Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?
That's a french Minitel terminal (their videotex system, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). The telephone company gave people free terminals if they would forgo printed telephone books. Remeber, this was the early 80:s so there must have been enough people with less than stellar keyboard skills who'd rather peck away on a ABC-keyboard than hunt around on a AZERTY-keyboard if given the choice. But I'm pretty certain that most terminals had the french standard AZERTY keyboard (here's the Minitel 1 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Minitel_1.JPG )
Re:Well There Goes Archival Color Photography
on
Kodak Kills Kodachrome
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I seriously doubt that. Unless they've been stored in sub-zero conditions, I guarantee you that your film has faded over the last twenty years. I suggest you read Henry Wilhelm's "The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs", the definitive work on traditional photographic permanence.
I'll reiterate something I've posted before: If the US patent system diverges far enough from the global average of rights when it comes to patents then the US market will become too expensive to both develop for and enter into. So anyone who knows how to game the system better will be given a competetive advantage. If you need to engage in market conditions that differ to much from the global average then that market becomes a high risk one. The result could easily be that there is some additonal protection for companies that are only based in the US. For multinationals and foreign companies it will become too risky to enter into and that will lead them looking to the global market as their primary market and the US as a secondary market because of the inherent risks.
I don't think any economy is going to prosper in the long run by excluding actual innovation. They will end up with second-generation inventions.
I think I know what the answer probably is, that it really was about political pressure or bribery, but I'd like to give Swedish courts the benefit of the doubt first and see the reasoning behind the decision. Does the Swedish legal system make this sort of thing available?
I'd say it's very improbable that it's polital pressure or bribery behind the verdict since Sweden is one of the least corrupt countries in the world (according to Transparency International) and judges aren't elected, they are civil servants. I think the reason is that the court isn't familiar enough with these new developments and might be lacking the ability to comprehend them. After all, there's a reason they're sitting in the first judicial instance and not judging in the appeals court.
The full court opionion is probably already out but it will take some time for people to read and analyze it. So keep your eyes open for more information.
I'm guessing it will be worth it mostly because I think your basic assumption of how they're going to do it is incorrect.
I think they will apply the same methods as when they did decide to crack down on large scale internet auction sellers. Basically they identified people selling a large quantities of identical stuff (anything from electronics to beauty products). Some of them were indeed brick and mortar merchant doing at bit of unreported side trading or just people running an unregistered online business. So I think it goes: identify persons behind the business (in this case stripping), audit those people and if necessary take them to court. If you work as an online stripper with unexplained cash you'll probably need a pretty good explanation where the money came from if you want to avoid backtaxes.
I doubt they will spend more than 1 man-year on this projekt. And the people doing the work will be Tax Office agents so I think they'll be more effective than police officers in this case.
The Pierre Auger Observatory (http://www.auger.org/observatory/) records one 10^19 eV hit per km^2 a year, just on earth. If that hasn't turned up any major anomalies in our solar system or even in the major mass centers in our close vicinity over the billions of years it's been happening then I would like an explantion why.
If the US patent system diverges far enough from the global average rights of patents then the US market will become too expensive to both develop for and enter into. Of course the US market is a major one but if the worldwide market share is bigger it means that the risks in the US (submarine patents etc) are not worth spending your money on primarily. So it will protect the US companies on their home turf. But multinational companpanies, even US based, will be looking at the US as a secondary market because of the risks.
The Advertising Standards Authority is the independent body set up by the advertising industry to police the rules laid down in the advertising codes. The strength of the self-regulatory system lies in both the independence of the ASA and the support and commitment of the advertising industry...
And Gregory Benford didn't adress a new problem either, it's well known problem that's been on the table for quite some time. Even the Department of Energy formed a panel to examine the problem in the 1980s (see this Time Magazine article from 1984 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,926980,00.html )
I heard about it the first time when I took a human-computer interaction course in the early 90s.
My advice would be the one which you can find a decent degree of personal interest in. Your choice in education is hopefully a result of your personal interests and not something you've simply been told "is good" for you and this of course increases your chances in succeding both with education and career. I believe the same thing goes for learing anything else that might be somewhat tangential to your direct goals.
As for what counts as personal interest of course depends entirely on yourself. Wanting to use it to further an international career, or being of use in a multicultural setting where you live or just having an interest in the countries where it's used in general are all valid reasons in my book. Just to mention a few reasons.
I found it amazing that the simplest known lifeform that can reproduce independently is the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria, with 582970 base pairs! This probably isn't the simplest one that can theoretically exist - it is hard to imagine the right combination out of 4^582970 appearing at random in the pre-life organic soup - but whatever simpler thing existed before it is a mystery, as well as why none of the simpler forms still exist today (if that is the case).
As for why the simpler forms don't exist? One theory that I came up with just by actually trying to think about it in a creative way is this: maybe life only arose in one proteced place and evolved there until it could live outside that specific and protected biotope. Maybe it's still around somewhere but there's not much chance finding it. My favourite theory for where life began is somewhere relativly deep in the bedrock since it would provide a stable environment and also a possible energy source. Today we have lithotrop bacteria living hundreds of meters down in bedrock where they get their energy from oxidizing iron which isn't that chemically complex. Then add the fact that bacteria often swap genetic material with eachother so it's pretty safe to assume that their precursors did as well then the result would be a reasonably fast evolution in a confined biotope where the more fit individuals would easily outcompete their older relatives.
You do realise that while there a some things that both cars have in common there's quite a lot more that differs between a ultrahigh mileage experimental vehicle and a road-registerable car usable in everyday traffic. Things that come to mind is having: a performance in both speed and acceleration that doesn't make it a slightly mobile roadblock, safety regarding both collision and usability, and comfortable enough to actually be usable.
The isopropanol I have at home isn't labeled as rubbing alcohol but as electronic cleaing spray because it disolves oily substances but doesn't readily interact easily with electronic equipment.
It is important to note that open source developers, whether commercial or non-commercial, will not need a patent license for the development of implementations of these protocols or for the non-commercial distribution of these implementations, according to Microsoft's Patent Pledge for Open Source Developers.
The wiki software, MediaWiki, was written for Wikipedia and is licensed under the GPL ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_does_MediaWiki_work%3F. According to Wikipedia they use MySQL as their database and run it all on Linux servers.
Yeah, I doubt that Google would want to acquire a major defense contractor (the automotive part was sold to GM and the rest remained in Sweden for most parts). The SAAB AT4 has even been adopteb by the US Army where it's know as the M136 antitank grenade launcher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M136)
As I said, it's not for everyone but just using "average person" isn't good enough. Potential users are those who live outside cities where broadband isn't available but 3G is (not extremly uncommon here), people who live in more than one place (weekend commuters, people with summer cottages... there's one summer cottage for every two households in Sweden) and it's also useful for people who travel in work so they don't need to hassle their customers for net access or search for wifi.
And then we have the people who feel they want to be able to be online anywhere and everywhere. They don't need it but they want it and think it's worth paying something for.
They're not anywhere near a majority. But it all adds up to a sizeable market anyway.
Just grabbed one of the many junkmail papers i find in my IRL mailbox here in Sweden: If you sign up for a 24 month plan on mobile 3G broadband (at $70 a month) you get a Toshiba 15" laptop with 3 GB memory, Athlon X2 and 250 GB hd for $170.
For some people that kind of offer makes sense, for others not. But this is just one of several offers that I find in my mail every month. And you bet the buyers will pay the monthly fee, one way or another. Just like with cellphones.
The eight move permutation I use on a Rubiks cube with the corners done is:
Turn "right side" a quarter turn towards you
Turn "bottom layer" a quarter turn to the left
Turn "right side" a quarter turn away from you
Turn "center layer" a quarter turn to the right
Turn "right side" a quarter turn towards you
Turn "bottom layer" a quarter turn to the right
Turn "right side" a quarter turn away from you
Turn "middle layer" a quarter to the left
Those 8 moves will shift places of 3 edge pieces, the two in the middle layer closest to you and the bottom one furthest away from you. And carefully applied that's all I need, with the minor variation that the center layer turn is either left, right or a half full turn. Of course I actually use other move-patterns as well but they're basically just for speed/convenience.
I actually found one of the solutions (obviously not uniquely) for the Rubiks Cube myself. It ended up to be the "corners first"-type of solution which I think is quite a natural way to reach a solution (it's basically a divide and conquer algorithm). If you can put the corners in their right place you only need to use a 8 move permutation to solve the rest which I call "the cross"-pieces.
So I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this as being the obvious but not perfect solution?
Slashdot Mirror
You're mixing up power gain with voltage gain. This wikipedia article explains it pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gain
Nothing going that far back but http://www.euroncap.com/home.aspx has some somewhat older results. For example, the 2006 Civic (http://www.euroncap.com/tests/honda_civic_2006/270.aspx) compares quite favourably with the 1998 Civic (http://www.euroncap.com/tests/honda_civic_1998/35.aspx). Looks like they changed to a new rating scheme this year though.
Also, check out the keyboard on this beast! Not QUERTY. Not DVORAK. Who thought that would be a good idea?
That's a french Minitel terminal (their videotex system, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel). The telephone company gave people free terminals if they would forgo printed telephone books. Remeber, this was the early 80:s so there must have been enough people with less than stellar keyboard skills who'd rather peck away on a ABC-keyboard than hunt around on a AZERTY-keyboard if given the choice. But I'm pretty certain that most terminals had the french standard AZERTY keyboard (here's the Minitel 1 http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Minitel_1.JPG )
I seriously doubt that. Unless they've been stored in sub-zero conditions, I guarantee you that your film has faded over the last twenty years. I suggest you read Henry Wilhelm's "The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs", the definitive work on traditional photographic permanence.
And the book is available for free download here: http://www.wilhelm-research.com/book_toc.html
In the long term: yes. In the short term: no.
I'll reiterate something I've posted before: If the US patent system diverges far enough from the global average of rights when it comes to patents then the US market will become too expensive to both develop for and enter into. So anyone who knows how to game the system better will be given a competetive advantage. If you need to engage in market conditions that differ to much from the global average then that market becomes a high risk one. The result could easily be that there is some additonal protection for companies that are only based in the US. For multinationals and foreign companies it will become too risky to enter into and that will lead them looking to the global market as their primary market and the US as a secondary market because of the inherent risks.
I don't think any economy is going to prosper in the long run by excluding actual innovation. They will end up with second-generation inventions.
I think I know what the answer probably is, that it really was about political pressure or bribery, but I'd like to give Swedish courts the benefit of the doubt first and see the reasoning behind the decision. Does the Swedish legal system make this sort of thing available?
I'd say it's very improbable that it's polital pressure or bribery behind the verdict since Sweden is one of the least corrupt countries in the world (according to Transparency International) and judges aren't elected, they are civil servants. I think the reason is that the court isn't familiar enough with these new developments and might be lacking the ability to comprehend them. After all, there's a reason they're sitting in the first judicial instance and not judging in the appeals court.
The full court opionion is probably already out but it will take some time for people to read and analyze it. So keep your eyes open for more information.
I'm guessing it will be worth it mostly because I think your basic assumption of how they're going to do it is incorrect.
I think they will apply the same methods as when they did decide to crack down on large scale internet auction sellers. Basically they identified people selling a large quantities of identical stuff (anything from electronics to beauty products). Some of them were indeed brick and mortar merchant doing at bit of unreported side trading or just people running an unregistered online business. So I think it goes: identify persons behind the business (in this case stripping), audit those people and if necessary take them to court. If you work as an online stripper with unexplained cash you'll probably need a pretty good explanation where the money came from if you want to avoid backtaxes.
I doubt they will spend more than 1 man-year on this projekt. And the people doing the work will be Tax Office agents so I think they'll be more effective than police officers in this case.
The LHC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lhc) has a collison energy of in the TeV scale (tera = 10^12)
The Pierre Auger Observatory (http://www.auger.org/observatory/) records one 10^19 eV hit per km^2 a year, just on earth. If that hasn't turned up any major anomalies in our solar system or even in the major mass centers in our close vicinity over the billions of years it's been happening then I would like an explantion why.
If the US patent system diverges far enough from the global average rights of patents then the US market will become too expensive to both develop for and enter into. Of course the US market is a major one but if the worldwide market share is bigger it means that the risks in the US (submarine patents etc) are not worth spending your money on primarily. So it will protect the US companies on their home turf. But multinational companpanies, even US based, will be looking at the US as a secondary market because of the risks.
SSD don't have seek times so all blocks have the same access times which means that fragmentation isn't an issue.
Source:http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/about/
And Gregory Benford didn't adress a new problem either, it's well known problem that's been on the table for quite some time. Even the Department of Energy formed a panel to examine the problem in the 1980s (see this Time Magazine article from 1984 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,926980,00.html )
I heard about it the first time when I took a human-computer interaction course in the early 90s.
My advice would be the one which you can find a decent degree of personal interest in. Your choice in education is hopefully a result of your personal interests and not something you've simply been told "is good" for you and this of course increases your chances in succeding both with education and career. I believe the same thing goes for learing anything else that might be somewhat tangential to your direct goals.
As for what counts as personal interest of course depends entirely on yourself. Wanting to use it to further an international career, or being of use in a multicultural setting where you live or just having an interest in the countries where it's used in general are all valid reasons in my book. Just to mention a few reasons.
Of course if you put it that by saying "4^582970 is astounding" and don't consider the mechanisms that it describes it sounds extremely improbable. But if you consider that all the avialable codons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codon) only code for 20 different amino acids it's still one huge set of available chemichal compounds but it's enormously less than a 4^582970 coin toss (for amino acids see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_standard_amino_acids and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codons#RNA_codon_table )
As for why the simpler forms don't exist? One theory that I came up with just by actually trying to think about it in a creative way is this: maybe life only arose in one proteced place and evolved there until it could live outside that specific and protected biotope. Maybe it's still around somewhere but there's not much chance finding it. My favourite theory for where life began is somewhere relativly deep in the bedrock since it would provide a stable environment and also a possible energy source. Today we have lithotrop bacteria living hundreds of meters down in bedrock where they get their energy from oxidizing iron which isn't that chemically complex. Then add the fact that bacteria often swap genetic material with eachother so it's pretty safe to assume that their precursors did as well then the result would be a reasonably fast evolution in a confined biotope where the more fit individuals would easily outcompete their older relatives.
Disclaimer: I'm no molecular biologist.
You do realise that while there a some things that both cars have in common there's quite a lot more that differs between a ultrahigh mileage experimental vehicle and a road-registerable car usable in everyday traffic. Things that come to mind is having: a performance in both speed and acceleration that doesn't make it a slightly mobile roadblock, safety regarding both collision and usability, and comfortable enough to actually be usable.
Isopropanol would also be my choice of cleaning agent.
Not only is it a disinfectant but it's regularly used as a cleaing agent for electronics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isopropyl_alcohol
The isopropanol I have at home isn't labeled as rubbing alcohol but as electronic cleaing spray because it disolves oily substances but doesn't readily interact easily with electronic equipment.
The wiki software, MediaWiki, was written for Wikipedia and is licensed under the GPL ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_does_MediaWiki_work%3F. According to Wikipedia they use MySQL as their database and run it all on Linux servers.
You remember correctly, here is the year 2000 New York Times article covering the case: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/technology/23PORN.html?ex=1214452800&en=6a4a8bd6fbec1199&ei=5070
According to the article it only took the jury a few minutes to find him not guilty.
Yeah, I doubt that Google would want to acquire a major defense contractor (the automotive part was sold to GM and the rest remained in Sweden for most parts). The SAAB AT4 has even been adopteb by the US Army where it's know as the M136 antitank grenade launcher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M136)
As I said, it's not for everyone but just using "average person" isn't good enough. Potential users are those who live outside cities where broadband isn't available but 3G is (not extremly uncommon here), people who live in more than one place (weekend commuters, people with summer cottages... there's one summer cottage for every two households in Sweden) and it's also useful for people who travel in work so they don't need to hassle their customers for net access or search for wifi.
And then we have the people who feel they want to be able to be online anywhere and everywhere. They don't need it but they want it and think it's worth paying something for.
They're not anywhere near a majority. But it all adds up to a sizeable market anyway.
Just grabbed one of the many junkmail papers i find in my IRL mailbox here in Sweden: If you sign up for a 24 month plan on mobile 3G broadband (at $70 a month) you get a Toshiba 15" laptop with 3 GB memory, Athlon X2 and 250 GB hd for $170. For some people that kind of offer makes sense, for others not. But this is just one of several offers that I find in my mail every month. And you bet the buyers will pay the monthly fee, one way or another. Just like with cellphones.
The eight move permutation I use on a Rubiks cube with the corners done is:
Turn "right side" a quarter turn towards you
Turn "bottom layer" a quarter turn to the left
Turn "right side" a quarter turn away from you
Turn "center layer" a quarter turn to the right
Turn "right side" a quarter turn towards you
Turn "bottom layer" a quarter turn to the right
Turn "right side" a quarter turn away from you
Turn "middle layer" a quarter to the left
Those 8 moves will shift places of 3 edge pieces, the two in the middle layer closest to you and the bottom one furthest away from you. And carefully applied that's all I need, with the minor variation that the center layer turn is either left, right or a half full turn. Of course I actually use other move-patterns as well but they're basically just for speed/convenience.
Ehum, of course I meant the same 8 move permutation applied many times, not just once. Sorry.
I actually found one of the solutions (obviously not uniquely) for the Rubiks Cube myself. It ended up to be the "corners first"-type of solution which I think is quite a natural way to reach a solution (it's basically a divide and conquer algorithm). If you can put the corners in their right place you only need to use a 8 move permutation to solve the rest which I call "the cross"-pieces.
So I'm curious if anyone else has experienced this as being the obvious but not perfect solution?