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I dunno. You could argue, were you so inclined, that it'd allow a much more dynamic programme; theatre owners would have much more flexibility in what they show; assuming that our theatre-owning chum had his own database of films from which to choose, a system could be set up (for example) whereby everyone in a particular auditorium votes for a film electronically; that film is then chosen.

I'm assuming, of course, that movie makers realise how handy such features would be, and don't lock out such abilities.

More on how digital cinema works, btw, can be found at How Digital Cinema Works

check it out here.

anyway -- playing games on that would be rediculously hard. the point of IMAX is so that your entire peripheral vision is occupied. except that in games etc, the part of the screen which is now at the far end of your p.vision actually conveys important information... so i would imagine this won't come out too well.

but it's all about the bragging rights afterall, i guess.

Reference: http://www.howstuffworks.com/question372.htm

I have provided some interesting links that may help to answer your questions. Enjoy.

How Fuel Cells Work

Will Fuel Cells Power Homes?

I have provided some interesting links that may help to answer your questions. Enjoy.

How Fuel Cells Work

Will Fuel Cells Power Homes?

What a load of crap, do people still believe the Earth is flat?
Reducing diets never work..what happens when you stop if your eating habits were bad to begin with?
I don't need to read study after study to know why...it's common sense everybody knows the answer: If you eat 3000 kilocalories a day and use up 2500 kilocalories with activity you'll store that 500 "calories" of unused energy as fat. Do that enough and you will store a lot of fat.
It's no wonder people in the Western world are fat it's because we all eat too much and exercise very little. In Third World countries (Ethiopia in the 80's especially) where food is scarce and a lot of work is required to even get that food you won't see obese or even overweight people, or at least it's very rare.
Everything in moderation!

A lot of people don't know this:
"...a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
It turns out that the calories on a food package are actually kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie). The word is sometimes capitalized to show the difference, but usually not..."

Howstuffworks.com
How Calories Work

Calories, Fat and Exercise

What a load of crap, do people still believe the Earth is flat?
Reducing diets never work..what happens when you stop if your eating habits were bad to begin with?
I don't need to read study after study to know why...it's common sense everybody knows the answer: If you eat 3000 kilocalories a day and use up 2500 kilocalories with activity you'll store that 500 "calories" of unused energy as fat. Do that enough and you will store a lot of fat.
It's no wonder people in the Western world are fat it's because we all eat too much and exercise very little. In Third World countries (Ethiopia in the 80's especially) where food is scarce and a lot of work is required to even get that food you won't see obese or even overweight people, or at least it's very rare.
Everything in moderation!

A lot of people don't know this:
"...a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
It turns out that the calories on a food package are actually kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie). The word is sometimes capitalized to show the difference, but usually not..."

Howstuffworks.com
How Calories Work

Calories, Fat and Exercise

What a load of crap, do people still believe the Earth is flat?
Reducing diets never work..what happens when you stop if your eating habits were bad to begin with?
I don't need to read study after study to know why...it's common sense everybody knows the answer: If you eat 3000 kilocalories a day and use up 2500 kilocalories with activity you'll store that 500 "calories" of unused energy as fat. Do that enough and you will store a lot of fat.
It's no wonder people in the Western world are fat it's because we all eat too much and exercise very little. In Third World countries (Ethiopia in the 80's especially) where food is scarce and a lot of work is required to even get that food you won't see obese or even overweight people, or at least it's very rare.
Everything in moderation!

A lot of people don't know this:
"...a calorie is the amount of energy, or heat, it takes to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
It turns out that the calories on a food package are actually kilocalories (1,000 calories = 1 kilocalorie). The word is sometimes capitalized to show the difference, but usually not..."

Howstuffworks.com
How Calories Work

Calories, Fat and Exercise

Anyone think we will eventually move to Dvorak?

And here is an interesting article explaining more in depth about how diesel-electric locomotives work, and once you read this you will understand more of why this isn't nearly as innefficient as it sounds.

The core renderer is fairly agnostic to single player versus multiplayer, but many other areas of the game have to make tradeoff decisions. A latency tolerant multiplayer game needs to have all time dependent effects predictable, which forces a style of programming that isn't always the most direct. A single player game can also have more expressive and precise effects, like multiply blended skeletal animations with pivot feet, that wouldn't work out well over a network channel.

Rocket engines are much more powerful, lighter, and more efficient (bizarely enough.)
well... not that bizare perhaps...
In the atmosphere, then yes.. jet-engines are more powerfull, but in space, a jet-engine would be useless...
the jet-engine compresses the air it intakes, and then pushes a turbine with again pushes air and voila.. movement...
now.. in space... there is no air to compress... so you need the propellant, which is simply "catapulted" out the bottom, thrusting the rocket in the oposite direction... a jet would get you nowhere...

Here is a explains exactly how the *transfer* system works. So yes the SS system does buy T-Bills with any excess money, but if you think about it that is just a way to transfer any left over cash to the general government budget.

There is a pretty nice article over at How Stuff Works with a breif explanation of the history and workings of Holographic Storage Devices

There is a pretty nice article over at How Stuff Works with a breif explanation of the history and workings of Holographic Storage Devices

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. Now we have artificial hearts (pop-up warning), artificial lungs, and artificial kidneys. (I mean that we as a society have them available to us as a technology, not that we as individuals actually have those things inside us, though some of us no doubt do.)

How long before we also have artificial skin to hold our artificial hair? How long before we decide what to put in our artifcial stomachs with our artificial brains?

The human race is about to step aside to make room for the cybernetically enhanced. May God have mercy on our souls. My one request is that none of my organs run anything made by Microsoft. See you in the future.

Actually, the way the networks are designed, this isn't true. XM satellites are in geosynchrynous orbit - one serves the eastern US and the other the western US. If one 'bird' goes out, then half the country loses the signal. The Sirius satellites are in a highly elliptical orbit; as one completes its sweep over the coverage area, another is beginning its sweep. The signal graph looks like a three-phase power graph - three superimposed sine waves that average out to a more or less DC signal. So if a Sirius bird goes off-line, you lose signal coverage for 1/3 of the orbit period.

Both companies probably have backup birds on the ground, ready to launch should a failure occur.

A good summary of the technical details can be found here (Sirius) and here (XM)

Actually, the way the networks are designed, this isn't true. XM satellites are in geosynchrynous orbit - one serves the eastern US and the other the western US. If one 'bird' goes out, then half the country loses the signal. The Sirius satellites are in a highly elliptical orbit; as one completes its sweep over the coverage area, another is beginning its sweep. The signal graph looks like a three-phase power graph - three superimposed sine waves that average out to a more or less DC signal. So if a Sirius bird goes off-line, you lose signal coverage for 1/3 of the orbit period.

Both companies probably have backup birds on the ground, ready to launch should a failure occur.

A good summary of the technical details can be found here (Sirius) and here (XM)

1. more than 2GB address space for your programs? I've loaded 6GB of hash table data on a 64 bit platform, and that's peanuts compared to what people are doing with some current database servers. You just can't do that kind of work on a 32 bit platform.
2. never having to compile with -D_LARGE_FILES (or your compiler's equivalent) again!
3. avoiding the 2038 problem completely!

I suppose this isn't technically the fault of Flash and its creators - you can do useful stuff with it, like How Stuff Works has - but when there's already a perfectly good way to present static text and images (and even moving images, sort of) and you invent something like Flash, what the hell do you _think_ it's going to be used for? The old quip still applies: it's called "Flash" because it's the opposite of "substance".

There are now two major competing DLP technologies, one from Texas Instruments (Digital Micromirror Devices, DMD) and another from Digital Solutions (Grating Light Valves, GLV). Other companies, notably Philips Research, are working on their own solutions.

I personally prefer the Digital Solutions (DS)approach because it's much cheaper and, if mass-produced, promises to bring super high-res projection TV to the masses for less than the price of a VCR. Sony has reportedly licensed GLV from DS, a sign that exciting things are in the works. I wouldn't mind a super hi-res rear projection adaptation as a replacement for my heavy and bulky monitor. I hope Sony is listening. :-)

Here is a good explanation of the technology,

I know this may not be the most reliable source of information, but this is from howstuffworks.com:
The computer consists of:
* A Pentium III Windows NT/2000 system with 128 megabytes (MB) of RAM
* A commercial communications software application
* A custom C++ application that works in conjunction with the commercial program above to provide the packet sniffing and filtering
* A type of physical lockout system that requires a special passcode to access the computer (This keeps anyone but the FBI from physically accessing the Carnivore system.)
* A network isolation device that makes the Carnivore system invisible to anything else on the network (This prevents anyone from hacking into the system from another computer.)
* A 2-gigabyte (GB) Iomega Jaz drive for storing the captured data (The Jaz drive uses 2-GB removable cartridges that can be swapped out as easily as a floppy disk.)

Everyone is apparently far too stupid to realize what its greatest use would be... So if you're sitting at the stop light at 3am, and no one is going the other way, the traffic light would be smart enough to see this, and change the light to green for you, no waiting.

You're sort of right. The weird shape of your outer ear also plays a very large role in determining where a sound came from.

How Hearing Works

MacroVision works by putting false sync and colour burst signals into the interlaced fields in a composite video signal.

This fools AGC (Automatic Gain Control) circuits into thinking they have a very bright picture, and so they reduce the gain. By varying the signal you can make the picture brightness pulse, or in some cases cause it to loose track of the synchronisation all together.

Conventional display devices don't have to have such accurate control of the gain of the signal, so are not very heavily effected, although it is possible to see the effects on some devices. You could see the high amplitude bursts, but these occur in the 'off screen' section of the field that holds the sync signals, and stuff like teletext - if you have vertical hold then you might be able to see them.

(For a great technical and non-technical explanation check Repair FAQ for an easy explanation check How Stuf Works)

Now originally this was intended to specifically block VHS style recorders, but as things have developed there is another device now in common use that can be effected, that wasn't around in consumer products when MacroVision was invented - the frame store.

These are handy digital devices that read the composite video signal in and store it in real time. The video can then be read out in any format you want. Why would you want to do this?

1) Stabilise the signal
2) Change video formats from 50/60 interlaced fields.

Now the first one is done during video editing so that different sources can be synchronised and things like picture in picture and wipe effects between 2 video sources will actually work. They are also now common in good prosumer VCR's for this reason. Digital camcorders have them by default because of point 2...

The second point is that it allows you to do standards conversion in real time - such as in a capture card where you digitise the signal to a different frame rate.

And here is the point - digital projectors such as LCD and DLP tend to use progressive scan rather than interlaced signals, so they contain conversion technology including frame stores to do the de-interlacing (good notes at SourceForge)

So any device that uses a frame store approach can be effected by MacroVision, it just depends on how good the AGC in the framestore is.

How do you avoid this? Simple really don't use a video signal that can have MacroVision on it. If you have RGB (component) then this won't have protection, and is the superior connection anyway for a projector. The S-Video source is normally ok as it seperates the chrominance and luminancne (colour and brightness) signals - although I've heard of a new 'level 2' MacroVision that can disrupt this - sorry no tech details on that I'm still looking, but I think it has to do with messing about with the chrominance.

Of course the fact you regenerate the signal from the framestore means a good one is able to strip the MacroVision out, but there are cheaper ways to do that, and no I'm not giving the links - spend 2 minutes on Google, and remember that MacroVision is specific to PAL/NTSC so don't go ordering abroad! A good legal reason to have such a device is to connect a non AV socket TV to a non RF output player via a normal VCR, or to connect a projector sensitive to MacroVision when you don't have RGB Component output. Of course in the US you will fall foul of the DMCA, but we already know what a mess that is!

I think you could use LCD on silicon technology. This basically uses liquid crystals mounted on a silicon chip to achieve good resolution and sharper picture quality. LCOS are expensive now, but the price should come down to a point where it is even cheaper than regular LCDs in projection tv's.

Here is a great Howstuffworks page on LCOS. This article is about the general workings of all projection TV's.

I think you could use LCD on silicon technology. This basically uses liquid crystals mounted on a silicon chip to achieve good resolution and sharper picture quality. LCOS are expensive now, but the price should come down to a point where it is even cheaper than regular LCDs in projection tv's.

Here is a great Howstuffworks page on LCOS. This article is about the general workings of all projection TV's.

I was wondering how in the world it was powered. Come to find out, it's just a bunch of tiny solar cells according to
this article at How Stuff Works.
The light coming into the eye is focused on the retina. Solar cells convert light to electricity. Electricity stimulates optic nerves. Voila --Sight!

I was wondering how in the world it was powered. Come to find out, it's just a bunch of tiny solar cells according to
this article at How Stuff Works.
The light coming into the eye is focused on the retina. Solar cells convert light to electricity. Electricity stimulates optic nerves. Voila --Sight!

There's an article on HowStuffWorks that shows how the Red-light traffic cameras work.

There's an article on HowStuffWorks that shows how the Red-light traffic cameras work.

Hrmmm.... um, well, maybe, but if so, the main picture on the featured site is NOT what the site is talking about.

A hovercraft has a plenum chamber, i.e. a cushion of air created by a vacuum or fan blowing DOWN into an enclosed, flexible area, usually called the "skirt". See this picture or these for the typical setup.

What this seems to be is simply an airplane without landing gear. Wow.

note: you can read more about hovercrafts here - though it's aimed for a younger audience.

I've been told this on several occasions by people who -are- well up on card security. The PIN is certainly stored on the card in some applications.

The PIN is obviously -not- stored plaintext, but as a DES encrypted number somehow. This may not be true for all systems but if you look halfway down here or here
You will get the general idea.

On the other hand, other sites tell you differently.

Fuel cells are closed systems, and the expensive part is recharging a cell and not filling it in the first place.

I don't understand. The hydrogen is the fuel in the fuel cell. You don't recharge a fuel cell, it works like an engine (though using the movement of electrons and protons instead of mechanical parts). And it's not a closed system. You put fuel in, and electricity and waste (water) comes out. Nothing stays internally. Read more about how they work here.

Besides, hydrogen has so many other drawbacks due to its low molecular weight, that the main problem isn't getting hydrogen it is using it.

There are two drawbacks. The first is you need to compress it to get a good power/volume ratio, and the second is that the molecules are so small they tend to leak out of anything trying to contain it. They are simple engineering problems though. The former we can already do without problem. The latter various materials are being tested for containers, as is storing the hydrogen within another compound such as boron and then using a catalyst to release it upon demand.

Phillip.
http://www.FutureEnergies.com/

Your understanding is right

When they come up with Electronic Ink on Power Paper, sing me up.

When they come up with Electronic Ink on Power Paper, sing me up.

Who makes hybrid gas/electric cars right now? Toyota and Honda.

Who showed hydrogen concept cars early this year? Ford and GM. When do they expect to be ready for market? 10 years.

Which technology is really better? They're comparable .

What did President Bush decide to do? End support for hybrids and spend money on fuel cells instead.

Connect the dots?

300watt powersupplies suck for electric bills

I'm not an expert but does the size of the power
supply really matter? The 300 W rating is a peak
power and if you only need 200 W for your system it
will only supply 200 W. If you replace your 300 W
power supply with a 450 W one you will not be using
150% more power.

How power supply ratings work

• Lay Language Summary of a paper presented by Stuart Parkin at the 1999 APS March Meeting
• Magnetic RAM cures your computer of short-term memory loss by Richard Butner
• IBM, Infineon looking to shake up memory market
• Instant Access Memory by David Voss
• How Magnetic RAM Will Work by Kevin Bonsor
• The Possibility of Commercial MRAM by John Dvorak
• Nanomagnetics (a chapter of Nanostructure Science and Technology: A Worldwide Study)
• Magnetic Random-Access Memory Promises PC Changes
• IBM says breakthrough will enable commercial MRAMs

Interesting highlights:

The trasentric paper quoted Electronic Buyer's News:

"Honeywell Inc. and Motorola Inc. are hoping to spin volume quantities of MRAM through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract that is also shared by IBM. DRAM powerhouses Micron, NEC, and Samsung are said to be developing the technology, while Hewlett-Packard has a design team looking into the viability of chip-level magnetic storage."

1. Much of this research is funded by a DARPA contract which means it is the money of US Taxpayers at work.
2. Samsung is part of the same contract.

The Wired article is fairly lengthy and also details the biography of Stuart Parkin. Parkin is the IBM fellow that has been driving most of the MRAM research.

Ciao.

man[3] wouldn't have to build the time machine the second time around, since man[2] was never killed by man[1].

An excerpt from Howstuffworks about this theory...

Let's say that you do travel back to meet your grandfather when he was a boy. In the theory of parallel universes, you may have traveled to another universe, one that is similar to ours, but has a different succession of events. For instance, if you were to travel back in time and kill one of your ancestors, you've only killed that person in one universe, which is no longer the universe that you exist in. And if you then try to travel back to your own time, you may end up in another parallel universe and never be able to get back to the universe you started in.

I'm lost.

woof.

Moonshine from that era was known to cause blindness but people took that risk.

That's because some of the producers were mixing in large amounts methyl alcohol (wood alcohol) or were just incompetant when it came to distilling. Methyl alcohol breaks down into formaldehyde and formic acid in the body. This is what caused blindness and/or death. While it is present in small amounts in may natural products, larger amounts of ethyl alcohol are also present (ethanol is the anitdote for methanol).

People had been making their own whiskey a long, long time before Prohibition. In some cases it was to turn grain into something more portable and profitable, in others it was to avoid paying taxes. Given the same risk, it was more profitable for the people to smuggle whiskey than beer or wine. Why do people drink beer or wine now instead of whiskey? It's cheaper per liter and it takes more liquid to get really drunk. Most people social drinkers and probably aren't out to get drunk really fast (depending on the region, there are people who make, drink and sell illegal moonshine). Those that do want to get drunk really fast and/or like the surge of alcohol hitting their system are going to go for the hard stuff. Would a powdered cocaine user or crackhead start chewing coca leaves if it suddently became legal? Probably not because they're used to the rapid rush.

methanol in the body Methanol treatment

How Wireless Networks Work

spread spectrum devices are designed to work around interference at specific frequencies. Anyone know if the processor would mess up if not properly shielded?

metric

slime; chime; mime; crime; fine; wine; dine; climb; sublime; vine; shine; forty-nine; mine;....need more?

I knew a man,
his name was Lang,
he owned a neon signnnnnnnnnnnnn....

And once a year,
we'd host a beer,
and toast to old Lang's sign....

[and toast to paradigm...or something like that)

(sung to the tune of "Auld Lang Syne")

Read
or
This

It doesn't beam your position. The satellites broadcast the exact time and, using the intersection of 3 of these such times, you can determine your position.

Your UPC code is coming shortly. Hold on the line while we look up the nearest tatoo parlour ...

Nah - I don't buy this - if "small errors" crept into data burnt onto CDs on a regular basis, half the software I downloaded and burnt would be corrupt.

Data CDs and Audio CDs have different encodings. Data CDs use 304 ECC bits per 2048 data bits. Audio CDs use 24 ECC bits per 2352 data bits. Audio CDs can degrade if you record/rip/record/rip multiple times. Data CDs can potentially degrade too, but the higher number of ECC bits makes it much rarer.

My Sony CD player even has "One bit sampling" on it LOL.

1 bit DACs are clever inventions that avoid the problems with traditional voltage ladders. They are nothing to laugh about.

Seen on a DVD the other day too: "PAL" like the data is different if your player renders PAL as opposed to NTSC or Secam.

The coding on a PAL DVD is different to the encoding on an NTSC DVD. This is why R4 vs R1 sites tend to recommend R4 because the higher resolution on PAL DVDs gives you a better picture on decent TVs.

also, you can make a compass [thinkquest.org] using a bowl of still water, a blade of grass, and a small sliver of ferrous metal. (like the hand of a watch)

Also, you can make a GPS system using only a few atomic clocks, several satellites in low earth orbit, and about eleventy billion dollars.