Here's the paper, or at least the abstract. The talk was given yesterday at the American Institute of Physics in San Francisco. Here's the abstract, but it doesn't tell you much.
In our work, we investigate whether, and to what extent, the unique physical phenomenon of long lifetime resonant electro-magnetic states can, with long-tailed bona-fide (non-radiative) modes, be used for efficient energy transfer. Intuitively, if both the drain and the source are resonant states of the same frequency with long lifetimes, they should be able to exchange energy very efficiently, while interaction with other environmental off-resonant objects could be negligible. Of course, intricacies of the real world make this simple picture significantly more complex. Nevertheless, via detailed theoretical, and numerical analyses of typical real-world model-situations and realistic material parameters, we establish that such a non-radiative scheme could indeed be practical for middle-range wireless energy transfer (i.e. within a room, or a factory pavilion). Important novel applications are thus enabled.
The author is credible; he has a good track record in non-linear optics.
There's a somewhat nutty exposition of this resonance phenomenon here by a radio ham. There's actually some decent physics in that article, if you ignore the nutty stuff. This phenomenon has been known for decades.
There's a way to actively drive an antenna into resonance and increase the amount of power it receives.
The problem is that if you have those resonant currents flowing in your antenna, most of the energy gets lost in resistive heating as the currents slosh around in the antenna. This idea might need superconductors to make it work.
This area hasn't been studied much recently because it relates to antenna design for waves much longer than the antenna. All the action is up in the gigahertz range today, where antennas are tiny. Almost nobody's working on better AM broadcast receiver antennas any more. Interestingly, those wierd ferrite-rod antennas that are inside AM broadcast radios use this phenomenon. There's a radio ham in Finland who built an active resonant ferrite rod antenna for 3 to 12MHz AM signals.
Right now, this power transmission scheme is just a theoretical concept. The physicist talking about it hasn't built one. So it's not yet clear if it can be realized. But it's standard EM physics.
It reminded me of "Paris in the Twentieth Century", which Jules Verne wrote a century ago. Verne showed the manuscript to his friends and literary agent, all of whom agreed that it was too lousy to publish. So Verne put it in a box. A century later, one of his descendants found the manuscript and published it. It still sucks.
Spider Robinson is an OK writer, and Heinlein did great work, but Robinson trying to be Heinlein just doesn't work. Somebody more in tune with Heinlein's worldview, like David Weber, might have done a much better job. Weber, like Heinlein, does drama. Robinson does comedy. It just doesn't fit.
Worse, the book runs out before the plot does. This is mostly an anachronism; SF books today are longer than they were in Heinlein's early days. And today, you can do series. Heinlein's ideas for Variable Star could have been built up into a three-volume series with huge scope. Weber might have done that.
It wouldn't have read like Heinlein, though; Heinlein keeps the focus on the main character through most of his books, which today is regarded as too limiting for a big story. The result is wierd; aliens blow up the earth, but that's a subplot to the main love story. Yes, George Lucas made that work, but he had special effects and a symphony orchestra to support it. And besides, at the point Variable Star ends, the human race is losing. Yet the ending is upbeat.
It's not Heinlein. Face it. If you want to read Spider Robinson, get one of his Callahan books. If you want to read good Heinlein, read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". But Variable Star? Skip it.
This season is so bad we may not even have a decision in the Virginia senate race by Xmas,
and won't know which party will control the new Senate. The recount won't even start until Nov. 28. Virginia has about ten different voting systems, including all the bad ones, and doesn't have a paper trail on the touch-screen voting machines. The current tally is
1,170,708 (Webb) vs. 1,162,576 (Allen).
The gadget we need, a voting system that doesn't suck, didn't make it in time for this year either.
Exactly. Somewhere in the list of people who traded the stock in the week or two before the spam run are the ones responsible. They can be found; that's what the U.S. Government's Financial Crimes Information Network is for. If we have to have all this Big Brother stuff, we should get some benefit from it.
There was the famous layoff at Wired News, where they laid off all the reporters and kept some of the editors.
Of course, what happened is that press releases took over.
Wired Magazine is now a version of the Sharper Image catalog. Who needs reporters? Content is what fills in the space between the ads. And if you just use press releases for that, nobody notices.
A "music tax" isn't going to fly. Most of the population does't download music.
Remember, the US has an aging population.
Someone should ask Mick Jagger about this. Before becoming a rock star, he went to the London School of Economics, and his business sense has been sufficient to extend his career by at least two decades beyond when it should have ended.
Plagarism shows up frequently in Wikipedia, but usually it's promotional. Typically, company X copied their "about" page into Wikipedia. Bands and musicians, usually ones that are a legend only in their own minds, try this. A new user associated with the thing being promoted is usually responsible.
Then there are the people with a collector mindset. They create endless minor articles like "Indiana State Highway 22" and biographical articles of long-forgotten city council members. Often by cutting and pasting. This is annoying, but complaints of copyright infringement are unlikely.
Google bought themselves into a real mess. All those crap "videos" that consist of a slide show with pirated music require vast amounts of effort for copyright clearance. You need a "mechanical license" to cover reproducing the audio. You need a "synchronization license" to cover using the audio in conjunction with the visual work. You need copyright clearance on each still image. Face it, that stuff isn't original. YouTube is going to end up having to take down all material of that type unless the user goes through the copyright clearance process.
I have a video on YouTube with audio, and I actually did get copyright clearance for two songs. With lesser bands, it's not too hard. But it does take time and effort. Also, you can buy, or even get free, "royalty-free music", although it tends to be rather bland.
Re:There were at least 2 single points of failure
on
The Hubble Lives On
·
· Score: 1
If the Service Module's engine failed while in lunar orbit, there would be no way to break out of lunar orbit and head back to earth.
That's right.
Apollo Abort Planning, p. 25: "Therefore, the sole propulsion source is the SPS because the service module RCS is incapable of performing a burn as large as that required for the TEI maneuver". However, this was recognized, and the SPS had redundancy in almost all components except the engine bell.
Many of the speculators selling XBox 360 units on eBay lost money. The price was high for only a few weeks; then it dropped to slightly below retail. Endless failed "reserve not met" auctions as speculators desperately tried to unload their inventory without losing money.
eBay sometimes creates the illusion that prices are higher than they really are. You can see the asking prices on auctions coming up, but not, usually, the actual prices at which a sale took place or high bid on failed auctions. Only prices at which transactions take place are real prices. Asking prices which don't result in sales are seller-side fantasies.
These are UDP-based protocols, on port 623. They can be sent from anywhere on the Internet; not just local machines. They provide total power over the target computer.
Functions include:
Change boot device for next boot, including boot from network.
Turn machine on, off, or reboot.
Disable keyboard and user on/off switch.
Now that's control.
Supposedly machines come out of the factory with an empty set of IPMI remote management passwords in their nonvolatile memory. Supposedly. All it would take would be to slip in a password load somewhere before the machine reaches the customer, and the customer would never notice that they're 0wned. Even a complete reload of the OS won't fix this. You can switch the machine from Windows to Linux and still be 0wned. Or worse, the IPMI hardware could have a built-in password (perhaps for "factory test") that you couldn't even detect unless you knew it. Because all this remote management stuff is already there, it takes a very minor change to make large numbers of machines very vulnerable.
Run IPMItool and find out what machines will talk to you. Try not to reboot your whole server farm by mistake.
The neat thing about doing small claims cases like this is that it's only time consuming the first time. Once you've found all the resources you need and have all the materials ready, the second case is basically macro instantiation.
Process servers are useful. The first time I used one, it was a company named "Attila the Hun School of Charm". Really. I went down to their place in person, and as I was filling out the paperwork, one of the process servers comes in. He looks like a football linebacker and is driving a Jeep with big tires. A few days later, I get the return from the process server, describing the delivery of the summons: "Person appearing to be in charge threw papers out front door". When I got to court with that, it was an instant win - default judgement in my favor.
Collection approaches vary by state. I'm in California. I had a court judgement against a retail store, and after some non-fruitful phone calls and letters, I paid for a "till tap" and an "8 hour keeper", services of the County Sheriff. This works against any business with a cash register. A uniformed, armed sheriff or two show up at the business, present a copy of the court judgement to the store manager, and take the money out of the cash register. That's the "till tap". Refusing to pay is not an option. If there's not enough money in the cash register, they stick around for up to eight hours, standing next to the cashier and taking the money as it comes in. Persons who pay by check are told to make their check out to "County of...". They handle credit cards, too. That's the "8 hour keeper". It seldom gets that far; businesses will frantically come up with some cash to get rid of the sheriff.
Eventually, you get a check from the sheriff's office.
The fee for the "8 hour keeper" is added to the judgement. So you get that payment back.
That's not an investigative file. That's just his correspondence with Hoover's office. There's not even anything from Hoover himself in there. Nor anything from Tolson. It's staff people in Hoover's office. Helen Gandy was Hoover's secretary.
Manned spaceflight would never have gotten off the ground if NASA had exhibited such risk averse behavior almost 50 years ago.
Apollo did have such risk-averse behavior. The mission could be aborted at almost any point without losing the astronauts. The only point in the whole mission where a single engine failure was fatal were the few seconds just before landing on the moon.
Freeamp, which is now called Zinf due to complaints from the Winamp people, is what you want. No ads. No phoning home. No DRM. No nonsense. Open source. Runs on Windows and Linux.
Back in the late 1980s, one of the design students at Stanford came up with a Frisbee you could shoot down with a Laser Tag gun. The Frisbee had a detector for the light pattern from the gun. When triggered, it released a spring-loaded flap which made the Frisbee aerodynamically unstable, so the Frisbee would crash.
Very cute, but the laser tag fad died before this went anywhere.
You have to drill through five web pages to get to the actual job info.
It's a maintenance programming job on code written using "extreme programming", which means you get to fix the bugs the "extreme programming" types put in while being pushed to produce code fast.
No salary is mentioned, so this probably is a low-paying job.
26 different buzzword technologies are mentioned, and the ad wants someone with five years experience in most of them. A matchup like that is statistically unlikely.
There's better data available. Broadcast TV signals contain considerable metadata. The AMOL data in the VBI and the SID data in the audio clearly identify the program content and source. Here's a encoder [norpak.ca] for that information, which is inserted to make Nielsen ratings and advertising payments work.
See U.S. patent #5,699,124 for some details of how the data is encoded.
So MythTV is still guessing, like the ad-skipping VCRs of twenty years ago.
There's better data available. Broadcast TV signals contain considerable metadata. The AMOL data in the VBI and the SID data in the audio clearly identify the program content and source. Here's a encoder for that information, which is inserted to make Nielsen ratings and advertising payments work.
See U.S. patent #5,699,124 for some details of how the data is encoded.
So far, the PVR community doesn't seem to have figured this stuff out, and the specs aren't easy to get, but the data is out there.
This is an excellent argument for ad blocking. The article never mentions the basic truth - almost all offsite content on web pages is ads. (Of course, this is someone from Google talking, and Google, after all, is an ad-delivery service which runs a search engine to boost their hits.) Web page load is choking on ads. I noted previously that some sites load ads from as many as six different sources. This saturates the number of connections the browser supports. Page load then bottlenecks on the slowest ad server.
So install AdBlock and FlashBlock in Firefox, and watch your browsing speed up.
Web-based advertising looks like a saturated market. Watch for some big bankruptcies among advertising-supported services.
Slashdot Mirror
In our work, we investigate whether, and to what extent, the unique physical phenomenon of long lifetime resonant electro-magnetic states can, with long-tailed bona-fide (non-radiative) modes, be used for efficient energy transfer. Intuitively, if both the drain and the source are resonant states of the same frequency with long lifetimes, they should be able to exchange energy very efficiently, while interaction with other environmental off-resonant objects could be negligible. Of course, intricacies of the real world make this simple picture significantly more complex. Nevertheless, via detailed theoretical, and numerical analyses of typical real-world model-situations and realistic material parameters, we establish that such a non-radiative scheme could indeed be practical for middle-range wireless energy transfer (i.e. within a room, or a factory pavilion). Important novel applications are thus enabled.
The author is credible; he has a good track record in non-linear optics.
There's a somewhat nutty exposition of this resonance phenomenon here by a radio ham. There's actually some decent physics in that article, if you ignore the nutty stuff. This phenomenon has been known for decades. There's a way to actively drive an antenna into resonance and increase the amount of power it receives. The problem is that if you have those resonant currents flowing in your antenna, most of the energy gets lost in resistive heating as the currents slosh around in the antenna. This idea might need superconductors to make it work.
This area hasn't been studied much recently because it relates to antenna design for waves much longer than the antenna. All the action is up in the gigahertz range today, where antennas are tiny. Almost nobody's working on better AM broadcast receiver antennas any more. Interestingly, those wierd ferrite-rod antennas that are inside AM broadcast radios use this phenomenon. There's a radio ham in Finland who built an active resonant ferrite rod antenna for 3 to 12MHz AM signals.
Right now, this power transmission scheme is just a theoretical concept. The physicist talking about it hasn't built one. So it's not yet clear if it can be realized. But it's standard EM physics.
"Variable Star" is a disappointment.
It reminded me of "Paris in the Twentieth Century", which Jules Verne wrote a century ago. Verne showed the manuscript to his friends and literary agent, all of whom agreed that it was too lousy to publish. So Verne put it in a box. A century later, one of his descendants found the manuscript and published it. It still sucks.
Spider Robinson is an OK writer, and Heinlein did great work, but Robinson trying to be Heinlein just doesn't work. Somebody more in tune with Heinlein's worldview, like David Weber, might have done a much better job. Weber, like Heinlein, does drama. Robinson does comedy. It just doesn't fit.
Worse, the book runs out before the plot does. This is mostly an anachronism; SF books today are longer than they were in Heinlein's early days. And today, you can do series. Heinlein's ideas for Variable Star could have been built up into a three-volume series with huge scope. Weber might have done that. It wouldn't have read like Heinlein, though; Heinlein keeps the focus on the main character through most of his books, which today is regarded as too limiting for a big story. The result is wierd; aliens blow up the earth, but that's a subplot to the main love story. Yes, George Lucas made that work, but he had special effects and a symphony orchestra to support it. And besides, at the point Variable Star ends, the human race is losing. Yet the ending is upbeat.
It's not Heinlein. Face it. If you want to read Spider Robinson, get one of his Callahan books. If you want to read good Heinlein, read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". But Variable Star? Skip it.
Look at their stock chart. Ticker symbol LNUX, no less.
This season is so bad we may not even have a decision in the Virginia senate race by Xmas, and won't know which party will control the new Senate. The recount won't even start until Nov. 28. Virginia has about ten different voting systems, including all the bad ones, and doesn't have a paper trail on the touch-screen voting machines. The current tally is 1,170,708 (Webb) vs. 1,162,576 (Allen).
The gadget we need, a voting system that doesn't suck, didn't make it in time for this year either.
Exactly. Somewhere in the list of people who traded the stock in the week or two before the spam run are the ones responsible. They can be found; that's what the U.S. Government's Financial Crimes Information Network is for. If we have to have all this Big Brother stuff, we should get some benefit from it.
Send those stock spams to SEC Enforcement.
There was the famous layoff at Wired News, where they laid off all the reporters and kept some of the editors.
Of course, what happened is that press releases took over. Wired Magazine is now a version of the Sharper Image catalog. Who needs reporters? Content is what fills in the space between the ads. And if you just use press releases for that, nobody notices.
A "music tax" isn't going to fly. Most of the population does't download music. Remember, the US has an aging population.
Someone should ask Mick Jagger about this. Before becoming a rock star, he went to the London School of Economics, and his business sense has been sufficient to extend his career by at least two decades beyond when it should have ended.
Plagarism shows up frequently in Wikipedia, but usually it's promotional. Typically, company X copied their "about" page into Wikipedia. Bands and musicians, usually ones that are a legend only in their own minds, try this. A new user associated with the thing being promoted is usually responsible.
Then there are the people with a collector mindset. They create endless minor articles like "Indiana State Highway 22" and biographical articles of long-forgotten city council members. Often by cutting and pasting. This is annoying, but complaints of copyright infringement are unlikely.
Google bought themselves into a real mess. All those crap "videos" that consist of a slide show with pirated music require vast amounts of effort for copyright clearance. You need a "mechanical license" to cover reproducing the audio. You need a "synchronization license" to cover using the audio in conjunction with the visual work. You need copyright clearance on each still image. Face it, that stuff isn't original. YouTube is going to end up having to take down all material of that type unless the user goes through the copyright clearance process.
I have a video on YouTube with audio, and I actually did get copyright clearance for two songs. With lesser bands, it's not too hard. But it does take time and effort. Also, you can buy, or even get free, "royalty-free music", although it tends to be rather bland.
That's right. Apollo Abort Planning, p. 25: "Therefore, the sole propulsion source is the SPS because the service module RCS is incapable of performing a burn as large as that required for the TEI maneuver". However, this was recognized, and the SPS had redundancy in almost all components except the engine bell.
Many of the speculators selling XBox 360 units on eBay lost money. The price was high for only a few weeks; then it dropped to slightly below retail. Endless failed "reserve not met" auctions as speculators desperately tried to unload their inventory without losing money.
eBay sometimes creates the illusion that prices are higher than they really are. You can see the asking prices on auctions coming up, but not, usually, the actual prices at which a sale took place or high bid on failed auctions. Only prices at which transactions take place are real prices. Asking prices which don't result in sales are seller-side fantasies.
Here's what scares me: The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and the Remote Management and Control Protocol. (RMCP). Many machines in the field implement these protocols in the network controller, independent of the operating system.
These are UDP-based protocols, on port 623. They can be sent from anywhere on the Internet; not just local machines. They provide total power over the target computer. Functions include:
-
Change boot device for next boot, including boot from network.
-
Turn machine on, off, or reboot.
- Disable keyboard and user on/off switch.
Now that's control.Supposedly machines come out of the factory with an empty set of IPMI remote management passwords in their nonvolatile memory. Supposedly. All it would take would be to slip in a password load somewhere before the machine reaches the customer, and the customer would never notice that they're 0wned. Even a complete reload of the OS won't fix this. You can switch the machine from Windows to Linux and still be 0wned. Or worse, the IPMI hardware could have a built-in password (perhaps for "factory test") that you couldn't even detect unless you knew it. Because all this remote management stuff is already there, it takes a very minor change to make large numbers of machines very vulnerable.
Run IPMItool and find out what machines will talk to you. Try not to reboot your whole server farm by mistake.
The neat thing about doing small claims cases like this is that it's only time consuming the first time. Once you've found all the resources you need and have all the materials ready, the second case is basically macro instantiation.
Process servers are useful. The first time I used one, it was a company named "Attila the Hun School of Charm". Really. I went down to their place in person, and as I was filling out the paperwork, one of the process servers comes in. He looks like a football linebacker and is driving a Jeep with big tires. A few days later, I get the return from the process server, describing the delivery of the summons: "Person appearing to be in charge threw papers out front door". When I got to court with that, it was an instant win - default judgement in my favor.
Collection approaches vary by state. I'm in California. I had a court judgement against a retail store, and after some non-fruitful phone calls and letters, I paid for a "till tap" and an "8 hour keeper", services of the County Sheriff. This works against any business with a cash register. A uniformed, armed sheriff or two show up at the business, present a copy of the court judgement to the store manager, and take the money out of the cash register. That's the "till tap". Refusing to pay is not an option. If there's not enough money in the cash register, they stick around for up to eight hours, standing next to the cashier and taking the money as it comes in. Persons who pay by check are told to make their check out to "County of ...". They handle credit cards, too. That's the "8 hour keeper". It seldom gets that far; businesses will frantically come up with some cash to get rid of the sheriff.
Eventually, you get a check from the sheriff's office. The fee for the "8 hour keeper" is added to the judgement. So you get that payment back.
That's not an investigative file. That's just his correspondence with Hoover's office. There's not even anything from Hoover himself in there. Nor anything from Tolson. It's staff people in Hoover's office. Helen Gandy was Hoover's secretary.
This year, we have someone down the block who has:
The overall effect is of a carnival dark ride. A cheezy one.
Manned spaceflight would never have gotten off the ground if NASA had exhibited such risk averse behavior almost 50 years ago.
Apollo did have such risk-averse behavior. The mission could be aborted at almost any point without losing the astronauts. The only point in the whole mission where a single engine failure was fatal were the few seconds just before landing on the moon.
Freeamp, which is now called Zinf due to complaints from the Winamp people, is what you want. No ads. No phoning home. No DRM. No nonsense. Open source. Runs on Windows and Linux.
Back in the late 1980s, one of the design students at Stanford came up with a Frisbee you could shoot down with a Laser Tag gun. The Frisbee had a detector for the light pattern from the gun. When triggered, it released a spring-loaded flap which made the Frisbee aerodynamically unstable, so the Frisbee would crash.
Very cute, but the laser tag fad died before this went anywhere.
Well, let's see.
But if you need people, put a recruiting van out in front of the Sun complex in Newark. Sun is closing that facility.
Meant to post that in the MythTV article. Oops.
See U.S. patent #5,699,124 for some details of how the data is encoded.
Some of the same data is encoded in the audio. Here's some info about decoding it.
So far, the PVR community doesn't seem to have figured this stuff out, and the specs aren't easy to get, but the data is out there.
That has essentially the same feature set as the Motorola Sprint phone I have now, but it's less bulky.
Here's a reference on extracting SID data from audio.
So MythTV is still guessing, like the ad-skipping VCRs of twenty years ago.
There's better data available. Broadcast TV signals contain considerable metadata. The AMOL data in the VBI and the SID data in the audio clearly identify the program content and source. Here's a encoder for that information, which is inserted to make Nielsen ratings and advertising payments work.
See U.S. patent #5,699,124 for some details of how the data is encoded.
So far, the PVR community doesn't seem to have figured this stuff out, and the specs aren't easy to get, but the data is out there.
This is an excellent argument for ad blocking. The article never mentions the basic truth - almost all offsite content on web pages is ads. (Of course, this is someone from Google talking, and Google, after all, is an ad-delivery service which runs a search engine to boost their hits.) Web page load is choking on ads. I noted previously that some sites load ads from as many as six different sources. This saturates the number of connections the browser supports. Page load then bottlenecks on the slowest ad server.
So install AdBlock and FlashBlock in Firefox, and watch your browsing speed up.
Web-based advertising looks like a saturated market. Watch for some big bankruptcies among advertising-supported services.