We talk about this at work all the time. A lot of people would agree with the article, but that position really comes from a certain degree of ignorance. Think about this: What would someone from the 1920's think if they were transported immediately to the present and saw you using your cell phone? They'd probably think, "wow, that's a phone that doesn't need wires... and it's really small". They would recognize it as a means of long distance communication very similar IN FUNCTION to the telephones they were familiar with. In fact it is a radically different device relying on completely different types of technology than the telephones of the 1920's with which our time traveler is familiar. Most of the technology that allows that very familiar device to operate didn't exist in the 20's. To the lay person a telephone is a telephone, but to a scientist or an engineer there are vast differences between seemingly similar items. What would a person from Victorian England say when they saw a maglev train? How about "wow that's a crazy fast locomotive... where's the smoke and steam?" Other than shape and function a steam locomotive and a maglev train have very little in common. They are based on vastly different technology and speak to our continuous pace of technological advancement. Sure going from using a horse to using a horseless carriage seems like a big technological leap, but going from a bi-plane to a stealth fighter involves many more significant technological and scientific advances. Yet to a lay person the two items are clearly related and the advancement is all "under the hood".
The fact of the matter is that the human body can only do so many things and so the technology that assists us to do those things is going to look more or less the same, no matter how advanced it is. There are technological advancements that allow us to do those same things in new ways, and it is those that make it look like a major leap. For example telegraph communication existed for quite some time, but it seemed miraculous when the first trans-Atlantic cable was installed. It was heralded as a technological triumph of the ages, and in fact it radically altered (advanced) the way the world operated, but technologically speaking, it wasn't that big a leap. Sure the effort of making the cable and stringing it across the Atlantic was epic in size, but the technology was not a giant leap forward. There were problems with the first cable and it soon stopped working. Good science and engineering resulted in a clever solution, but again it wasn't like the discovery of fire. To the world though, it seemed like a really big deal, the guy who goofed up on the first system had mud on his face and the guy who came up with the solution was hailed as a genius. It changed the world, but it just wasn't that big a leap.
One day soon we'll probably be able to communicate neural implant to neural implant, this will be a huge technological leap, and it may be heralded as a giant leap forward. But it may also be seen as a really small cell phone installed in your head... ho hum. It's not that technology has stopped advancing at a frightening pace, it's that we've grown so accustomed to it.
Tin whiskers are, in fact a reality. They are a problem with pure tin specifically. The older tin-lead, and newer tin-vanadium alloys don't have the problem. However, many manufacturers still manufacture parts in a pure tin variety. The reason for all of this pure tin madness is that the EU passed strict anti-lead regulations and so the lead had to be removed from electronics. EU manufacturers immediately started using pure tin parts. In the US, many manufacturers followed suit, partly because pure tin parts were now more available than tin-lead (and at the time there was hardly any tin-vanadium), and partly because they wanted to maintain a good environmental image. Some manufacturers, having been burned by the whisker problem insisted on a better solution hence the tin-vanadium solders now available. The problem is there are a lot of electronics out there with pure tin parts in there. For example, I'm no fan of flying on Airbus aircraft manufactured in the late '90s and early 2000s (pure tin baby). The thing is, the hardware will work perfectly... until it doesn't, then an errant short will cause a malfunction and in the act, the tin whisker will vaporize. The only way you'll find the problem is with electron microscopy.
One time pads, when implemented properly, are always immune to cryptographic attack. As long as the one time pad is truely random, it remains secure, and both the sender and receiver are synchronized there is no way to discern any information masked by the one time pad. The problem is that satisfying all three of these requirements in a useable system is almost impossible.
I can't find ublix anywhere on the web (although I'm certain I've found stuff before searching for the word ublix). Anyway, an ublix is a non-newtonian fluid. You can make an ublix at home with corn starch and water. It's really fun stuff. It flows like a thick liquid, you can rest your hand on it and it will sink in, but if you hit it with your fist, it will harden in proportion to the force you apply and so your punch will go nowhere. If you let your hand sink in, ball it up, then try to pull it out quickly, the ublix won't budge and your hand will stay stuck. It's a lot of fun, and it is exactly what I thought of when I read the slashdot headline. Here is a link to a short description of the mixture. It's not much help, but I'm hoping someone out there can post a better link.
Geolocation systems by their very nature are pushed into "easily jammed" frequencies. They need broad coverage (so the signal can be picked up anywhere beneath the satellite) with a relatively small antenna on the satellite (weight/size restrictions of launch vehicles). This means you have to use relatively low frequencies. The satellites can't transmit much power (not alot of power available on the satellite) so they need a frequency with low free space loss. Since the antennas of both the satellite and the ground based receiver have to be mostly omni-directional (satellite antenna is at least hemispheric, but will provide little gain), and small, this also drives to a relatively low frequency.
So now we know they need a relatively low frequency... what does this mean? It means that the signal is easier to jam than if it were at a high frequency. Since lower frequencies mean lower free space loss, they are easier to jam because you don't need to produce as much power to go as far. You can deliver more jamming power to a given antenna at a low frequency then at a high frequency.
Also GPS type signals are very weak on the ground. The satellites don't transmit much power and the space loss knocks it doen until the signal is very close to the noise floor. You don't need that much power to jam it anyway.
Basicly what I'm saying is this: if Galileo is to work as a geolocation system it will be, by definition, at an easily jammed frequency. The US just said, "get off of our frequencies and find your own". They didn't say, "go to this frequency so we can easily jam you".
Wow, an animal made mostly of water with a big airsack in the middle of it can float... no freakin' way.
This is just like the article I just read that talked about how scientists recently discovered that fish can feel pain, and how this discovery has caused some to question the humaneness of angling.
Hello, of course they freakin' feel pain, how else do they know they've been injured. A machine feels no pain, if a joint breaks, or a rivet comes loose it keeps working... often to it's own destruction. Animals however can't afford to bash themselves to death when injured, they have to know they are injured to adapt their behaviour to improve their chances of survival.
I swear all of these scientists talking about anthropomorphism have got it all wrong. We shouldn't be trying to prove how other organisms are like us, but how we are any different from the rest of the natural world. They assume that the human race is somehow different, seperated from the rest of nature. They say, prove that animals think and have feelings... prove that fish feel pain. What a waste of time. Prove to me that you feel pain. I dare you to come up with a convincing proof that you feel pain. Hell, prove that you even think.
I'd like to coin a new term anthro-isolationism. It means the attitude that humankind is somehow detatched from nature, somehow above it. That's the predominant menatality in the scientific community.
I can't believe that someone bothered to prove that fish feel pain.
Am I the only one who thinks that the ideas that dinosaurs floated and that fish feel pain don't need proving until every other freakin' fact and idea has been worked to death?
I thought that dark matter was supposed to exist not only at the center of galaxies but in a "halo" surrounding them. This dark matter halo would help explain the unusual rotational properties observed in most galaxies. If that is the case, did the researchers also see this signiture in the region of the supposed halo? If they did, that observation would indeed be interesting. If they only see it at the galactic core then I'm not convinced that they have identified a reliable indicator of dark matter's presence.
implications for organ donation and rejection
on
Chimera Twins Story
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This brings up some interesting questions. First off, what are the implications for the present organ donation system? The radio story talks about a women who discovered her condition when she needed a kidney, and her own children were tested as incompatable. It turns out that they inherited genes from one of her sets and that was not the genome responsible for her blood supply. But what about the other possibility. I need a kidney, my sister tests as a viable donor, but it turns out her kidney has a different genome then the one that tested positive for a match. The kidney gets transplanted and my body rejects it. How often does this happen in real life?
Also, is anyone studying the way the body's immune system handles having two omnipresent genomes? What implications, if any, does this have for the study of drugs that could help lower the threat of organ rejection?
Does anyone know the answers to these questions, and if not, is anyone looking into them?
Not much detail on the company's website. I'm interested in how they construct the image. If it is truely holographic, then it will require a medium for the image to be projected on. After all, a hologram is just an interference pattern. That is unless of course they plan on projecting directly onto the retina which I find hard to believe. So the image won't float in the air above the body of the person being operated on, it will float in front of some display case. It won't be visible from all angles either. They don't call it a free floating volumetric display, so it must be projected. It sounds cool, but not as cool as it's made out.
I'm sure this has already been said, but here goes...
While all of this legal maneuvering is interesting, and both sides have some valid points (although in large I agree with Lessig more than with the RIAA), I think the main point is this: the landscape has changed. The legal issues that are being argued here are either issues that relate to a business/technological environment that no longer exists, or are issues that relate to laws that were created to preserve that extinct business/technological environment.
File swapping is a reality and there is no way to prevent it. All of the legislation in the world cannot put the cat back in the bag. Not only is the DMCA a law that clearly benefits only those companies who's lobbying efforts created it, but it is a law that criminalizes the activities of millions of people.
File sharing will go on with or without the support of content providers like the RIAA or the MPAA. If these organizations do not see the writing on the wall and embrace this new technology they will swiftly be relegated to the sidelines in the new content economy.
Hyping your product is often, not only necessary, but unavoidable. Certainly there is a fairly large degree of dishonesty in the tech community, but often the only way to describe a device is with a vague easy to undertand description. As an engineer, you have to describe your design to business types who really don't know crap about technology. In the dumbing down of your description you have to generalize, and the problem with generalizations is that they can often be misinterpreted.
Let's say you're designing a video data link. Your boss doesn't know and frankly probably doesn't care about the clever compression and variable bit rate stuff you've implemented. If you got into stuff like channel characterization and configurable modulation parameters, the glazed look in the higher-ups faces would make you wonder if the water at the meeting had been spiked with thorozine. So you simplify, and say you can send video up to 5km away. Now this isn't a false statement, it just doesn't say that at that range you have increased compression and a lower frame rate. However, from that simplified description, someone, somewhere, may end up saying you can send 1080i signals for miles.
The point here is that even when there is no deception intended, product descriptions have to be understandable to a large number of people of. This results in a generalized description which is open to mis-interpretation.
The UN is constantly monitoring world population to look for signs of impending supply/demand mismatches especially when it comes to food supply. The dogma for decades has been just what you said, population grows exponentially, and food production does not; however, several months ago, the UN released a report showing that population growth was slowing, not only in modern industrial societies, but in developing nations across the globe as well.
This was not due to some global epidemic or food shortage. What the UN discovered was that, and this was especially true in developing nations, people were opting to have fewer children. They realized the financial burden large families presented and were opting to have fewer children, later in life, so that they can afford better standards of living. That of course is not the whole story, it is far to complex for a short post to cover. I don't remember where to get the info, I think there was a column on it in the front of a recent Scientific American issue.
The point is the effect is real, and the UN has had to change its long term prediction of global population. In 30 years, instead of exponential growth and a vast underfed population, the world population should reach a plateau of about 10 billion and stay there comfortably. I highly recomend finding the SciAm article, it's really very interesting. If I can dig it up at home I'll post the issue number later.
I like wires too. They're much more secure, and when a wire will work , why use wireless, you're just wasting spectrum.
While I have no doubts that you do indeed get a headache when you use your cell phone, I have friends who say the same thing, the power output is very low from those devices and is simply insufficient to cause any damage. Concern about cell phones today simply isn't warranted.
The transmitted power of old AMPS cell phones was much higher than todays digital phones... they needed the margin, but study after study has failed to show any real correlation with any type of illness. If there were a proposed mechanism whereby the RF engergy from a wireless device could induce your headache or other illnesses, I'd be a little less skeptical, but couple the lack of any realistic mechanism with the fact that large scale statistical investigations have failed to show any correlation with illness, and I'll just keep on using my cell phone.
Also, let's not forget that your entire environment is saturated with RF. Television, radio, telecommunications, lightning, etc., all of these generate radio waves that have been passing through you since the day you were born, and at times, at levels far in excess of the transmitted power of any of the wireless devices we are discussing. You talk about living near a TV/radio transmitter. Years ago (years ago in the US at least, Mexico still allows it) radio stations blasted out signals at ridiculous powers. Powers so great, that you could hear the AM signal just by walking by a chain link fence. There are no cancer clusters associated with these transmissions, no increases in migraines.
When RADAR was in its infancy, people were regularly exposed to excessive levels of RF radiation. A famous story involves a set of British researchers trying to find the source of a humming sound coming from their RADAR assembly only to discover that the sound wouldn't register on any microphones. It turned out that it was a side effect of the RADAR. The energy was so great that it caused the membrane around their brains to expand and contract thereby causing them each to hear a sound as the beam swept through them. They suffered no long term effects, and no headaches, even as they heard the sound.
RF can injure or kill (just think about a microwave oven) but the fact is that the devices we are talking about (cell phones, 802.11, the new Firewireless) do not even aproach the level necessary for injury. Maybe, like the sound that the British researches were searching for, it's all in your head.
The broadcast industry is already performing digital transmission of some television signals in some markets. By a certain date, all transmissions will have to be digital per FCC regulation. Whether or not a digital signal is HDTV or not depends on how many digital transmission channels a certain broadcaster want to utilize for a given broadcast. This means that digital TV signals come in several flavors depending on the content, and some carry HDTV feeds. Since these signals are broadcast they are, by definition, Wireless HDTV... so it's already here.
That said, yes, this new wireless Firewire (Firewireless?) could handle HDTV signals with minimal compression.
Let's put it this way, wireless has never been proven to be unsafe. All of the science says you should be fine and studies show no conclusive evidence of any health risks inherent in wireless signals despite years and years of research. You might as well worry about incandescent bulbs being a health risk. Sure no one has shown them to cause any health problems, but no one has proven them to be safe either.
Point to the definitive study and statistical analysis that says the incandescent bulb is safe. Can't find it... well damn I'm going to change all my bulbs to fluorescent... oh wait, has anyone proven that safe yet... I guess it's sunlight for me... wait, doesn't sunlight cause skin cancer...
I know this is kind of blasphemous and all, but maybe we don't have as good a handle on gravity as we think. After all, Newton's Law of Gravity seemed to work just fine until we looked at Mercury. It was close enough to the sun that Relativistic effects had a visible impact. For the rest of the planets (within the margin of error of the measurement devices of the day), Newton's Law held true, but the closer you got to the sun, the more and more Newton and Einstein diverged.
At Mercury's orbit, Relativity ended up getting rid of about.5 degrees (if memory serves) of the orbit around the sun. This was observable, and unexplained until Einstein came along. Perhaps we are seeing another such divergence, between the accepted theory and reality as we look at gravity on a galactic scale.
Technically no, but if I were to develop something that could make money, or be in any way usefull, they would claim it and I would have to prove that I used no company resource in it's developement. Proving a negative is always hard to do and inevitable they would squash me with their legal team.
This isn't really new stuff. Back in my freshman year of college I got interested in volumetric displays. I came up with some ideas and found out that someone had already done it. I forget his name, but he was a polish scientist working for the navy making volumentric displays for submarines. My first idea, and also this gentlemen's was to use a spining helical surface that rotated through 180 degrees and iluminate it with laser beams deflected from a spinning mirror. That was 10 years ago... and he had working models.
Not wanting to work out another solution only to find someone had beaten me too it, I decided to do a little research and see what else was out there. I found a woman, I also forget her name but you'll have to excuse me because I haven't looked at this stuff in quite a while, who was using rare earth element doped fluoride glass to produce volumetric displays. Her work involved utilizing IR lasers. When the two beams intersected in the glass they caused a point to illuminate. A raster or vector scan of the volume could produce three dimensional images. This work was paralleled by a man in Japan, again... can't remember his name.
After finding out about the rare earth doped fluoride glass processes I had to figure out another one. I did, it's really cool, and so far no-one else has put forth a similar design. However, I could never fund the work myself (I was a starving student), and then I began working for a big company with whom I have one of those "anything you think of is ours" clauses in my contract, so I can't work on it now either.
However, I may get a chance to pursue it in the not so distant future, and man will it be cool to see it operating. Of course if I ever do get it working I will make sure that my web site has the capacity to handle the slashdot effect.
I think we should also look into bombing Mars to search for life. If there is simple life to find, we could look for the residue of vaporized organic matter in the plumes, and if there is advanced life hiding below the surface of Mars we only have to wait for the obvious reply... war machines descending on New Jersey.
Um... yeah, I think they said "extended talktimes" not "perpetual talktimes". If you could recover some of your wasted energy, you could extend battery life. How much, well that depends on the efficiency with which you can recover energy and the threshold below which the system cannot perform. I have my doubts about the system being able to recover enough energy from say a phones vibe mode to power anything for very long, however, just the motion generated by the user's walking could be recovered over time, it would be like a kinetic quartz watch, only it's a cell phone.
Slashdot Mirror
We talk about this at work all the time. A lot of people would agree with the article, but that position really comes from a certain degree of ignorance. Think about this: What would someone from the 1920's think if they were transported immediately to the present and saw you using your cell phone? They'd probably think, "wow, that's a phone that doesn't need wires... and it's really small". They would recognize it as a means of long distance communication very similar IN FUNCTION to the telephones they were familiar with. In fact it is a radically different device relying on completely different types of technology than the telephones of the 1920's with which our time traveler is familiar. Most of the technology that allows that very familiar device to operate didn't exist in the 20's. To the lay person a telephone is a telephone, but to a scientist or an engineer there are vast differences between seemingly similar items. What would a person from Victorian England say when they saw a maglev train? How about "wow that's a crazy fast locomotive... where's the smoke and steam?" Other than shape and function a steam locomotive and a maglev train have very little in common. They are based on vastly different technology and speak to our continuous pace of technological advancement. Sure going from using a horse to using a horseless carriage seems like a big technological leap, but going from a bi-plane to a stealth fighter involves many more significant technological and scientific advances. Yet to a lay person the two items are clearly related and the advancement is all "under the hood".
The fact of the matter is that the human body can only do so many things and so the technology that assists us to do those things is going to look more or less the same, no matter how advanced it is. There are technological advancements that allow us to do those same things in new ways, and it is those that make it look like a major leap. For example telegraph communication existed for quite some time, but it seemed miraculous when the first trans-Atlantic cable was installed. It was heralded as a technological triumph of the ages, and in fact it radically altered (advanced) the way the world operated, but technologically speaking, it wasn't that big a leap. Sure the effort of making the cable and stringing it across the Atlantic was epic in size, but the technology was not a giant leap forward. There were problems with the first cable and it soon stopped working. Good science and engineering resulted in a clever solution, but again it wasn't like the discovery of fire. To the world though, it seemed like a really big deal, the guy who goofed up on the first system had mud on his face and the guy who came up with the solution was hailed as a genius. It changed the world, but it just wasn't that big a leap.
One day soon we'll probably be able to communicate neural implant to neural implant, this will be a huge technological leap, and it may be heralded as a giant leap forward. But it may also be seen as a really small cell phone installed in your head... ho hum. It's not that technology has stopped advancing at a frightening pace, it's that we've grown so accustomed to it.
Tin whiskers are, in fact a reality. They are a problem with pure tin specifically. The older tin-lead, and newer tin-vanadium alloys don't have the problem. However, many manufacturers still manufacture parts in a pure tin variety. The reason for all of this pure tin madness is that the EU passed strict anti-lead regulations and so the lead had to be removed from electronics. EU manufacturers immediately started using pure tin parts. In the US, many manufacturers followed suit, partly because pure tin parts were now more available than tin-lead (and at the time there was hardly any tin-vanadium), and partly because they wanted to maintain a good environmental image. Some manufacturers, having been burned by the whisker problem insisted on a better solution hence the tin-vanadium solders now available. The problem is there are a lot of electronics out there with pure tin parts in there. For example, I'm no fan of flying on Airbus aircraft manufactured in the late '90s and early 2000s (pure tin baby). The thing is, the hardware will work perfectly... until it doesn't, then an errant short will cause a malfunction and in the act, the tin whisker will vaporize. The only way you'll find the problem is with electron microscopy.
It's a relatively simple game, but I just can't get enough. I have an NES emulator on my PC just for this game.
One time pads, when implemented properly, are always immune to cryptographic attack. As long as the one time pad is truely random, it remains secure, and both the sender and receiver are synchronized there is no way to discern any information masked by the one time pad. The problem is that satisfying all three of these requirements in a useable system is almost impossible.
What ever happened to that city "discovered" off the coast of Cuba about a year ago?
Thank you. I was pretty sure I had it wrong. Now I know what to search for.
I can't find ublix anywhere on the web (although I'm certain I've found stuff before searching for the word ublix). Anyway, an ublix is a non-newtonian fluid. You can make an ublix at home with corn starch and water. It's really fun stuff. It flows like a thick liquid, you can rest your hand on it and it will sink in, but if you hit it with your fist, it will harden in proportion to the force you apply and so your punch will go nowhere. If you let your hand sink in, ball it up, then try to pull it out quickly, the ublix won't budge and your hand will stay stuck. It's a lot of fun, and it is exactly what I thought of when I read the slashdot headline. Here is a link to a short description of the mixture. It's not much help, but I'm hoping someone out there can post a better link.
Geolocation systems by their very nature are pushed into "easily jammed" frequencies. They need broad coverage (so the signal can be picked up anywhere beneath the satellite) with a relatively small antenna on the satellite (weight/size restrictions of launch vehicles). This means you have to use relatively low frequencies. The satellites can't transmit much power (not alot of power available on the satellite) so they need a frequency with low free space loss. Since the antennas of both the satellite and the ground based receiver have to be mostly omni-directional (satellite antenna is at least hemispheric, but will provide little gain), and small, this also drives to a relatively low frequency.
So now we know they need a relatively low frequency... what does this mean? It means that the signal is easier to jam than if it were at a high frequency. Since lower frequencies mean lower free space loss, they are easier to jam because you don't need to produce as much power to go as far. You can deliver more jamming power to a given antenna at a low frequency then at a high frequency.
Also GPS type signals are very weak on the ground. The satellites don't transmit much power and the space loss knocks it doen until the signal is very close to the noise floor. You don't need that much power to jam it anyway.
Basicly what I'm saying is this: if Galileo is to work as a geolocation system it will be, by definition, at an easily jammed frequency. The US just said, "get off of our frequencies and find your own". They didn't say, "go to this frequency so we can easily jam you".
Wow, an animal made mostly of water with a big airsack in the middle of it can float... no freakin' way.
This is just like the article I just read that talked about how scientists recently discovered that fish can feel pain, and how this discovery has caused some to question the humaneness of angling.
Hello, of course they freakin' feel pain, how else do they know they've been injured. A machine feels no pain, if a joint breaks, or a rivet comes loose it keeps working... often to it's own destruction. Animals however can't afford to bash themselves to death when injured, they have to know they are injured to adapt their behaviour to improve their chances of survival.
I swear all of these scientists talking about anthropomorphism have got it all wrong. We shouldn't be trying to prove how other organisms are like us, but how we are any different from the rest of the natural world. They assume that the human race is somehow different, seperated from the rest of nature. They say, prove that animals think and have feelings... prove that fish feel pain. What a waste of time. Prove to me that you feel pain. I dare you to come up with a convincing proof that you feel pain. Hell, prove that you even think.
I'd like to coin a new term anthro-isolationism. It means the attitude that humankind is somehow detatched from nature, somehow above it. That's the predominant menatality in the scientific community.
I can't believe that someone bothered to prove that fish feel pain.
Am I the only one who thinks that the ideas that dinosaurs floated and that fish feel pain don't need proving until every other freakin' fact and idea has been worked to death?
I thought that dark matter was supposed to exist not only at the center of galaxies but in a "halo" surrounding them. This dark matter halo would help explain the unusual rotational properties observed in most galaxies. If that is the case, did the researchers also see this signiture in the region of the supposed halo? If they did, that observation would indeed be interesting. If they only see it at the galactic core then I'm not convinced that they have identified a reliable indicator of dark matter's presence.
This brings up some interesting questions. First off, what are the implications for the present organ donation system? The radio story talks about a women who discovered her condition when she needed a kidney, and her own children were tested as incompatable. It turns out that they inherited genes from one of her sets and that was not the genome responsible for her blood supply. But what about the other possibility. I need a kidney, my sister tests as a viable donor, but it turns out her kidney has a different genome then the one that tested positive for a match. The kidney gets transplanted and my body rejects it. How often does this happen in real life?
Also, is anyone studying the way the body's immune system handles having two omnipresent genomes? What implications, if any, does this have for the study of drugs that could help lower the threat of organ rejection?
Does anyone know the answers to these questions, and if not, is anyone looking into them?
Not much detail on the company's website. I'm interested in how they construct the image. If it is truely holographic, then it will require a medium for the image to be projected on. After all, a hologram is just an interference pattern. That is unless of course they plan on projecting directly onto the retina which I find hard to believe. So the image won't float in the air above the body of the person being operated on, it will float in front of some display case. It won't be visible from all angles either. They don't call it a free floating volumetric display, so it must be projected. It sounds cool, but not as cool as it's made out.
While all of this legal maneuvering is interesting, and both sides have some valid points (although in large I agree with Lessig more than with the RIAA), I think the main point is this: the landscape has changed. The legal issues that are being argued here are either issues that relate to a business/technological environment that no longer exists, or are issues that relate to laws that were created to preserve that extinct business/technological environment.
File swapping is a reality and there is no way to prevent it. All of the legislation in the world cannot put the cat back in the bag. Not only is the DMCA a law that clearly benefits only those companies who's lobbying efforts created it, but it is a law that criminalizes the activities of millions of people.
File sharing will go on with or without the support of content providers like the RIAA or the MPAA. If these organizations do not see the writing on the wall and embrace this new technology they will swiftly be relegated to the sidelines in the new content economy.
Let's say you're designing a video data link. Your boss doesn't know and frankly probably doesn't care about the clever compression and variable bit rate stuff you've implemented. If you got into stuff like channel characterization and configurable modulation parameters, the glazed look in the higher-ups faces would make you wonder if the water at the meeting had been spiked with thorozine. So you simplify, and say you can send video up to 5km away. Now this isn't a false statement, it just doesn't say that at that range you have increased compression and a lower frame rate. However, from that simplified description, someone, somewhere, may end up saying you can send 1080i signals for miles.
The point here is that even when there is no deception intended, product descriptions have to be understandable to a large number of people of. This results in a generalized description which is open to mis-interpretation.
This was not due to some global epidemic or food shortage. What the UN discovered was that, and this was especially true in developing nations, people were opting to have fewer children. They realized the financial burden large families presented and were opting to have fewer children, later in life, so that they can afford better standards of living. That of course is not the whole story, it is far to complex for a short post to cover. I don't remember where to get the info, I think there was a column on it in the front of a recent Scientific American issue.
The point is the effect is real, and the UN has had to change its long term prediction of global population. In 30 years, instead of exponential growth and a vast underfed population, the world population should reach a plateau of about 10 billion and stay there comfortably. I highly recomend finding the SciAm article, it's really very interesting. If I can dig it up at home I'll post the issue number later.
While I have no doubts that you do indeed get a headache when you use your cell phone, I have friends who say the same thing, the power output is very low from those devices and is simply insufficient to cause any damage. Concern about cell phones today simply isn't warranted.
The transmitted power of old AMPS cell phones was much higher than todays digital phones... they needed the margin, but study after study has failed to show any real correlation with any type of illness. If there were a proposed mechanism whereby the RF engergy from a wireless device could induce your headache or other illnesses, I'd be a little less skeptical, but couple the lack of any realistic mechanism with the fact that large scale statistical investigations have failed to show any correlation with illness, and I'll just keep on using my cell phone.
Also, let's not forget that your entire environment is saturated with RF. Television, radio, telecommunications, lightning, etc., all of these generate radio waves that have been passing through you since the day you were born, and at times, at levels far in excess of the transmitted power of any of the wireless devices we are discussing. You talk about living near a TV/radio transmitter. Years ago (years ago in the US at least, Mexico still allows it) radio stations blasted out signals at ridiculous powers. Powers so great, that you could hear the AM signal just by walking by a chain link fence. There are no cancer clusters associated with these transmissions, no increases in migraines.
When RADAR was in its infancy, people were regularly exposed to excessive levels of RF radiation. A famous story involves a set of British researchers trying to find the source of a humming sound coming from their RADAR assembly only to discover that the sound wouldn't register on any microphones. It turned out that it was a side effect of the RADAR. The energy was so great that it caused the membrane around their brains to expand and contract thereby causing them each to hear a sound as the beam swept through them. They suffered no long term effects, and no headaches, even as they heard the sound.
RF can injure or kill (just think about a microwave oven) but the fact is that the devices we are talking about (cell phones, 802.11, the new Firewireless) do not even aproach the level necessary for injury. Maybe, like the sound that the British researches were searching for, it's all in your head.
That said, yes, this new wireless Firewire (Firewireless?) could handle HDTV signals with minimal compression.
Point to the definitive study and statistical analysis that says the incandescent bulb is safe. Can't find it... well damn I'm going to change all my bulbs to fluorescent... oh wait, has anyone proven that safe yet... I guess it's sunlight for me... wait, doesn't sunlight cause skin cancer...
At Mercury's orbit, Relativity ended up getting rid of about .5 degrees (if memory serves) of the orbit around the sun. This was observable, and unexplained until Einstein came along. Perhaps we are seeing another such divergence, between the accepted theory and reality as we look at gravity on a galactic scale.
Technically no, but if I were to develop something that could make money, or be in any way usefull, they would claim it and I would have to prove that I used no company resource in it's developement. Proving a negative is always hard to do and inevitable they would squash me with their legal team.
That's his name. I wonder what he's working on now... have to google it I suppose.
Not wanting to work out another solution only to find someone had beaten me too it, I decided to do a little research and see what else was out there. I found a woman, I also forget her name but you'll have to excuse me because I haven't looked at this stuff in quite a while, who was using rare earth element doped fluoride glass to produce volumetric displays. Her work involved utilizing IR lasers. When the two beams intersected in the glass they caused a point to illuminate. A raster or vector scan of the volume could produce three dimensional images. This work was paralleled by a man in Japan, again... can't remember his name.
After finding out about the rare earth doped fluoride glass processes I had to figure out another one. I did, it's really cool, and so far no-one else has put forth a similar design. However, I could never fund the work myself (I was a starving student), and then I began working for a big company with whom I have one of those "anything you think of is ours" clauses in my contract, so I can't work on it now either.
However, I may get a chance to pursue it in the not so distant future, and man will it be cool to see it operating. Of course if I ever do get it working I will make sure that my web site has the capacity to handle the slashdot effect.
I think we should also look into bombing Mars to search for life. If there is simple life to find, we could look for the residue of vaporized organic matter in the plumes, and if there is advanced life hiding below the surface of Mars we only have to wait for the obvious reply... war machines descending on New Jersey.
Um... yeah, I think they said "extended talktimes" not "perpetual talktimes". If you could recover some of your wasted energy, you could extend battery life. How much, well that depends on the efficiency with which you can recover energy and the threshold below which the system cannot perform. I have my doubts about the system being able to recover enough energy from say a phones vibe mode to power anything for very long, however, just the motion generated by the user's walking could be recovered over time, it would be like a kinetic quartz watch, only it's a cell phone.
My favorite Weekly World News Headline ever was:
Scientists Plan to Blow Up the Moon
"we'd be better off without it anyway," says one top reasearcher