solutions available. Use Nuclear to generate electricity and hydrogen, short to medium distance travel use batteries, long distance and aviation can use hydrogen or electricity.
Heck, when you factor in service costs batteries are already starting to become competitive for cars, electric trains are well tested, and it has been demonstrated several times that powering jet engines on cryogenic hydrogen is perfectly feasible. Charging times and capacities for batteries are improving every year, and the infra structure for charging batteries ( i.e the electric grid ) is more or less there.
The way I see it, it is only a question of time ( set mainly by how rapidly the oil price is going to rise ) before the majority of fossil fuel consumption is replaced with electric. Aviation is a bit tricky because using batteries will probably not be practical, but on the other hand airlines have predictable schedules, use all their fuel within a few hours, and use a much larger scale than personal cars, and this essentially removes the main problems with liquid hydrogen ( the heat flow through a large container is much easier to deal with since volume increases quicker than surface area as you scale things up ).
Bio-fuels are generally a very bad idea as simply planting trees would soak up way more CO2 than the bio-fuels would save within a century. Also, if used in the form of combustion of ethanol they are not much cleaner than petroleum in terms of all non-CO2 pollutants. You still get soot particles and nitrates from the combustion...
if spy sat so powerful how come the US center wasn't using them to observe Bin Alladin's every move?
To get a decent image spy satellites must be in relatively low orbit. Since the velocity of a satellite depends on its altitude this means they can't stay stationary over a fixed point. To stay focused on a fixed point a satellite would have to be geo-stationary, meaning they orbit the earth at the same [angular] speed as the earth's rotation. This occurs at such a high altitude that you can't get any decent image. As a consequence spy satellites are good at getting very sharp images of things that have a fixed position, or at least a position you know, they are however rather useless for tracking the movements of a small object since they are only in position to view it for a fraction of the day.
If, on the other hand, you are able to put a radio transmitter onto your target, ( like , say , a mobile phone... ) then you have a whole different game. You can then take advantage of the difference in time it takes for the signal to reach 3 or more receivers to triangulate the position with metre ( or better) accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, first of all, this will not stand up in court, ever. Virtual desktops have been around forever so it could be easy to argue that they have failed to try to enforce their patent, meaning it should be declared void. Then it is most likely prior art, obviousness, etc ...
Here comes the catch. It doesn't matter that they will lose. It is a patent troll company, it doesn't mind going bankrupt. All it cares about is a) a small chance of having people settle out of court b) causing damage to the company they sue, either because of their legal costs, or by scaring investors away. This is one example of how the patent system is broken, you can set up a shell company and use it to cause damage to your competitors without any valid claim at all. If you filibuster the case it will cause them to have to waste a load of cash, it will add uncertainty to their business, etc... The only drawback would be if you get caught with the hand sufficiently far down the cookie jar that you could get sued/tried for corruption, but as we all know, that won't happen.
Sure, but when I want to find the volume isotope shift of Gallium-69 II's hyperfine structure for the 4s5p triplet S_0 - 4s5p triplet P_0 transition, then I'm out of luck. So no, Wikipedia isn't running out of things to document, us geeks just haven't had the time to upload the solutions to all our coursework yet ; )
The term comes from Solid State physics, which in some circles ( i.e my university it seems ) is sloppily used as a synonym for "quantum physics of semiconductors" (There is actually quite a bit more to solid state physics than that, but that is a different matter).
Flash memory exploits Quantum-tunneling ( i.e because particles do not have a certain position they can "tunnel" through a barrier ) in order to store information in small cells, while a traditional harddrive rearranges the magnetic domains of a ferro-magnetic film on the disk. My guess is solid-state storage was just a more "user-friendly" term than TITRRAM (Tunnel Injection - Tunnel Release Random access memory ). However, I have to admit that as it would probably be pronounced as TITRAM, the potential for jokes about Random Access juxtapositioned with TIT would have been much more entertaining ; )
So you are telling me, that despite Windows being pushed with every new OEM computer sold, despite Microsoft's inflated "sales" prices, and despite Linux systems obviously not showing up consistently in "market share" numbers, despite people dual booting to play their games... Linux market share still more than DOUBLED last year? Increasing by 0.5 percentage points from 0.31% to 0.8%.
Greater than unity exponential growth rates Redmond! It's the Penguin, and by the looks of it this will be big...
a)Apple deliberately made the update brick the phone if third party applications were installed. There is no technical reason for this, other than to prevent people from unlocking their phone. It is not a matter of the customer doing something incompatible, it is a matter of Apple releasing a patch that deliberately destroys the devices of people who have done something they didn't like.
b)While I can agree that they can make their warranty subject to what you do with the phone, this doesn't absolve them from responsibility if there are unrelated defects. As an example, if touch-screen is made from an inferior material and scratches easily, saying "well you modified the software, so tough luck" is not acceptable.
Bad car analogy: If you send your car in for an oil-change and the mechanic notes you have used tieres from a competitor, then it is not acceptable for the mechanic to disable your engine to punish you. Also, if the fuel tank suffers from a design flaw causing it to catch fires in the case of a crash, then saying "you changed the tires, no warranty" is not an acceptable excuse.
Basically this lawyer is throwing up a lot of stuff to see what sticks, in my opinion some of it should.
Based on my experience with Ubuntu, I'd say that the biggest issue is by far hardware vendors. When given ideal hardware Linux will pretty much "just work" but there is a lot of hardware that is not just less than ideal, but quite frankly unusable. I eventually bought a new PCI wireless card because I couldn't get my existing one to work, even with ndiswrapper.
Unfortunately there really isn't a whole lot the developers can do to change this unless hardware vendors start opening their specs. The good news is that a lot of vendors do realize that having the FLOSS community write the drivers is pretty much the cheapest way to outsource development. As a bonus these drivers tend to be a lot more stable as well.
A number of things.
/tmp ( or whatever the equivalent is on windows ) and thus it acts as a weak form of DRM, forcing people to return to the site since they don't know how to download a permanent copy.
...
a)Most users don't realize it is easy to copy the flash movies from your
b)Flash stores data on the client computer ( a bit like cookies ) which is used to snoo... errr... automatically obtain customer feedback.
c)Flash lets you have all kinds of annoying banners, clickable monkeys, advert overlays, etc
So in short:
Control, Data mining, Money
It won't end as such, but eventually competitors that offer a better/different type of service will appear. The old sites won't go away thou, because some people won't care about the adds and continue to use them. Sort of like you get tabloids, magazines and newspapers. At the end of the day, pick the ones you like and ignore the crap. I'm sure there is some firefox plugin which lets you block flash on all pages except the ones you explicitly whitelist ( will somebody link it since I'm ignorant about it ? ).
So the solution is to start having ISPs analyze my network traffic ? How about NO ? No thanks. I'd rather they just implement multicast, and don't use lack of bandwidth as an excuse to start spying on the users. Heck, traffic analysis obviously won't work with encrypted content, so shall we have to choose between privacy and quality of service? I for one do NOT welcome our existing overlords snooping more on what we do, and I would prefer it if they stick to net-neutrality and actually implement protocols like multicast, that have been designed to deal with the bandwidth issues.
Well at 19keV the Q value is quite sufficient to put the radiation energies above what you would want in large quantities. Naaa, the reason tritium is harmless is the same reason why it is useless for a battery. Its low decay energy means you need quite a lot of it to get any reasonable punch out.
You mentioned Pu-238, but that is not beta-voltaics, RTGs operate on the thermal energy generated from alpha-decay ( which is higher than beta emission ). Of course, alpha radiation is also a lot more dangerous if you were to ingest a high intensity alpha-emitter, but if you use it to power a pacemaker this is probably not your greatest concern if the device breaks...
Also, while beta-voltaics is perfectly possible, the issue is if it would be practical to draw large amounts of power from them. To do so you would need high energies and large intensities, which would give you trouble with radiation. If you tried to use tritium you would, because of its low decay energy, need a very large quantity, and tritium is not exactly cheap... Also, you are wrong about it not being detectable by any other means than a liquid scintillation counter. At sufficient intensities you would notice it, but typical concentrations of tritium you would encounter by accident are so small that the signal will be overshadowed by noise (of course, if you use a detector with a threshold energy above the incoming radiation you won't see a thing, but that would be true even if you stuck it next to a beam with high enough intensity to melt the detector ).
Basically, the energy you can get out of a radioactive sample is directly proportional to the decay energy, as is the damage the radiation will cause if you ingest or inhale the emitter ( thou other things like biological half-life come into play as well ). So while Polonium-208 with a decay energy hundreds of times that of tritium could give you more battery power, it would be correspondingly more toxic if ingested.
1: XOR your encrypted database with 2GB of appropriate "art". ...
2: Explain to the police that your data is encrypted with a OTP
3:
4: Profit!
Plausible deniability is not half as fun as plausible Goatse baiting...
Which is perfectly true. A nuclear reactor produces about 1 cubic meter of high level waste per gigawatt year. Thus depending a bit on the reactor, if you bother to include low-level waste, and what size of desk you are talking about, it could definitely fit under a desk, without trouble. So while Reagan was a bit nutty in a number of ways, on that particular issue he was pretty much spot on ( and no doubt he was probably quoting some scientists who told him that ).
Of course, a far more sensible solution is to recycle the waste and transmute the more troublesome isotopes, meaning the waste will be some 60 times lower in amount, and decay to safe levels within 200 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_fast_reactor#Efficiency_and_Fuel_cycle
It is just too bad that politics and people who think they are doing the environment a favor keep getting in the way. Had these projects not been repeatedly cancelled on politicall grounds, we would probably have solved the waste issue by now. Luckily killing such an obviously benevolent technology is difficult, so we can still expect actinide transmutation to be comercialised before 2030 or so. As it happens, one of the few sane things Bush has done [probably by accident] was to support the GNEP allowing the US to join , France, Japan, Canada, China , Russia, South Korea and a few other countries in developing these technologies.
This is another of those hard to die myths that will have to be debunked over and over again. Consider:
a)Butter has a higher energy density than a laptop battery
b)The hydrogen in a cup of water, if fusioned all the way to iron, would release enough energy to flatten a city ( or power it for our entire lifetime).
c)A lithium battery holding 0 charge is just as flamable and dangerous as a fully charged one.
I think this myth came about because people figured nuclear = dangerous, and Li-ion = dangerous. In reality things are far from that simple. It is not the energy density of Li-ion batteries that cause them to explode, as an example, it is the fact that they contain lithium, which is a very reactive alkali metal. As I already mentioned, a completely depleted Li-ion battery could still catch fire, and if you pulverised it and poured water on it, it would literarely explode as the liberated hydrogen ignited.
For a car, you could vitrify an isotope like Plutonium-238, forming a very inert ceramic rod which would produce heat at a perfectly predictable rate. It would also be very safe since even if the ZOMG terrorists tried to use it in a dirty bomb, the inert nature of the ceramic would keep the plutonium contained, and as a pure alpha-emitter enclosed in a ceramic, there would be virtually no mentionable radiation release. To give you an idea of how safe such a device could be. They have been used to power pacemakers.
It would also be absolutely useless for a nuclear weapon, even if the pure Pu-238 could be recovered, since weapons need very pure Pu-239. Just the heat generated from Pu-238 would make a fission weapon virtually impossible, and the neutronic properties make it absolutely useless.
The only reasonable risk I could see from such a device would be if it was left in a very enclosed space so that the heat generated would start a fire. This is however a fairly limited engineering problem which is not unique to RTGs. Similar precautions are needed for electric heaters and engines.
Main disadvantage is the ( at present ) fairly high price of Pu-238. Producing it in quantity is a fairly complex process, and it would probably be a lot cheaper to just use regular battery electric vehicles.
Tritium is chemically indistinguishable from the hydrogen in water. Now because water molecules exchange hydrogen atoms all the time a sample of tritium in water will be rapidly diluted to harmless concentrations. Similarly, if you happen to ingest or drink some of it, the cure is literarely to go down to the pub and have a number of pints, as that will drive a lot of water through your system, taking the tritium with it.
Really, we encounter more dangerous substances every day. If someone wanted to poison the water, pouring dissolved lead from an old car battery into it would cause much greater problems. The irrational fear of radiation is a bit similar to the retarded safety routines at your local airport. Nail scissors with 1cm blunt blades are prohibited, but there is nothing wrong with buying 3 glass bottles of highly flamable vodka, cigarette lighters, and a number of napkins at the tax free. Heck, my local airport even sells hair-spray which uses propane and butane as propelants.
You have similar irrational behavior when it comes to anything with even a remote chance of causing cancer. Latest one over in Europe was concerns about Titanium dioxide particles in sun-block. Following a headline some people stopped using sun-block, thus exposing themself to the sun's UV rays... and don't get me started on how the signal strength of cellphones would be reduced if the antennae were closer together...
Oh well... .
The problem with that logic is that as beta radiation is stopped, the electrons ( beta particles ) emit bremsstrahlung, more commonly known as X-rays. Thus even if you can easily stop the beta radiation itself, the secondary X-rays could be an issue. This is not much of a problem for a small sample of beta-emitter, but if you have enough of it to power a laptop, then it starts becoming a concern.
If you are going to generate large quantities of energy from radioactive decay, then ideally you want a sample which emits a lot of alpha radiation, does not produce large amounts of gamma or bremsstrahlung , and is readily produced in quantities. Perhaps a bit ironicly, one of the safest compounds to use for this is Plutonium-238, which is almost a pure alpha-emitter, produces a lot of energy per decay, and has a halflife in the region where it is readily useful.
Of course, because people will confuse it with Plutonium-239 ( which unlike Pu-238 can be used for nuclear weapons ), and because there is a good old myth that "plutonium is the most toxic compound on earth", it is rather unlikely that Plutonium-238 will ever go into consumer electronics. Doesn't stop NASA from using it in satellites and their Mars probes however. Gotta love politics...
Some improvements that could help:
a)The default action for opening a document ( double click ) should not be the same as the default action for executing a binary ( double click ) and installing software ( yep, another double click ).
b)Don't offer the option to execute binaries when you hit a link in the web browser. If the user wants to run a binary it goes: download -> execute ( again, not double click ).
c)Try to avoid a situation which encourages the user to hit "Allow" without thinking.
Oh, and finally, when it becomes apparent that a program is full of bugs because "features" were pushed in favor of bug fixes...
"BAD PROJECT MANAGER! NO BISCUIT!"
The idea here seems to be to force universities and public institutions to use Microsoft as otherwise people will not be able to access their documents from Microsoft's servers. If this is not a good reason to move away from Microsoft's document formats I don't know what is. Sure, today you can just use your stand-alone version of Office, but will Office 2010 make a subscription mandatory? Will Office 2013 still allow you to store your documents locally ? Really, if you thought Google doing "software as a service" was scary, Imagine what happens when the Windows API suddenly starts to display a lot of "bugs" that cause software that is NOT software as a [Microsoft] service to fail... They will never do it? Just like windows update would "only notify you" about new patches. Just like WGA would "let users know they have a genuine copy" ? They have no qualms trying to corrupt the ISO, they have no qualms installing software on your machine without your consent. It is a BadIdea(TM) to trust them with anything of any level of importance.
It would probably work the same way as it does for mobile phones. I.e, you restrict the signal strength so any given transmitter / receiver pair only covers a fairly small area. That way if you have sufficiently many access points you can use the same frequency many many times, in different geographical locations. There are numerous other games you can play ( as all ISPs do ) with regards to contention, traffic shaping etc... With sufficiently smart access points you could give priority to clients that use little bandwidth overall, but want a very rapid burst every now and then. You can also implement various protocols that save bandwidth, like multicast. Basically, after throwing a few "hacks" into the network you can get a remarkably efficient use of that 15MB/s, effectively meaning you use the full 15MB/s rather than having it idle for 90% of the time and then suddenly get choked by a peak in demand. Sad thing is that because this will work much better for unencrypted data ( since you can analyze it better ) it will basically mean that if users are pressured into encrypting their traffic because a couple of players *cough* just can't help but violating people's privacy, then that will negatively impact the performance of the network. Now, the network maintainers obviously won't like that, and thus you can expect to see users who care about their privacy being penalized for encrypting their data. Either actively ( connections dropped, port blocks, subscriptions canceled etc... ) or passively ( encrypted traffic gets lower priority... ).
So how long do people think it is for Google to start a music downloading service? Lets me see...
a)Bandwidth , check
b)Storage capacity, check
c)Revenue stream, check ( subscription / adds )
d)Search, check
e)Marketing, check
f)...
h)Profit! (I'm sincerely sorry, but it didn't feel right to leave it out.)
Question is if they will write it themself or if they are waiting for somebody else to do the hard work so they can buy it.
Sadly the parent should be moderated insightful rather than funny.
Diseases spread, leaving poor people without treatment makes them much more likely to go ill which can in turn infect other people etc... Furthermore sick people are less able to work, and most work benefits society one way or another. Education reduces crime and accidents and increases customer awareness and customers being well informed is a necessity in a free market system.
This is disputed at best. As an example, because resources are scarce it can be perfectly possible for a single player of sufficient size to buy all of them. A phone company could buy all the available phone lines in country, so unless you are going to consider it realistic for competitors to start building a completely new network, you then get a monopoly. The claim that monopolies are impossible in a completely free market is purely hypothetical, because in practice there can be huge barriers to entry which means it would take a very long time for markets to adjust. In some cases it might even be impossible. Imagine a situation where a single company has bought every single Oil well on the planet as an example. The idea that a free market makes monopolies impossible simply doesn't apply when you have barriers to entry, especially not when the resources being traded are essential and sufficiently scarce for a single player to controll all of them. You do however have a point that many monopolies are state sanctioned, I did mention some examples ( copyright , patents ).
Ok, for the love of god, stop calling the US economic system capitalism, it isn't, at least not in the way Adam Smith, or even Friedman talked about it. Capitalism assumes that the government limit regulation only to account for externalities ( pollution, healthcare, education etc... ) while simultaneously ensuring that you don't get coercive monopolies. Does this sound like the US today? AT&T is a problem precisely BECAUSE you don't have any meaningful competition. Virtually all of the problems in the US are caused by corrupt decisions that run directly against the idea of utilizing competition in a free market to balance prices. Copyright , Patents, Farmer Subsidies, Trade barriers... you name it.
It appears to me that you have two very common naive interpretations of capitalism. The first is the "libertarian" viewpoint in which the free market is a magical solution to all problems and government intervention is the source of all evil. The second is what I like to call the "hippie" interpretation which blames all problems on capitalism no matter what. I've heard people seriously trying to argue that capitalism is the root cause of homophobia, apparently due to how corporations favor "the nuclear family" or something (I was tempted to suggest that the nuclear family should be banned on environmental concerns because radiation causes cancer, but I figured it was a bad idea. ).
Really, stop blaming every single problem on capitalism ( or communism for that matter ). Reality is that the government is corrupt, which will cause you trouble in a planned economy as well as a market based one. Much of this is the consequence of a bad electoral system which favors only two very similar parties, but thinking that the problem would somehow go away if the US had a more socialistic system is naive at best. It would merely substitute government agencies for corporations. To really deal with it you would have to overhaul the electoral system, but that is not going to happen any time soon.
This is true if and only if you don't chop down a bunch of trees in order to make room for the bio-fuel producing crops. As it happens, deforestation causes CO2 emissions similar in magnitude to fossil fuel use. Thus rather than starting to grow bio-fuel crops, you would be much better of planting trees. This is especially true if you simultaneously retrofit fossil fuel plants with carbon capture and storage technology and start expanding the use of nuclear, solar,wind geothermal and tidal power.
Having said that, if you could find a way to economically grow these algae in water tanks in the dessert or something, then you might have a fairly decent energy source, thou I suspect it would just be a very inefficient solar plant.
It sort of pains me to see all these touted solutions to fuel and energy when we have perfectly valid (and economical ) solutions available. Use Nuclear to generate electricity and hydrogen, short to medium distance travel use batteries, long distance and aviation can use hydrogen or electricity. Heck, when you factor in service costs batteries are already starting to become competitive for cars, electric trains are well tested, and it has been demonstrated several times that powering jet engines on cryogenic hydrogen is perfectly feasible. Charging times and capacities for batteries are improving every year, and the infra structure for charging batteries ( i.e the electric grid ) is more or less there. The way I see it, it is only a question of time ( set mainly by how rapidly the oil price is going to rise ) before the majority of fossil fuel consumption is replaced with electric. Aviation is a bit tricky because using batteries will probably not be practical, but on the other hand airlines have predictable schedules, use all their fuel within a few hours, and use a much larger scale than personal cars, and this essentially removes the main problems with liquid hydrogen ( the heat flow through a large container is much easier to deal with since volume increases quicker than surface area as you scale things up ). Bio-fuels are generally a very bad idea as simply planting trees would soak up way more CO2 than the bio-fuels would save within a century. Also, if used in the form of combustion of ethanol they are not much cleaner than petroleum in terms of all non-CO2 pollutants. You still get soot particles and nitrates from the combustion ...