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I prefer the opposite theft. IIRC, two guys in grey coveralls wheel a new ATM into the local mall and lock it to a lamp post in a main courtyard. After weeks of complaints that the damn thing doesn't work, two guys in grey coveralls come and unlock it to cart it away.
In the meantime, the PC and card reader inside (programmed to do the usual ATM dialog, then print "Your transaction cannot be completed at this time") has been gathering mag-strip data and PINs for hundreds of cards.
One mag-strip writer later, you've got access to hundreds of accounts.
See ATM Spoofing here for something along those lines.

--

Some may prefer Dennis Ritchie or even Richard Stallman...

Internet suspend/resume at Intel Research in pittsburgh is another: paper HERE. They also had an article in scientific america awhile back.

One big advantage of managing with VM's is a complete system is just like a file, and thus can be copied and migrated easily. For example, if you have a production server with some faulty hardware, you can migrate the machine to a new host by simply copying the VM files, then repair the hardware, and copy it back.

Of course the efficiency is degraded somewhat do to the VM overhead, but the main argument is cycles are cheap, peopel are expensive. It's cheaper to by a P4 2.4 GHZ for $500 than buy a new sysadmin for $60,000. If you are performance-limited, just replicate instead of buying some fancy hardware (or look into better VM technology like VMware ESX server).

This is a terrible slashdot article, no hype, no good in-jokes, no mindless "____ is the next big thing".

Next you'll expect slashdot readers to actually learn something about the history of computing, and the basics of computer science, and information technology.

I will pay you $100 for each crash.

Sounds like the way our deity does things. I like it.

You may wanna check out the system we use at Stanford.

Stanford has something called "Bookshare".

It's student developed and student maintained. Basically, you sign up and then list any books you own but don't currently need. By searching through the combined listings, you can usually find copies of your required textbooks for free. Then you return them at the end of the quarter/semester.

share.stanford.edu is the general site, and it includes subsections for books, music and movies.

I've used it myself and found the textbook library very useful. The textbook library is linked to the current course offerings, so it all works quite efficiently.

Great clean user interface, and a simple concept. Could serve as a great model for an opensource effort, in my opinion.

Stanford has something called "Bookshare".

It's student developed and student maintained. Basically, you sign up and then list any books you own but don't currently need. By searching through the combined listings, you can usually find copies of your required textbooks for free. Then you return them at the end of the quarter/semester.

share.stanford.edu is the general site, and it includes subsections for books, music and movies.

I've used it myself and found the textbook library very useful. The textbook library is linked to the current course offerings, so it all works quite efficiently.

Great clean user interface, and a simple concept. Could serve as a great model for an opensource effort, in my opinion.

Stanford has something called "Bookshare".

It's student developed and student maintained. Basically, you sign up and then list any books you own but don't currently need. By searching through the combined listings, you can usually find copies of your required textbooks for free. Then you return them at the end of the quarter/semester.

share.stanford.edu is the general site, and it includes subsections for books, music and movies.

I've used it myself and found the textbook library very useful. The textbook library is linked to the current course offerings, so it all works quite efficiently.

Great clean user interface, and a simple concept. Could serve as a great model for an opensource effort, in my opinion.

Stanford has something called "Bookshare".

It's student developed and student maintained. Basically, you sign up and then list any books you own but don't currently need. By searching through the combined listings, you can usually find copies of your required textbooks for free. Then you return them at the end of the quarter/semester.

share.stanford.edu is the general site, and it includes subsections for books, music and movies.

I've used it myself and found the textbook library very useful. The textbook library is linked to the current course offerings, so it all works quite efficiently.

Great clean user interface, and a simple concept. Could serve as a great model for an opensource effort, in my opinion.

You should read The Future of Ideas, by Lawrence Lessig. One of the things he talks about in the book is economic reasons of why entities (such as companies or countries) might "give away" their intellectual property under an open license. One argument would be if they forked an open project and kept a secret version, they would have to spend a lot more resources if they wanted to use updates to the project. IIRC, another reason is that it enhances value of assets they have in other ways. Maybe if they give away their source code it enhances the value of their computers significantly enough so that they don't need to keep it proprietary.

Fair Use is about the right to quote portions of one work within another, as a means of making commentary, criticism, or parody. See Standford's explanation or Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the Copyright law.

You might argue that it's 'reasonable' to download an MP3 file that corresponds to a track from a CD that you own, but it's simply not 'Fair Use'.

Rather than fuss over mechanical failures and damaged media, why not use flash memory for backups? We maintain about 100 servers distributed to customers' sites. Each night we copy a backup of critical data (generally less than 128MB) to removable media in case the hard drive fails.

Both of these would be my recommendation. I use flash media to boot firewalls, routers and embedded servers that run from RAM drives (nearing 100 deployed at customer sites and in our network). But I automount a partion on CF modules for logs. Flash memory is very reliable; it's rated at about 100,000 destructive writes. Read that as wiping it out, reformating it, not as I wrote to /var/log/messages for a week and the media toasted because somebody's machine caused the firewall to log crap every 2 seconds for a week. If it wasn't reliable, Cisco wouldn't use it for non-volatile storage (neither would I).

The way we handle server backups is for servers to backup via a script to a tar.gz file over a private T-1 for servers. Granted, this amounts to a lot of GB for us but if you use something like rdiff-backup or a more simple script that backups up your files across the net through an SSH tunnel, you should be in pretty good shape. CDRWs are a poor choice if you can't or won't rotate media routinely. Especially since their lifespan for writes is low. You or your customer will have to rotate if you use CDRWs.

From Stanford:

"Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. For example, if you wish to criticize a novelist, you should have the freedom to quote a portion of the novelist's work without asking permission. Absent this freedom, copyright owners could stifle any negative comments about their work."

So, for example, my inclusion of that quote makes use of 'fair use'.

Regarding the Treaty of Tripoli, perhaps you might want to study a more scholarly source. (You will want to read the whole thing and pay particular attention to the issues around "Article XI.")

Regarding the beliefs of Founders of the United States, and how they were all Deists, I think the matter is more complex than you acknowledge.

Err.. you're thinking of the Gates Building at Stanford, maybe?

all right funny guy, if that's the way you want to be, you just made it on to my friend list 8-)

Oh great. Now I have to dig out my old 720K floppy disks to check my notes on how to be sociable with actual human beings, and I can't find the way to change the CMOS settings for the old FDD controller.

My grilf just broke the F10 key while we were doing NGMWT--Nerdy Giggly Man/Woman Thing--in the client room (immediately adjacent to the server room, which is actually a garage converted from holding actual cars to holding underpowered motor scooters, solar arrays (during rainstorms), and firmware development stations for chips nobody cares about anymore)).

NOT!

::::snort:::: ::::::nosewipe:::::

What's next? You gonna ruin the exquisitely calibrated pitch of the blades of the propeller on my beanie? ::::::sigh::::: :-p

But all right. You win. ;-) Pleased to meet you. :-) :::::extending hand::::: :::::wondering if you remembered which hand most recently absorbed my proboscal mucous:::::

BTW- can you explain your .sig? followed the link and I have to admit, I'm kinda lost.

Google whacking only permits two terms, and it's so indistinguishible from impossibility that, with odds like that, I believe it would be wiser to arrange a date with Pamela Anderson.

Thus, in my quest to find the perfectly mediocre challenge, I "invented" Google befuddling. I guess its rules are as follows:

1. Use more than 6 words in a Google search.
2. Make the query appear perfectly valid in human logic.
3. Show off the results to people in that Google, as if by a "miracle", failed to do its usual magical coherence in its answers.
4. Old fashioned "pre-Google" search engine rubbish is "victory".

I guess it is not inherently competitive any more than figure skating is. It might very well be an artform. For example, due to the question generated by Google, this link has some merit, IMHO.

I'm not quite sure. I just extract these ideas from a spatially sequent malodorous orifice (near a wild hair), and the consequently necessary cleaning and disinfecting runs up a lot of temporal overhead. I think you can about imagine, huh?

Anyway, hope that helps. (snicker) :-)
Now as you were saying about who should ascend to the throne after Governor Schwarzenegger...

• Stanford Movement Publications (2002 and before) - especially Kathy Pullen's paper
  
• Motion Synthesis from Annotation
  
• SIGGRAPH 2002 Publications
  

• Stanford Movement Publications (2002 and before) - especially Kathy Pullen's paper
  
• Motion Synthesis from Annotation
  
• SIGGRAPH 2002 Publications
  

This is pretty much what I do. I have a file server with the 1 OS drive (to boot and run from, obviously), 1 NFS export drive (for all of my important data), 1 drive that mirrors the previous drive, and 1 more drive to hold backups of the /home directories on the other couple of machines on the network.

This solution has worked like a charm for me. The real workhorse is rdiff-backup, which when thrown into a crontab, does automatic daily incremental backups of everything mentioned above without any intervention at all. Quick tip: you can use hdparm in Linux to literally turn off drives that are only used once a day to help save some wear and tear on them, plus electricity.

I got these sites from:
http://door.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rank_biblio.html

A message from stanford to US News to stop publishing their shit:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/961206gcfallow.html http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/970418rankings.html

This an article from an education consultant:
http://www.washingtonparent.com/articles/9712/rank ings.htm

This article goes over the false assumptions about rankings:
http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/99 /collrank.html

A page from petersons declaring college rankings irresponsible:
http://www.petersons.com/about/ranking.html A page on the ucla server giving tips on choosing a university:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/mm/cc/info/choosing/eval .html

Articles from the chronicle:
http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i02/02a06701.htm http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i11/11a00101.htm

Article from columbia:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.1/vying.h tm

Slate articles:
http://slate.msn.com/id/34027/ http://slate.msn.com/id/34278/

A law school's article on rankings:
http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/usnwr.htm

A law school association to ask to stop ranking:
http://www.aals.org/ranknews.html http://www.aals.org/validity.html

Law school admission counsel:
http://www.lsac.org/LSAC.asp?url=lsac/deans-speak- out-rankings.asp

AMU's response to their high ranking:
http://www.tamu.edu/new/vision/where.html

I got these sites from:
http://door.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rank_biblio.html

A message from stanford to US News to stop publishing their shit:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/961206gcfallow.html http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/970418rankings.html

This an article from an education consultant:
http://www.washingtonparent.com/articles/9712/rank ings.htm

This article goes over the false assumptions about rankings:
http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/99 /collrank.html

A page from petersons declaring college rankings irresponsible:
http://www.petersons.com/about/ranking.html A page on the ucla server giving tips on choosing a university:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/mm/cc/info/choosing/eval .html

Articles from the chronicle:
http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i02/02a06701.htm http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i11/11a00101.htm

Article from columbia:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.1/vying.h tm

Slate articles:
http://slate.msn.com/id/34027/ http://slate.msn.com/id/34278/

A law school's article on rankings:
http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/usnwr.htm

A law school association to ask to stop ranking:
http://www.aals.org/ranknews.html http://www.aals.org/validity.html

Law school admission counsel:
http://www.lsac.org/LSAC.asp?url=lsac/deans-speak- out-rankings.asp

AMU's response to their high ranking:
http://www.tamu.edu/new/vision/where.html

Particular CD? Hah, I guess you're too young to remember having to check page 46, line 3, word 12 in the manual. :)

More details on that old thing (+1 nostalgia) here:
http://www-cse.stanford.edu/classes/cs201/projects -99-00/software-piracy/copyright.html

For some number of years I thought my allergy symptoms were related to high pressure systems. After looking at pressure records, they certainly seemed correlated with my sniffling and sneezing. Some of my friends were having headaches at the same time.

However, I have an alternate explanation for my allergies -- high pressure systems affect winds and winds can bring in pollens. The high pressure systems in Northern California come from the west. As they go east, they blow pollen, pesticides, etc. from the California Central Valley to the coast (where I live). At other times we have relatively clean air (well, there's smog...). So when the dirty air comes in, I sneeze. In this theory, high pressure and my allergy symptoms are correlated but high pressure itself isn't the direct cause of those symptoms.

It's just a theory, though. I'm willing to believe that air pressure can affect your health, but I'm also willing to be convinced otherwise. At this point I don't have enough data. I'd love to hear the experiences of others.

1) How about a large array of solar arrays in orbit above the planet. They could soak up pure sunlight, and fire it down to the earth in the form of a laser at ground-bound solar arrays waiting for bursts of light. Of course there would be drawbacks: Birds flying through the beams would be vaporised, as well as any aircraft which accidentally strayed off course, and there's always the chance that something might hit a satellite, shifting its aim to target a busload of nuns.

2) Combine power generation with them space elevators we keep hearing about. Aren't those supposed to generate some huge amount of static electricity? You know, giant metallic strand kilometers in length, raking the sky all the way up to zero atmosphere... Why not harness it? I have no idea how we'd get the power back down to the ground, but hey. I'm just a kook.

3) Um... geothermal taps at active volcanoes? Not necessarily a *smart* investment, but it's hot, and we know how to get electricity from hot dirt.

4) Electroactive polymers. If we can find a way to manufacture these little pads inexpensively, then why not have them running under sidewalks, highways, stairs, bowling alleys, basketball courts, train tracks, treadmills, carpets (especially at your local all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet)... They *have* to be pretty resilient if the military is planning to stick them in troops' boots. Every time a car rolls by or a pudgy fellow trundles over to get a fifth bowl of kung-pao chicken, you'd be getting something out of it.

5) Put great big magnets on top of cars, and run large coils of wire around all highways. Okay, that was stupid.

6) Attach generators to doors. All doors. Turnstyles.

7) If only there were a way to safely transmit power. Wouldn't it be great to have all of the icky nuclear power plants to the moon and just have them send the energy home? Maybe something with quantum-entangled pairs of stuff? Like have one member on the moon being jiggled like a maraca by a nuclear furnace and the other half on Earth having its quantum-jiggles somehow harnessed for its energy?

Probably not, huh?

Umm, that's not the case. That's the government's press release.

The case is in a PDF file here, and it backs up the SecurityFocus article.

Benchmarks are inherently flawed for the reasons stated in the posts. Comparing hardware to itself and similar hardware means there's no external reference point. Comparing one thing to another is okay, but you can't get absolute numbers in a closed Platonic system.

Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem states that you can't define a system entirely in its own terms, and that any system needs to be defined by terms outside of it.

So, how can you accurately rate hardware based on similar hardware? To meet the GIT (Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem), you would need to compare the hardware with something outside of the system, so you have an external reference point. For example, if you're benchmarking graphics cards, you need to also compare them to something outside of that area of hardware.. so.. say, a graphics tablet, or an iPod.

So, say that the first graphics card is 0.7% compared to the iPod, we now have an external reference to use with the other graphics cards.. so a better card might be 10% compared with the iPod, or a few percent compared to the graphics tablet, which proves that the second card is better than the first, due to the respective ratings compared to the external objects.

This is just regular math. I have to say, it's pretty amazing what you can apply regular math to.. yes, even benchmarks!

Flexible systems solve more of the initial problem but tend to be harder to manage. (Pick your favorite example: Linux vs. Mac, C++ vs. Java, Civilization vs. Quake, ...) What I worried about back when I used ACLs was that roles can change over time. Yes, I have some directory that Bob should have access to. Two months from now, Alice joins Bob's group and takes over his duties, so she needs access. Can Bob grant that access? Now what happens when Bob transfers to a different group? Who's going to go around checking all files accessible by Bob to determine which of them were accessible by him because he's working on some particular project and which were accessible because he's a good buddy of mine? What if you forget to do this?

Keep it simple. If not for yourself, for your children, and your children's children.

There has been some work on using graphics cards for computation. The tough part is figuring out how to rephrase your algorithm in terms of what the GPU can handle. You'd expect matrix math to work out but people have tried to implement more interesting algorithms too. :-)

This course description gives a decent overview of the basic probabilistic nature of quantum physics. I just found it because I'd recommend reading the course book, Quantum Mechanics and Experience, for an excellent description of the 'problem' of quantum interpretation.

Interestingly, it is a philosophy course. Most physicists have long since resigned themselves to the empiricist view that interpretation of quantum effects doesn't matter (see my sig). If it can't be directly seen and measured, it doesn't exist. The problem with that view is that what 'does' exist cannot be explained other than as quantum 'randomness'.

As for hidden variables, I'm inclined to agree with Einstein on this matter, too. If physicists throughout time had resigned themselves to thoughtlessly measuring and manipulating obvious variables, they would instead be called "chemists". It's obvious that there is more to quantum effects than is presently measurable.

We complain about the Microsoft monoculture because what OS other people use affects me too -- availability of software, interoperability of protocols, sharing of documents. There's a cost to being in the minority. I can use more than one OS, but it's a lot of work.

With search engines, it doesn't really matter much what other people use. I can still use any search engine I choose without risking a penalty for choosing something different. I'm also able to easily use more than one.

I think the big difference is that with search engines, I feel like I have a choice, and I'm not being pressured to use one particular search engine.

If there were 10,000 niche search engines, how would you figure out which search engine is the right one? Either you'd have a metasearch engine that searched them all or you'd have a serach engine that told you which search engine to go to. Either way, there'd be some place where people started the search process, and that site would upset the balance of power.

Weird. I'm not seeing any ads on Google when I search for hiccups. It's possible that Google already got to it -- its ad system looks out for ads that users aren't interested in (i.e., aren't getting clicks) and turns them off.

I'm playing a game. I don't want it to be realistic. I don't want to deal with eating, bathroom breaks, or "that time of the month". I don't want to wait 8 hours while my characters sleep. I want to be able to pause the game. I don't want to deal with colds and flus and lyme disease. I don't want to deal with dying without being able to reload. I don't want to play the boring parts of the story.

As far as special colors and fonts go, my random guess would be that for replayability, you want to help the player the second time through (as you're playing a different clan/race/class) by emphasizing the text that may change. You normally skip the long text the second time you play the game, so you need something to draw your eye to the things you need to pay attention to.

Realism is overrated in games. The point of the game is to escape real life, not to emulate it.

The standard Microsoft weenie excuse for instability in the past has been "it's the drivers!"

Creatine's just an amino acid.

Not one of the vital ones to life: ie, if you don't have it, your protiens will not all mis-fold / you will not degenerate into a corpse.

Having WAYYY too much Creatine will help fuel bacterial growth & whatnot. Still, Creatine is a neat fuel, the body likes having it in muscle to fuel short-term bursts of energy.

Interested in more about amino acids/proteins and what they can mean to you? Check out Folding@Home as mentioned on Slash_ _dot

And fold for team #93

They're not really rare. As the article states, Debeers has a stockpile and controls the supply ruthlessly with tactics that makes Microsoft look like reasonable.

They pretty much ignored an antitrust judgement, have been held responsible for untold exploitation of black African minors, and have been accused of much worse. In the article, one of the interviewees recalls and indirect death threat and treats the journalist with suspicion, fearful that he is an agent of Debeers.

Yes, ladies, we know they look pretty. They may also be more responsible for more terrorism than drugs, certainly more than Bush/Ascroft would like you to beleive.

I was incredibly annoyed when my health insurance company printed my social security number on my health insurance card. I no longer carry that card with me. :P

Can somebody explain this to me? How can this patent exist when in 1998 there were applets / plugins running inside Netscape Navigator doing all the things the patented method does The patent was filed in 1994 for "so-called" invention done in 1993. More info here. I find this ruling frightening. The above page points to prior/concurent art and if MS cannot win its case, who will? Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror? Who is next on Eoals diary? It may be one more blattant proof of the stupidity of current patent laws in US but applets and other embedded programs are now subject to patent in HTML. So you cannot implement the HTML spec (which is supposed to be an open spec) in the US whithout a license or being subject to a law suit.

And Cal(Berkeley) is blocking their network from outside access starting today for four days. Makes me wonder how many other large networks have been compromised, but don't know it.

I'm glad I don't work at Stanford.....don't envy them having to wipe 2,400 machines and sort through files that need to be replaced.....trying to avoid trojans, etc

Ok, so if we pair electrons and holes, we get excitons. But what do we get when we pair protons and neutrons? Do we get hardons?

Theoretical physicists at Stanford and the University of Tokyo think they've found a way to solve the dissipation problem by manipulating a neglected property of the electron - its ''spin,'' or orientation, typically described by its quantum state as ''up'' or ''down.'' They report their findings in the Aug. 7 issue of Science Express, an online version of Science magazine. Electronics relies on Ohm's Law, which says application of a voltage to many materials results in the creation of a current. That's because electrons transmit their charge through the materials. But Ohm's Law also describes the inevitable conversion of electric energy into heat when electrons encounter resistance as they pass through materials.

''We have discovered the equivalent of a new 'Ohm's Law' for spintronics - the emerging science of manipulating the spin of electrons for useful purposes,'' says Shoucheng Zhang, a physics professor at Stanford. Professor Naoto Nagaosa of the University of Tokyo and his research assistant, Shuichi Murakami, are Zhang's co-authors. ''Unlike the Ohm's Law for electronics, the new 'Ohm's Law' that we've discovered says that the spin of the electron can be transported without any loss of energy, or dissipation. Furthermore, this effect occurs at room temperature in materials already widely used in the semiconductor industry, such as gallium arsenide. That's important because it could enable a new generation of computing devices.''

Zhang uses a celestial analogy to explain two important properties of electrons - their center of mass and their spin: ''The Earth has two kinds of motion. One is that its center of mass moves around the Sun. But the other is that it also spins by itself, or rotates. The way it moves around the Sun gives us the year, but the way it rotates around by itself gives us the day. The electron has similar properties.'' While electronics uses voltage to move an electron's center of mass, spintronics uses voltage to manipulate its spin.

The authors predict that application of an electric field will cause electrons' spins to flow together collectively in a current. The applied electric force, the spins and the spin current align in three different directions that are all perpendicular to each other (see film of the effect at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/august2 0/zhang-video-820.html).

''This is a remarkable thing,'' explains Zhang. ''I push you forward and you move sideways - not in the direction that I'm pushing you.''

So far, only superconductors are known to carry current without any dissipation. However, extremely low temperatures, typically -150 degree Celsius, are required for the dissipationless current to flow inside a superconductor. Unlike electronic superconductors being investigated in advanced laboratories throughout the world, whose operating temperatures are too low to be practical in commercial devices, Zhang, Nagaosa and Murakami theorize that the dissipationless spin cur

Theoretical physicists at Stanford and the University of Tokyo think they've found a way to solve the dissipation problem by manipulating a neglected property of the electron - its ''spin,'' or orientation, typically described by its quantum state as ''up'' or ''down.'' They report their findings in the Aug. 7 issue of Science Express, an online version of Science magazine. Electronics relies on Ohm's Law, which says application of a voltage to many materials results in the creation of a current. That's because electrons transmit their charge through the materials. But Ohm's Law also describes the inevitable conversion of electric energy into heat when electrons encounter resistance as they pass through materials.

''We have discovered the equivalent of a new 'Ohm's Law' for spintronics - the emerging science of manipulating the spin of electrons for useful purposes,'' says Shoucheng Zhang, a physics professor at Stanford. Professor Naoto Nagaosa of the University of Tokyo and his research assistant, Shuichi Murakami, are Zhang's co-authors. ''Unlike the Ohm's Law for electronics, the new 'Ohm's Law' that we've discovered says that the spin of the electron can be transported without any loss of energy, or dissipation. Furthermore, this effect occurs at room temperature in materials already widely used in the semiconductor industry, such as gallium arsenide. That's important because it could enable a new generation of computing devices.''

Zhang uses a celestial analogy to explain two important properties of electrons - their center of mass and their spin: ''The Earth has two kinds of motion. One is that its center of mass moves around the Sun. But the other is that it also spins by itself, or rotates. The way it moves around the Sun gives us the year, but the way it rotates around by itself gives us the day. The electron has similar properties.'' While electronics uses voltage to move an electron's center of mass, spintronics uses voltage to manipulate its spin.

The authors predict that application of an electric field will cause electrons' spins to flow together collectively in a current. The applied electric force, the spins and the spin current align in three different directions that are all perpendicular to each other (see film of the effect at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/august2 0/zhang-video-820.html).

''This is a remarkable thing,'' explains Zhang. ''I push you forward and you move sideways - not in the direction that I'm pushing you.''

So far, only superconductors are known to carry current without any dissipation. However, extremely low temperatures, typically -150 degree Celsius, are required for the dissipationless current to flow inside a superconductor. Unlike electronic superconductors being investigated in advanced laboratories throughout the world, whose operating temperatures are too low to be practical in commercial devices, Zhang, Nagaosa and Murakami theorize that the dissipationless spin cur

Theoretical physicists at Stanford and the University of Tokyo think they've found a way to solve the dissipation problem by manipulating a neglected property of the electron - its ''spin,'' or orientation, typically described by its quantum state as ''up'' or ''down.'' They report their findings in the Aug. 7 issue of Science Express, an online version of Science magazine. Electronics relies on Ohm's Law, which says application of a voltage to many materials results in the creation of a current. That's because electrons transmit their charge through the materials. But Ohm's Law also describes the inevitable conversion of electric energy into heat when electrons encounter resistance as they pass through materials.

''We have discovered the equivalent of a new 'Ohm's Law' for spintronics - the emerging science of manipulating the spin of electrons for useful purposes,'' says Shoucheng Zhang, a physics professor at Stanford. Professor Naoto Nagaosa of the University of Tokyo and his research assistant, Shuichi Murakami, are Zhang's co-authors. ''Unlike the Ohm's Law for electronics, the new 'Ohm's Law' that we've discovered says that the spin of the electron can be transported without any loss of energy, or dissipation. Furthermore, this effect occurs at room temperature in materials already widely used in the semiconductor industry, such as gallium arsenide. That's important because it could enable a new generation of computing devices.''

Zhang uses a celestial analogy to explain two important properties of electrons - their center of mass and their spin: ''The Earth has two kinds of motion. One is that its center of mass moves around the Sun. But the other is that it also spins by itself, or rotates. The way it moves around the Sun gives us the year, but the way it rotates around by itself gives us the day. The electron has similar properties.'' While electronics uses voltage to move an electron's center of mass, spintronics uses voltage to manipulate its spin.

The authors predict that application of an electric field will cause electrons' spins to flow together collectively in a current. The applied electric force, the spins and the spin current align in three different directions that are all perpendicular to each other (see film of the effect at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/august2 0/zhang-video-820.html).

''This is a remarkable thing,'' explains Zhang. ''I push you forward and you move sideways - not in the direction that I'm pushing you.''

So far, only superconductors are known to carry current without any dissipation. However, extremely low temperatures, typically -150 degree Celsius, are required for the dissipationless current to flow inside a superconductor. Unlike electronic superconductors being investigated in advanced laboratories throughout the world, whose operating temperatures are too low to be practical in commercial devices, Zhang, Nagaosa and Murakami theorize that the dissipationless spin cur

At least one scholar from Stanford thinks it's very likely that Mr. Bush's mispronunciation is an intentional attempt to seem like a "regular guy" to the American people.

More recently, a third option has become available: having fully implanted power system that can be recharged wirelessly, via em radiation of some kind (you can google for it). This is a big gain, because it allows devices that are more power hungry while still maintaining the benefits of not breaching the skin and not needing frequent operations. But it still requires people to remember and have access to the appropriate charging device consistantly. If for any reason some one forgets or can't recharge, the device may shut down, sometimes with fatal results. So having a way to remove one more step for powering these things should really help improve the quality of life for a lot of people today.

Of course, personally I find this to be a very exciting development for future things as well. When we get to the point of having more optional implants, for things like boosting hearing or vision, a way to power them will be necessary, and if the power requirements are low, then this system would be perfect. Ultimately, widespread adoption of anything, from an OS to a vehicle, is all about making it as easy and intuitive for end users as possible. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on for advanced things like brain-computer interfaces, and people who are interested should look around, as the state of the art has advanced a great deal in the past 5 years. Here are a few links for the curious, and much more can be found with google, of course:

Graz University of Technology

Standford/DVA Neural Interface Project

Beyond the Big Barrier(lighter, intro type stuff)
News Group:
sci.med.psychobiology

Anyway, despite the problems with power-control, China and Europe are adopting their own versions of CDMA for 3G services.

*walsh functions are orthogonal - by modulating the output signal by the assigned walsh function (different for every transmitter) and then scrambling the resultant signal by a pseudo-random sequence (to improve the average PSD), all of the signals are orthogonal to each other and do not interfere as long as the power is exactly the same for all of them (power differences screw up the orthogonality).

For those of you that enjoy interesting and different games, you should check this out. It's a 3d arcade version of the ancient chinese game Go.

... the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important. Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact.

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.