Slashdot Mirror

I already explained it once here: https://rcbi.rochester.edu/weblog/vanooste/2009/04/03/AwordtotheTWCRoadRunnermarke.html

The problem is that we currently pay enough for the ISP to be able to afford a decent unlimited plan. The fact that we pay for a 5 Mbps plan but only get 512 kbps is not our fault but their problem for not upgrading capacity. With what we pay right now (and TWC has a monopoly in my neighborhood) they should be able to afford fiber to the premises and then they want to cap our current half-a-megabit connection too?

There's a lot on corporal punishment in the Behavior Analysis literature. Full text of the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis is free to the public (up until the most recent 2 issues).
http://seab.envmed.rochester.edu/jaba/

My boss at my last job was a hard-core Applied Behavior Analyst. He continually emphasized with our staff to be aware of our use of aversive stimuli with the residents we worked with and be aware of how they were conditioning us as well as vice versa. I'm almost directly quoting him in that last post.

That may be true. What about nuclear batteries however?

New 'Nuclear Battery' Runs 10 Years, 10 Times More Powerful

Nuclear Battery in Your Laptop

I know they're not available now but it looks like they may not be too far off. (I actually don't know much about these so if someone knows why they wouldn't be viable I'd be interested to know)

Others have noted that everyone is using poor quality displays, not just Apple, but I haven't seen anyone that mentioned that other laptops DO have the issue on display here.

I bought a Lenovo T61 in March and it had this same line problem. I went online and found others with the same issue (among other problems with the screen - it is just poor quality in general.)

I managed to get the screen replaced with one from a different manufacturer. A representative from Lenovo was participating in the discussion on notebookforums.com, where people were reporting issues with Lenovo laptop screens, and I sent my system in so that he could look at it himself. He acknowledged that it was bad and managed to get the repair guys to put in a different screen, but I don't think they're really doing anything to address the problem, like trying to get screen manufacturers to come up with better screens. Most people just don't care, unfortunately, especially with Thinkpads, which are aimed towards business not graphics.

So the result is that I have a different screen, from a different manufacturer (I believe it's currently an LG, while the original was from Samsung.) It has slight better viewing angles, but most importantly, the gray lines are gone.

Why are the lines such an issue? They really screw up photos and graphics. For the Macbook Pro, used by many photo and graphics "pros", that's a real serious issue. It's hard to capture how bad it really is, but here are some photos I took illustrating the issue:

http://mail.rochester.edu/~chacker/t61lcd.jpg
http://mail.rochester.edu/~chacker/t61lcd2.jpg

(I should note that the two screens shown are different sizes, but have the same resolution of 1680x1050, which is why the pixel size is different.)

For normal use, browsing Slashdot and writing TPS reports, or whatever, it is noticeable but you get used to it and it's not a problem. If you're doing photo editing, or even just looking at photos online, it is a HUGE annoyance. I was going to return the computer if I couldn't get it fixed because it was such a problem. Bad viewing angles and low brightness I can deal with, but these lines I really couldn't. The screens used in Thinkpads are supposedly 8-bit, so I don't think this is a dithering issue as speculated in other comments (I could be wrong and I'm not sure how that works specifically, that's just my feeling.)

Others have noted that everyone is using poor quality displays, not just Apple, but I haven't seen anyone that mentioned that other laptops DO have the issue on display here.

I bought a Lenovo T61 in March and it had this same line problem. I went online and found others with the same issue (among other problems with the screen - it is just poor quality in general.)

I managed to get the screen replaced with one from a different manufacturer. A representative from Lenovo was participating in the discussion on notebookforums.com, where people were reporting issues with Lenovo laptop screens, and I sent my system in so that he could look at it himself. He acknowledged that it was bad and managed to get the repair guys to put in a different screen, but I don't think they're really doing anything to address the problem, like trying to get screen manufacturers to come up with better screens. Most people just don't care, unfortunately, especially with Thinkpads, which are aimed towards business not graphics.

So the result is that I have a different screen, from a different manufacturer (I believe it's currently an LG, while the original was from Samsung.) It has slight better viewing angles, but most importantly, the gray lines are gone.

Why are the lines such an issue? They really screw up photos and graphics. For the Macbook Pro, used by many photo and graphics "pros", that's a real serious issue. It's hard to capture how bad it really is, but here are some photos I took illustrating the issue:

http://mail.rochester.edu/~chacker/t61lcd.jpg
http://mail.rochester.edu/~chacker/t61lcd2.jpg

(I should note that the two screens shown are different sizes, but have the same resolution of 1680x1050, which is why the pixel size is different.)

For normal use, browsing Slashdot and writing TPS reports, or whatever, it is noticeable but you get used to it and it's not a problem. If you're doing photo editing, or even just looking at photos online, it is a HUGE annoyance. I was going to return the computer if I couldn't get it fixed because it was such a problem. Bad viewing angles and low brightness I can deal with, but these lines I really couldn't. The screens used in Thinkpads are supposedly 8-bit, so I don't think this is a dithering issue as speculated in other comments (I could be wrong and I'm not sure how that works specifically, that's just my feeling.)

There is a correlation between performance in visual tasks and the amount of time people have been playing action video games. The initial study has shown that action-video-game (AVG, e.g. Unreal Tournament, other ego-shooters) players perform significantly better in a range of visual attention tasks than non-AVG players. In later studies it has been shown that this increased performance is not observed for people who do play games that are not of the AVG-genre (e.g. The Sims), and also that 50h of game playing of AVG games is sufficient to observe a significant performance increase in visual tasks. Currently, the same lab is investigating whether this effect is also observed in the elderly, with positive initial results. For more information, just have a look at the lab's list of publications (disclaimer: I'm in the same department as that lab, though not member of that lab).

In relation to the article, they seem to recommend the people to play games of the non-AVG type. For this reason I have my doubts that these games will significantly improve performance in visual tasks. On the other hand, it might support other tasks that are required while driving, but that remains to be shown.

There is a correlation between performance in visual tasks and the amount of time people have been playing action video games. The initial study has shown that action-video-game (AVG, e.g. Unreal Tournament, other ego-shooters) players perform significantly better in a range of visual attention tasks than non-AVG players. In later studies it has been shown that this increased performance is not observed for people who do play games that are not of the AVG-genre (e.g. The Sims), and also that 50h of game playing of AVG games is sufficient to observe a significant performance increase in visual tasks. Currently, the same lab is investigating whether this effect is also observed in the elderly, with positive initial results. For more information, just have a look at the lab's list of publications (disclaimer: I'm in the same department as that lab, though not member of that lab).

In relation to the article, they seem to recommend the people to play games of the non-AVG type. For this reason I have my doubts that these games will significantly improve performance in visual tasks. On the other hand, it might support other tasks that are required while driving, but that remains to be shown.

http://www.energy.rochester.edu/nordvarm/env/
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/uk/chpa/commheat/eursuccess.htm

Already done on a quite large scale in finland, norway and sweden.

http://www.energy.rochester.edu/nordvarm/env/
http://www.energy.rochester.edu/uk/chpa/commheat/eursuccess.htm

Already done on a quite large scale in finland, norway and sweden.

>President Bush didn't lie about anything re:Iraq.

"We've removed an ally of al Qaeda"
"He has trained and financed al Qaeda-type organizations before, al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations."
"Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
"Saddam Hussein . . . is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."
"The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."
"We recently found two mobile biological weapons facilities which were capable of producing biological agents."

There's a good argument that it's not a lie if he believed it himself. The counterargument is that lying to yourself is wrong and damaging.

Who is this for? Those with Alzheimer's or amnesia?

Who is this for? Those with Alzheimer's or amnesia?

University of Rochester is building a petawatt laser of capable of picosecond pulse lengths. http://omegaep.lle.rochester.edu/

http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/pr/news/story.cfm?id=1932

I thought it was more to do with the orbitals of the electrons rather than the atomic number of the atom, and the orbitals of the electrons depend on the crystalline arrangement of atoms, and whether they have been ionised or not. Even different ions of the same atom will have a different
  absorption spectrum and emission spectrum. So no atom has one unique color, but may have a series of wavelengths of light that it can emit, which our sight would perceive as a mix of red, green or blue wavelengths, but provide us with a specific visual interpretation (eg. greenish-blue).

...of serving your time and paying your debt to society?

The problem is we are confusing two different situations - one where the law does not reflect society and one where there is a very genuine need to protect the public and of course the entire gamut in between.

Some crimes are so abhorent and so damaging to the victims that the question is where do you set the debt? I know it's an emotive issue but if someone is raped at best it will take the victim many years to come to terms with and at worst make them take their life.

If such crimes are commited to a very young victim, especially by a family member and over a long period of time, that victim can become an offender themselves in later years.

In any event, is it enough for someone to repay a debt if they are likely to offend again?

I'm sorry that the truth is not as empowering as what you choose to believe, but unfortunately that's a general feature of reality.

Thanks for all your comments (whether we agree on everything or not).

To try to leave things on a positive note, here is are a couple of links to research on the mind-body connection as it relates to the immune system. On the history of the development of the field of psychoneuroimmunology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology
From:
http://www.rochester.edu/pr/Review/V59N3/feature2.html
"Can your mental state influence your susceptibility to disease? Much of the scientific evidence that this is so has been coming out of the [Rochester] University Medical Center department headed by neurobiologist David Felten. ...The mind isn't restricted to curing, however; we have always sensed that human thoughts can kill as well as mend. Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon, for instance, in investigating deaths by voodoo in the 1940s concluded that humans could indeed die from "the fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror." It was not until the 1970s, however, that documented evidence of a physiological link between the mind and body was firmly established. One of the earliest such came from a study of rodents in labs at the University Medical Center, and led to the development of a new, hybrid field of study now known as psychoneuroimmunology, generally (and mercifully) shortened to "PNI." PNI is now a highly rated specialty of the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at Rochester, the department headed since 1995 by David Felten. Felten, who also holds the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Professorship, is recognized as one of the leading researchers in the field. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," he is the unassuming wearer of numerous other laurels, including--in addition to a dozen or so teaching awards ("Teaching is my passion," he says)--two nominations for the Albert Lasker Award for Medical Research (sometimes the precursor to a Nobel), and, most recently, the Norman Cousins Award in Mind-Body Health given by the Fetzer Foundation. ... Using special fluorescent stains to trace nerves to various bodily locations, including bone marrow, lymph nodes, and the spleen, the Felten team had discovered a network of nerves leading to blood vessels as well as cells of the immune system. The researchers also found nerves in the thymus and spleen terminating near clusters of lymphocytes, macrophages, and mast cells, all of which help control immune function. There it was, the mind-body connection--clear evidence that the brain has the ability to send signals to immune-system cells. Granny was right, after all. ... "The University Medical Center is now viewed by many as the primary site for the study of brain behavior and immunology," Felten says. "And not only are we in the forefront of research, but we teach our doctors and nurses to treat patients as human beings, not just as slices of anatomy. I never heard the word 'healing' the whole time I was a medical student; here we don't just dismiss it that way. ... "There is so much left to find out--we are nowhere near identifying all the players. And we have no idea," he says, in zestful anticipation of surprises yet to come, "what might be out there lying around the next corner.""

And on a practical basis, yoga and laughter are two good ways to help improve immune function:
http://www.lolyoga.com/therapeutic-benefits.php
"Oliver Wendell Holmes Dr. Lee Berk and fellow researcher Dr. Stanley Tan of Loma Linda University in California have been studying the effects of laughter on the immune system. To date their published studies have shown that laughing lowers

You still havent read the article have you?

If you had read my post you'd realize I did read it. Maybe you didn't comprehend that.

Maybe we will use a transporter to get it out... or... wait... what else could we do? Oh, I know! We can DRILL... DEEP! Sorry about the sarcasm... but I even quoted the article and bolded the relevant sections...

"Deep within" is NOT "Deep Drilling".

with today's technology, is a deep drill reservoir/plant combo. There isnt ANY other way. I provided a BUNCH of links in my other posts.

And elsewhere I provided links showing deep drilling isn't necessary. Another example that shows deep drilling isn't needed is Iceland. The same can be said of Yellowstone, Hawaii, and I'm sure there are many others such as along the Ring of Fire and near Hot Springs. One person used geothermal produced electricity for a resort. Here are more examples where geothermal can be used while drilling less than 10,000 feet, that's no where near the depth of the Mariana Trench. Maybe you have a different definition of "deep drilling" but that's not too deep to me. Here's a page showing 14 places in California that produces geothermal electricity.

Try again.

Hmmm.... The Scientific Method may be more accurately summarized as follows:

1. Observe
2. Develop Hypothesis
3. Make predictions based on hypothesis
4. Test predictions by experimentation

Remember: a Hypothesis is not the same as Theory

A rebuttal:

a) The amount of incoming radiation DOES change though. The fluctuation does correlate to current trends, better then CO2 levels do. Current hypothesis show a direct link between cloud formation and solar output, and a direct link between cloud levels and energy available for absorption. Given that the highest guess for a doubling of CO2 (some guessed number) results in a increase of 2 wm2 (from 2 wm2 current hypothesis) potential warming, it is strong dwarfed by the change of 120 wm2 that can be the affect of a cloud. To the study concerning the affects of cosmic rays (still understudy, but very interesting, and marks a strong relationship): http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/sky-experiment_2.pdf Calling the Sun and it's actions, especially when Mars, Jupiter and several other planets are experiencing the same thing "irrelevant" kinda of a strong but incorrect statement.

b) Kinda wrong. According to the Global Warming Hypothesis, if CO2 was the major affect warming the atmosphere, it would affect the Troposphere the most, with the Troposphere being warmer then the surface. BUT, after the aforementioned satellite studies, they found that the Troposphere is 1C cooler then the surface. Link: http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=1824

c) A large fraction. 14% of the increase. 85% is still natural, and that means a whopping total of 3-4% of the total amount of CO2 is from our fossil fuel release. A good page on the true amounts is laid out here: http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html Before you start trying to chop down the messenger, look at the references. The EPA and the IPCC. And the site adds in the amount of Water Vapor to the affect. Something you have not brought up, even though it is the largest greenhouse gas, amounting to 95% of the total affect.

d) The oceans absorb and release CO2 based on their temperature. There are both the largest absorber and largest releaser of CO2. 20 times what humans produce. And the ocean can easily absorb more CO2 then we, as human, have access to produce through all of our fossil fuels before it becomes noticeable acidic. You claim is correct, but with NO relative reference it is a worthless point. Gif from NASA: http://geo.arc.nasa.gov/sge/casa/CO2-cycle.gif

e) Right on some, but in all dishonest by omission. Like I posted above, without the relative numbers, you are dismissing one part without allowing anything relative to be mentioned. I would like to see a link to what you say on C12/C14 ratios. Oh, if you google it be careful, because you just end up proving the earth is only 10,000 years old. Bad argument.

Summary:

a) Wrong
b) Wrong
c) Close. BUT: Still dwarfed by all other sources of CO2 emissions. And CO2 is still only the 3% of the total GHE.

Please, if you have some facts to rebut this, lay them down. With links please.

Josh

Well, I am a scientist (Comp. Sci.), and I don't recall ever hearing of James Randi before. But, then again, I haven't yet seen anyone manage anything approach "paranormal" involving a computer, unless we're counting Windows ME as "supernaturally bad".

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2993

Looks kinda like the eye of Sauron...

Sorry to be harsh, but I'm not going to bother replying. Your post is a incoherent mess, full of half-truths, truthiness and fill. Pretty much every sentence in it is either factually incorrect, an arbitrary assumption, logically inconsistent or not responding to the points they purport to respond to. I'd suggest you learn about logical fallacies and logical argument in general. Ideally, learn about the scientific method also.

---

Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.

Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior

If/when the CPU designers currently screaming "more threads, more threads!" at us coders get around to implementing efficient h/w transactional memory, painless fine grain parallelism may become a reality. Until then, STM may be fine for very large applications on systems with huge memories and lots of cores, but probably isn't an option for the average desktop.

But STM does present some intriguing possibilities for distributed parallel environments (think STM + DSM).

In his table, under "Research Lab", Google gets a "Not really". This guy has absolutely no idea about what he's talking about. Google has some of the most cutting-edge research in the industry. They almost always have research papers published at the conferences that I attend (so does MS, but Yahoo rarely does). Here are some examples.

Could they be somehow related to this guy? If they are, I hate to think what's in store.

I suspect the original press release and the articles on Science Daily and PhysOrg are FUBAR. I think an article in the Washington Post is probably more accurate. Unfortunately the Phys. Rev. Letter web site doesn't seem to have the actual paper publicly available yet.

I suspect the original press release and the articles on Science Daily and PhysOrg are FUBAR. I think an article in the Washington Post is probably more accurate. Unfortunately the Phys. Rev. Letter web site doesn't seem to have the actual paper publicly available yet.

rom what I can gather the important part of the article is that they have been able to slow down each photon in order to buffer it.

Howell's home page
Boyd's home page

The article isn't a good match with any project listed there.

The idea of storage by slowing something down goes back to a comically ancient technology, which was converting bits to sound waves and sending them through tubes of mercury to be detected electrically milliseconds later.

Howell's home page
Boyd's home page

The article isn't a good match with any project listed there.

The idea of storage by slowing something down goes back to a comically ancient technology, which was converting bits to sound waves and sending them through tubes of mercury to be detected electrically milliseconds later.

Give the man a cookie. Finally, someone who actually understands the purpose of patents. The whole deal, here, is that, in the past, people just kept their inventions secret if they could. The end result? Techniques could die with their inventor (read about Damascus steel for a great example of this). And, as you say, meanwhile people have to duplicate the effort.

I don't know about that. Most of the most famous inventions were generally unprotected by patents or heavily overpatented. Printing presses, screw propellers (reference), internal combustion engines, transistors (existing patents from 1930 were very similar to the ones made at Bell), and plenty of others. That's not to say that a lot of people didn't obtain or try to obtain patents, just that the general industry was able to work around the patents. Additionally, very few inventors have actually made much money for their patents. Most often, individual inventors have been crushed by rich corporations who stole their ideas, filed their own patents, and tied the inventors up in court for years. In general, big discoveries are created by the big thinkers who simply publish their ideas, and it's left up to industry to create practical implementations of these ideas. Patents can push industry to develop working implementations, but only if they are overbroad. The physical world allows a near infinite number of solutions to most classes of problems, so once a working device is patented it usually gives competitors enough information to build a similar device anyway. In reality, all that patents can do is prevent exact copying of a design. In that sense, it's very similar to copyright.

As for software patents, I have no problem with them on the surface (well, except for those that are obvious, but that's a problem with the patent office, not patents in general). However, I think software patents should have a more limited lifespan. After all, 20 years is a *very* long time in the world of computing (just think how different things were in 1986). Something like 4 or 5 years makes far more sense.

The reason software patents are bad is that copyright already covers the same concepts for software that patents do for hardware and machines, namely preventing the exact duplication of an invention. There is no need for softare patents because copyright law prevents competitors from exactly copying an existing solution and selling it themselves. However, there should be nothing wrong with understanding the underlying problem that needs to be solved, examining all the existing approaches, selecting the best approach, and reimplementing a working solution. In some cases, there are what can be called optimal solutions to problems in computer science, and in this case the copyright office recognizes that re-implementations of an optimal algorithm to solve the same problem may in fact be very similar, if not exactly so. The key is that they were produced from first principles and existing research and not directly copied from an existing copyrighted work. Patents work the same way (but in practice patent owners pretend they don't and file lawsuits contrary to this fact), and for instance patents on creating chemicals or medicines are merely a patent on a specific process of creating the end product, or in essence a patent on a machine (considering the entire process as a whole) that produces the end product. Someone who can build a machine to do the same thing in a slightly different way won't infringe the patent.

Any other concept of patents (or copyrights) requires that some entity can own an idea or class of ideas, and not merely a physical representation of a particular idea. I agree with you that patent terms should be shortened (along with copyright terms) to 5 to 10 years. The rate of progress is increasing, and there's no reason to pretend otherwise by having even longer terms th

Let's also note that since global warming hasn't been remotely proven to any true scientists' satisfaction, one possible option is "spend nothing because there's nothing to spend it on".

A finding like this would lend support to the Nemesis theory. If our sun and any of those sister stars are still in some gravitational cycle, it could help explain the periodic extinctions that seem to occur every 26 million years.

If you're an environmentally concerned sort, you might also be happy to know that it generates extraordinarily little pollution compared to the refinement and combustion of fossil fuels.

I'm still unhappy about the waste created: "Most of the radioactive isotopes in high level waste emit large amounts of radiation and have extremely long half-lives (some longer than 100,000 years) creating long time periods before the waste will settle to safe levels of radioactivity."

<sarcasm> Future generations will probably be sincerely delighted about how responsibly we are handling radioactivity today, if they manage to notice before it is too late.</sarcasm>

No, the laser light is turned INTO the energy of the electron beam. It is not infinitely reusable.

That said, I don't see very many posts yet which address the central importance of this news. So let me do that now. THIS IS HUGE HUGE HUGE NEWS. I would be shocked if the LOASIS group weren't on stage with the king of Sweden in a decade or so. Seriously, that's how big this is. No one expected things to happen this fast in wakefield acceleration. No one. Just two years ago I posted a story here about the latest achievement of the same wakefield acceleration research group. They were then at 80 MeV electron energies over millimeters of acceleration distance using a 10 terawatt laser pulse. With 1,000-2,000 trillion watt (petawatt) lasers coming on line in the next few years and this new multi-cm acceleration distance possibility it is not beyond the realm of the plausible to expect to see hundred GeV, possibly even TeV energies coming out of these things. It takes the Stanford linear electron accelerator 2 miles to accelerate its 50 GeV electron positron beams! What we are witnessing is nothing short of a revolution in particle acclerators that will open up new frontiers of high TeV scale particle physics faster than anyone ever thought possible. This is the sort of breakthrough that happens once in 3 or 4 decades.... if you're lucky.

I've been watching the portable reader for a while and watched it slip its schedule twice, realized the screen is smaller than I thought/hoped earlier, and wished it had a stylus. What I always wanted was an 11" screen with these features and the ability to just draw ink onto bitmaps that I save. No text recognition, none of that crap. Just electronic paper (literally: just let me make marks on a blank page) and the reader funcitons. The closest I've seen is this: http://www.lib.rochester.edu/main/devices/device11 .htm/ and the goReader seems defunct and was way too expensive. So this seems like just another near miss to me. The problem seems to be that no one can ever bring themselves to offer the product I described: they start pumping up the functionality until it just *has* to cost close to $1000 or they make the sony reader, which shoots a little too low, like the previous paperback-sized reader that didn't take off --anybody remember the Rocket reader? I actually saw one in a store a few years ago. Is there any hope that someone's eventually going to make what I want? PDA screens are too small. And I don't want PDA functions. Most readers are just readers. What I want is the sony reader with a digitizer and an 11" diagonal screen. I don't even ask to annotate books. Just let me draw on blank pages. Work on the software for later. I'll even pay mark-up to add software to do more things later. Just give me that damn device, so I can avoid carrying paper documents and a notepad and not carry a portable computer. An not path $2500 for a whole tablet computer, since that's not what I want. In excess of half the business world would by my device, why won't anyone build it?

There is some open source software from the University of Rochester called webwork.
http://webwork.rochester.edu/

It's is an automatic math-based homework assignment and submission system.

It can give each student a different version of the same problem.

Part of the problem with most anti-cheating methods is that it makes more work on the already busy professor.

Why bother with 110Mhz when you can get 1-3Thz:P
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2585

Bullshit!

Stop repeating urban legends as fact.

DES
U.S. Patent: 3,962,539
Filed: February 24, 1975
Issued: June 8, 1976
Inventors: Ehrsam et al.
Assignee: IBM

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) patent was assigned to IBM Corporation in 1976. After establishment of DES as a government stadard, IBM placed the patent in the public domain, offering royalty-free licenses conditional on adherence to the specifications of the standard. The patent expired in 1993.

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/users/faculty/nelson/c ourses/cryptology/notes/lecture_19.txt

Also, you are misusing the word 'theory'. From http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/phy_labs/Appendix E/AppendixE.html

"A scientific theory or law represents an hypothesis, or a group of related hypotheses, which has been confirmed through repeated experimental tests. Theories in physics are often formulated in terms of a few concepts and equations, which are identified with "laws of nature," suggesting their universal applicability. Accepted scientific theories and laws become part of our understanding of the universe and the basis for exploring less well-understood areas of knowledge. Theories are not easily discarded; new discoveries are first assumed to fit into the existing theoretical framework. It is only when, after repeated experimental tests, the new phenomenon cannot be accommodated that scientists seriously question the theory and attempt to modify it. The validity that we attach to scientific theories as representing realities of the physical world is to be contrasted with the facile invalidation implied by the expression, "It's only a theory." For example, it is unlikely that a person will step off a tall building on the assumption that they will not fall, because "Gravity is only a theory."

Don't need this breakthrough. We can already do that.

The ENTIRE article was ripped from the university site. Not a single added value--in fact, it was negative value as I had to go to the original for the animations. In these cases, can we please bypass to blogospammers and just get the real deal? Pretty please?

http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=2544

TFA Mentioned some animations, if anyone was looking for them, they are here.

See original press release with animations.

From the article:

The new circuitry topology allows the ILFD to divide by three as well as two.

This tiny change has huge ramifications. A circuit design that can divide by two or three can, for instance, divide 9,999 clock pulses by two, and the 10,000th by 3, giving an average of 2.0001, which could be the frequency at which the cell phone is trying to communicate. Should the phone need to communicate at 2.0002 gigahertz, the ILFD could divide 9,998 clock pulses by two, and the 9,999th and 10,000th by three, yielding an average of 2.0002. By varying how many clock pulses are divided by two or by three, any frequency can be selected, making the power-saving ILFD method viable for the first time.

What does this actually mean? To me it sounds like the writer has no clue as to what they are writing about.

Can somebody please correct me here?

From the above, divide by 3 has little value. Divide by 4 would do just the same. Example: If you can vary how many clock pulses are divided by 2 or 4 (i.e. 2x2), you can get any frequency you want. There is no need for divide by 3.

Divide by 3, however is useful in an oscillator for a totally different reason:

If you can only divide by 2, then your frequency choices are 2,4,8,16 etc, while adding 3 as a factor gives you 2,3,4,6,8,9,10 etc.

This is outlined in detailed in a 4 year old article here:

p. 23: A wide band Modulo-3 ILFD

It states that in inverter based amplifier gives low power.

Hui's chip is described here. (By Hui)

Please give me feedback on this.