Um, what? The big baddie in Homeworld: Cataclysm is "The Beast", a Borg-like bio-mechanical entity that exists only to assimilate everything. If it even had a religion, it was solipsism. The goodies are a clan of what was originally a priest-caste, turned interplanetary miners.
Now in the original game, Homeworld, there was one (minor) enemy that matches your description. But if anything, the goodies are the religous ones, compared to the big baddies which are the corrupt empire you're fighting against.
Though it's not that common to find a game that presents religion in a positive light. Perhaps Morrowind fits? You end up playing what is essentially a messiah-figure who defeats an evil god/demon and removes the corruption from the land.
Also, I'm not convinced that placing a polarizer over half the screen wouldn't just turn that half of the screen totally black (as shown in figure 2 of the paper).
No. The cellophane (which is placed on half the screen) isn't a polariser, it's a half-wave plate. That means it rotates the polarisation of any light passing through it by 90 degrees.
In effect, they're making the left half of the screen emit light with horizontal polarisation, and the right half with vertical polarisation (or vice versa).
Yep - I actually know the guy who did the physics for Carmageddon 1 & 2 (at least the PC version) - I shared a house with him at university. He was a damn good programmer, had an Acorn Archimedes IIRC. He has a Ph.D, though in lasers, not mechanics.
I strongly suspect that Carmaggedon's physics model can be traced back to a programming project on car suspension modelling in Imperial College's 1st year physics lab.
How about solenoid valves for the pneumatics - by the way, why can't we get the pneumatic systems anymore, huh? Walking machines would get sooo much easier, to an extent. Pitsco sells the parts, for most of it, so it is available still, but only if you know about them - still, it is nearly impossible to get the blue air tank to power your pneumatic system - check Ebay and pay through the nose, IF you are lucky.
You can buy complete pnematic accessory packs (including the blue tank) via the lego website. Comes with a big and small piston, two valves, a tank, big and small pumps etc. Buy three, I did:)
Apart from the live TV stuff, the thing I like the most about my ReplayTV is that it's random access. Want to watch a particular episode of a recorded show? Easy. It's labeled by the name of the show, and the episode title. Just choose it, and it starts playing immediately - no looking through tapes, no fast-forwarding and rewinding to find the beginning. Magic.
Since Hurd is supposedly build ontop of Mach, why doesn't RMS always refer to it as Hurd/Mach? Or Mach/Hurd? Then we can have the truely wonderful construction GNU/Mach/Hurd which sound madder than mad Bob McMad.
The leader of the American team (The NERDS) that participated in the British series has posted on Slashdot before.
He said that the experts know what the challenge is beforehand - they submit a tentative design and a list of critical parts - but the actual teams don't know until it starts.
In fact, if you go to the Channel 4 website you can see what appears to be the expert's design brief for each show; e.g.: The Airship.
Does this AirQ device actually use the GPS signal to record the ground speed, or is it linked to the speedometer? Because I have a GPS with a 'maximum speed recorded' feature, and I sometimes find it's quite inaccurate. This is probably due to the tendency to the location to 'snap' instantenously when satellite visibility changes, making it look like I travelled half a block in 5 seconds.
If this sort of thing becomes widespread, I hope that whoever makes the in-car GPS units (Garmin?) has some good legal defense against being sued for innaccurately reporting speed.
"When will someone just lay some ethernet cable on this, put a few megs of memory in speakers and just cut out the whole cabling dilemma altogether"
Even when you do this, audiophiles will buy $10k ethernet cables made of oxygen-free copper and RJ-45 connecters with platinum-iridium contacts because they will claim it sounds "warmer".
Possible but I think that even M$oft would be against this one because it would make all current versions of Windoze illegal as well.
Why would MS be against this? Then everyone needs to upgrade windows9x/NT etc. to windows:TNG (the latest no-you-dont-own-it-you-rent-it-for-a-fee-every-yea r edition).
The other benefit is a public relations one: No exciting, public-option-influencing TV shots of protesters being pepper sprayed, baton-charged or tear-gassed, just a silent, invisible-acting weapon that makes people ache (especially if they have fillings!) and run away.
As for a maser sniper-rifle, microwaves are inherently more difficult to focus than visible light, so maintaining a collimated beam will be hard. A back-of-envelope calculation estimates a ~1 m diameter beam at 50 m would be about all that would be possible.
Ah, but the reviewers don't get paid, worst luck. It's all done on 'good will'. The editors do get paid (and normally there will be many editors for one journal), but not much, I hear.
If you want something like a colour insert for your article in a normal b&w journal, you almost always have to pay page charges...
-- Bob
Someone's running a dissociated press / travesty generator on Jon Katz's articles? What's sad is that it makes almost as much sense as the man himself. I really like the last paragraph.
That's interesting... so they don't have much of a database themselves? They want the users to do the grunt work of entering the info?
(No doubt this features prominently in their pitch to the VCs... "No need to buy a database or hire anyone; Our users are all stupid and will do all the tedious work for us, so we can then sell it. Big Win.")
So, what's to stop you entering a load of crap for all the barcode you can find (e.g. links to goatse.cx)? You're not under any kind of oblication to enter truthful infomation. You'll probably want to randomize your serial number first, though, so they can't easily trash all your entries.
Fairly easy to change the polarization, in fact you can do it with no moving parts (there's a device called a Pockels cell which can rotate the polarization of a beam by an arbtrary amound depending on how much voltage you apply to a crystal).
There's another aspect to your second point (increasing the power to increase S/N): You are only legally allowed so much power in a laser beam that you are shining around in open space.
I'd suspect that you'd be limited to class I or II lasers. Anything more and you'd risk eye damage to anyone that intersects the beam. If you were using a Class IV laser, you'd also have to watch out for scatter from any object that would enter the beam (fog, birds, dust etc.), since the light scattered could be dangerous enough to cause damage.
Actually, on looking through the rulings, I'm bound to admit that most of them are quite fair. They still seem biased towards companies rather than individuals (even for.org domains, for which they seem to be ignoring the old non-commercial organization rule), and emphasis 'use of domain to offer goods and services' an awful lot, but they're not as bad as the more publicised cases lead me to believe.
As for the web-vs-email thing, this came up in the zero.com case, where a guy using the domain for email (not web hosting) was challenged by a company holding the trademark. One of their arguments was thay he wasn't using the domain and thus was squatting. The WIPO admitted that the WWW is just one of the uses for a domain, the guy had been legitimately using it as an email addresss, and he won the case.
The best way to hang onto your domain seems to be: Publicise it a lot - get lots of evidence out there that you use the domain 'in good faith' and it is associated with yourself - get your email address and web page listed in directories, etc.
Also, if contacted by a company who want your domain, don't try to sell it to them. Say it's not for sale is they ask to buy it. Offering the domain for $nnnn seems to be used as evidence for cybersquatting in many of the cases.
Interesting point. According to WIPO's proposal, they could be booted by, say, a local Brazillian company that offers Amazon river tours. Yeah, right.
And I'm confused about the 'personal names' thing. Does that mean that Joe Random McDonald is going to be able to take away www.mcdonalds.com? Of course not, because just like nearly every time they have before, WIPO are going to rule for the biggest company with the most expensive lawyers.
It's actually quite different from dye lasers. People have made solid dye lasers before - you can dope the dye into a sol-gel material and end up with something like a dyed glass, which will then work as a laser. (The major problem is that you can't operate them continuously, so you make them in a disc form and spin them.) And, as you said, you need another laser to pump them. In this case, they seem to grow a continuous crytal of an organic molecule, which forms some kind of organic semiconductor. The crystal is then directly electrically pumped. If they can change the organic molecule slightly and alter the tuning range, that will be extremely useful, especially if they can get down to the UV.
The efficiency depends a lot on the capacity of the TEC (thermoelectric cooler) and the temperature differential between hot and cold sides.
A nasty effect you have to watch out for is 'thermal runaway' - if the hot side gets too hot, the efficiency of heat pumping suddenly drops, and whole device can quickly get very hot. You can end up frying the thing you are trying to cool. To avoid this, you need a good heatsink with plenty of spare capacity on the hot side. Even better would be to cool with heatsink with a water loop.
The best way of running a TEC is to have a thermistor on both sides of the device and a monitoring and PSU circuit such as those made by Wavelength electronics. Expensive, but they will avoid thermal runaway and will keep what you are cooling at precise temperature.
One nice thing about TECs is that you can run them both in series and in parallel. In parallel, you have more cooling capacity (pumps more watts). In series, you stack the TECs and can get down to much lower temperatures - minus 60degC is not too difficult.
What I really want to know is what the 'additional query words' mean at the end of that MS KB page mean. What the hell is "barney barnie acti ac ta mates mate actimate actamate actamates kbimu actimates"?
As far as I can see, from reading the articles, there's nothing particularly new here.
Most physics courses cover the difference between phase and group velocity of a wave - the phase velocity is the rate at which any particular frequency of the light is moving, but the group velocity is the rate at which the modulation of those frequencies (i.e., the envelope of the waveform) is travelling.
The phase velocity may exceed c in a dispersive medium, but infomation (a modulation on the wave) can only travel at the group velocity. You are usually taught that the group velocity never exceeds c.
This is not actually true - at frequencies close to an absorption resonance, it is possible for the group velocity to exceed c. However, the information still doesn't travel faster than c. Most physics/optics texts don't discuss this because it's tricky to handle.
The effect on a signal travelling through a absorbing medium is two-fold: 1 - The signal is strongly (exponentially) attenuated - this is (roughly) what an evanescent wave is, one that is quickly decaying as it propogates. This is also why it's difficult to do these sort of experiments over any distance - you have to start of with a hughly powerful signal and measure a tiny output. 2 - The envelope of the signal is wildly distorted. The high-frequency components of the signal propogate faster (and with less aborption) than the lower frequency components, and are detected first. Actually, they break up into two packets, known as the Summerfeld and Brillouin precursors. The rest of the (now very distorted) signal follows more slowely behind them.
What's important to realise is that even the fastest propogating components, the precursors, only travel at <~c. They may however travel faster than the usually defined speed of light in the medium. This stuff has been known for a long time, and there have been a lot of experiments to check it. This is just the latest one.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, what? The big baddie in Homeworld: Cataclysm is "The Beast", a Borg-like bio-mechanical entity that exists only to assimilate everything. If it even had a religion, it was solipsism. The goodies are a clan of what was originally a priest-caste, turned interplanetary miners.
Now in the original game, Homeworld, there was one (minor) enemy that matches your description. But if anything, the goodies are the religous ones, compared to the big baddies which are the corrupt empire you're fighting against.
Though it's not that common to find a game that presents religion in a positive light. Perhaps Morrowind fits? You end up playing what is essentially a messiah-figure who defeats an evil god/demon and removes the corruption from the land.
So this is kind of like "Nobody ever lost their job for buying IBM"?
Nobody ever kept their job for buying Apple.
Has a nice ring to it, I can see it on the adverts now.
No. The cellophane (which is placed on half the screen) isn't a polariser, it's a half-wave plate. That means it rotates the polarisation of any light passing through it by 90 degrees.
In effect, they're making the left half of the screen emit light with horizontal polarisation, and the right half with vertical polarisation (or vice versa).
Yep - I actually know the guy who did the physics for Carmageddon 1 & 2 (at least the PC version) - I shared a house with him at university. He was a damn good programmer, had an Acorn Archimedes IIRC. He has a Ph.D, though in lasers, not mechanics.
I strongly suspect that Carmaggedon's physics model can be traced back to a programming project on car suspension modelling in Imperial College's 1st year physics lab.
Watch the video (link on the site). You actually see the processors smoking, within a few seconds of removing the heatsink - kind of fun, actually.
-- Bob
You can buy complete pnematic accessory packs (including the blue tank) via the lego website. Comes with a big and small piston, two valves, a tank, big and small pumps etc. Buy three, I did :)
-- Bob
Apart from the live TV stuff, the thing I like the most about my ReplayTV is that it's random access. Want to watch a particular episode of a recorded show? Easy. It's labeled by the name of the show, and the episode title. Just choose it, and it starts playing immediately - no looking through tapes, no fast-forwarding and rewinding to find the beginning. Magic.
-- Bob
Since Hurd is supposedly build ontop of Mach, why doesn't RMS always refer to it as Hurd/Mach? Or Mach/Hurd? Then we can have the truely wonderful construction GNU/Mach/Hurd which sound madder than mad Bob McMad.
Holy crap. Is it also called steganography when you hide communications by presenting them as yellow text on a blue and red spiral background?
Edward Tufte would not be impressed.
-- Bob
He said that the experts know what the challenge is beforehand - they submit a tentative design and a list of critical parts - but the actual teams don't know until it starts.
In fact, if you go to the Channel 4 website you can see what appears to be the expert's design brief for each show; e.g.: The Airship.
Does this AirQ device actually use the GPS signal to record the ground speed, or is it linked to the speedometer? Because I have a GPS with a 'maximum speed recorded' feature, and I sometimes find it's quite inaccurate. This is probably due to the tendency to the location to 'snap' instantenously when satellite visibility changes, making it look like I travelled half a block in 5 seconds.
If this sort of thing becomes widespread, I hope that whoever makes the in-car GPS units (Garmin?) has some good legal defense against being sued for innaccurately reporting speed.
-- Bob
"When will someone just lay some ethernet cable on this, put a few megs of memory in speakers and just cut out the whole cabling dilemma altogether"
Even when you do this, audiophiles will buy $10k ethernet cables made of oxygen-free copper and RJ-45 connecters with platinum-iridium contacts because they will claim it sounds "warmer".
-- Bob
Ching ching!
-- Bob
The other benefit is a public relations one: No exciting, public-option-influencing TV shots of protesters being pepper sprayed, baton-charged or tear-gassed, just a silent, invisible-acting weapon that makes people ache (especially if they have fillings!) and run away.
As for a maser sniper-rifle, microwaves are inherently more difficult to focus than visible light, so maintaining a collimated beam will be hard. A back-of-envelope calculation estimates a ~1 m diameter beam at 50 m would be about all that would be possible.
-- Bob
Ah, but the reviewers don't get paid, worst luck. It's all done on 'good will'. The editors do get paid (and normally there will be many editors for one journal), but not much, I hear. If you want something like a colour insert for your article in a normal b&w journal, you almost always have to pay page charges... -- Bob
Someone's running a dissociated press / travesty generator on Jon Katz's articles? What's sad is that it makes almost as much sense as the man himself. I really like the last paragraph.
That's interesting... so they don't have much of a database themselves? They want the users to do the grunt work of entering the info?
(No doubt this features prominently in their pitch to the VCs... "No need to buy a database or hire anyone; Our users are all stupid and will do all the tedious work for us, so we can then sell it. Big Win.")
So, what's to stop you entering a load of crap for all the barcode you can find (e.g. links to goatse.cx)? You're not under any kind of oblication to enter truthful infomation. You'll probably want to randomize your serial number first, though, so they can't easily trash all your entries.
-- Bob
Fairly easy to change the polarization, in fact you can do it with no moving parts (there's a device called a Pockels cell which can rotate the polarization of a beam by an arbtrary amound depending on how much voltage you apply to a crystal).
There's another aspect to your second point (increasing the power to increase S/N): You are only legally allowed so much power in a laser beam that you are shining around in open space.
I'd suspect that you'd be limited to class I or II lasers. Anything more and you'd risk eye damage to anyone that intersects the beam. If you were using a Class IV laser, you'd also have to watch out for scatter from any object that would enter the beam (fog, birds, dust etc.), since the light scattered could be dangerous enough to cause damage.
Actually, on looking through the rulings, I'm bound to admit that most of them are quite fair. They still seem biased towards companies rather than individuals (even for .org domains, for which they seem to be ignoring the old non-commercial organization rule), and emphasis 'use of domain to offer goods and services' an awful lot, but they're not as bad as the more publicised cases lead me to believe.
As for the web-vs-email thing, this came up in the zero.com case, where a guy using the domain for email (not web hosting) was challenged by a company holding the trademark. One of their arguments was thay he wasn't using the domain and thus was squatting. The WIPO admitted that the WWW is just one of the uses for a domain, the guy had been legitimately using it as an email addresss, and he won the case.
The best way to hang onto your domain seems to be: Publicise it a lot - get lots of evidence out there that you use the domain 'in good faith' and it is associated with yourself - get your email address and web page listed in directories, etc.
Also, if contacted by a company who want your domain, don't try to sell it to them. Say it's not for sale is they ask to buy it. Offering the domain for $nnnn seems to be used as evidence for cybersquatting in many of the cases.
Interesting point. According to WIPO's proposal, they could be booted by, say, a local Brazillian company that offers Amazon river tours. Yeah, right. And I'm confused about the 'personal names' thing. Does that mean that Joe Random McDonald is going to be able to take away www.mcdonalds.com? Of course not, because just like nearly every time they have before, WIPO are going to rule for the biggest company with the most expensive lawyers.
It's actually quite different from dye lasers. People have made solid dye lasers before - you can dope the dye into a sol-gel material and end up with something like a dyed glass, which will then work as a laser. (The major problem is that you can't operate them continuously, so you make them in a disc form and spin them.) And, as you said, you need another laser to pump them. In this case, they seem to grow a continuous crytal of an organic molecule, which forms some kind of organic semiconductor. The crystal is then directly electrically pumped. If they can change the organic molecule slightly and alter the tuning range, that will be extremely useful, especially if they can get down to the UV.
A nasty effect you have to watch out for is 'thermal runaway' - if the hot side gets too hot, the efficiency of heat pumping suddenly drops, and whole device can quickly get very hot. You can end up frying the thing you are trying to cool. To avoid this, you need a good heatsink with plenty of spare capacity on the hot side. Even better would be to cool with heatsink with a water loop.
The best way of running a TEC is to have a thermistor on both sides of the device and a monitoring and PSU circuit such as those made by Wavelength electronics. Expensive, but they will avoid thermal runaway and will keep what you are cooling at precise temperature.
One nice thing about TECs is that you can run them both in series and in parallel. In parallel, you have more cooling capacity (pumps more watts). In series, you stack the TECs and can get down to much lower temperatures - minus 60degC is not too difficult.
What I really want to know is what the 'additional query words' mean at the end of that MS KB page mean. What the hell is "barney barnie acti ac ta mates mate actimate actamate actamates kbimu actimates"?
Is that like "Klaatu barada nikto"?
Most physics courses cover the difference between phase and group velocity of a wave - the phase velocity is the rate at which any particular frequency of the light is moving, but the group velocity is the rate at which the modulation of those frequencies (i.e., the envelope of the waveform) is travelling.
The phase velocity may exceed c in a dispersive medium, but infomation (a modulation on the wave) can only travel at the group velocity. You are usually taught that the group velocity never exceeds c.
This is not actually true - at frequencies close to an absorption resonance, it is possible for the group velocity to exceed c. However, the information still doesn't travel faster than c. Most physics/optics texts don't discuss this because it's tricky to handle.
The effect on a signal travelling through a absorbing medium is two-fold:
1 - The signal is strongly (exponentially) attenuated - this is (roughly) what an evanescent wave is, one that is quickly decaying as it propogates. This is also why it's difficult to do these sort of experiments over any distance - you have to start of with a hughly powerful signal and measure a tiny output.
2 - The envelope of the signal is wildly distorted. The high-frequency components of the signal propogate faster (and with less aborption) than the lower frequency components, and are detected first. Actually, they break up into two packets, known as the Summerfeld and Brillouin precursors. The rest of the (now very distorted) signal follows more slowely behind them.
What's important to realise is that even the fastest propogating components, the precursors, only travel at <~c. They may however travel faster than the usually defined speed of light in the medium. This stuff has been known for a long time, and there have been a lot of experiments to check it. This is just the latest one.