You do have Fair Use going for you with broadcast stations. Unfortunately, though you have to agree to XM's service agreement in order to subscribe to the service, and you waive that right in the agreement. "But you still have it!" you might say. Think of this - It's kind of akin to how signing an NDA or a confidentiality agreement with your employer that limits your (supposedly very basic American) right of "free speech." If you don't like the agreement, ask them to change it, don't subscribe to the service, or seek an alternative. Sirius has a similar no-record clause also, so your alternative choices are somewhat limited.
It sounds like they are probably willing to make an exception for the TiVo thing, though. XM has shown themselves to be fairly progressive, at least compared to their competition who is still begging money heavily, so it's good to see them open up to the idea of time shifting rather than go all apeshit about it.
You can even buy products like this that give you similar capabilities in most regular chassis. Just add a SATA raid controller and you're ready to go!
It's kind of funny that none of the responses to you point out the obvious --
Serial ATA defines this. SATA connectors on 3.5" HDD's have a specific positional requirement similar to SCA connectors on SCSI drives. There are plenty of SATA backplanes available. Apple's XServe RAID and G5 towers use them. You can order cases with SATA backplanes for other platforms from plenty of manufacturers. There are external enclosures with SATA backplanes also.
I guess it's also worth noting that 2.5" (laptop) IDE hard drives have similar positional requirements for the 44 pin connectors, thus buildigng a 2.5" ide backplane would be trivially easy, though nobody would ever bother to do it.
I have never been to a store that would not exchange an opened copy of a CD or DVD for the exact same item if it was defective and included all the original materials.
MetaCreations had a product called Canoma that you'd import a photo or two, describe the 3d scene in the photo with basic modelling, then it would create a 3d textured representation from the photos. It didn't make really really wonderful scenes or anything, but the stuff you could do with it in about an hour were incredible.
Adobe purchased the product from MetaCreations and it's not being sold anymore. Perhaps it will come out again in the future to compliment their horrible Atmosphere product.
Well, if you just read the article (joking, but it's really in there) it says that he got a piece of aluminum grate (pre drilled), layed it on top of the piece he cut, and drilled the holes all manually -- I imagine with a rotary drill.
Re:It's not sequencing, not even real DNA viewing!
on
Home DNA Sequencing
·
· Score: 1
This is one of those times that you kind of wish there was some sort of moderation that said 'attach this comment to the article'.
They do have a 20 minute "instant" test for HIV anyway that is an oral test. I don't know about other STD's but it's probably just a matter of getting the right proteins in the strip.
Anyway the company that makes it is called OraSure. I believe it is pretty expensive, but the accuracy is supposed to be pretty high.
I wonder what the ban on things like cameras will be like in the future when people have them implated into their eyes -- either as a rehabilitative or assistive device or as part of some bionic enhancement...
We've been waiting for this since you first told us about it 6 years ago, folks. Hurry up and DO it already. It seems every time there is some article on this it's just to fuel some hype for a new round of investment or something. It's always been 'Next Year!!!" or something like that, but never "Look. Here is a cell phone running on a fuel cell. It cost us $100,000 to build this one, but we're ramping up for mass production and should be ready to start the robots up in 12 months." They always have some vague concept artwork and a giagantic prototype and this 'please give us money' verbiage.
As for the airplane problem, first, I don't think there will be any regulation or rules on this until it actually becomes a problem. I mean, they still let you carry a cigarette lighter and a bottle of booze onto a plane and that is no worse. The first second someone sets fire to the inside of a cabin, though, how long do you think before no liquor or fire-making devices are allowed as carry on's?
Now, follow this idea here -- If fuel cells actually exist and are cheap and great AND they have been around long enough and are ubiquitous enough that the airlines have a problem with them it would be highly likely that EVERYONE is walking around with one or more of these things in all manner of electronic gadget they posess. It's also likely that the gadgets have grown increasingly more demanding power wise after the dependence on batteries is freed. Thus, using batteries is really kind of a non option. In order to keep business, airlines would have to do something such as provide reliable and universal alternative power supplies on the airliners or lose business. It's not a problem I'm worrying about. I don't see why people feel the need to keep bringing it up. It's not like we'll even be flying around in planes anymore once these things come to market in about 200 years.
Man, the Star Trek vectrex game was horrible even by Vectrex standards.. It was just an endless shoot-em-up space game and it had nothing to do with Star Treck except that they were both set in space.
The Vectrex could draw text on the screen. They should have at least pretended to add a bit of a plot (one line of text would have improved the game 10000%!
It would be useful if a browser had an option to set the referrer to:
1) Blank 2) Constant value 3) Same URL that is being retrieved 4) "base" URL of the site being accessed -- ie if you were acccessing http://www.yahoo.com/some/path/some/file.html the referer would be "http://www.yahoo.com/"
Given that while major segments of network were taken out by the blackout, other large parts of the Internet including parts of the Internet inside the area with power failure remained unaffected -- as established by this report, one would likely conclude that the Internet is at least as reliable as the power grid if not quite a bit more so.
Given that the power grid is already considered critical infrastructure, it doesn't make sense why they would make the conclusion that the Internet is not suitable as such, although it's been established as more reliable (though not completely fault tolerant)
Their original conclusion was drawn based on logic working backwards from the failure.
Haha! I have never said 'you insensitive clod!' in a post that I remember.. The "This thread is worthess..." is a holdover from the auto forum sites where it is used fairly often...
http://www.proxim.com/products/bwa/multipoint/ts un ami/multipoint/index.html - Tsunami is Proxim's fastest point to multipoint solution operating at up to 360Mb/s at the hub. Subscriber endpoints can be up to 60Mb/s..
Apparently they have released some new products, too, since I last checked. The Tsunami 480 pushes 480Mb/s over public spectrum! They claim 5mi+ ranges too. http://www.proxim.com/products/bwa/point/tsunami/t sunami_480/index.html
Here is a company going the optical/laser route (great in cities between skyscrapers where the public radio bands are crowded). It also tends to be a quite a bit more secure than RF wireless since in order to intercept it, you have to 'break the beam.' To intercept such a transmission you have not only the logistical problem of getting your interception device in between the two endpoints and lining it up exactly, but the problem of doing it without being detected when anyone with two eyes can monitor the integrity of the link.
Just a small note regarding your comments -- it's really not hard to support a bunch of different aspect ratios from a programming standpoint. Most of the newer games are using some 3d api and the hardware can just adjust the scaling/stretching factors.. IE if you write your code properly, it's no more difficult to support 10 aspect ratios than it is to support 2.
Plus, PC ports of games make this more of a necessity anyway with the different aspect resolutions of PC monitors these days... mainly 5:4, 16:9, and 5:3 being not that uncommon compared to 4:3 anymore..
If they did that, they'd open themselves to real currency trading and would thus be required to be registered with the SEC and insured. As it stands now, they probably have to at least have an auctioneer license to do what they do. Depending on how the exchange to/from US dollars works, they may require some sort of registration there also...
Actually to be more specific the FCC limits the spectrum, which limits how many devices/how much data can be sent accross the air effectively. for instance there is nothing that i could use or purchase that would give me a 10mi radius of access with 100mb speeds, nothing even close.
Isn't that what I said about spectrum? Technology itself limits the speed of data in a given piece of spectrum
You have to qualify what you mean exactly about "speed" then -- because you can get a license to broadcast HDTV and spew the 32Mb OTA datastream for 20 miles or more with a single transmitter, and that's just a "consumer-friendly" example. There is plenty of other hardware out there that would absolutely blow you away at what it can do (if you have the money and the licenses) -- Think wireless GigE/10GigE. Think auto-laser-aimed gyro-stabalized antennas.
As for publicly usable (ie without a license) FAST wireless products, you have to get into some proprietary equipment, but it does scream. WyLAN have some backhaul radios that do 12Mb (10Mb wireline, symetric transmission) over 5-10 miles at full speed. They use the 5GHz ISM band which is publc. If that's not enough for you, Proxim has products pushing 100Mb wireline, symmetric speeds at 2-3 miles at 45Mb at longer distances, and you still don't need licenses for it. There are some visible light wireless procucts (ie infrared/near-IR laser) that will do GigE at up to a mile apparently, but I have no experience with thtese guys. Visible light products are neat because this part of the EM spectrum is totally out of the jurisdiction of the FCC.. However it's really hard to use for anything but point-to-point operations.
If you want to expand into the realm of "easily acquired" licenses -- ie FCC licenses that aren't really that hard or expensive for an individual or business to get (compared to say, buying your own chunk of spectrum for instance) you can get products that do Wireless ATM (~155Mb/s), GigE, etc.
The main problem with all of these products, though, is the very high cost. They have to be pretty cutting-edge to cram that amount of data into such a narrow, weak signal. Just because there is a product that can do 100Mb ethernet wirelessly without an FCC license, it doesn't mean that Billy Bob will spend the $15K setting up an endpoint to get 100Mb access at his farm. Technologies such as Ultra Wideband that would reduce their cost significantly, though, require the radio spectrum to be used in such a different way than it is now that the FCC doesn't have any rules that apply to such transmissions!
The FCC isn't limiting wireless speeds. They are limiting publicly accessible spectrum. With the right licenses and enough money to burn on endpoint equpment you can fire tons of data (ie many many Gb/s) through the air all you want. If the FCC opened up a huge wash of spectrum tomorrow, we'd probably have some really neat devices come down the line within a couple months!
Unfortunately, the tree cannon is not as really exciting as you probably expect. It's a cannon barrel built out of a tree -- not a device that shoots tree trunks some ungodly distance.
The myth says that long ago, some town in Hungary at odds with a neighboring town built a cannon out of a tree overnight to shoot at their enemy; however, when they fired it, the cannon exploded killing half of their own town.
The show involves the guys building a tree cannon and some ammo using nothing but tools available at the time set in the myth. (except they discover the drilling would have taken far longer than a day as told in the story -- they end up using a power drill to speed the process)
Anyway, the cannon ends up working really well, so they declare the story implausable especially considering the impossible one day construction time. As they often do, they then go way overboard in an attempt to make the story true at any cost -- they dump 5lbs of gunpowder in the thing and plug up the end with aluminum and blow it all to hell.
Sorry for revealing the entire "plot", but they show clips throughout the whole thing -- the show isn't exactly unpredictable, but it's great fun to watch! Check it out.
It's kind of ironic that if some big-budget movie wanted to pay the city of Sydney a bunch of money to block off the REAL streets and use them as a racetrack, there would be almost no controversy at all despite the REAL danger that driving cars around inside the city at insane speeds would present.
Slashdot Mirror
You do have Fair Use going for you with broadcast stations. Unfortunately, though you have to agree to XM's service agreement in order to subscribe to the service, and you waive that right in the agreement. "But you still have it!" you might say. Think of this - It's kind of akin to how signing an NDA or a confidentiality agreement with your employer that limits your (supposedly very basic American) right of "free speech." If you don't like the agreement, ask them to change it, don't subscribe to the service, or seek an alternative. Sirius has a similar no-record clause also, so your alternative choices are somewhat limited.
It sounds like they are probably willing to make an exception for the TiVo thing, though. XM has shown themselves to be fairly progressive, at least compared to their competition who is still begging money heavily, so it's good to see them open up to the idea of time shifting rather than go all apeshit about it.
~GoRK
Hate replying to myself but ---
You can even buy products like this that give you similar capabilities in most regular chassis. Just add a SATA raid controller and you're ready to go!
It's kind of funny that none of the responses to you point out the obvious --
Serial ATA defines this. SATA connectors on 3.5" HDD's have a specific positional requirement similar to SCA connectors on SCSI drives. There are plenty of SATA backplanes available. Apple's XServe RAID and G5 towers use them. You can order cases with SATA backplanes for other platforms from plenty of manufacturers. There are external enclosures with SATA backplanes also.
I guess it's also worth noting that 2.5" (laptop) IDE hard drives have similar positional requirements for the 44 pin connectors, thus buildigng a 2.5" ide backplane would be trivially easy, though nobody would ever bother to do it.
~GoRK
I have never been to a store that would not exchange an opened copy of a CD or DVD for the exact same item if it was defective and included all the original materials.
There are laser drills and water jet drills and particle jet drills that are common in all types of industrial manufacturing, mining, tunneling, etc.
MetaCreations had a product called Canoma that you'd import a photo or two, describe the 3d scene in the photo with basic modelling, then it would create a 3d textured representation from the photos. It didn't make really really wonderful scenes or anything, but the stuff you could do with it in about an hour were incredible.
Adobe purchased the product from MetaCreations and it's not being sold anymore. Perhaps it will come out again in the future to compliment their horrible Atmosphere product.
Also, Java sucks.
~GoRK
We are the space robots.
We are here to protect you.
We are here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Space has a terrible power.
Do you have stairs in your house?
Well, if you just read the article (joking, but it's really in there) it says that he got a piece of aluminum grate (pre drilled), layed it on top of the piece he cut, and drilled the holes all manually -- I imagine with a rotary drill.
This is one of those times that you kind of wish there was some sort of moderation that said 'attach this comment to the article'.
~GoRK
They do have a 20 minute "instant" test for HIV anyway that is an oral test. I don't know about other STD's but it's probably just a matter of getting the right proteins in the strip.
Anyway the company that makes it is called OraSure. I believe it is pretty expensive, but the accuracy is supposed to be pretty high.
I wonder what the ban on things like cameras will be like in the future when people have them implated into their eyes -- either as a rehabilitative or assistive device or as part of some bionic enhancement...
~GoRK
We've been waiting for this since you first told us about it 6 years ago, folks. Hurry up and DO it already. It seems every time there is some article on this it's just to fuel some hype for a new round of investment or something. It's always been 'Next Year!!!" or something like that, but never "Look. Here is a cell phone running on a fuel cell. It cost us $100,000 to build this one, but we're ramping up for mass production and should be ready to start the robots up in 12 months." They always have some vague concept artwork and a giagantic prototype and this 'please give us money' verbiage.
As for the airplane problem, first, I don't think there will be any regulation or rules on this until it actually becomes a problem. I mean, they still let you carry a cigarette lighter and a bottle of booze onto a plane and that is no worse. The first second someone sets fire to the inside of a cabin, though, how long do you think before no liquor or fire-making devices are allowed as carry on's?
Now, follow this idea here -- If fuel cells actually exist and are cheap and great AND they have been around long enough and are ubiquitous enough that the airlines have a problem with them it would be highly likely that EVERYONE is walking around with one or more of these things in all manner of electronic gadget they posess. It's also likely that the gadgets have grown increasingly more demanding power wise after the dependence on batteries is freed. Thus, using batteries is really kind of a non option. In order to keep business, airlines would have to do something such as provide reliable and universal alternative power supplies on the airliners or lose business. It's not a problem I'm worrying about. I don't see why people feel the need to keep bringing it up. It's not like we'll even be flying around in planes anymore once these things come to market in about 200 years.
Man, the Star Trek vectrex game was horrible even by Vectrex standards.. It was just an endless shoot-em-up space game and it had nothing to do with Star Treck except that they were both set in space.
The Vectrex could draw text on the screen. They should have at least pretended to add a bit of a plot (one line of text would have improved the game 10000%!
It would be useful if a browser had an option to set the referrer to:
1) Blank
2) Constant value
3) Same URL that is being retrieved
4) "base" URL of the site being accessed -- ie if you were acccessing http://www.yahoo.com/some/path/some/file.html the referer would be "http://www.yahoo.com/"
Given that while major segments of network were taken out by the blackout, other large parts of the Internet including parts of the Internet inside the area with power failure remained unaffected -- as established by this report, one would likely conclude that the Internet is at least as reliable as the power grid if not quite a bit more so.
Given that the power grid is already considered critical infrastructure, it doesn't make sense why they would make the conclusion that the Internet is not suitable as such, although it's been established as more reliable (though not completely fault tolerant)
Their original conclusion was drawn based on logic working backwards from the failure.
Haha! I have never said 'you insensitive clod!' in a post that I remember.. The "This thread is worthess..." is a holdover from the auto forum sites where it is used fairly often...
See here for a little example...
No Problem.. In case you want some links...
s un ami/multipoint/index.html - Tsunami is Proxim's fastest point to multipoint solution operating at up to 360Mb/s at the hub. Subscriber endpoints can be up to 60Mb/s..
t sunami_480/index.html
r pr ise.htm
http://www.proxim.com/products/bwa/multipoint/t
Apparently they have released some new products, too, since I last checked. The Tsunami 480 pushes 480Mb/s over public spectrum! They claim 5mi+ ranges too. http://www.proxim.com/products/bwa/point/tsunami/
Here is a company going the optical/laser route (great in cities between skyscrapers where the public radio bands are crowded). It also tends to be a quite a bit more secure than RF wireless since in order to intercept it, you have to 'break the beam.' To intercept such a transmission you have not only the logistical problem of getting your interception device in between the two endpoints and lining it up exactly, but the problem of doing it without being detected when anyone with two eyes can monitor the integrity of the link.
http://www.cablefreesolutions.com/products_ente
This thread is worthess without pics.
Seriously, this is cool, but the whole thing is about photos that don't seem to be available anywhere yet except in the magazine.
Just a small note regarding your comments -- it's really not hard to support a bunch of different aspect ratios from a programming standpoint. Most of the newer games are using some 3d api and the hardware can just adjust the scaling/stretching factors .. IE if you write your code properly, it's no more difficult to support 10 aspect ratios than it is to support 2.
Plus, PC ports of games make this more of a necessity anyway with the different aspect resolutions of PC monitors these days... mainly 5:4, 16:9, and 5:3 being not that uncommon compared to 4:3 anymore..
If they did that, they'd open themselves to real currency trading and would thus be required to be registered with the SEC and insured. As it stands now, they probably have to at least have an auctioneer license to do what they do. Depending on how the exchange to/from US dollars works, they may require some sort of registration there also...
~GoRK
Actually to be more specific the FCC limits the spectrum, which limits how many devices/how much data can be sent accross the air effectively. for instance there is nothing that i could use or purchase that would give me a 10mi radius of access with 100mb speeds, nothing even close.
Isn't that what I said about spectrum? Technology itself limits the speed of data in a given piece of spectrum
You have to qualify what you mean exactly about "speed" then -- because you can get a license to broadcast HDTV and spew the 32Mb OTA datastream for 20 miles or more with a single transmitter, and that's just a "consumer-friendly" example. There is plenty of other hardware out there that would absolutely blow you away at what it can do (if you have the money and the licenses) -- Think wireless GigE/10GigE. Think auto-laser-aimed gyro-stabalized antennas.
As for publicly usable (ie without a license) FAST wireless products, you have to get into some proprietary equipment, but it does scream. WyLAN have some backhaul radios that do 12Mb (10Mb wireline, symetric transmission) over 5-10 miles at full speed. They use the 5GHz ISM band which is publc. If that's not enough for you, Proxim has products pushing 100Mb wireline, symmetric speeds at 2-3 miles at 45Mb at longer distances, and you still don't need licenses for it. There are some visible light wireless procucts (ie infrared/near-IR laser) that will do GigE at up to a mile apparently, but I have no experience with thtese guys. Visible light products are neat because this part of the EM spectrum is totally out of the jurisdiction of the FCC.. However it's really hard to use for anything but point-to-point operations.
If you want to expand into the realm of "easily acquired" licenses -- ie FCC licenses that aren't really that hard or expensive for an individual or business to get (compared to say, buying your own chunk of spectrum for instance) you can get products that do Wireless ATM (~155Mb/s), GigE, etc.
The main problem with all of these products, though, is the very high cost. They have to be pretty cutting-edge to cram that amount of data into such a narrow, weak signal. Just because there is a product that can do 100Mb ethernet wirelessly without an FCC license, it doesn't mean that Billy Bob will spend the $15K setting up an endpoint to get 100Mb access at his farm. Technologies such as Ultra Wideband that would reduce their cost significantly, though, require the radio spectrum to be used in such a different way than it is now that the FCC doesn't have any rules that apply to such transmissions!
The FCC isn't limiting wireless speeds. They are limiting publicly accessible spectrum. With the right licenses and enough money to burn on endpoint equpment you can fire tons of data (ie many many Gb/s) through the air all you want. If the FCC opened up a huge wash of spectrum tomorrow, we'd probably have some really neat devices come down the line within a couple months!
I counted the total number of slashdot comments made re: the sco suit -- it was well over 25,000 -- I imagine that it's quite a lot higher now.
Unfortunately, the tree cannon is not as really exciting as you probably expect. It's a cannon barrel built out of a tree -- not a device that shoots tree trunks some ungodly distance.
The myth says that long ago, some town in Hungary at odds with a neighboring town built a cannon out of a tree overnight to shoot at their enemy; however, when they fired it, the cannon exploded killing half of their own town.
The show involves the guys building a tree cannon and some ammo using nothing but tools available at the time set in the myth. (except they discover the drilling would have taken far longer than a day as told in the story -- they end up using a power drill to speed the process)
Anyway, the cannon ends up working really well, so they declare the story implausable especially considering the impossible one day construction time. As they often do, they then go way overboard in an attempt to make the story true at any cost -- they dump 5lbs of gunpowder in the thing and plug up the end with aluminum and blow it all to hell.
Sorry for revealing the entire "plot", but they show clips throughout the whole thing -- the show isn't exactly unpredictable, but it's great fun to watch! Check it out.
It's kind of ironic that if some big-budget movie wanted to pay the city of Sydney a bunch of money to block off the REAL streets and use them as a racetrack, there would be almost no controversy at all despite the REAL danger that driving cars around inside the city at insane speeds would present.
~GoRK