Specifically, since the tags will not have a power source, the power in the pulse will have to scale as the 4th power of distance. So if the range is 1cm now, to get a 10m (30') range, they'll need
(approximately) 1 quadrillion times the radio power. (Or, rather, the product of the % of power that the tag re-emits and the power of scanner will need to scale by 1 quadrillion times)
However, generally a "normal" business profit would be in terms of return on investment, or mark-up relative to costs of production, not constant per unit. Gum drops do not see a $50 profit per unit, since they are much cheaper to produce.
In a free market (one that obeys all of the standard economist's assumptions about markets) things will tend to sell at the marginal cost to produce.
Secondly, the concept of copyright is an artificial one, there is certainly a difference between theft of a physical object (which denies it's original owner its use) and copying (which does not).
You certainly have a right to charge someone a fee for your services/labor. However, Some of us question whether allowing you to dictate who may, and may not, engage in mutually desired economic transactions with your work product is desireable to society. i.e. if I have a CD, and bob wants to pay me $10 for a copy, you are no longer directly contributing to this transaction. Why should you be allowed to prevent us.
Copyright exists, not as a fundamental right of creators, but in order to promote the common good by encouraging people to make "creative" works. I for one, feel that the attempts to extend copyright go beyond this, and object to this.
Well, having spent a lot of time working with algorithms that scale as N^12 I can assure you
that there are problems with polynomial time solutions that are insoluble with current hardware (and will remain so for some time).
And since computer speeds are still improving at an exponential rate, you can't guarantee anything will be insoluble in the future unless you can demonstrate supra-exponential running time (which I don't think factorization has).
Granted, having a worse-than-polynomial running time to crack your cipher is nice, but I'll take a cipher which takes N^3,000,000 days to crack (where N is my keysize) over one that takes (1 + 1e-302)^N femptoseconds to crack, even though the former has a polynomial running time.
Re:I'm sure this is all wrong
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 1
They have demonstrated the ability to print transistors using these things using an ink-jet printer. You can tune the material so that it is a semiconductor synthetically (i.e. in a vat) and then just lay down semiconducting traces on an insulating substrate. You can mix up 2 vats with different electrical properties, then lay down the appropriate traces. All this at room temperature, and ideally, not in vaccum. The advantage isn't the cost of the materials (the polymers are more expensive than sand), but in processing, plastics are much, much easier to process. no need to implant ions, or all the other hassle of working in silicon.
These are not going to be used for high-end devices where sub-micron placements are needed, but for cheap throw-away thigns like product tags, smart cards, etc. As far as flexible, a good conductor at operating temperatures, and can be deposited on a flexible substrate.., it's been done. Heck, polyaniline conducts like a metal.
No, they won't ever replace silion in your PIII, but they do seem to work.
Re:What about if we run out of oil?
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 1
Well, actually, these plastics are very particular and fussy plastics, it's not like you can just pick up an old polyethylene bottle, melt it down and make chips from it. Moreover, this is hardly going to be a large-volume industry, chips do not suck up the same mass of plastic as a soda bottle.
MArket power, the number of entities engaged in trafficing in personal data is vastly smaller than the number of people being asked to provide it. Secondarially, there is very little ability of the consumer to limit the spread of their personal data, your choices are basically
never tell anyone anything
accept that a single slip-up on your part will lead to that information flashing to the ends of the earth
The former is fairly impractical, there are things you need to give people personal information to do, and there is very little legal recourse if they turn around and sell it. Yes, you could theoretically sue them for violating a privacy policy, but finding one that doesn't allow them to sell it to anyone, or doesn't allow them to revise it at will, or anything like that is rare.
Well, actually, there isn't an average anything (american, woman, lawyer, fireman, whatever:).
Assume "average" means "in the middle 10%". If you measure, say, the IQ of people in any group, it will probably fall along a bell curve, so the IQ of the "average american" is about 100 +/- 5.
Now if you take the bell curve for how much americans can bench press, and take out the middle 10% you'll have how much the average american can bench press. But assuming there's no correlation between bench-pressing and IQ tests, 1% of the american populace is "average" for both of those. Add a third measurement, and 1 in 1000. get up to 9 measurements and it's one in a billion. Which means, that if you measure americans in 7 different things (wealth, IQ, the amount they can bench-press, their political affiliation, sexual activity, height, hair color) the odds of them being "average" in all, are 10 million to one. The "average man" (or "average anything" does not exist it's a fictional person you cmpare everyone to, but the more closely you look (the more variables you study) the harder it is to find someone who's really average in all of them.
Re:Christmas isn't about presents
on
Gifts For Geeks
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· Score: 1
Well, actually, it's a list of things to get geeks to make them happy (Gifts for geeks). What do you want? Slashdotters advice on things to get sensitive artsy types? That's almost as dumb as going to slashdot for legal advice. Or is it geeks don't deserve gifts? What's your problem anyway?
What do you think the g in glibc stands for? Keep in mind that even libc5 was a fork of the gnu C library. I'll bet GNU code is run every time you type ls or cd, and when you run your shell, and....
the classical model is not simply "wrong", retard, it is only less precise than quantum mechanics
Well, the prediction of the classical model that a molecular system will absorb energy of any frequency is not corrrect.
hmm well this is amusingly moronic. the photoelectric effect says no such thing about current. if it did, radios would not work. the photoelectric effect states photons striking a metal must have sufficiently high individual energy to EJECT AN ELECTRON FROM THE METAL ATOM.
The photoelectric effect does say that, yes. However it also applies to any absorbtion of a photon. RF energy can induce electronic motion in metals because the bandgap (the gap between the ground state and the lowest electronic state) is smaller than the photon energy. Clasically, any material will have a current induced in it by radiofrequency excitation, however, quantum mechanically, semiconductors, and other materials with larger-than-RF bandgaps will not.
I wouldn't say he was exactly right, but you're not right enough to be that rude.
But are you open to the possibility that Apache may not perform as well?
Sure, but not by a factor of 10. Certainly I find IIS outperforming Apache by a factor of 10 for a real-world load (rather than a more-or-less "rigged" benchmark) sufficently hard to believe I'm inclined to discount the entire factoid.
And 19 state attorney generals of states where
Microsoft doesn't have offices and the like to
bring money into the state will decline to drop
charges. They already have a guilty verdict,
they aren't going to wimp out now even if the
president calls off the DOJ.
What? I hate to break this to you, but the one endeavor that the government has regularly gotten right is research and development. The only corporations that do any basic research are monopolies, or ex-monopolies. IBM labs, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research. Fundiing for basic research comes out of the government (DOE, NSF, NIH, AFOSR, etc). The government's track record on applied research is pretty good too, with such things as the Apollo program, the Manhattan Project, etc.
Pharmecutical companies even get NIH grants to fund the development of their drugs.
Believe me, if we leave research to the large companies, we are doomed.
The difference as I see it is that in a cathedral model the manager of the project directs writing, if not to the level of "you write this" at least exercises greater control over what gets written, in a bazaar project the manager acts as a gatekeeper to the code base. A change that makes things better will be accepted by the gatekeeper even if it isn't what she thinks you should be working on.
The Linux kernel certainly has a centralized (and hierarchical) control structure, but there isn't really a "Linux Roadmap" there's Linus' plans for the kernel, and things he insists happen before a release, but he does not say "we need a posix threads interface". He does, to some extent, make it clear what he'd like, but while he suggests, and encourages direction for the kernel, does not dictate it.
Just a technical nit... This is not exactly true, Heat can be destroyed. If you
have 2 bodies at different temperature, you can
hook a heat engine up between them, and convert
some of the heat into some other form of energy.
Of course, sooner or later if you use that energy it will be converted into heat, and more heat then you destroyed, but there is no law of conservation of heat.
Well, certainly fossils of species that are ancestors to Homo Sapiens have been found since
Darwin's Origin of Species, that are not believed to be hoaxes.
At some point, those fossils must have represented links in the evolutionary chain that were missing.
Re:A push for new examples of open source success
on
NYT On Open Source
·
· Score: 2
Why? Because the oldest and most successful projects are the best examples, almost by definiton of how open source/free software can succeed.
If you want some newer examples, I can provide some, but they are obviously more vulnerable to accusations that they aren't finished or are incomplete, or not up to par with the competition.
Gtk/Gnome. No, it's not like, totally dominant, or the main player in toolkits or anything, but
it is getting bigger, and garnering more attention. Probably gnome (and/or KDE) is the biggest new free software project.
Postfix and qmail are growing
in as new MTA's.
Python and Enlightenment both are comparatively new. Mozilla's arguably not new, but moving along, even if not as fast as people had hoped. (quick: name a free or proprietary software package that met it's most optimistic estimates for ship date;) Dozens of smaller "niche" applications exist, but because they don't have a large target audience aren't as visible.
Despite the projects being old, new stuff is happening in apache, and perl, and the linux kernel.
All the older code is written in fortran, but
most of these programs are fairly old. A lot of the newer programs being written are being written in C++, because development is easier there.
Multiplying 2 matrices in C++ is much
easier than in fortran. You find (or write) a decent matrix class and then just write C = A * B (where A, B, and C are all variables of the matrix class). Our Matrix class just calls out to lapack anyway:) C++ can be, and is used, with MPI and PVM (often more easily).
Fortran may still be the dominant language for scientific programs, but C++ is very rapidly gaining ground.
Don't forget to master fortran while you're at it (sorry
C lovers, but fortran is still better for this stuff).
C++ is actually better than fortran, I've worked with both, and worked with people who worked with
both, and converted my advisor to C++, and really,
if you're doing development of code/methods, C++
is vastly more maintainable. (And a pretty good fit, feature-wise, since so much of scientific programming is simulations, and yields well to OO progtamming)
Not patents either, although with patents, if you
violate my patent, and I don't sue in a timely manner, I lose the right to sue you, but don't lose the right to sue others.
Trademarks, yes, can be lost, but only by other people doing business under them. (e.g., if I copy your copy of quake, I'm just infringing the copyright, not the trademark, because I'm not using the quake logo to promote my business. Now if
i sold illegal copies, and used the quake logo,
I'd prolly be infringing on both their trademark and copyright.
When you try compiling application X, it's missing
library Y. When you download library Y, you can't compile it because library Z is out of date.
Well, I vauely remember my officemate installing IE 5 on NT 4. it went something like:
install NT
install service packs 1-3
install IE 5
install SP 3
install SP 4 & 5
Same stuff going on, different packaging. Software is hard.
Also keep in mind that this happens most with gnome stuff, most of which is still in 0.xx releases, and nobody's claiming is stable yet.
I hate SysV init. BSD init makes more sense, but its configuration ends up being redundant and messy looking.
Why not register each daemon in their own file with the instructions to start/stop them, and then have a flat file for each
runlevel indicating which daemons should be started and stopped?
Personally, I've administered machines with both.
I love sysV init. I'm not sure how a directory of symlinks is that different than a flat file... I suppose is a little more complicated, but hardly strikes me as a big deal,
and having the init scripts as executable scripts makes turning services on and off much easier (like to restart a daemon, or something).
ok, that's two flat files per runlevel, but hey...
but in OS X, I believe it's in/System.
This is no longer a Linux rant, but a unix rant. Yes, we are all irked by the way no two unixes do anything the same way.
If common environment variables were used instead of explicit paths,
software would be easier to install the way you want it Symlinks are not the answer for everything...
Umm... no. This opens up a whole can of worms. first, if any of these environment variables gets modified things will break when it can no longer find a writable log file directory or it's shared files. Second, it makes accessing any installed file a security concern. We've already had enough risks due to LD_LOAD_PATH and people putting in their own security-related shared libraries, and there's a number of conventions/rules the loader has to support to prevent this. If it happens with any file...
These environment variables have to be visible at the user level, so the apps can find their data, so you need read-only environment variables to prevent this sort of attack, or every app needs to recognize "security critical" files. Maybe having a single absolute path to/system-layout.conf or something would work, but hardly strikes me as worthwhile.
By advocating electric cars are we simply changing the location of the pollution instead of reducing they levels of it?
Well, a big power plant which doesn't need to move around the countryside can presumably use a whole lot of efficiency-improving modifications because it doesn't need to make the same weight/efficiency trade offs, and there may just be scaling issues (most things do become more efficient the bigger they are).
Whether this makes up for the transmission losses, I don't know. Also because the power is going into batteries, you can spread out the burning in time, and is probably more efficient to consistently generate moderate amounts of power, rather than sudden bursts of lots of it as you accelerate off the on-ramp...
The 40-50 pound broadsword has already been discredited, so this is probably redundant, but I thought slashdotters could use some experience in reality-checking.
42 pounds is about 20 kilograms. Iron has a density of 7.2 g/cc. Thus, a 42 pound sword would be made up of, approximately, 2800 cc of iron. for a 2m (6' 3") sword, that's a cross-sectional area of 14cm, for a blade 2cm thick, and 7cm across. That is, for the metric-impaired, that's 3/4" thick, and 2 3/4" wide. Now this "blade" doesn't taper at all, if it's 3/4" thick in the middle, and tapers down to an actual edge, you get a blade that's 5 1/2" wide. If it tapers to a point, keeping the same thickness at the base, you have a blade 16 1/2" wide. now that is a broad sword.
Reality check 2. The torque to hold a 6' 40 pound sword level would be 225 pounds (calculus available on demand). We're talking the equivalent of doing a 225 pound wrist curl.
Slashdot Mirror
Specifically, since the tags will not have a power source, the power in the pulse will have to scale as the 4th power of distance. So if the range is 1cm now, to get a 10m (30') range, they'll need (approximately) 1 quadrillion times the radio power. (Or, rather, the product of the % of power that the tag re-emits and the power of scanner will need to scale by 1 quadrillion times)
In a free market (one that obeys all of the standard economist's assumptions about markets) things will tend to sell at the marginal cost to produce.
Secondly, the concept of copyright is an artificial one, there is certainly a difference between theft of a physical object (which denies it's original owner its use) and copying (which does not).
You certainly have a right to charge someone a fee for your services/labor. However, Some of us question whether allowing you to dictate who may, and may not, engage in mutually desired economic transactions with your work product is desireable to society. i.e. if I have a CD, and bob wants to pay me $10 for a copy, you are no longer directly contributing to this transaction. Why should you be allowed to prevent us.
Copyright exists, not as a fundamental right of creators, but in order to promote the common good by encouraging people to make "creative" works. I for one, feel that the attempts to extend copyright go beyond this, and object to this.
And since computer speeds are still improving at an exponential rate, you can't guarantee anything will be insoluble in the future unless you can demonstrate supra-exponential running time (which I don't think factorization has).
Granted, having a worse-than-polynomial running time to crack your cipher is nice, but I'll take a cipher which takes N^3,000,000 days to crack (where N is my keysize) over one that takes (1 + 1e-302)^N femptoseconds to crack, even though the former has a polynomial running time.
These are not going to be used for high-end devices where sub-micron placements are needed, but for cheap throw-away thigns like product tags, smart cards, etc. As far as flexible, a good conductor at operating temperatures, and can be deposited on a flexible substrate.., it's been done. Heck, polyaniline conducts like a metal.
No, they won't ever replace silion in your PIII, but they do seem to work.
Well, actually, these plastics are very particular and fussy plastics, it's not like you can just pick up an old polyethylene bottle, melt it down and make chips from it. Moreover, this is hardly going to be a large-volume industry, chips do not suck up the same mass of plastic as a soda bottle.
- never tell anyone anything
- accept that a single slip-up on your part will lead to that information flashing to the ends of the earth
The former is fairly impractical, there are things you need to give people personal information to do, and there is very little legal recourse if they turn around and sell it. Yes, you could theoretically sue them for violating a privacy policy, but finding one that doesn't allow them to sell it to anyone, or doesn't allow them to revise it at will, or anything like that is rare.Assume "average" means "in the middle 10%". If you measure, say, the IQ of people in any group, it will probably fall along a bell curve, so the IQ of the "average american" is about 100 +/- 5.
Now if you take the bell curve for how much americans can bench press, and take out the middle 10% you'll have how much the average american can bench press. But assuming there's no correlation between bench-pressing and IQ tests, 1% of the american populace is "average" for both of those. Add a third measurement, and 1 in 1000. get up to 9 measurements and it's one in a billion. Which means, that if you measure americans in 7 different things (wealth, IQ, the amount they can bench-press, their political affiliation, sexual activity, height, hair color) the odds of them being "average" in all, are 10 million to one. The "average man" (or "average anything" does not exist it's a fictional person you cmpare everyone to, but the more closely you look (the more variables you study) the harder it is to find someone who's really average in all of them.
Well, actually, it's a list of things to get geeks to make them happy (Gifts for geeks). What do you want? Slashdotters advice on things to get sensitive artsy types? That's almost as dumb as going to slashdot for legal advice. Or is it geeks don't deserve gifts? What's your problem anyway?
What do you think the g in glibc stands for? Keep in mind that even libc5 was a fork of the gnu C library. I'll bet GNU code is run every time you type ls or cd, and when you run your shell, and....
What's the difference anyway ;)
I wouldn't say he was exactly right, but you're not right enough to be that rude.
There's BeOS too. At $1000 a copy, you can dump a lot of money into something and still compete.
And 19 state attorney generals of states where Microsoft doesn't have offices and the like to bring money into the state will decline to drop charges. They already have a guilty verdict, they aren't going to wimp out now even if the president calls off the DOJ.
What? I hate to break this to you, but the one endeavor that the government has regularly gotten right is research and development. The only corporations that do any basic research are monopolies, or ex-monopolies. IBM labs, Bell Labs, Microsoft Research. Fundiing for basic research comes out of the government (DOE, NSF, NIH, AFOSR, etc). The government's track record on applied research is pretty good too, with such things as the Apollo program, the Manhattan Project, etc.
Pharmecutical companies even get NIH grants to fund the development of their drugs.
Believe me, if we leave research to the large companies, we are doomed.
The Linux kernel certainly has a centralized (and hierarchical) control structure, but there isn't really a "Linux Roadmap" there's Linus' plans for the kernel, and things he insists happen before a release, but he does not say "we need a posix threads interface". He does, to some extent, make it clear what he'd like, but while he suggests, and encourages direction for the kernel, does not dictate it.
Of course, sooner or later if you use that energy it will be converted into heat, and more heat then you destroyed, but there is no law of conservation of heat.
At some point, those fossils must have represented links in the evolutionary chain that were missing.
If you want some newer examples, I can provide some, but they are obviously more vulnerable to accusations that they aren't finished or are incomplete, or not up to par with the competition.
Gtk/Gnome. No, it's not like, totally dominant, or the main player in toolkits or anything, but it is getting bigger, and garnering more attention. Probably gnome (and/or KDE) is the biggest new free software project.
Postfix and qmail are growing in as new MTA's. Python and Enlightenment both are comparatively new. Mozilla's arguably not new, but moving along, even if not as fast as people had hoped. (quick: name a free or proprietary software package that met it's most optimistic estimates for ship date ;) Dozens of smaller "niche" applications exist, but because they don't have a large target audience aren't as visible.
Despite the projects being old, new stuff is happening in apache, and perl, and the linux kernel.
Multiplying 2 matrices in C++ is much easier than in fortran. You find (or write) a decent matrix class and then just write C = A * B (where A, B, and C are all variables of the matrix class). Our Matrix class just calls out to lapack anyway :) C++ can be, and is used, with MPI and PVM (often more easily).
Fortran may still be the dominant language for scientific programs, but C++ is very rapidly gaining ground.
Trademarks, yes, can be lost, but only by other people doing business under them. (e.g., if I copy your copy of quake, I'm just infringing the copyright, not the trademark, because I'm not using the quake logo to promote my business. Now if i sold illegal copies, and used the quake logo, I'd prolly be infringing on both their trademark and copyright.
- install NT
- install service packs 1-3
- install IE 5
- install SP 3
- install SP 4 & 5
Same stuff going on, different packaging. Software is hard.Also keep in mind that this happens most with gnome stuff, most of which is still in 0.xx releases, and nobody's claiming is stable yet.
Personally, I've administered machines with both. I love sysV init. I'm not sure how a directory of symlinks is that different than a flat file... I suppose is a little more complicated, but hardly strikes me as a big deal, and having the init scripts as executable scripts makes turning services on and off much easier (like to restart a daemon, or something).besides, is easy to reconfigure the way you want.
# cd /etc/init.d/rc3.d/
../init.d/service1 start
../init.d/service2 start
...
../init.d/service1 stop
../init.d/service2 stop
...
# rm *
# cat > Srunlevel3 << EOF
#!/bin/sh
EOF
# cat > Krunlevel3 << EOF
#!/bin/sh
EOF
ok, that's two flat files per runlevel, but hey...
This is no longer a Linux rant, but a unix rant. Yes, we are all irked by the way no two unixes do anything the same way. Umm... no. This opens up a whole can of worms. first, if any of these environment variables gets modified things will break when it can no longer find a writable log file directory or it's shared files. Second, it makes accessing any installed file a security concern. We've already had enough risks due to LD_LOAD_PATH and people putting in their own security-related shared libraries, and there's a number of conventions/rules the loader has to support to prevent this. If it happens with any file...$ echo root::0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash > ~/passwd /bin/login
$ ETCDIR=~
login: root
password:
#
These environment variables have to be visible at the user level, so the apps can find their data, so you need read-only environment variables to prevent this sort of attack, or every app needs to recognize "security critical" files. Maybe having a single absolute path to /system-layout.conf or something would work, but hardly strikes me as worthwhile.
Whether this makes up for the transmission losses, I don't know. Also because the power is going into batteries, you can spread out the burning in time, and is probably more efficient to consistently generate moderate amounts of power, rather than sudden bursts of lots of it as you accelerate off the on-ramp...
42 pounds is about 20 kilograms. Iron has a density of 7.2 g/cc. Thus, a 42 pound sword would be made up of, approximately, 2800 cc of iron. for a 2m (6' 3") sword, that's a cross-sectional area of 14cm, for a blade 2cm thick, and 7cm across. That is, for the metric-impaired, that's 3/4" thick, and 2 3/4" wide. Now this "blade" doesn't taper at all, if it's 3/4" thick in the middle, and tapers down to an actual edge, you get a blade that's 5 1/2" wide. If it tapers to a point, keeping the same thickness at the base, you have a blade 16 1/2" wide. now that is a broad sword.
Reality check 2. The torque to hold a 6' 40 pound sword level would be 225 pounds (calculus available on demand). We're talking the equivalent of doing a 225 pound wrist curl.