I never understood why this patent was granted - back in 2006 the same gestures were demonstrated (and publicly) by Jeff Han with his FTIR multi-touch display.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html - take a look from about 2:29 onwards, pinch zoom, scoll etc.

It really doesn't appear that Apple should have been able to patent it, especially if their file date was in 2007 and it looks like the grant date was 2011 (seriously? wtf?).

Still, who knows why it was granted, and if I can find that prior art surely the other big companies who were sued because of it could too so I assume I'm missing something.

Seriously?

Wow.

Do you actually read what you're trolling?

You wrote "Then your issue is not with Siri, but with technology as a whole. You have no business being on this site and should leave now." in response to '"My phone doesn't work" because Siri is offline'.

And then you write "My phone, which has Siri as a feature, is not working to it's full advertised functionality. Therefore, saying my phone isn't working is no less valid than the options I provided." after of course bitching about "Ever said "hmm, the cell tower must be down?" or "Power's out". You are the same person you're complaining about. The power isn't out, one of the many transformers is having one of hundreds of problems or a line is severed, etc. etc. "

As a troll you only get about a 3 out of 10, you made me laugh at you so that's good, but you really didn't manage consistency - you're all over the place like a frog on a hotplate. I'd suggest in future before answering you at least remain consistent within the same thread!

You cannot be right because you took both sides in the argument - revisionist history only works if there isn't a record of what you said originally.

As for..

"People who get all high and mighty because they know a little bit about computers are assholes." - I don't quite understand why you said it, it's not like I professed great knowledge about computers (not saying I don't). I spoke about power and the mechanics of cell towers - must have missed the computers. But I agree (in your case at least), you profess to know a little about computers and you're acting an ass.

One thing I am happy about though, you said "You're as dumb as he was." which is at least not saying I'm as dumb as you - cause that definitely would be a bad thing ;)

I've just got to jump in here... In reference to the "Power's out"... Because obviously the power is out, the power supply to the house isn't functioning (probably why they said the power was out) - there's this fun thing called context (something you should be aware of the way you promote Siri - which frankly is Siri's killer feature over other voice systems) and when someone says the power's out, well the power's out. To jump in and say that because the power's on elsewhere (like upstream of their local transformer or in another country) then the power isn't out still doesn't change the obvious fact that "the power's out" for the person saying "the power's out".

Remember, when dealing with anything other than http (or other stateless protocols) CONTEXT is king - as in humans, humans use context so when someone says the "power's out" you probably don't need to check on the opposite side of the world.

And of course actually the cell tower could be "down", down being a generic term covering non-functional (through falling over, no power, lightning strike etc etc) - granted the failure could be on the device - but personally when I've said the network or tower is down it's usually because I've spoken to the friends around and found the ones on the same network have no signal (I'd blame the device in my pocket that I can most easily affect). The cell tower might be fine, but the network connection from the tower might be broken, but that has different failure symptoms on the device so....

Why have you leapt on someone saying that people will complain if Siri goes down - it's happened already as this quick (google) search found this http://www.pcworld.com/article/243175/siri_goes_down_for_a_day_apple_says_network_outages_are_possible.html
From that article:
" According to Venture Beat, contacting Apple customer service resulted in the typical, "Have you tried restarting your device?"" so people contacted Apple customer service because Siri was down... And they guy you tried to tear a new hole said...

"Now imagine those people with an iPhone 4S during a data outage or in the middle of New York City (or another smartphone sinkhole)? "My phone doesn't work" because Siri is offline or unreachable is a pretty lame excuse, but perfectly valid for people who are going to be trained to rely on it."

So he was right, and you were wrong.

Of course I'm not entirely sure what his point was - people will complain? That's not a surprise, there have been complaints about the accent it reads back to you in..

I'm also surprised that you didn't leap on it as validation of Siri - it's made enough of an impact that people complain when it's missing, if it were just a toy most likely people wouldn't bother calling customer support, no?

Agreed, in every particular - which I think is the first time that's ever happened to me on slashdot!

Kudos.

Z.

Yes.

It's planned to be built at sea, so no continental drift to worry about.

Sea allows mobility (to an extent) to avoid the worst storms (and there are areas that get very few hurricanes) but just building big and strong enough would protect against things like hurricanes.

A quick search of oil rigs (and I'd assume these are smaller than the base station would be) shows that they get hit all the time (and damaged all the time) but the ones that leap out at me were those that had an oil tanker smacked into them. One major advantage of being at sea is that there is very little debris to be flinging at your base station and no continental shelf to raise up waves / tsunamis.

It's just an engineering problem there, nothing fundamentally unsolvable (except perhaps the ribbon, but it's looking good there too).

Z.

Ahh a troll!

Yes, it is fiction, for it is not (yet) reality - the very definition of fiction.

It doesn't appear to be impossible, just very difficult.

Physics required for a geo-stable space platform? Huh? Do you mean something in geosynchronous orbit? Like say satellite TV? All those satellites are in geosynch orbit so you don't need active dishes to track them - geosynchronous orbit isn't difficult and is done every day.

The materials sciences for the ribbon material? Yes that isn't available yet, but it's on the way. There is no theoretical reason why we cannot build one, only practical reasons as we've not developed the materials yet.

One of the fun things you can do is look at what we have now, look at our scientific understanding of the universe from gravitation to atoms and then keep plugging away and testing and seeing what you get.

The theory describes materials such as carbon nano-tubes or graphene with sufficient tensile strength vs their weight to be able to build a space elevator. We cannot manufacture them in long enough sections yet but they are improving all the time - there's a lot of money in working out how to make this stuff.

Storms are engineering challenges, after all we manage to stick large unsupported free-standing structures up into storms and have them stay up, obviously this means we've got no idea how to do it at all and have just been lucky. Sheesh.

The people who are thinking about this aren't delusional (any more than the average population is - and probably less), these are just problems (even though you find them scary and don't understand) and they can be solved one way or another.

Z.

Well if you think it through the most effective renewable energy is space based solar, it's much more dense, permanently on and doesn't annoy anyone.

This starts being really possible with a space elevator, both for getting the machinery into space in the first place and getting the power back down (there's been talk of conductive cores to the elevators).

Is it really better for everyone if another $18billion is spent on social care? Isn't that just stopgap spending, spend a little more to temporarily make people feel better without actually changing anything? No new resources, no new energy sources etc? According to a quick look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_federal_budget it seems that about $1.527 trillion was spent on welfare, how would $18 billion (1.1%) even be noticed in a budget of that size? Or add to it more than cheap and reliable access to space would? How about power costs dropping to fractions of what they are today? How about the reductions in pollution from shutting down fossil fuel power plants? How about dealing with nuclear waste once and for all? How about a reduction in wars and exploitation because the need for oil has just dropped massively?

The benefits of a space elevator out weigh pretty much anything you could possibly think of to do with $18 billion, spending it on anything else is short-sighted and really not going to change anything except probably make it worse.

Z.

What? Seriously you think you can just detach the ribbon from the base station and then attach it again? If the ribbon breaks at the base (the same scenario as detaching it) then the ribbon is lost to space.

The ribbon has to be under tension at the base, as in attempting to lift the base off the ground in order for anything to be able to climb it, otherwise you're attempting to climb an unsupported ribbon, which means the ribbon wants to escape but the base station doesn't let it. If there wasn't any tension in the base of the ribbon, you'd be climbing the inertia of the ribbon only, which means after all that effort, you can launch one item (and even then you need to climb quickly).

This isn't something you can just pull in and out or have hover about, the entire edifice is in dynamic tension and losing one of those balanced forces will bring the entire thing down (or up, or off or whatever).

It's anchored to a floating platform in the sea (not seen any viable discussions of land based elevators), the ribbon isn't like a rope dangling in the sky that you climb, it's not a rope ladder. The terrestrial end HAS to be anchored to a counter-weight that can also be supported by the earth in order to have tension you can exploit to climb the cable.

Z.

No need for ION engines (not sure why that's capitalised) to hold anything up - the forces on the cable beyond geosynch pull the entire cable tight, about the only use for the ion engines would be (and this is any type of reaction thruster) to help damp oscillations in the cable.

You are correct, the cable is much longer than it needs to be (more than twice I believe, geosynch is roughly 35k km up and the designs I've seen talk about a 100k km cable) mostly due to the requirement for lifting tension and the fact that the cable is incredibly light for it's length, in the order of grams per km.

An easier (for a given value of easy) would be to have a large mass (it's a measure of mass / distance past geosynch - no need for dark matter when a rock will do) a distance beyond the geosynch to counter-weight, either way it works - the forces on the cable past geosynch cause the cable to stick out straight, perpendicular to the surface of the planet and will always attempt to get that as straight as possible.

Don't worry about the cable snapping going too fast or too slow, as it happens as you have a weight travel down the cable the cable will travel ahead of the rotation of the planet, as something climbs the cable the cable will lean behind the rotation of the planet - effectively there's an east-west acceleration as the weight descends / ascends the cable. This has the effect of pulling the cable down fractionally but the excess tension also pulls the cable back up again, it won't be instant or 'snapping' as there's never any massive horizontal displacement / force - the speed of the climber dictates the rate of change of circumference/orbit and thus the horizontal force applied to the cable.

The tail won't really get ahead of behind of the 'station' (there won't actually be a station as far as I know) as the cable will attempt to remain straight from the point of horizontal deflection. There will be vibrations and other variations travelling up and down the cable but they should both damp in time and be damped dynamically.

One last thing to remember, most of the cable is outside of the atmosphere so there's no atmospheric drag (well, vanishingly small as it's not exactly a pure vacuum) on the tail to add to the problems.

It's a hard engineering challenge and we've not got the materials to do it yet but it'll change a lot when it (or something like it) does happen.

Z.

Sigh.

The whole point of a space elevator is that the centre of mass of the cable is at geosynch orbit (well slightly past it). There is no need to continuously thrust to hold the cable up because the rotational speed of the planet will fling away the cable.

The reason that the cable stays up is the gravity drops off by the square of the distance but distance travelled by the cable per hour at any height increases. The period of rotation is always 24 hours (give or take some lean) but the circumference described is greater as the height increases.

What this means is that at geosynchronous orbit the force downward due to gravity (at that distance from earth) exactly matches the centripetal forces from orbiting the planet (or more accurately attempting to fly off in a straight line but the gravity of the planet curving that line).
Below geosynchronous orbit if you are orbiting the earth once a day you're doomed to crash into the planet without active energy input (the rate of curvature is higher than your speed thus you'll hit), above geosynchronous orbit if you're still orbiting the earth once a day you're doomed to escape the planets' gravity altogether and go flying off as you spiral out. This is why low orbit satellites orbit so quickly and high orbit satellites orbit so slowly, the relative strengths of gravity at the different orbits, plus the distance travelled to complete an orbit dictate the speeds.

The parts of the cable that are above geosynchronous orbit are attempting to escape earth, and the parts of the cable that are below geosynchronous orbit are trying to crash down to earth - the reason the cable stays up is that these are balanced. The entire weight of the cable (less the reduction due to centripetal forces) below geosynch (and adding the tension in the cable necessary to lift a weight) is indeed all passed through the portion of the cable in geosynch orbit (it's actually a huge section as 1 metre from geosynch either way isn't much difference). But the cable isn't a cable, at least not in current designs, it's a ribbon varying in width from thinnest at the ends to widest at geosynch as the loads vary - there are also thickness variations due to expected damage to the cable, ie at certain orbital levels micro-meteorite (and space junk more likely) impacts are very likely so the cable would be made wider to compensate.

Please note that this doesn't allow anything to be pulled up the cable, it is just supporting itself, what you need to do is stick a nice big weight on the end of the cable on earth, like say the base station weighing in at hundreds of tonnes (but not supported by the cable, supported by the earth's surface) and then extend the cable upwards until it has a tension high enough to do something useful. The tension in the base of the cable where it meets the base station will be at least the weight of anything you want to send up the cable (and have more because acceleration increases the force).

The real problem with understanding this is that humans live on such a small height variation and deal with speeds so slow that you cannot easily imagine what happens to gravity over those distances and how much energy is involved in those speeds - if you accept that orbital mechanics isn't the same as you running about on earth it becomes much easier to understand.

No revisions of any laws (other then potentially materials sciences as we don't yet have a material that has a strong enough tensile strength but low enough weight) are required for this to work, all you need to do is understand them.

The 'energy' you use to raise the payload is electrical converted to kinetic converted to gravitational potential. If there happened to be a mountain of a magical material that reached out into space then climbing that mountain would not violate any laws of thermodynamics.

Towers have problems, compressive strength vs weight, mechanical strength of the earths crust, and major issues with stability. Compression is a positive runaway scenario (the tower bends slightly and the weight causes the bend to accelerate), tension has a negative (or neutral I suppose) runaway scenario (the cable bends and the cable tries to straighten out).

Z.