first, when you "buy" a copy of the book online, the company gives you half of a key block, ala pgp. then you download the whole book in some crazy encrypted format. then, the company's program uses your personal key to decrypt the text, but then ==display it only as a jpg file to the screen== 1 page at a time. sure, you could copy and page 600 jpgs to disk and run OCR on them, but there are probably nice ways of making the ocr confusing. and who wants to do that?
and since it's encrypted to your specific key, tracking would be easy.
the filesize would be small, only zipped & encrypted text, so you could download portably if you wanted. or even make it only work when you are online.
also, what about steganographically hiding a key in a text? i think with about 50 typos or extra spaces riddled throughout a book it would be hard to clean them all, and you could track distribution.
did you just say that "microwaves are not the same wavelength as light"?????
what do you think microwaves are made of?
what you meant to say was that "microwaves are not the same wavelength as VISIBLE light." microwaves have the advantage of being able to penetrate flesh about 1-2cm to heat more thoroughly, where a LASER would just char skin (or explode skin at high enough power).
...to steal computing power for my own diabolical schemes of taking over the world.
It might would be a nice way to increase your effective bandwidth for poorly linked places like.ru, etc.
Maybe this virus model could have beneficial use for something like that? Instead of your data taking (mainly) one route, it takes many routes through your distant friends in chunks to find you more quickly?
except in equations you use "K" (Kelvin) and not "k" (wavenumber or something). and since it _is_ named for a guy named Kelvin, it should be proper to use it either way, like Gauss or Henry./m
Laser cooling is an application of using the Doppler shift to selectively absorb photons propagating counter to the direction of the atom's movement. The laser is slighty red-detuned from some spectral line of the atom, so when the atom moves towards the laser, it absorbs a now correctly blue-shifted photon and gets a kick of momentum to slow it down. Since the atom emits the photon again in a random direction, then net result after millions of collisions is to slow its net velocity to zero.
Since the atom is also emitting photons in random directions, it settles down to a minimum kinetic energy / temperature of about 240 microKelvin (for Sodium, for example). To cool atoms furter, you have to add in magnetic traps, then selectively "heat" the hottest atoms with RF energy to "boil" off the highest part of the temperature distribution to result in a lower average temperature of the condensate.
Check the MIT Center for UltraCold Atoms for more details.
How many years until firemen are burning "unauthorized" books?
Will I have to insert some sort of smart chip to unlock paper books I own at home?
Nowhere in any book have I seen the publisher write "Not Intended for Distribution or Rental". Would their suit apply if I tried to sell old books at a garage sale?
the LIGO interferometer is a michelson interferometer with fabry-perot interferometers in each arm and an additional fabry-perot on the input side (bright port). i have inside (ha!) information that this lock was acheived without the power-recylcing mirror aligned, so the laser power resonating in the system was a couple of orders of magnitude below nominal.
the trick is that when the power recylcing mirror is locked in, the whole thing undergoes a 180 degree phase shift, which no one really knew about until recently. so you have to make all sorts of tricky modifications to your control electronics to compensate for this.
also, the gravity waves they are looking for come in quadrupole form (don't know? don't ask), mostly from binary stars, supernovae, etc. one guy told me that the biggest signal came from the actual physical expansion of the earth due to the tidal effects of the moon that increased the length of one of the arms about 100 microns over the 2 km distance.
some truly impressive physics will be done one everything is truly fine tuned enough to detect strain levels down to 1E-27.
as a sidenote, the beam arms are about 1m in diameter, and 2 km long each, under high vacuum. something like 1/2 ton of dynamite in potential energy each. hope it doesn't crack.
i worked on ligo, so if you have any other questions just ask.
plasma is too inefficient to use as a weapon. all you get out of it is the heat energy put in to heating it, so basically you get the same pressure-detonation effect as LN in a coke bottle, only a little hotter.
the real weapon of the future is antimatter. just spill it and BANG. plus no fallout. and limitless scalability. just think what would happen if you dropped a bomb containing, say, a ton of antimatter on a planet. bye bye.
and i think that physicists with morality should work to foil those without...
plasmas are not so exotic as some people like to make them sound. take your flourescent lamp, for example. to generate them all you need are two electrodes, some hight voltage, and some frequency. as far as using it for a shield goes, how would you make it go _around_ something? i suppose you could have the + at the front of the ship and the - at the end, assuming the rest of your hull was an insulator. you might be able to make it cloak radar if you happened to be using just the right atomic plasma and energy state to absorb just exactly the radar frequency the enemy was using, but was far as a defensive sheild goes, forget it. how much mass is in that plasma? a microgram? at best? that's not a lot of mass to put in the way of a bullet or even a couple kilojoule laser burst. physics before fantasy. micah
Like the original comment says, this is a "Last Mile" system for densely populated urban areas, not to give your house a T-1.
Given the way lasers work, each receiver would have to be connected to the hub by its own separate laser. Splitting beams is not economical in a power/$ point of view. So maybe your 500 tenant apartment building in downtown LA might get one, but not your suburban single family home.
Second, the wattage of this laser will probably be below 50 mW. I have used lasers as powerful as 2 Watts (output!!!), and even that took a couple of seconds to smolder a piece of paper. Lasers 5 mW cannot possibly harm a human eye and lasers 25 mW are generally considered safe.
And as fars connection drops go, I think I would be happy for the occasional (unharmed) pigeon as opposed to a backhoe through a USWest fiber...
Slashdot Mirror
and since it's encrypted to your specific key, tracking would be easy.
the filesize would be small, only zipped & encrypted text, so you could download portably if you wanted. or even make it only work when you are online.
also, what about steganographically hiding a key in a text? i think with about 50 typos or extra spaces riddled throughout a book it would be hard to clean them all, and you could track distribution.
just some methods to think about.
/m
what do you think microwaves are made of?
what you meant to say was that "microwaves are not the same wavelength as VISIBLE light." microwaves have the advantage of being able to penetrate flesh about 1-2cm to heat more thoroughly, where a LASER would just char skin (or explode skin at high enough power).
/m
It might would be a nice way to increase your effective bandwidth for poorly linked places like .ru, etc.
Maybe this virus model could have beneficial use for something like that? Instead of your data taking (mainly) one route, it takes many routes through your distant friends in chunks to find you more quickly?
/muerte
except in equations you use "K" (Kelvin) and not "k" (wavenumber or something). and since it _is_ named for a guy named Kelvin, it should be proper to use it either way, like Gauss or Henry. /m
Since the atom is also emitting photons in random directions, it settles down to a minimum kinetic energy / temperature of about 240 microKelvin (for Sodium, for example). To cool atoms furter, you have to add in magnetic traps, then selectively "heat" the hottest atoms with RF energy to "boil" off the highest part of the temperature distribution to result in a lower average temperature of the condensate.
Check the MIT Center for UltraCold Atoms for more details.
Muerte
Will I have to insert some sort of smart chip to unlock paper books I own at home?
Nowhere in any book have I seen the publisher write "Not Intended for Distribution or Rental". Would their suit apply if I tried to sell old books at a garage sale?
/muerte
the trick is that when the power recylcing mirror is locked in, the whole thing undergoes a 180 degree phase shift, which no one really knew about until recently. so you have to make all sorts of tricky modifications to your control electronics to compensate for this.
also, the gravity waves they are looking for come in quadrupole form (don't know? don't ask), mostly from binary stars, supernovae, etc. one guy told me that the biggest signal came from the actual physical expansion of the earth due to the tidal effects of the moon that increased the length of one of the arms about 100 microns over the 2 km distance.
some truly impressive physics will be done one everything is truly fine tuned enough to detect strain levels down to 1E-27.
as a sidenote, the beam arms are about 1m in diameter, and 2 km long each, under high vacuum. something like 1/2 ton of dynamite in potential energy each. hope it doesn't crack.
i worked on ligo, so if you have any other questions just ask.
plasma is too inefficient to use as a weapon. all you get out of it is the heat energy put in to heating it, so basically you get the same pressure-detonation effect as LN in a coke bottle, only a little hotter.
the real weapon of the future is antimatter. just spill it and BANG. plus no fallout. and limitless scalability. just think what would happen if you dropped a bomb containing, say, a ton of antimatter on a planet. bye bye.
and i think that physicists with morality should work to foil those without...
micah
plasmas are not so exotic as some people like to make them sound. take your flourescent lamp, for example. to generate them all you need are two electrodes, some hight voltage, and some frequency. as far as using it for a shield goes, how would you make it go _around_ something? i suppose you could have the + at the front of the ship and the - at the end, assuming the rest of your hull was an insulator. you might be able to make it cloak radar if you happened to be using just the right atomic plasma and energy state to absorb just exactly the radar frequency the enemy was using, but was far as a defensive sheild goes, forget it. how much mass is in that plasma? a microgram? at best? that's not a lot of mass to put in the way of a bullet or even a couple kilojoule laser burst. physics before fantasy. micah
Like the original comment says, this is a "Last Mile" system for densely populated urban areas, not to give your house a T-1. Given the way lasers work, each receiver would have to be connected to the hub by its own separate laser. Splitting beams is not economical in a power/$ point of view. So maybe your 500 tenant apartment building in downtown LA might get one, but not your suburban single family home. Second, the wattage of this laser will probably be below 50 mW. I have used lasers as powerful as 2 Watts (output!!!), and even that took a couple of seconds to smolder a piece of paper. Lasers 5 mW cannot possibly harm a human eye and lasers 25 mW are generally considered safe. And as fars connection drops go, I think I would be happy for the occasional (unharmed) pigeon as opposed to a backhoe through a USWest fiber...