Posts by Whitter

Re: A wide variety of threats

Sorry: "Industrial".

Re: Bigger

My first reaction to this interview was to start peering into the backgrounds!

Higher res PLEASE!

Re: Congress may be more cooperative than you think.

Posted for the second time today....

The definition of an honest politician is "one that stays bought".

Re: Waste of Space

The definition of an honest politician: "One that stays bought".

Re: Hold on!

Indeed: the suggestion is for graphine to act within a short-pulse laser system, not to be a lasing material itself. The odd thing in such systems is that you only have to make some beam directions/frequencies/phases less easy to traverse the resonating cavity than the rest, and the lasing material (whatever that is) will put most of its energy into the easy routes (via positive feedback of the stuff that gets though most easily).

As pointed out by a few, you can't have a single frquency and be a short pulse at the same time: a short pulse requires a range of phase-locked frequencies. But the definition of a laser can cope with that.

Visual and dexterous imparement (e.g. post-stroke) are common in older generations. This proposal may not meet everyone's needs, but it will help a good number, and that's a plus for them. And it is simple, stupid.

Re: Knew It Was Coming

Wasn't it obvious when they put an "airplane mode" into your phone?

I just never knew what it was really for.

Who needs MS flight sim now!

What do you buy?

It can all get a bit silly if you try even just a little bit.

Say I buy a CD. What I buy is a disk with a series of holes in it. I use a CD player to read those holes into a digital equivalent, decode them, copy them to another buffer, send to a DAC, send the analog output to a speaker, wobble the diaphram a bit and make some sound which I listen to, decode in by ears to nerve impulses and so on and so on.

I didn't buy the sound. I bought the holes. So is any of this process legit? I'd imagine as soon as I read the holes, that's a derivative work. I've stored bits of it endlessly as I've gone along because the design is easier in some cases, because I have to in others. So is that reproduction?

Does fair use allow this? Not all markets have a fair use BTW. If it does, then there's copies in there: fair use copies. In what way are they legally different to other copies? Becuse they are only temporary perhaps - but I've never seen that in the small print of a CD case; and if it isn't on the case (info before you buy), it doesn't count. Again - depending on what juristiction you are in.

Can we not have a grown-up chat about digital ownership - which probably means RIPA-types and the freetards are sent outside and the rest of us can sort out something sensible?

Re: Community?

Indeed: my first response has become "What did Google say?" whenever somebody asks.

Re: Umm, minor point

Indeed, but as a researcher pointed out only last week, (and on El Reg here: www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/lightspeed_variable/) there really isn't any significant stretch of vacuum anywhere due to pesky background radiation particles being "in the background" as it were plus the even peskier virtual particles, with an extended field theory slapped on to fill the gaps.

Re: Agree totally on the Take-Aways

I had a vindaloo in Germany where I was served a korma with a little extra chilli added. They didn't undertand why I sent it back (beyond the difficulties expected due to my poor German).

Re: Also, MIT did this last year

2010 is the first I recall seeing a demo. Old news indeed.

Re: Care-o-Meter hovering at zero

If you want to mount a high res camera mounted to mini-remote-zepplin, photograph Bristol, then sell the photos for a tenner, on you go. Just don't steal somebody's else's work who did it properly.

Granted the Somalia reference was poorly chosen, but the point still holds. If nobody will pay, nobody will supply. Economics is about a maintainable market - the "everything for nothing" market is an inevitable dead-end.

Re: Also

I thought too expensive *was* Apple?

Sarcasm tags required for some it seems!

Fair usage: you can't download constantly for 1 month, so unbiased time division is not realistic.

But as you charge in monthly units, you should refund in monthly units.

Set a triggering threshold loss-per-day (e.g. 2 hours) and/or loss per month (e.g. more than 2 days per month) to get the whole thing rolling. Companies can then compete on the packages they offer to customers: if the ISP doesn't believe its own reliability hype, the package will soon show that.

Stolen != Bought (Well, not necessarily anyway)

That assumes that they were actually stolen: not just a lie to get the next hipster model on insurance.

Re: So they have negative Kinetic Energy?

First thing I thought on reading the article intro was "aren't population inversions in a laser in a negative temperature state?"

I must get out more.

Re: Beware uninformed customers

And beware pointless insurance, e.g. short-hop travel insurance (if stolen from your hold luggage it's not covered. In travel insurance: WTF?). Buildings insurance (structure) yes. Contents? Rarely worth it - the decent policies cost too much, the affordable ones are worse than a bank account you put some savings into to handle it yourself.

And don't forget the true cost of claiming: not just the excess and deprication of items-worth by insurance auditors, but also the future cost resulting from a claim: all the other insurance renewals you'll get in the next 5 years (wether in the same field or not) will go up by a total that is likely far more than what you've just "saved".

A con of an industry.

Re: Every single update...

Not just Adobe: it's all of them.

I think they have been court tested in NY and it was essentially "companies are expected to read them - individuals are not". That might have been wishful thinking though!

The article makes a bizare claim for Apple ("I have to say I find Apple’s take on things rather interesting."), but as anyone who has updated any app on an iPhone/iPod etc knows, the T&Cs change with great regularity and even greater verbosity: 35 pages or more to get an update from another company, not even apple!

Re: Prior art?

The new bit you add to prior art to create a new patent must be more than just "neat" or "handy": the new bit must itself be *inventive* and "not obvious to anyone skilled in the art".

The seperate issue of patenting things you haven't (or as yet can't) make is yet another hole in IP law. But let's face it: IP law is starting to push the "collander" comparison further than you'd want a collander to go.

Re: Just like PC's

It's worse than just the PC-like functionality causing UI overload - the "dumb" TVs without the PC section also have awful UIs. It seems to be an industry with no UI skills at all - I guess they think nobody makes a purchase choice based on the UI menus.

liquid lenses

There was a prototype oil lens a bunch of years ago, simply using an applied voltage to change the surface curvature. Never heard whatever happened to it.