They are both part of the same thing, the EM spectrum - and light has a much higher chance of being absorbed by interplanetary "stuff" before it ever reached us (hence why we can use FM radios indoors, but not something in the visible spectrum).
Radio can be directional as well (microwave transmitters) - but all the worry about focussing is not really on the agenda - any alien who puts the effort into "focussing" a beam on us might as well just use some more obvious means of catching our attention - a binary broadband pulse every 60 units of time or something equally unnatural to make us sit up and take notice.
It is a real shame that Game DRM hasn't gotten the same bad publicity and force for change movement against it that music has.
mp3's have, despite the music companies best efforts, proven to be what buyers want - not "you can only listen to this track on 2 machines" DRM files. That has been enforced by media coverage and scrutiny - pointing out and badgering the music labels that people don't want DRM junk.
This unfortunately hasn't happened with PC games - I guess they are less "mainstream" as far as media coverage is concerned.
I used to buy a lot of games, and enjoy playing them - but the situation has deteriorated very badly in the last 4-5 years. Games not only have the usual "key & cd/dvd in the drive" requirements, but I have encountered a number, which I paid hard money for, that refuse to install if I have CloneCD installed - others that refuse to install if I have Daemon Tools installed - both programs that I legitimately use (and not for games, just to avoid having to take tens of cd's around with me).
I bought HL2 - but haven't been able to play it for a couple years as I am behind a tight firewall and so can't register it. Consequently I haven't bought Ep2 or 3.
The games companies have to wisen up - I used to by 3-6 games per year - I now haven't bought a single one in the last 2 years - I can't be bothered with games I paid hard cash for treating me like I am a criminal. I am not interested (nor should ever need to) apply the various circumvention cracks to get around the DRM just so I can play a game I have bought.
The farce from Ubi-Soft only reinforces the situation - the same crackers who they decry as "destroying the games industry" are the ones they rip-off when they can't be bothered to write a patch (for a bug caused by all their neurotic DRM crap). Ubi-soft better hope there were no trojans in the crack - or they could find themselves on the end of a hefty lawsuit.
Many. It was built for the Apollo program, first used in 1967 - and handled almost all of the Saturn V Apollo launches bar one (so ~ 16). After that it has, along with 39B been handling Shuttle launches - and so presumably taken close to, if not more than 50% of them (so around 60+). Hence we could be looking at around 70-80 launches - launches of the heaviest kind.
39B has already started to be refurbished for Project Constellation, launching the Ares Saturn like rockets. The plan is that 39A will follow suit after the last of the space shuttle missions are finished.
It was a burial ground for what may have been the country's first royal dynasty "country" - didn't exist 5,000 years ago, patchy local tribes, communities and chiefdoms were all that exsisted, often as small as a couple hundred people.
"first" - nope - there were thousands of years of these patchy clans and communities going back far before 5,000 BP - the Stonehenge neolithic communities and any political, cultural or religious "leaders" there weren't the "first" anything.
"royal dynasty" - Firstly it wasn't royal - that is a modern definition, and can only be used when it means what it says, I see the FA uses it as well, and it should be rightly criticised for inaccurate reporting. We know little concrete about how stone age societies functioned - far too little to use the word "royal". Secondly there is no evidence that it is a "dynasty" of anything.
Historical accuracy seems to becoming abandoned these days. The media seem to becoming more and more able to get away with just making up anything they want to fit the "angle", particularly with scientific pieces.
The holy grail is an electrically pumped organic laser. Varying the co-polymer ratios has improved electron mobilities, but they still have many orders of magnitudes to go before they would get into the likely energy densities required for lasing.
People are attacking it from multiple ends. Bradley's group have gone at it by taking an efficient light emitter and attempting to improve its pitiful charge mobilities. Others have taken very good charge carrying organic materials, LETs (light emitting transistors) and attempted to improve their pitiful light emission. (paper)
Decisions like this don't surprise me, and they sum up why MS will lose.
Firstly, MS is starting to build a rather unattractive profile for themselves as "droppers". Any time they can't be bothered with something or some part of "the management" takes a decision then something gets culled. They did it with their DRM music that left thousands high and dry, and now they have done it with this. The folks at MS have to realise that nobody is going to want to deal with them if they keep it up. Because no matter what the gee whiz initiative or idea, everybody knows fine that if MS get frustrated with not having dominance with it, or gets bored and want to spend the money elsewhere, then they will drop it with a "screw you guys, I'm going home" attitude. Will they get as many vendors signing up to the "search cashback" program when they know (and we know) it will likely be scrapped in a year or two?
Secondly, it sums up MS in another way. They just don't get "it". They think of everything through some corporate eyes that requires dominance and control. Google scans books (and I am absolutely sure will continue to scan books) not because they want to "bury MS", but because they want to "organize the worlds knowledge". Criticisms of privacy et al. are all very valid, but part of a different argument strand. When it comes down to it Google scan books because they realise the importance of digitizing knowledge, and aside from the altruistic benefits of digitizing otherwise inaccessible paper - when it is digitised it can be searched, when it can be searched it can be monetized.
MS are stuck - and will always be stuck - in the 1990's. They treat all this as "the search wars" - they treat the whole thing as some second version of the browser wars. The only catch is that the tactics that won them that one won't work any more. The decision to end book scanning just reeks of the war mentality. They didn't scan and weren't scanning books to help the end user, they were doing it in an attempt to "bury Google". That is why they will lose - they are stuck in the past.
a bunch of guys who didn't actually do anything themselves Nope - a bunch of guys who (allegedly) knew what the 7/7 bombers were going to do in advance and (allegedly) actively helped them to do it. The parenthesised words can be removed if they are convicted.
I'm not going to stand here and "defend the camera's at all costs" - I don't want to, or believe that they are the all singing all dancing saviours of civil society. What I do want to point out, and did so in my post, was highlight that the reactionary, hyperbole filled junk that characterises so much of "anti-camera" brigade - and to their detriment, because by turning it into a game of "the scary cameras are watching you" they are preying on the same FUD philosophy that the CCTV-turfers prey on.
They have some decent statistics in there. And none of them will say that CCTV is used for "everything but terrorism investigations", because that is demonstratively false - the entire point of my post.
Recent reports in the U.K. media indicate that the laws are being used for everything but terrorism investigations "everything but" - well no, actually, that is tabloid style summary hyperbole - in fact it isn't even hyperbole, just plan rubbish.
The submitter should familiarise themselves with (off the top of my head) three ongoing terrorist trials where CCTV evidence is important to gaining a possible conviction. One in particular, that of the prosecution of associates of the 7th of July London bombers who travelled with them to London in advance to case targets, relies heavily on CCTV to link these people to the bombers, and will help obtain convictions (should that be what the jury decides).
That is just an ongoing trial, and is publicly known, "terrorism investigations" covers a multitude of unknown (to the public) current investigations - monitoring people who have warranted the attention of the intelligence community.
But god forbid the truth should get in the way of a hyperactive slashdot submission - desperate for 500 comments of "1984", "slippery slope" and every other cliché under the sun. There may be (and indeed I would personally say, are) valid criticisms of CCTV and how people are monitored in public places - but that debate is entirely short circuited and debased with juvenile submissions like this that are not interested in facts, only hyperbole.
While I can see (no pun intended) good possibilities for games, it may cause a few problems if it were implemented in a desktop environment (as a few here are suggesting). I know at the moment, with the firefox tab-mix plus "hover the mouse over the tab to select it" feature that while it is useful, it can also be annoying if I don't park the mouse properly, as I can suddenly switch tab when doing something else. I could envisage the same problems with this. Unless it was easily deactivated a stray glance or blink could be shuffling me around my desktop environ.
For games though it presumably would add another immersion layer, which can only be a beneficial thing.
There is a difference between "strongly encouraged" and "required". Until it is required then it is not going to change much - the big hardware providers hold too much sway for Dell et al. to cancel multimillion (if not billion) dollar contracts because they won't provide the source code for a couple of piddly little drivers.
A step in the right direction if they genuinely mean it, but if it is just disingenuous chatter to "keep the OSS camp happy" then it is just PR.
When most of the core "computer" guys who were in from the start made their millions they left. Those that took over (some of whom were always there but not able to overrule the computer guys) were the corporate whores who's only aim is to make as much money and control as much as they possibly can.
Ironically I feel if they had implemented this model 10 years ago it likely would have been accepted and become the norm (and MS would have forever controlled office software). Introducing it now, it is likely to fail. Everyone is far more wary of jumping into the "MS abyss", certainly in my own place of work the enforcement from the in the last 6 months is standardisation on office 2003, never mind 2007 or subscription models. Attempts to strong arm this onto businesses will lead to them refusing to budge from 2003 or, even worse (from MS's perspective), jumping over to OOO.
It was entirely predictable though - 2007 contained nothing of interest. They couldn't keep creating new glassy icons and gimmicky gui changes for ever and expecting people to pay $300 for it. A subscription model is the only way they can "secure the revenue stream". And for the corporate whores running MS, "securing the revenue stream" is all that matters - the customer is way down the list of priorities.
For myself and most people I know, the internet is about acquiring information about things we aren't familiar with, not about rehashing information which we already know. Whether that information be used for personal enjoyment - learning something new for the sake of learning something new - or for personal research Then you are not using the internet correctly. Don't you see? You aren't meant to want to "learn" anything new - all you should be using the internet for is buying things, passing meaningless chatter with "friends" to enable advertisers to better target you - and then look at those adverts. If you are using it for anything else then you are a p2p criminal who funds terrorists and you should be banned by your ISP.
The internet isn't a knowledge tool (at least as far as the global corporates are concerned), it is one giant shop where "consumers" go to buy things or be influenced to buy things. If "Facebook" genuinely cared about their users then Beacon would have been abhorent to them - instead they insipidly conceived and silently implemented it without their users consent. I am amazed anybody gives characters like that a single piece of information, they are absolute sharks.
he's already doing deals to deliver some people's content faster Typical bit of marketing here - this shouldn't be allowed to stand. Deals aren't being done to deliver content "faster" - deals are being done to deliver other content slower. Bandwidth is a zero-sum equation.
Assuming (since I am not an expert on this) that the prioritisation of content is being done by some sort of prioritising of packets then it is a mutually exclusive situation. The line is only so fast - the line contains only so much bandwidth. If all providers pay to have their content prioritised then nothing moves any "faster" than it is with neutrality. If only one pays to have their content "faster" then all they are doing is degrading all other traffic.
ISP provisions need to be revolutionised - the current crop are perfectly happy as a hegemony of providers - do what they like, charge what they like. There is "competition" in only a very superficial sense.
so who's to say that Microsoft can't trim Windows in order to fit better on a handheld? I think that is the point. 5 years of development and one service pack later MS is still struggling to get Vista to run on the machines it was designed for. Creating a lean palm version would be a million miles away.
I am not aware of the detailed structure of Vista's kernel, but my guess would be it is unlikely to be easily scaled down - it is an OS that requires higher specifications than XP to do mundane tasks like file copying. That doesn't suggest efficiency and portability.
They aren't ridiculous - and you are ill informed to say that they are. Average power vs. peak power. Those two variables are highly relevent for a pulsed laser. Your "torch" isn't even pulsed.
A lot of ground breaking research is undertaken *utilising* the ability to deliver very short very high energy pulses - for doing that you can deliver a huge amount of energy in a very tiny amount of time - then observe what happens. Indeed a lot of the very high energy regions cannot be accessed with anything but ultrafast pulsed systems, as CW setups would just destroy themselves (and even using UF systems chirping "tricks" are used to reduce peak powers until the final moment to ensure the optics aren't burnt out).
Sure our governments listens, but without a court order and some reasonable suspicion to get the warrant none of listening can amount of much of anything, Come on, that is just a half twist on the "if you are doing nothing wrong then it doesn't matter that we are intercepting your mail" age old argument that is a total fallacy in any argument about privacy. There is *no* moral authority coming from the US on this unless there is a reasonable suspicion to enable listening in the first place - otherwise you are just in a 1984 "as long as you abide by the law you have nothing to worry about" trap.
I am not commenting on any symmetry of press freedom - that is very obviously different. What I was commenting on were other forms of moral and civil liberties. Hundreds dead in the Tibetan protests over the last few weeks is obviously something that is far away from a western mirror image, but there are plenty of activities (particularly the Bush administrations') that if they were going on in China there would be a western "outcry" and moralising about it - yet it goes on here and seems to be accepted. I mean look at the wiretapping situation - free unaccountable will to snoop on anyone's activities in any facet of their lives, online and offline - there are no checks and balances in that - and nothing seems to be changing.
Stop talking bollocks. The Thatcher government banned Mr Adams from all broadcast media in the UK, the BBC (along with ITN and all the other UK broadcasters) had no choice but to do it or they would be prosecuted - it has bugger all to do with the BBC themselves.
It won't work though. I have long predicted that this is going to become the protest Olympics. Not like the 1980 boycott nonsense - indeed the exact opposite, everyone goes, and everyone goes (or attempts to) where they like. I would be amazed if all of the major human rights organisations have not very well thought out plans to make public protests at the games. If they protests, it is reported - if they get caught and jailed it is reported (coupled with the "outrage, they kept me in a 3x3 cell" headlines).
If the journo's attempt to go outside the "gated world" you foresee then they will either, a: find the real story and report it (scoop!), or b: have some "obey all orders" state authority tell them they are barred - the journo's will report that (scoop!) and China will still look bad.
This Olympics were only ever going to be a success for China if the media played along with their "lets all play happy families, look everything is nice" game - I was pleased to see the widespread reporting of the Tibet protesters interrupting the torch lighting in Greece (coincidentally I can see the 5 rings depicted as handcuffs becoming a oft repeated protest symbol for this games) - that is indicative that the media aren't going to play the brush it under the carpet game.
I partly feel sorry for the honest Chinese people who want to be proud of their country. And in truth the oppression and censorship isn't really 100 miles away from some practices in the western world (camp X ray, extraordinary rendition being two examples where the moral code of conduct has just been chucked in the fire). But at the same time the Chinese government is just far too easy a target - the appallingly hilarious cold war communist part ways that they attempt to deny the plain truth ("the sky is blue" - reply "no it isn't" end of discussion) is just far too easy to make a mockery out of.
I have read two of the culture books, The player of games, and Consider Phlebas. Both were impressive and I would like to get caught up with the rest (two more bought but on the long term reading list). His work is very enjoyable to read, and paints pictures that are more than escapist SF. There is a lot of nuance in the political structure and its implications.
I am glad that he is still writing on the series, the review for Matter suggests an enjoyable read.
MS doesn't care about anyone following it (since even they themselves aren't going to). All they are doing it for is so they can claim that MS Office uses an open ISO standard, OOXML (even though it won't use the ISO passed standard) so that governments, businesses and buyers are not scared away from their products.
As with everything MS does it is all about control and money. They have observed the fights that took/are taking place at various governmental and state levels over the mandatory use of an open standard - and they see that it is a threat to their monopoly, hence they have strategised to nullify the problem without giving up any of their control. The whole thing is a rate 10 sham. And if anyone ever wants to know why a lot of people don't trust MS then this is a perfect example of it - the process and the mockery they are making of it is frankly satirical.
That isn't a philosophy that can exist in the society of law and order that we live in. Wrong in the case of wikileaks isn't just something objectionable, it is, in a lot of the content they serve, (very likely) something illegal.
As civil societies we have legal provisions in place for rightful whistleblowing; that can't be extended to some sort of personal definition of the law, as you imply.
Slashdot Mirror
They are both part of the same thing, the EM spectrum - and light has a much higher chance of being absorbed by interplanetary "stuff" before it ever reached us (hence why we can use FM radios indoors, but not something in the visible spectrum).
Radio can be directional as well (microwave transmitters) - but all the worry about focussing is not really on the agenda - any alien who puts the effort into "focussing" a beam on us might as well just use some more obvious means of catching our attention - a binary broadband pulse every 60 units of time or something equally unnatural to make us sit up and take notice.
It is a real shame that Game DRM hasn't gotten the same bad publicity and force for change movement against it that music has.
mp3's have, despite the music companies best efforts, proven to be what buyers want - not "you can only listen to this track on 2 machines" DRM files. That has been enforced by media coverage and scrutiny - pointing out and badgering the music labels that people don't want DRM junk.
This unfortunately hasn't happened with PC games - I guess they are less "mainstream" as far as media coverage is concerned.
I used to buy a lot of games, and enjoy playing them - but the situation has deteriorated very badly in the last 4-5 years. Games not only have the usual "key & cd/dvd in the drive" requirements, but I have encountered a number, which I paid hard money for, that refuse to install if I have CloneCD installed - others that refuse to install if I have Daemon Tools installed - both programs that I legitimately use (and not for games, just to avoid having to take tens of cd's around with me).
I bought HL2 - but haven't been able to play it for a couple years as I am behind a tight firewall and so can't register it. Consequently I haven't bought Ep2 or 3.
The games companies have to wisen up - I used to by 3-6 games per year - I now haven't bought a single one in the last 2 years - I can't be bothered with games I paid hard cash for treating me like I am a criminal. I am not interested (nor should ever need to) apply the various circumvention cracks to get around the DRM just so I can play a game I have bought.
The farce from Ubi-Soft only reinforces the situation - the same crackers who they decry as "destroying the games industry" are the ones they rip-off when they can't be bothered to write a patch (for a bug caused by all their neurotic DRM crap). Ubi-soft better hope there were no trojans in the crack - or they could find themselves on the end of a hefty lawsuit.
Many. It was built for the Apollo program, first used in 1967 - and handled almost all of the Saturn V Apollo launches bar one (so ~ 16). After that it has, along with 39B been handling Shuttle launches - and so presumably taken close to, if not more than 50% of them (so around 60+). Hence we could be looking at around 70-80 launches - launches of the heaviest kind.
39B has already started to be refurbished for Project Constellation, launching the Ares Saturn like rockets. The plan is that 39A will follow suit after the last of the space shuttle missions are finished.
"first" - nope - there were thousands of years of these patchy clans and communities going back far before 5,000 BP - the Stonehenge neolithic communities and any political, cultural or religious "leaders" there weren't the "first" anything.
"royal dynasty" - Firstly it wasn't royal - that is a modern definition, and can only be used when it means what it says, I see the FA uses it as well, and it should be rightly criticised for inaccurate reporting. We know little concrete about how stone age societies functioned - far too little to use the word "royal". Secondly there is no evidence that it is a "dynasty" of anything.
Historical accuracy seems to becoming abandoned these days. The media seem to becoming more and more able to get away with just making up anything they want to fit the "angle", particularly with scientific pieces.
This is moving in the right direction.
The holy grail is an electrically pumped organic laser. Varying the co-polymer ratios has improved electron mobilities, but they still have many orders of magnitudes to go before they would get into the likely energy densities required for lasing.
People are attacking it from multiple ends. Bradley's group have gone at it by taking an efficient light emitter and attempting to improve its pitiful charge mobilities. Others have taken very good charge carrying organic materials, LETs (light emitting transistors) and attempted to improve their pitiful light emission. (paper)
Decisions like this don't surprise me, and they sum up why MS will lose.
Firstly, MS is starting to build a rather unattractive profile for themselves as "droppers". Any time they can't be bothered with something or some part of "the management" takes a decision then something gets culled. They did it with their DRM music that left thousands high and dry, and now they have done it with this. The folks at MS have to realise that nobody is going to want to deal with them if they keep it up. Because no matter what the gee whiz initiative or idea, everybody knows fine that if MS get frustrated with not having dominance with it, or gets bored and want to spend the money elsewhere, then they will drop it with a "screw you guys, I'm going home" attitude. Will they get as many vendors signing up to the "search cashback" program when they know (and we know) it will likely be scrapped in a year or two?
Secondly, it sums up MS in another way. They just don't get "it". They think of everything through some corporate eyes that requires dominance and control. Google scans books (and I am absolutely sure will continue to scan books) not because they want to "bury MS", but because they want to "organize the worlds knowledge". Criticisms of privacy et al. are all very valid, but part of a different argument strand. When it comes down to it Google scan books because they realise the importance of digitizing knowledge, and aside from the altruistic benefits of digitizing otherwise inaccessible paper - when it is digitised it can be searched, when it can be searched it can be monetized.
MS are stuck - and will always be stuck - in the 1990's. They treat all this as "the search wars" - they treat the whole thing as some second version of the browser wars. The only catch is that the tactics that won them that one won't work any more. The decision to end book scanning just reeks of the war mentality. They didn't scan and weren't scanning books to help the end user, they were doing it in an attempt to "bury Google". That is why they will lose - they are stuck in the past.
I'm not going to stand here and "defend the camera's at all costs" - I don't want to, or believe that they are the all singing all dancing saviours of civil society. What I do want to point out, and did so in my post, was highlight that the reactionary, hyperbole filled junk that characterises so much of "anti-camera" brigade - and to their detriment, because by turning it into a game of "the scary cameras are watching you" they are preying on the same FUD philosophy that the CCTV-turfers prey on.
The submitter should familiarise themselves with (off the top of my head) three ongoing terrorist trials where CCTV evidence is important to gaining a possible conviction. One in particular, that of the prosecution of associates of the 7th of July London bombers who travelled with them to London in advance to case targets, relies heavily on CCTV to link these people to the bombers, and will help obtain convictions (should that be what the jury decides).
That is just an ongoing trial, and is publicly known, "terrorism investigations" covers a multitude of unknown (to the public) current investigations - monitoring people who have warranted the attention of the intelligence community.
But god forbid the truth should get in the way of a hyperactive slashdot submission - desperate for 500 comments of "1984", "slippery slope" and every other cliché under the sun. There may be (and indeed I would personally say, are) valid criticisms of CCTV and how people are monitored in public places - but that debate is entirely short circuited and debased with juvenile submissions like this that are not interested in facts, only hyperbole.
While I can see (no pun intended) good possibilities for games, it may cause a few problems if it were implemented in a desktop environment (as a few here are suggesting). I know at the moment, with the firefox tab-mix plus "hover the mouse over the tab to select it" feature that while it is useful, it can also be annoying if I don't park the mouse properly, as I can suddenly switch tab when doing something else. I could envisage the same problems with this. Unless it was easily deactivated a stray glance or blink could be shuffling me around my desktop environ.
For games though it presumably would add another immersion layer, which can only be a beneficial thing.
He shouldn't be given the oxygen of publicity for his personal (and entirely unfounded) obsession.
There is a difference between "strongly encouraged" and "required". Until it is required then it is not going to change much - the big hardware providers hold too much sway for Dell et al. to cancel multimillion (if not billion) dollar contracts because they won't provide the source code for a couple of piddly little drivers.
A step in the right direction if they genuinely mean it, but if it is just disingenuous chatter to "keep the OSS camp happy" then it is just PR.
When most of the core "computer" guys who were in from the start made their millions they left. Those that took over (some of whom were always there but not able to overrule the computer guys) were the corporate whores who's only aim is to make as much money and control as much as they possibly can.
Ironically I feel if they had implemented this model 10 years ago it likely would have been accepted and become the norm (and MS would have forever controlled office software). Introducing it now, it is likely to fail. Everyone is far more wary of jumping into the "MS abyss", certainly in my own place of work the enforcement from the in the last 6 months is standardisation on office 2003, never mind 2007 or subscription models. Attempts to strong arm this onto businesses will lead to them refusing to budge from 2003 or, even worse (from MS's perspective), jumping over to OOO.
It was entirely predictable though - 2007 contained nothing of interest. They couldn't keep creating new glassy icons and gimmicky gui changes for ever and expecting people to pay $300 for it. A subscription model is the only way they can "secure the revenue stream". And for the corporate whores running MS, "securing the revenue stream" is all that matters - the customer is way down the list of priorities.
The internet isn't a knowledge tool (at least as far as the global corporates are concerned), it is one giant shop where "consumers" go to buy things or be influenced to buy things. If "Facebook" genuinely cared about their users then Beacon would have been abhorent to them - instead they insipidly conceived and silently implemented it without their users consent. I am amazed anybody gives characters like that a single piece of information, they are absolute sharks.
Assuming (since I am not an expert on this) that the prioritisation of content is being done by some sort of prioritising of packets then it is a mutually exclusive situation. The line is only so fast - the line contains only so much bandwidth. If all providers pay to have their content prioritised then nothing moves any "faster" than it is with neutrality. If only one pays to have their content "faster" then all they are doing is degrading all other traffic.
ISP provisions need to be revolutionised - the current crop are perfectly happy as a hegemony of providers - do what they like, charge what they like. There is "competition" in only a very superficial sense.
I am not aware of the detailed structure of Vista's kernel, but my guess would be it is unlikely to be easily scaled down - it is an OS that requires higher specifications than XP to do mundane tasks like file copying. That doesn't suggest efficiency and portability.
They aren't ridiculous - and you are ill informed to say that they are. Average power vs. peak power. Those two variables are highly relevent for a pulsed laser. Your "torch" isn't even pulsed.
A lot of ground breaking research is undertaken *utilising* the ability to deliver very short very high energy pulses - for doing that you can deliver a huge amount of energy in a very tiny amount of time - then observe what happens. Indeed a lot of the very high energy regions cannot be accessed with anything but ultrafast pulsed systems, as CW setups would just destroy themselves (and even using UF systems chirping "tricks" are used to reduce peak powers until the final moment to ensure the optics aren't burnt out).
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirped_pulse_amplification
I am not commenting on any symmetry of press freedom - that is very obviously different. What I was commenting on were other forms of moral and civil liberties. Hundreds dead in the Tibetan protests over the last few weeks is obviously something that is far away from a western mirror image, but there are plenty of activities (particularly the Bush administrations') that if they were going on in China there would be a western "outcry" and moralising about it - yet it goes on here and seems to be accepted. I mean look at the wiretapping situation - free unaccountable will to snoop on anyone's activities in any facet of their lives, online and offline - there are no checks and balances in that - and nothing seems to be changing.
Stop talking bollocks. The Thatcher government banned Mr Adams from all broadcast media in the UK, the BBC (along with ITN and all the other UK broadcasters) had no choice but to do it or they would be prosecuted - it has bugger all to do with the BBC themselves.
It won't work though. I have long predicted that this is going to become the protest Olympics. Not like the 1980 boycott nonsense - indeed the exact opposite, everyone goes, and everyone goes (or attempts to) where they like. I would be amazed if all of the major human rights organisations have not very well thought out plans to make public protests at the games. If they protests, it is reported - if they get caught and jailed it is reported (coupled with the "outrage, they kept me in a 3x3 cell" headlines).
If the journo's attempt to go outside the "gated world" you foresee then they will either, a: find the real story and report it (scoop!), or b: have some "obey all orders" state authority tell them they are barred - the journo's will report that (scoop!) and China will still look bad.
This Olympics were only ever going to be a success for China if the media played along with their "lets all play happy families, look everything is nice" game - I was pleased to see the widespread reporting of the Tibet protesters interrupting the torch lighting in Greece (coincidentally I can see the 5 rings depicted as handcuffs becoming a oft repeated protest symbol for this games) - that is indicative that the media aren't going to play the brush it under the carpet game.
I partly feel sorry for the honest Chinese people who want to be proud of their country. And in truth the oppression and censorship isn't really 100 miles away from some practices in the western world (camp X ray, extraordinary rendition being two examples where the moral code of conduct has just been chucked in the fire). But at the same time the Chinese government is just far too easy a target - the appallingly hilarious cold war communist part ways that they attempt to deny the plain truth ("the sky is blue" - reply "no it isn't" end of discussion) is just far too easy to make a mockery out of.
Let the games commence.
I have read two of the culture books, The player of games, and Consider Phlebas. Both were impressive and I would like to get caught up with the rest (two more bought but on the long term reading list). His work is very enjoyable to read, and paints pictures that are more than escapist SF. There is a lot of nuance in the political structure and its implications.
I am glad that he is still writing on the series, the review for Matter suggests an enjoyable read.
MS doesn't care about anyone following it (since even they themselves aren't going to). All they are doing it for is so they can claim that MS Office uses an open ISO standard, OOXML (even though it won't use the ISO passed standard) so that governments, businesses and buyers are not scared away from their products.
As with everything MS does it is all about control and money. They have observed the fights that took/are taking place at various governmental and state levels over the mandatory use of an open standard - and they see that it is a threat to their monopoly, hence they have strategised to nullify the problem without giving up any of their control. The whole thing is a rate 10 sham. And if anyone ever wants to know why a lot of people don't trust MS then this is a perfect example of it - the process and the mockery they are making of it is frankly satirical.
They should have done this in August - more publicity and much harder for the Chinese authorities to deny it had happened.
That isn't a philosophy that can exist in the society of law and order that we live in. Wrong in the case of wikileaks isn't just something objectionable, it is, in a lot of the content they serve, (very likely) something illegal.
As civil societies we have legal provisions in place for rightful whistleblowing; that can't be extended to some sort of personal definition of the law, as you imply.