Posts by Eddy Ito 4662 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2007
It's certainly not "free energy" but it does lead to an interesting question of efficiency. If they can make the whole process more efficient than many existing processes and can get the needed power out of it then it could become an interesting alternative for high drain devices such as electric wheel chairs. It would be pretty nice to replace a lot of battery weight with a small refillable water tank and a packet of silicon balls.
Even in sprawling urban areas there is often only one other choice. Right now I can pick TWC or Verizon but if I moved a few blocks I could pick TWC or AT&T and about one street can pick any of the three. I'd wager, after suffering for months with them, that TWC aren't able to provide the service anyway because the ISDN speeds they offer simply isn't up to the job unless you want to watch at 2:30 AM when it rockets up to nearly 640 kbits/s. Now if I could just get Verizon to fix the jitter problem so I could have decent VOIP service. The whole exercise is a bit like saying they're renting you a Ferrari that can go "up to" 200 mph but giving you pothole and boulder strewn concrete roadway that runs through downtown LA at rush hour.
"Because Wifi doesn't receive phone calls, which is probably the primary purpose of having a phone connected to a mobile phone network."
Sure it does. You just need a handset that is capable and a service provider who has caught up with half decade old GAN/UMA technology. When at home my own mother uses her Sidekick to call over wifi, it was the feature that got her to switch to T-mob.
"otherwise the good ole governement will whip your arse for tax evasion"
As a product of public education in the US, I don't do my taxes anymore because it is now sufficiently complex and changes so often it is more cost effective for me to hire a specialist and I'm lucky enough to have a family friend who is a recently retired IRS auditor who does it for a nominal fee and a fancy dinner.
"carefully selecting investments, selling assets and strengthening control of working capital such as inventory."
Is it possible that Sony made, or is still making, the same mistake that everyone who used their house as a checkbook in the run up to the great economic dry heaves of late? Somehow I doubt it and this is PR using the term asset to mean a money sink that some other fool will think is valuable. Let's be honest, on the balance sheet the real difference between an investment and an asset is pronunciation just like the twins liabilities and expenses on the other side. Put another way one side is the stuff that makes money and the other side is the stuff that takes money.
A corporate HQ is just like your house and it shouldn't be placed on the asset side of the sheet ever because it doesn't produce an income. I know some folks like to think the value goes up and therefore it's an investment but it isn't because you have to live somewhere and if you're lucky the best you get is to sell the big house, move into a small house and hopefully have some cash left to visit [insert warm place or grandkids here] every year. Sony has the same issue, the McMansion they bought it a little too big for them to handle so they are going to move to a cheap cottage they can afford. It's an indication that unless Sony can turn it around, these are their twilight years.
"See those red sweets in the supermarket? Many of them are literally coloured with the blood of animals."
I do believe you are thinking of carminic acid that is produced by an insect called a cochineal. The insect actually produces the acid as a defense against predators such as ants. It also just happens to be good as red dye because it doesn't change color over time and it can get the "all natural" moniker. Red blood on the other hand would be a poor red dye because it changes to a brownish color quite rapidly, at least on the white dress shirt I was wearing to a wedding when I hadn't noticed the razor nick until parking the car.
"a reinvented desert eagle with todays metals, would server more use with 3 people having them with 10 clips each"
Two points, first I have a 30+ year old shotgun that weighs a tick over 8 lb not 8 kg and the ones made with "todays metals" run closer to 7 lb but most of that is in the synthetic stock not the metal bits. Second, you need to learn a little about material stress so here's a quick primer. A higher pressure round needs more material to keep it from coming apart in all the wrong directions and the larger the diameter is the larger the stress in the metal so again more metal is required to keep it from coming apart. No matter what you do it will still require a certain amount of high strength steel unless you have far more dollars than sense and don't go thinking that S&W's scandium frames are much more than an expensive aluminium alloy and such a wonderful modern technology because aluminum frames have been around since about the 1950s.
" the weight of a volume of pure water 0.1m x 0.1m x 0.1m"
There remains a problem even if you can get pure 1H216O and that is water has this nasty habit of changing it's density with pressure and temperature and is most dense around 4 degrees C at "normal" atmospheric pressure.
Reading the paper the gallium nitride has a high refractive index, similar to that of diamond, and therefore has a low critical angle of 23 degrees. That means any light coming to the surface at an angle greater than 23 degrees from the normal is reflected internally. In general it doesn't work the other way around but I could see where if a solar cell has a similar refractive index the pyramids may allow the light into the solar cells and any light reflected back up toward the surface has a better chance of being reflected back inside the cell rather than just leaving as it came in. Sort of like an internal retroreflector or a light trap if you will. Very cool stuff indeed.
"it works by reflection, rather than refraction."
No, it is certainly a refractive device. Essentially it's just a regular lens with the thickness cut out. If you take a normal round plano-convex lens and slice it into thin round sheets then bore a hole in each slice such that the next smaller slice fits inside it you will have made a Fresnel lens. This gets rid of a lot of weight and I imagine if one is going to walk a lens to the top of a lighthouse it makes sense to use a lightweight lens (ouch).
"when they have perfectly good (free) drinking water available."
I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't live in an American city. The water here, in SoCal at least, is neither free nor perfectly good as there are times when I open the raw tap and the aroma immediately reminds me of the hyper-chlorinated pool I learned to swim in as a child. Needless to say the water that goes into my coffee maker is thrice filtered with the last stage being reverse osmosis. Before the city we had nearly perfect water with tds of 50 ppm and a pH of 6.6 coming from 630 ft below ground.
I quick scan of the neighborhood shows there are only two 5 GHz wifi SSIDs in the area, one is mine and the other is a neighbor that I set up a few weeks ago right next to mine but the 2.4 GHz band shows no fewer than 24 SSIDs sitting across the entire spectrum on every channel (except 14 which isn't allowed in the US). While I applaud the opened up resources, I fear it won't do much good unless more kit comes with 5 GHz radios as standard equipment. Most folks aren't up for swapping out the the wifi card in their laptop and in tablets and phones it just isn't happening.
It actually looks almost like a bimetallic strip but with a very quick response time and since it works based on electrostriction it responds to changing electric fields so it shouldn't use much more power than an equivalent capacitor. It would also be interesting to know if it also works in reverse so you could tell if it was being bent at the same time. Besides, most every real keyboard has moving parts even if it's just the rubber flexures that hold the contacts apart. Anyway, there's a video on this page for your viewing pleasure.
I don't believe opinion needs facts at all. It is one thing to say; "X is a dishonest, scurrilous and lavender shop" which indicates a statement of fact not opinion. Opinion is not a statement of fact but a statement of perception; "it is my estimation that X shop is not only dishonest but scurrilous and lavender as well".
You keep using this term, I do not think it means what you think it means. I don't believe you are referring to either Garrett Hardin nor Aristotle as right wing idiots. So I can only assume by ideological right wing idiot you mean the wealthy, homophobic, gas-guzzling suv driving, control what you do authoritarian and not the wealthy, dope smoking, hybrid driving, control what you have authoritarian that is presumably the left wing. Either way if you follow the money going into campaign contributions I think you'll find ideological idiots contributing to both sides of the authoritarian divide.
I fully admit that I am unaware of any recent conversations where any one wing tool has used the tragedy of the so called commons in any realm so I may just be speaking from ignorance but I'd welcome something more concrete and not just an assertion. My apology to others for tangent but I'm genuinely flummoxed by the comparison. Perhaps the meaning is that like the "commons" software can't be owned and may require an upfront fee for use and a given amount of maintenance so it's a bit like a road use tax that gets paid on car registrations and petrol.
One of my favorite tricks to use in conjunction with some.company@mydomain is to scan the incoming address to check if it is actually coming from 'some company' and if it doesn't I automatically redirect it to something like customersupport@some.company. I've gotten some very cross emails but I almost never get spam on some.company.3@mydomain unless they run to their admin who sets up a filter on that end.
I was thinking the same thing. "A point-light system that placed markers on the subjects' bodies was used to show the raters just the movements of the walkers rather than their actual form." That statement alone makes it seem quite trivial to have a few guys strut their stuff and be rated in a like manner. It also makes it easy to compare if there is any difference in perception among body types based on movement. Who knows, maybe the paunch bellied ale guzzlers among us are found to have the most silky smooth and attractive motions if only we'd wear a couple inches of heel. I imagine it would be easy enough to find an adequate supply of test subjects down at the local pub most nights. Of course given how much ale they'd have to consume before walking about in heels might make their gait a bit uneven but there would be plenty of swing and gyration.
"Why should people have to open a web browser to perform a search, when there is search functionality built into the standard UI?"
This is one of those things that pops up every so often and typically fails to gain much traction. Think back to Watson and Apple's copy Sherlock which was replaced by the desktop search utility Spotlight. Essentially they were just a metasearch that grabs info from both the local filesystem and internet search engines. For some reason they aren't very popular but I'd hazard a guess that most folks prefer a clear delineation of different searches and search tools.
"Just ask Apple for the account details of these people, and away you go."
You really expect that to work without a year of legal wrangling? I know it's China but I don't imagine Apple just coughs up account details at every drop of the hat. Maybe Apple does hand out information that isn't listed on the store's app page but if they do it's a bit disturbing that any Tom, Dick or Mary can get any info they want about any developer, corporate or individual, in the app store.
It may be a wide brush but let's not forget it's Major Bloomberg we're talking about. The guy throws out bans as solutions to everything. It doesn't matter what it is, it could be guns, video games, plastic bags or super size soda. The guy is about a pecan short of being a total nutter and, frankly, he should be banned from power.
I think you are looking for useful idiots in the wrong place. It isn't about security and has as much to do with it as the security theater that the TSA performs at the airport, none. Ultimately it's about having leverage on as many people as possible because we all know the data can be lost or misplaced when it becomes convenient for the puppet masters.
To save you the google it's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that for the most part legalizes spying on everyone else in the world but not within U.S. borders. The amendments passed in 2008 essentially redact the word Foreign and allow the U.S. gubbermint to spy domestically and unleash the full-on "we'll send your ass to Gitmo, take everything you own and then have the IRS crawl sideways through your colon while wearing crampons if you don't comply" intimidation power to anyone who doesn't give them every little byte they ask for.
So when the little gray/green with just a touch of fuchsia space folks arrive to a deserted planet after the star charts have shifted slightly and start throwing switches to see just how smart we were at which point the ICBMs will become a self destruct system. Their last words will be, "Oh shit! Those fucking clever little bastards!"1
1 Approximate translation since there will be no direct correlation to the word shit. Space travel will have negated the need to actually eat and shit. Space folks will be genetically engineered chimeras part animal and part plant which provide a self feeding and fertilizing organism that is maintained by the background radiation in space. The benefits of not needing food stores or waste management combined with no need for radiation shielding is what will have made long term space travel possible. Of course the space folks not directly blown up by the ICBMs will actually become so large they will be stranded here and need to duck to avoid being struck by the moon. At least that's what I gather from talking with some excitable fellow who entered a disappearing blue police box not long ago.
It does look a bit like they took an old axe prow steamer leveled at the gunnels with top stack consisting of a glass box, a giant iPad, a smaller glass box and topped with a giant iPad mini.
I assume the shiny axe edge is to destroy any hapless blow boat that should cross its path but the chrome anchors are totally for show and will never see the bottom of a harbour but some poor soul will be hanging out there polishing before making entry anywhere.
I've got to side with eSeM and Malcolm. This is a marketing geek report for momentary bragging rights. No investor worth half his portfolio would put any stock in it. I mean come on, it doesn't even include growth for the period and while I'm fairly sure more phones were shuffled this quarter than the same quarter a year ago it isn't measured or even mentioned so it's perfectly plausible that the market actually contracted and the contraction was just slower for some companies in certain regions.
Hell, the US market could have contracted and the EU market tripled or the US market could have grown at twice the rate of the EU and we would never know the difference from this report. If the various markets grew or shrank at roughly equal rates we would know a tiny bit more but it's still largely something for marketing folks to take to their bosses and say, "see, I deserve a bigger holiday bonus this year."
On a side note RIM's BB10 devices are set to launch early next year and I hope, if only for the sake of consumer choice, they put up a better showing in next years TTM data.
It's about being lazy and sizing or placing the TV to the room. The lazy bit is all in the eyes and a longer focal distance requires less focus and hence reduced chance of eye strain, you are supposed to be relaxing with an and tonic after all. Secondly with a small screen I used to divide the room so that part was for sitting with a book and the other part was for watching the telly but this limited the number of people who could watch the telly given the viewing angle. A larger screen means more friends can come by and watch the game because now the TV is placed to be viewed down the length of the room and not the width and all the beer chugging buddies can have a nice view without undue distortion.
Now that I'm married, I appreciate the social atmosphere of folks chatting in small groups and flitting in and out of conversations as they prance their way about the room and the large flat panel TV remains dark and unobtrusive against the wall. Oh the joys of nibbling cheese and crackers while guzzling sipping wine and prattling on lightheartedly conversing with mostly unfamiliar enchanting people and occasionally finding a like minded soul who is also looking forward to the weekend slaving away in the garage or shed with the old tiny TV and a mini-fridge stocked with refreshments.
Does that clear it up the sitting further away bit?
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