Its true we are not in a zero sum game. Of course if you want to get global about it, it is a postive sum game. We reap the benefits of the energy input from the sun.
That gives us our food, our hydroelectric power, our oil came from that source, our wind power. So much comes from the sun.
So we can all agree that there is a net positive flow of energy into our system that we take advantage of and if we husband our resources well, we continually gain.
I assume that your vision is more global than economics and that your IQ is greater then 99+ (my assumption of course).
The Social Security System is an insurance system where people put in money and that money earns interest over time and then people get the benefit of those "buried acorns" when they need it. With inflation and other shifts in reality it may be that the value received at the other end is the same as what people put in, but non the less it is something and long term planning of laying up nuts for the winter of our lives. (I use a simple example so there is not confusion and my assumption might be wrong above).
So the sliding scale is whether you get out what you put in more or less. The more or less might as you imply be at the expense of someone else, or it may be at the expense of mined oil or mined crops or hopefully in the future, just the input of the sun.
So narrow vision is a matter of perception dont you think? Vision is something else entirely. I wish I could tell you where to go to get it.
The reason that someone under 35 might not benefit from Social Security, is the polititians that have been raiding the SS funds over the years and not funding it properly and not telling anyone.
Now they don't want to take responsibility for what has been done in the past and want to shed the obligation. Not unlike what the business trends have been to get rid of Pensions in favor of pushing that cost and obligation for retirement onto the employee. Even when pensions were in place they liked to let people go just before being vested to avoid the obligation.
The Social Security system is essentially (supose to be) a federally sponsored retirement insurance program. This is a good thing, just like National Heath care would be a good thing for us as a people.
People have been paying money into the system and should get a return on that investment when they retire. Insurance companies do the same thing and invest that money and make a profit so they win and the insured wins. The actuarial component is the long term expectations that set the benefits returned and the costs changed.
The Govenment has not acted properly with that investment so far. If that had been an insurance company, someone would get sent to jail or fired for theft or malfeasance.
The SS system would not need to be a pyramid scheme like you suggest with the ban on abortions and the government sponsored rape, if the money had been responibly earmarked and invested. Maybe the penalties for that malfeasance should be the same as for rape.
Of course another scheme along the lines of your suggestions for a fix of the problem would be to instead of paying out money, pay with food and services that were not marked up by the private sector, you know by those people making millions of dollars in Insurance, malepractice claims (the lawyers, not the claiments), the war profiteers. That would be a wonderful idea. Put a 50% tax on law suit awards, with the govenment taking their cut first. That would fund the SS system in about 6 months.
Sorry to disappont you but what you are saying is current Conservative drizzle. When someone retires they need the money now and for a few years. If we look at the Stock market crash in the 30' and more recently the crash in the.com market and the more recent blick due to Enron, World Com and the World trade center, you can see that in the short term the market, not just individual stocks can be strongly effected. Lets look at the recent Mutual Funds problems. A safe haven for your stock, you would think so until some idiot starts wanting to be richer.
So CEO robery can effect the entire market and for a long time. The privatization typically gives peoplc choices to play the stock lottery with their retirements. How informed is you great Aunt at making choices. Who in the market can make good long term choices. There are none.
You probably know what an S&P index fund is. Most people don't. Should they have to understand that there are some times you should shift your money to bond funds out of stock funds. If you do that wrong you loose both ways. If its your retirement money to live on, you have no way of recooping that loss. Lets just send everyone to Los Vegas for retirement and if they loose Soylent Green.
Well Lets see. The current conservative governement wants us all to be stock holders because they truely believe that that will make Republicans of all of us.
To that end they want to replace "assured" retirement with "un-insured" stock ownership. Companies with the help of government have gotten out from under the onus of having to actually be responsibe for their employees after they retire, some after being with a company faithfully working for 20-30 years. All the time making profits for the company. Business wants it simple. I pay you and we are even. But of course in that process of getting rid of the pensions and going to 401K's they haven't increased benefits to employee's, they have reduced them, near term and more importantly far term.
The Government is wanting to follow along with this trend with Social Security. The Republicans are drooling to push the saftey net off onto individuals. With "privatizing" Social Security which is the same thing as shifting pensions to 401K's and talking of cutting down existing benefits.
These are why people own stock. Not because they choose to. I would venture to say almost no one wants to trade a certain retirement benefit for the massive uncertainties of the stock market. In these plans there is not certainty. What do we say to our elderly that will rely on these sources of income for their later life. "I'm sorry, another CEO robbed his investors (probably not a liberal) and the stock market fell for a year while you needed the money for another operation. You will have to pay your Hospital bill anyway and we are evicting your from your Home and selling it to pay the debt."
Please, this risk is a real risk with real short term concequences for you and me and everyone. Lets put it into real persective. What it means to those people that will have to live with it.
Wonderful, they have understood the value of availablility of communication. Of course you now are supplying and paying for the power I imagine where they used to. If that is correct they have kept the functionality (for the time the UPS still operates) but shifted the ongoing energy cost to you. An interesting compromise. Like a company giving a signing bonus to join a company that asks you to pay for your own insurance, a loss leader I think they call it.
Isn't it true that the profit in ink jet printers is not in the printers but in the ink jet cartriges you have to buy and buy and buy.
The stategy to give you a UPS is wise planning for them because the world is running out of oil and coal and the price of electricity will soon start to climb. They have off loaded the burden of that future rising uncertain cost.
Like the difference in rental properties one where the landlord pays for the heating and the other where the tenents have individual heat they pick up the energy cost for.
But all in all a responsive offering and one that makes a lot of sense for them and for you, until the electricity cost gets too high.
The issue with the power is that maybe the cable is up but that won't power my cable phone most likely so when power is out watch out for the looters. We will have to resort to our cell phones, oops, that power might be out too.
"because I am not doing anything to subvert the government."
The trouble here is you won't always know what they consider subversive. Lets say that a relative of yours Is falsely arrested and you speak out against the treatment to a friend. You may be hauled in for investigation if you speak your mind or make a joke about something. An example might be someone making a silly sick joke about having a bomb on an airplane, just a joke mind you, haven't we all make sick off color jokes. Well if you are at an airport you could get hauled in for questioning and detained today. It may even be a felonly to make a joke like that. Well its a small step to catching people making jokes over the phone with friends.
And the Caps program (I think that was the name) where airlines turned over millions of passenger records to NASA for pattern analysis to try and find patterns that could identify potential terrorists. Luckily it appears as though people found out and the airlines are getting a black eye for it and the study was unprofitable but who knows if it was really shelved.
What if it turned out that the pattern was shopping at Eddie Bauer and ordering certain books from Amazom.com and checking out certain books in the library. Maybe it turns out that 75% of the known terrorist did that and you did too. Your conversations might then be monitored and your conversations analyzed. Probably by the same people that analyzed the intellegence that brought us the war in Iraq. Would you want to trust those folks to not interpret all your actions, purchases, library books, plane reservations, family conversations as not doing anything to subvert the government. As it turns out Hussan does not appear to have been doing anything to subvert our government and look where that got him.
I trust those people in power about as much as I trust Microsoft to get it right.
I would think that the "business model" that they would come up with and make no mistake it will be a "business model" that will allow someone outside of government to afford to live in a gated community away from the rif raf (those ones we have to watch), will get rid of the requirement for the need to supply power. That burden will be shifted to the 'consumer' not unlike pensions shifted to 401k's and the up comming attempt to make you buy your own medicare and eventually social security retirement.
When the power goes out in your house. You can still pick up the phone and call, assuming you have some phones that don't rely on house power. When the phone drops on the floor, it still works. The wires are in place in your home and to the switch.
There is a place for a stable tried and true technology for basic communication.
Although the internet seems very stable the local distribution systems are suseptible to network hanky panky that the current system is not.
The ability to listen in and record your conversations and transactions and internet queries would be enhanced. Now with the Patriot Act (actully a misnomer) there is a much higher probablility that your life will be scrutinized by those currently in power without your knowlege and more importantly without oversight or accountablilty. That is an extremely scary and dangerous thing.
I would imagine that the current power structure would love to have a central control of all communications you recieve, be able to monitor all communication you give. What a wonderful world. First the courts and then the media. 1984 where are you.
And I remember when the electro-magnetic spectrum was public domain albiet regulated. Now with legislation it is sold and owned and it is illegal for you to even listen to certain frequencies. Radio's can't be sold in the US if they can tune certain frequency bands. Who are these people?
But you need to draw your box larger. The corn has absorbed energy from the Sun and that energy is what you are mining. There is energy cost from growing the corn (crops are getting free input from the sun and mining the soil for nutrients, monocultures are make this last effect worse and cause us to input nutrients back in, lets stop that maybe).
So you have free energy that you are converting in form and transporting to other locations where you want work to be done. So energy lost on the way is part of the cost, not unlike a wholesaler and a retailer taking there cut.
The issue is you have a final destination that you want to use energy for. The benefits of this are that at the point of application of that energy you have fewer toxic byproducts, like CO or hexane and all those other burn byproducts. If you look at the whole system you can control centrally some of that environment unfriendly pollution such that the entire system, from Sun to Car if you will is much better for all of us. The ethanol is just an energy transport mechanism.
If on the other hand, all the rural location can just grow a little extra corn and mash it up and produce their own energy brining production closer to use, then we cut down lossed due to transport, which may make the whole system even more efficient if not put a few gas stations out of work or be less practical.
That is an interesting question and a hard test for right/wrong determinationl. I think probably that they did not have the math at the time developed to turn it into a useful predictive tool. But the insight he had which we now see was dead on, if not simplest formulation or model. I call to mind some of the airplane, helocopter designs of Da Vinci. We dont call his ideas wrong just because they did not have the technology developed to implement those ideas.
Thanks, I replied below before reading your repy. You are probably right that it may have been an ad hoc kludge, but he found a system for that kluge. A Fourier series if you only take it out a few terms is an approximation if taken out fully the limit I believe converges. Too bad he did not have infinit time. I still think it was pretty good for the time. The fact that no one else picked it up may be an argument that it was an adhoc kluge vs being a passed along well stated system.
Yes but that was just becasue Ptolemy only included a few terms in the sequence. I am confident that given enough time he would have asymptoticly approached the same thing.
Yes frequency domain, you said it, periodic fucntions, sines, cosines, circles. Thats what the trig functions are about.
What Ptolomey was doing was trying to come up with a way of describing the periodic behavior of the planets motion as seen by an observer on earth. After all each planet traverses the sky and comes back again. Think of it as a slow oscilloscope if you like. A complex function at that.
So you 'are' incorrect about my being incorrect. The Fourier sequences are a tool for describing mathematical functions.
"A Fourier series is an expansion of a periodic function f(x) in terms of an infinite sum of sines and cosines. Fourier series make use of the orthogonality relationships of the sine and cosine functions. The computation and study of Fourier series is known as harmonic analysis and is extremely useful as a way to break up an arbitrary periodic function into a a set of simple terms than can be plugged in, solved individually, and then recombined to obtain the solution to the original problem or an approximation to it to whatever accuracy is desired or practical. "
taken from
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FourierSeries.html
The key above is "arbitrary periodic function". It has application in the frequency domain but like all math it is pure in its description and has much wider application.
I remember a case where someone recognized that the chaos bi-fraction formula was like some of the formulas describing some heart/electrical/chemical relationships which lead to the understanding of why and when the heart went into fibrillation.
I suspect the Fibonacci sequence has a wider application than the description of the shell of a snail.
I think you will find that Ptolemy of Alexandria's Circles of Ptolemy was an elegant, if not emperical, result. It has since been systemitzed by Fourier and his Fourier series which forms a fuction using a summation of an infinite series of of diminishing Cosine terms that can approximate other functions, say like the motion of planets from another viewpoint or that pesky Square wave.
The motions of the planets, lets see, a circle within a circle within a circle, diminishing cosines for my money.
This has given us a powerful tool for analyzing difficult problems that might not otherwise be solvable. I think it took mathematics a few centuries to understand the brilliance of Ptolemy's insight. Most it seems even know have no clue what it really represents. It just took a few centuries to develop the math to write it in a different form. Who knows maybe he had the math but didn't share it, much like Issac Newton and his personal math he used to work out his important theorties, which in and of themselves have proven to be just approximations, good for calculations much slower than the speed of light.
I think you will find that Ptolemy of Alexandria's Circles of Ptolemy was an elegant, if not emperical, result. It has since been systemitzed by Fourier and his Fourier series with can come up with an infinite series of diminishing Cosine terms that can approximate and function say like the motion of planets from another viewpoint. An equivalent if not infinite series form of the same thing. I think it took mathematics a few centuries to understand the brilliance of Ptolemy's insight. Most it seems even know have no clue what it really represents.
I spent many hours watching Zato Ichi movies in the 70's I think he made about 53 movies, and a tv series. I have seen sources for the series online through ebay or other sources.
I have about 5 of the Zato Ichi movies and alway enjoy watching them.
Yes there was one black and white Chushingura I saw back then that was excellent. I'll have to track that one down.
For sure, I remember watching the episode where I believe it was starbuck crashed and was stranded on a planet that was a copy of the Wild West and the local tough guy had gotten his hands on a damaged Cylon and reprogrammed it to be his gunfighter enforcer. Starbuck was taken in by a Widow with child who nursed him back to life. He has to eventually go into town and have a Western Style shootout.. then leave.. halfway through I stood up and shouted "Shane"... About the only reason I watched it was to see what plot they had stolen and how thinly they had applied the Sci Fi paint to it.
Other great examples but done better. "The Magnificent 7" (Seven Samari). Many of the Clint Eastwood Dollar films (Tashira Mafune Ronin character). "Master Gunfigher" (Goyokin) (that was the best worst direct copy. And the Rudger Haurer Blind Swordsman film copying the Zato Ichi (Shintaro Katsu as Zato Ichi character).
In this review this player converts the digital to HDTV
"The key selling feature here is the DVI interface. The D1 is capable of de-interlacing and scaling the standard 480i DVD image up to 1080i. The deinterlacing and scaling chores are handled by a Sigma Designs EM8500 DVD decoder. Interestingly, the decoder is capable of playing back WMA files, but Bravo doesn't seem to support this feature."
If I remember right DVD's hold much higher resolution than you see. The standard was written to force the players to downgrade the resolution to video quality. There was a/. article about someone who was using a loophole that did not restrict the resolution for plasma display interfaces. I am not sure what happened to that effort, but the DVD industry was up in arms because if people knew that fact they would revolt and it you could get movied theater like resolution at home, the theaters would suffer.
Several things come to mind. Most cable systems provide seperate feeds to local areas, usually using a broadcast protocol I believe, with one feed linked to one server.
Also our local cable (Chicago area) came around and knocked on the door, they had to go around and check for RF leakage. I had a segment of my internal distribution that was not up to spec and radiated too much. They changed that part of the system and brought the emissions back in line with the specifications they had to operate under.
There is an issue with frequency/channel capacity and length of cable. The data we send is square waves which can be thought of as actually an infinite series of sine waves added together to give you the square wave shape. So square waves are rich in harmonics, and those different frequencies actually travel along the wire at slightly differnt speeds, which fuzzes the signal out over a distance. Like ethernet cables have an effective maximum length of what is it 100 ft or so for good signal quality.
So for pure data you need to put repeaters inline over distance to re-generate the signal. For long hauls you modulate the signals with a purer tone but still you have to detect the transistions which slows down your effect speed.
So the claim that it could be 5 times faster than cable makes little sense.
With the powerlines you have one fairly connected system that it would be hard to seperate out segments to balance the load for one ethernet segment. You have a problem when you have too many people contending for the the broadcast time.
I suspect they the scheme is really, like DSL just an end point distribution system like dsl or cable, just tapping into local isolated segments of the power to provide ethernet segment access to households.
I live under one of the flight paths to Ohare airport. I would hate to think the lighting up the grid with internet traffic could land one of those jumbo jets on my roof.
Slashdot Mirror
Its true we are not in a zero sum game. Of course if you want to get global about it, it is a postive sum game. We reap the benefits of the energy input from the sun.
That gives us our food, our hydroelectric power, our oil came from that source, our wind power. So much comes from the sun.
So we can all agree that there is a net positive flow of energy into our system that we take advantage of and if we husband our resources well, we continually gain.
I assume that your vision is more global than economics and that your IQ is greater then 99+ (my assumption of course).
The Social Security System is an insurance system where people put in money and that money earns interest over time and then people get the benefit of those "buried acorns" when they need it. With inflation and other shifts in reality it may be that the value received at the other end is the same as what people put in, but non the less it is something and long term planning of laying up nuts for the winter of our lives. (I use a simple example so there is not confusion and my assumption might be wrong above).
So the sliding scale is whether you get out what you put in more or less. The more or less might as you imply be at the expense of someone else, or it may be at the expense of mined oil or mined crops or hopefully in the future, just the input of the sun.
So narrow vision is a matter of perception dont you think? Vision is something else entirely. I wish I could tell you where to go to get it.
The reason that someone under 35 might not benefit from Social Security, is the polititians that have been raiding the SS funds over the years and not funding it properly and not telling anyone.
Now they don't want to take responsibility for what has been done in the past and want to shed the obligation. Not unlike what the business trends have been to get rid of Pensions in favor of pushing that cost and obligation for retirement onto the employee. Even when pensions were in place they liked to let people go just before being vested to avoid the obligation.
The Social Security system is essentially (supose to be) a federally sponsored retirement insurance program. This is a good thing, just like National Heath care would be a good thing for us as a people.
People have been paying money into the system and should get a return on that investment when they retire. Insurance companies do the same thing and invest that money and make a profit so they win and the insured wins. The actuarial component is the long term expectations that set the benefits returned and the costs changed.
The Govenment has not acted properly with that investment so far. If that had been an insurance company, someone would get sent to jail or fired for theft or malfeasance.
The SS system would not need to be a pyramid scheme like you suggest with the ban on abortions and the government sponsored rape, if the money had been responibly earmarked and invested. Maybe the penalties for that malfeasance should be the same as for rape.
Of course another scheme along the lines of your suggestions for a fix of the problem would be to instead of paying out money, pay with food and services that were not marked up by the private sector, you know by those people making millions of dollars in Insurance, malepractice claims (the lawyers, not the claiments), the war profiteers. That would be a wonderful idea. Put a 50% tax on law suit awards, with the govenment taking their cut first. That would fund the SS system in about 6 months.
Sorry to disappont you but what you are saying is current Conservative drizzle. When someone retires they need the money now and for a few years. If we look at the Stock market crash in the 30' and more recently the crash in the .com market and the more recent blick due to Enron, World Com and the World trade center, you can see that in the short term the market, not just individual stocks can be strongly effected. Lets look at the recent Mutual Funds problems. A safe haven for your stock, you would think so until some idiot starts wanting to be richer.
So CEO robery can effect the entire market and for a long time. The privatization typically gives peoplc choices to play the stock lottery with their retirements. How informed is you great Aunt at making choices. Who in the market can make good long term choices. There are none.
You probably know what an S&P index fund is. Most people don't. Should they have to understand that there are some times you should shift your money to bond funds out of stock funds. If you do that wrong you loose both ways. If its your retirement money to live on, you have no way of recooping that loss. Lets just send everyone to Los Vegas for retirement and if they loose Soylent Green.
Well Lets see. The current conservative governement wants us all to be stock holders because they truely believe that that will make Republicans of all of us.
To that end they want to replace "assured" retirement with "un-insured" stock ownership. Companies with the help of government have gotten out from under the onus of having to actually be responsibe for their employees after they retire, some after being with a company faithfully working for 20-30 years. All the time making profits for the company. Business wants it simple. I pay you and we are even. But of course in that process of getting rid of the pensions and going to 401K's they haven't increased benefits to employee's, they have reduced them, near term and more importantly far term.
The Government is wanting to follow along with this trend with Social Security. The Republicans are drooling to push the saftey net off onto individuals. With "privatizing" Social Security which is the same thing as shifting pensions to 401K's and talking of cutting down existing benefits.
These are why people own stock. Not because they choose to. I would venture to say almost no one wants to trade a certain retirement benefit for the massive uncertainties of the stock market. In these plans there is not certainty. What do we say to our elderly that will rely on these sources of income for their later life. "I'm sorry, another CEO robbed his investors (probably not a liberal) and the stock market fell for a year while you needed the money for another operation. You will have to pay your Hospital bill anyway and we are evicting your from your Home and selling it to pay the debt."
Please, this risk is a real risk with real short term concequences for you and me and everyone. Lets put it into real persective. What it means to those people that will have to live with it.
This is why Gandolf is not welcome. He always arrives carrying bad news.. Kill the messenger...
Wonderful, they have understood the value of availablility of communication. Of course you now are supplying and paying for the power I imagine where they used to. If that is correct they have kept the functionality (for the time the UPS still operates) but shifted the ongoing energy cost to you. An interesting compromise. Like a company giving a signing bonus to join a company that asks you to pay for your own insurance, a loss leader I think they call it.
Isn't it true that the profit in ink jet printers is not in the printers but in the ink jet cartriges you have to buy and buy and buy.
The stategy to give you a UPS is wise planning for them because the world is running out of oil and coal and the price of electricity will soon start to climb. They have off loaded the burden of that future rising uncertain cost.
Like the difference in rental properties one where the landlord pays for the heating and the other where the tenents have individual heat they pick up the energy cost for.
But all in all a responsive offering and one that makes a lot of sense for them and for you, until the electricity cost gets too high.
The issue with the power is that maybe the cable is up but that won't power my cable phone most likely so when power is out watch out for the looters. We will have to resort to our cell phones, oops, that power might be out too.
"because I am not doing anything to subvert the government."
The trouble here is you won't always know what they consider subversive. Lets say that a relative of yours Is falsely arrested and you speak out against the treatment to a friend. You may be hauled in for investigation if you speak your mind or make a joke about something. An example might be someone making a silly sick joke about having a bomb on an airplane, just a joke mind you, haven't we all make sick off color jokes. Well if you are at an airport you could get hauled in for questioning and detained today. It may even be a felonly to make a joke like that. Well its a small step to catching people making jokes over the phone with friends.
And the Caps program (I think that was the name) where airlines turned over millions of passenger records to NASA for pattern analysis to try and find patterns that could identify potential terrorists. Luckily it appears as though people found out and the airlines are getting a black eye for it and the study was unprofitable but who knows if it was really shelved.
What if it turned out that the pattern was shopping at Eddie Bauer and ordering certain books from Amazom.com and checking out certain books in the library. Maybe it turns out that 75% of the known terrorist did that and you did too. Your conversations might then be monitored and your conversations analyzed. Probably by the same people that analyzed the intellegence that brought us the war in Iraq. Would you want to trust those folks to not interpret all your actions, purchases, library books, plane reservations, family conversations as not doing anything to subvert the government. As it turns out Hussan does not appear to have been doing anything to subvert our government and look where that got him.
I trust those people in power about as much as I trust Microsoft to get it right.
I would think that the "business model" that they would come up with and make no mistake it will be a "business model" that will allow someone outside of government to afford to live in a gated community away from the rif raf (those ones we have to watch), will get rid of the requirement for the need to supply power. That burden will be shifted to the 'consumer' not unlike pensions shifted to 401k's and the up comming attempt to make you buy your own medicare and eventually social security retirement.
When the power goes out in your house. You can still pick up the phone and call, assuming you have some phones that don't rely on house power. When the phone drops on the floor, it still works. The wires are in place in your home and to the switch.
There is a place for a stable tried and true technology for basic communication.
Although the internet seems very stable the local distribution systems are suseptible to network hanky panky that the current system is not.
The ability to listen in and record your conversations and transactions and internet queries would be enhanced. Now with the Patriot Act (actully a misnomer) there is a much higher probablility that your life will be scrutinized by those currently in power without your knowlege and more importantly without oversight or accountablilty. That is an extremely scary and dangerous thing.
I would imagine that the current power structure would love to have a central control of all communications you recieve, be able to monitor all communication you give. What a wonderful world. First the courts and then the media. 1984 where are you.
And I remember when the electro-magnetic spectrum was public domain albiet regulated. Now with legislation it is sold and owned and it is illegal for you to even listen to certain frequencies. Radio's can't be sold in the US if they can tune certain frequency bands. Who are these people?
But you need to draw your box larger. The corn has absorbed energy from the Sun and that energy is what you are mining. There is energy cost from growing the corn (crops are getting free input from the sun and mining the soil for nutrients, monocultures are make this last effect worse and cause us to input nutrients back in, lets stop that maybe).
So you have free energy that you are converting in form and transporting to other locations where you want work to be done. So energy lost on the way is part of the cost, not unlike a wholesaler and a retailer taking there cut.
The issue is you have a final destination that you want to use energy for. The benefits of this are that at the point of application of that energy you have fewer toxic byproducts, like CO or hexane and all those other burn byproducts. If you look at the whole system you can control centrally some of that environment unfriendly pollution such that the entire system, from Sun to Car if you will is much better for all of us. The ethanol is just an energy transport mechanism.
If on the other hand, all the rural location can just grow a little extra corn and mash it up and produce their own energy brining production closer to use, then we cut down lossed due to transport, which may make the whole system even more efficient if not put a few gas stations out of work or be less practical.
That is an interesting question and a hard test for right/wrong determinationl. I think probably that they did not have the math at the time developed to turn it into a useful predictive tool. But the insight he had which we now see was dead on, if not simplest formulation or model. I call to mind some of the airplane, helocopter designs of Da Vinci. We dont call his ideas wrong just because they did not have the technology developed to implement those ideas.
Thanks, I replied below before reading your repy. You are probably right that it may have been an ad hoc kludge, but he found a system for that kluge. A Fourier series if you only take it out a few terms is an approximation if taken out fully the limit I believe converges. Too bad he did not have infinit time. I still think it was pretty good for the time. The fact that no one else picked it up may be an argument that it was an adhoc kluge vs being a passed along well stated system.
Yes but that was just becasue Ptolemy only included a few terms in the sequence. I am confident that given enough time he would have asymptoticly approached the same thing.
Yes frequency domain, you said it, periodic fucntions, sines, cosines, circles. Thats what the trig functions are about.
What Ptolomey was doing was trying to come up with a way of describing the periodic behavior of the planets motion as seen by an observer on earth. After all each planet traverses the sky and comes back again. Think of it as a slow oscilloscope if you like. A complex function at that.
So you 'are' incorrect about my being incorrect. The Fourier sequences are a tool for describing mathematical functions.
"A Fourier series is an expansion of a periodic function f(x) in terms of an infinite sum of sines and cosines. Fourier series make use of the orthogonality relationships of the sine and cosine functions. The computation and study of Fourier series is known as harmonic analysis and is extremely useful as a way to break up an arbitrary periodic function into a a set of simple terms than can be plugged in, solved individually, and then recombined to obtain the solution to the original problem or an approximation to it to whatever accuracy is desired or practical. "
taken from
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FourierSeries.html
The key above is "arbitrary periodic function". It has application in the frequency domain but like all math it is pure in its description and has much wider application.
I remember a case where someone recognized that the chaos bi-fraction formula was like some of the formulas describing some heart/electrical/chemical relationships which lead to the understanding of why and when the heart went into fibrillation.
I suspect the Fibonacci sequence has a wider application than the description of the shell of a snail.
I think you will find that Ptolemy of Alexandria's Circles of Ptolemy was an elegant, if not emperical, result. It has since been systemitzed by Fourier and his Fourier series which forms a fuction using a summation of an infinite series of of diminishing Cosine terms that can approximate other functions, say like the motion of planets from another viewpoint or that pesky Square wave.
The motions of the planets, lets see, a circle within a circle within a circle, diminishing cosines for my money.
This has given us a powerful tool for analyzing difficult problems that might not otherwise be solvable. I think it took mathematics a few centuries to understand the brilliance of Ptolemy's insight. Most it seems even know have no clue what it really represents. It just took a few centuries to develop the math to write it in a different form. Who knows maybe he had the math but didn't share it, much like Issac Newton and his personal math he used to work out his important theorties, which in and of themselves have proven to be just approximations, good for calculations much slower than the speed of light.
I think you will find that Ptolemy of Alexandria's Circles of Ptolemy was an elegant, if not emperical, result. It has since been systemitzed by Fourier and his Fourier series with can come up with an infinite series of diminishing Cosine terms that can approximate and function say like the motion of planets from another viewpoint. An equivalent if not infinite series form of the same thing. I think it took mathematics a few centuries to understand the brilliance of Ptolemy's insight. Most it seems even know have no clue what it really represents.
They have operations now for that kind of speach impediment.
No Blind Fury was not a done better version. I was refering to the knock offs mentioned as done better than the "Shane" clone in BG.
I spent many hours watching Zato Ichi movies in the 70's I think he made about 53 movies, and a tv series. I have seen sources for the series online through ebay or other sources.
I have about 5 of the Zato Ichi movies and alway enjoy watching them.
Yes there was one black and white Chushingura I saw back then that was excellent. I'll have to track that one down.
What a tangled web of plagerism we weave.
For sure, I remember watching the episode where I believe it was starbuck crashed and was stranded on a planet that was a copy of the Wild West and the local tough guy had gotten his hands on a damaged Cylon and reprogrammed it to be his gunfighter enforcer. Starbuck was taken in by a Widow with child who nursed him back to life. He has to eventually go into town and have a Western Style shootout.. then leave.. halfway through I stood up and shouted "Shane"... About the only reason I watched it was to see what plot they had stolen and how thinly they had applied the Sci Fi paint to it.
Other great examples but done better. "The Magnificent 7" (Seven Samari). Many of the Clint Eastwood Dollar films (Tashira Mafune Ronin character). "Master Gunfigher" (Goyokin) (that was the best worst direct copy. And the Rudger Haurer Blind Swordsman film copying the Zato Ichi (Shintaro Katsu as Zato Ichi character).
Plagerism + Royalties + Proper Attribution = productivity
Do you know of Is something equivalent for streaming video?
Actually it seems that two things are true. The 16:9 DVD Standard "will really play back at 852x480 resolution."
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http://forum.digital-digest.com/archive/topic/2
Here is an example where you can get 1080i resolution from a DVD by processing the digital signal and DVI interface.
http://www.emedialive.com/Articles/ReadArticle.
In this review this player converts the digital to HDTV
"The key selling feature here is the DVI interface. The D1 is capable of de-interlacing and scaling the standard 480i DVD image up to 1080i. The deinterlacing and scaling chores are handled by a Sigma Designs EM8500 DVD decoder. Interestingly, the decoder is capable of playing back WMA files, but Bravo doesn't seem to support this feature."
http://www.extremetech.com/print_article/0,3998
although I was wrong about the movie quality, HDTV quality availble from the DVD is pretty good.
If I remember right DVD's hold much higher resolution than you see. The standard was written to force the players to downgrade the resolution to video quality. There was a /. article about someone who was using a loophole that did not restrict the resolution for plasma display interfaces. I am not sure what happened to that effort, but the DVD industry was up in arms because if people knew that fact they would revolt and it you could get movied theater like resolution at home, the theaters would suffer.
Several things come to mind. Most cable systems provide seperate feeds to local areas, usually using a broadcast protocol I believe, with one feed linked to one server.
Also our local cable (Chicago area) came around and knocked on the door, they had to go around and check for RF leakage. I had a segment of my internal distribution that was not up to spec and radiated too much. They changed that part of the system and brought the emissions back in line with the specifications they had to operate under.
There is an issue with frequency/channel capacity and length of cable. The data we send is square waves which can be thought of as actually an infinite series of sine waves added together to give you the square wave shape. So square waves are rich in harmonics, and those different frequencies actually travel along the wire at slightly differnt speeds, which fuzzes the signal out over a distance. Like ethernet cables have an effective maximum length of what is it 100 ft or so for good signal quality.
So for pure data you need to put repeaters inline over distance to re-generate the signal. For long hauls you modulate the signals with a purer tone but still you have to detect the transistions which slows down your effect speed.
So the claim that it could be 5 times faster than cable makes little sense.
With the powerlines you have one fairly connected system that it would be hard to seperate out segments
to balance the load for one ethernet segment. You have a problem when you have too many people contending for the the broadcast time.
I suspect they the scheme is really, like DSL just an end point distribution system like dsl or cable, just tapping into local isolated segments of the power to provide ethernet segment access to households.
I live under one of the flight paths to Ohare airport. I would hate to think the lighting up the grid with internet traffic could land one of those jumbo jets on my roof.