Posts by Schultz 1771 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Oct 2007
I wonder how big the remaining market might be. Some parsimonious persons will be happy to stick to a smart phone and a lap-top and others will wait until they get the free tablet as a remote control for their TV or car. Anybody wants to bet that the tablet market will go the way of the netbook market in the next 5 years?
which consists of overcharging those few customers who were to lazy to cancel / rollover their contract after two years.
Don't need a new phone? We'll just keep charging you for the old one. (And no, we can't allow you to switch to the grandly advertised cheap new contracts because those are for _new_ customers.)
No they are not alike. I can hit you over the head with my heavy block of gold, I can stand on it to look over your head, I can attract mates with the glimmering qualities of it -- but all you can do is confuse people with those bits and bytes.
postpone the next court date to a point faaaaaaaar in the future to give everybody involved some time to innovate, evolve their business, develop new products, burn their platforms, etc. This might be a general solution to this type of patent litigation, just make sure none of the managers will ever get (or loose) a bonus due to performed (missed) litigation during his tenure.
"harder to read serif fonts resulted in better memory consolidation than sans serif fonts. It concluded that if the brain was having to 'work harder' to decode the text, then it was better able to comprehend and remember the content."
Is it really the 'difficulty to decode', or just that you read more slowly and therefore give your brain that extra time to comprehend? I found that the speed of presentation in a lecture is crucial. There need to be some breaks to allow everybody to digest the information. This can be done independent of the tools (Powerpoint or other) -- but an old-fashioned blackboard lecture has the delays built-in via the writing speed.
Your "true vacuum" does not allow any measurement, because your measurement relies on propagating some particle, e.g., a photon, through the vacuum -- but then the vacuum is no longer a true vacuum (there is a probability for particle pair creation).
This does not really matter, because we understand the pair creation process and can account for it in our physics models (I think this is part of quantum chromodynamics, but don't nail me down on this). So we do know c quite well.
(1) There are conservation laws for energy (color), spin (=angular momentum), etc., but you can find similar conservation laws in classical physics. The mathematical description can become tricky in the quantum world. (2) You cannot flip a switch to magically switch a property, you can only measure it. There is, however, a probabilistic relationship between the nature of the measurement and the measurement result, so you can affect the result by changing the measurement. (3) The measurement can affect the measurement result but, as a law of physics, no faster-than-light information can be transferred to an entangled particle (so far this has never been disproved -- despite large effort).
So yes, you have been given the wrong idea about entanglement. And everybody here is a complete sucker for reading all of this even though the progress towards information teleportation is zero.
#1 no, the have entangled properties, but the properties are created in the entangled common source. There is no communication ('information transfer') between the particles.
#2 no, think about the two particles as a single two-particle state of matter. The matter wave is as large as the distance of the two particles -- and once you measure a property of the wave at one point, you also know about some properties of the wave at another point.
#3 yes, the world is composed of entangle particles. But for an object of macroscopic size , the complex entangled (quantum mechanical) properties average out to classical properties, hence we cannot predict them. So even though the answer is a yes, you might pretend that the answer is no and you wont miss anything.
#4 this point is related to #3: we cannot predict observations on the level of the universe, so you can hypothesize all you want about local or non-local properties and nobody can prove you wrong.
Hope this helps.
Stop this nonsense forthwith --or Einstein and friends will come to spook (haunt) you.
This article mixes up information transfer with spooky action. This is a major fail: established physics agrees that information transfer is not possible at speeds faster than light, but you are allowed to invent lots of information-less spooky experiments.
Spooky action works like the following: Two travelers put a red and a blue chip in a bag and -- without looking -- take out one chip each and take it to a faraway location. If they both look at their chip at the same time, they suddenly know the color of the chip in the other travelers pocket -- spooky and definitely faster than light! But there is no information transfer from one traveler to the other. There might be predefined action (e.g., the red-chip traveler should return to home base), but the relevant information must have been agreed upon before the travelers set out, so that's information transfer from the joint departure point and not from on traveler to the other.
If you now replace 'traveler' with 'photon' and use spin/polarization/energy instead of color, then you have the blueprint for most spooky action experiments.
I use an android phone with an opera browser, accessing my work email, and I'd be really happy to have access to Nokia maps when traveling abroad (but I didn't stumble across that service yet).
So it seems to me that Android is quite open, and does not create any artificial lock-in. Remember the time when you needed internet explorer to download certain updates from MS, or when MS messenger suddenly appeared on your desktop?
Android phones are particularly open as compared to the competition - in particular if you jailbreak that provider-locked crapware and revert to stock android.
That is exactly what most people would like to avoid with their 'work' computer. We need a tool to do well-defined work and -- no thanks -- I do not want fries with that even if there is a McD promotion around the corner.
There is a change in the University system that is not mentioned in the article or the comments so far: The great inflation in University degrees. Can you realistically expect that some 50% of pupils with a degree will find the same type of interesting jobs that some elite 5% did some 50 years ago (statistics purely invented, but I am sure there is a place where they might match).
Also, it used to be that University graduates would be expected to be thinking on the job, not just applying learned knowledge. Especially in the hard sciences, your acquired knowledge from the University days will age very fast. So, points 1 and 2 in the job satisfaction survey kind of miss the point ("1) The extent to which the skills learned at university are used. 2) How closely a graduate's other skills match those required in the job).
Sorry, the study missed the point and someone should not graduate.
The analysis in the article seems too simplistic to me. The credit markets froze due to a lot of casino banking going on worldwide (do read up on AIG, which was somewhat instrumental in getting that going) -- and going bad quickly. When money gets scarce, this hits all types of borrowers, affecting those all-too-ordinary credits which were the business of HBOS. They obviously weren't careful enough to prepare for such a crisis (shame on them), but they surely would have been considered good managers if the worldwide banking casino had survived another decade.
About the 'Robin Hood tax', I would be very interested to hear your reasoning why that's "so wrong-headed in itself". If you do business, you pay tax. This does suppress business (you'll have to factor in VAT if you want to make profit selling something). It also keeps people from wasting their time trying to get some marginal benefit from trading stuff around.
The banking system looks like it might need some kind of tax to focus minds. There are too many bankers dealing with bankers, dealing with other members of the financial industry -- all of them hunting some marginal benefits (and creating a big systemic risk by introducing extra complexity into the markets). Tax their business transactions and you'll see a lot of wasteful activities end.
So this full-page threat advisory puts the UK security threat level corner nicely into context.
I always wondered how serious a 'Serious' terrorist thread threat really is (apart from seriously threatening some career when the shit does hit the fan). Just some percent (real-estate wise) as serious as subclass MI5 of a Nigerian 911 spam, it appears. Thanks for the clarification!
... that is assuming proper vacuum, of course.
Just in case you meant 'short' when you said 'quick': the shortest reproducible attosecond pulses have a duration of some 50-100 as, corresponding to 100*10e-18 m * 3e8 m/s = 10 nm. That's an awfully short amount of space or time.
But the use of a patent to suppress further developments in a broad field was not the original intent. Instead, patents were created to accelerate technological developments by putting the newest innovations out to the public.
Software patents and most patents for modern consumer electronics are an abomination and do not fulfill the original purpose of patents. In particular, the business cycle in of those field is far shorter than the patent duration, hence the patents do not accelerate technology development, but are used to purposefully slow it down.
US 1 and 12th grade students struggle with HTML's image tag, while Vietnamese students code. So the US is focused on perceived creative skills (make a nice website) and the Vietnamese learn the technical skills to code the browser.
Of course the next sentence in the US would be: "You are not allowed to use that image, it is copyrighted", while the Vietnamese go and hack the next software packet. Kind of obvious who will have the skills to be creative in the future!
Allow resale of electronic products (software) across borders and make the software companies liable for the functioning of legally purchased software (to ensure that every customer can get a ge-unblocked version). I am sure that some entrepreneur will be happy to resale all software in question if the legal situation is right.
The lack of exchangable battery makes it another disposable phone. I don't like those, because I tend to use my electronic gadgets forever (and then push the obsolete phones on needy foreign visitors or similar). Full points to Samsung for offering things that run more than 2 years!
From the 'normal citizen' point of view (and the criminal's too), this is just another bit of annoying and potentially dangerous spyware. Some governments decided to join the club of spyware distributors -- let's hope that democracy (where applicable) will take care of that problem at the next election.
Amazing ruling! After a decade of ignoring the rule of law, separation of powers, habeas corpus, international law, ... is this really the turning point? Electing a new government didn't seem to change much, so I am carefully pessimistic, but I really, really hope that this ruling is upheld!
Land of the brave and free? Lets keep hoping.
so were the breeder reactors and they died a slow death due to technical complications and cost. To contain a very hot and radioactive molten salt and to organize a reliable heat exchange with said molten salt might be a challenge. To keep the reaction mixture just right will be another.
Let's hope that it's more than a nice concept on paper.
if Apples lawyers would do anything but stonewall, they'd not be worth their money. Their job is to make the legal problem go away without giving anybody free information. Whether this is a smart PR move is another question, but they are not getting payed to do the work of the company PR drones.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
