ahhh, I see. I just thought the first one was a typo, or maybe some kind of range, as in " from 10 to 10^1.42 meters". Actually I thought the whole distance thing was a typo.
It sounds like you are living in a very small universe. From the numbers in your post it sounds like the farthest observable object in your universe is ~26.3 meters away from you (that is 10^1.42 meters if I'm not mistaken). Time to leave the house I think.
I don't know about that. An ideal car has a 50-50 front/rear weight distribution. Most likely the car in the add is a little front heavy (that's where the engine is). But if it were at 50-50 or even biased toward the rear a little, it wouldn't take much weight added to the front to cause it to tip. Technically speaking, in a frictionless world, you would only have to have a miniscule amount of extra weight (ounces... grams) in the front to get it to tip that way. In the real world, all you need is enough weight up front (e.g. enough force) to overcome the static friction of the pivot point. The more front heavy the setup, the faster the front end would accelerate downward, that's all.
This is an old lesson. When Ford Motor Company was first founded they built the best cars possible. They never broke down, and they needed little maintanance. This happened very early on... we're talking Model T times here. The result was, that after the first round of sales Ford had saturated the market with long lasting cars, and the number of potential customers plummeted. The company almost folded. Ford wised up and started manufacturing their cars differently so that the cars would undergo increased wear and tear and eventually need repair. This, along with some clever marketing, is known as "Engineered Obsolescence". It allows a company to maintain a customer base by not putting itself out of business.
EvDo looks interesting, but this article reads like a paid advertisement. The article says that EvDo is "10 times faster than any modem"... well since modems (and I do believe they are talking about dial up modems, not cable modems) only get up to 56kbps, we're talking about a whopping big 560kbs... My 802.11g gives me 54Mbps. The spectrum concerns are also real. Cell phone companies are not going to give up revenue generating bandwidth for a new service that people aren't screaming for.
It seems like common sense to me to say that the initial perception of an object is like a reflex. Think about speach or hearing in general. If your mother speaks to you, you don't have to listen to her to know that it's her, you just know. Your brain makes the determination as to who is speaking and you simply know.
Now let's say you are talking to someone for the very first time. Do you instantly recognize their voice? Of course not, you've never heard it before. Do you recognize it as a human voice? Yes you do, unless they've had a trachiotomy or something. The brain of course makes this determination and tells you that it's a person not a dog or a cat, etc.. Now the next time you speak with this person, the voice may be more familiar. Each successive time you speak with them, your chances of accurately identifying the voice without having to think about it go up.
Certainly some aspects of our visual system are inherited, the fact that we can distinguish between red and green even thought there is little contrast in their brightness. Or the fact that our vision is best suited to naturally lighted (read sunlight) situations. These are basic adaptations of our visual system, both sensors and processing, to the environment in which it evolved.
What the article seems to be saying is that all less basic aspects of our visual system are learned. For example, you may not know what type of car is driving in front of you in traffic, however after you get the latest Road & Track and read about model X, you begin to recognize the car without having to think about it. I'm not saying the article is banal, I'm simply saying that what it talks about seems like common sense. That said, I think it is important to scientifically explore things that seem like common sense, because if we were to simply dismiss a line of inquiry because the answer seemed like common sense, we would often miss out on some very interesting discoveries.
I don't know where to begin. Let's see... I don't think that human hearing is a "cybernetic system". Seems to me that some form of man made technology needs to be incorporated into something before it becomes cybernetic. That said, the author here has no concept of either human perception or compression technology. How bout this concept: imagery, including photography, art, motion pictures, etc. may damage our visual abilities because it provides us with a reduced visual data set. Looking at television, movies, photographs, paintings, drawings, cartoons, etc. will not adequatly stimulate our cybernetic vision and so slowly our visual abilities will atrophy to the point where they only respond to cartoons. Two words... horse shit.
Compression technology works on the underlying information in a signal. Lossy compression throws away different information in different circumstances, so even if the preposterous concepts proposed in this article were true, there would be no overarching set of data we were no longer subjected to and so no long term alteration of our perception would be evident.
That said, this article is probably a joke. At least I hope it is.
gonna have to start putting them in cases
on
87GB On DVD-Sized Media
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't know about you folks, but I'm of the opinion that the CD/DVD format is on it's way out. I don't mean that CD's or DVD's are going away, simply that newer denser media won't look like those disks. The problem is this, as the spacial density of the data on the disk increases, the impact due to scratching increases. Instead of obliterating x number of bits, a scratch on a more dense media obliterates many times x bits.
This can be mitigated by using error correcting codes. The cost of these codes is that the number of bits required to represent the same amount of real data goes up. At some point on the density curve we will reach a point where the amount of error correction bits required to make the media immune to most normal scratches will equal the added amount of information storage due to a higher density.
We are already starting to see this with DVD's. How many times have you rented a DVD and it gets skippy and/or halts. Then when you eject it and look to see if it is scratched you see a few scratches that you know wouldn't even give your CD player pause were they to occur on a CD. That's because when the CD format was created they had a quarter inch rule in the standard. The error correction had to be able to withstand a quarter inch hole being punched in the CD. A DVD certainly can't handle that.
What we will begin to find in our exposed media disks is that a higher and higher percentage of the available bit positions on the disk will have to be devoted to error correction. Thus a boost of n in the density won't corrispond to a boost in the actual amount of usable data stored on the disk. The solution, of course, is to put the media in a case, like a 3 1/2" disk for example. This mitigates the risk of actually scratching the disk and so we wouldn't need such a high degree of error correction. We would have those bits to store actual data in.
Exactly. I find, especially in the arena of communications and RF (my fields), that the things making the news are laughably old-hat most of the time. That said, the ways in which these basic technologies are commercialized are often, as in this case, quite nifty.
I don't think so. If you figure that most users will be in the same plane as the antenna arrays, then you don't need to cover as much of the sphere as if you assumed a three dimensional population of your space. Also if you look at the distance gains they talk about, they're not huge, so by definition the directivity isn't huge. My guess is that they have a handfull of beams that they can stear to cover most of they're immediate surroundings. Each beam would probably encompass several users, and as the constellation of users changes over time, the beams could, at a low update rate, track the user population.
One interesting thing is that, given enough elements in the arrays, they could sharpen or broaden the beamwidths as demand required it. For example if you had 10 users up close and one far away, you could broaden one beam and serve the 10 close users, and then narrow up another beam and direct it to the distant user. Alot of possibilities here. Again, very interesting, but not ground breaking.
Nothing new here. All it is is a phased array. By definition a phased array is directive, meaning it only covers a portion of the spherical space around the antenna. The reason this is good, is because directivity means gain. So yes, this new antenna will increase range, but only in a given direction. There are antenna schemes for 802.11b that get 10's of miles in range by using very directive antennas. There have been some articles on slashdot about this. The only interesting thing here is that the directivity is achieved by a phased array so it should be stearable. They may scan the 3 dimensional space (but this will cut availabitlity and thus bandwidth at any point). Or they may be able to stear multiple beams to point at areas with a concentration of devices. They may even be able to do it on the fly as demand changes, but there is no big breakthrough here. This technology is older than I am and probably older than most of you too.
True, but no one died. There was a great article on CNN's website last year detailing soccer deaths over the years and the numbers were staggering. Hundreds killed at some games: Riots, stampedes, brawls, people being crushed under foot or up against fences, balconies collapsing under the pressure of people rushing to the front. I particularly like the list of some of the more interesting things confiscated from hooligans as they entered the stadiums. My personal favorite was a radial saw. And let's not forget, that soccer hooligans have their own video game. Face it... soccer is a violent sport.
There certainly are many engineers who like cookie cutter designs. They become masters of a software package that does the design more than masters of the type of engineering the design requires. But at the same time, there are many engineers who can take these tools and do truely revolutionary things with them. These tools help you deal with the been there done that parts of your design while freeing you up to think about what hasn't been done before.
No one thinks that the calculator has hobled todays engineer simply because he no longer has to do long division. The calculator let's the engineer think about what the numbers mean without having to worry about whether or not he/she has remembered to carry the one.
By all means I agree that automotive pollution levels will be decreased by using fuel cells. Don't get me wrong. I'm just saying that fuel cells are always billed as putting an end to automotive pollution and that is just plain false. I hate when people twist the truth through omission to sell things to the public. It's not even that they outwardly claim fuel cells will be an end to pollution, it's the fact that they are always saying, "the only emissions come in the form of water vapor". They project a false sense of harmlessness that really irks me. It's an improvement that's all.
Also, the fact that fuel cells will be placed in other devices to replace their batteries does mean that some of the gains made in the automotive field will be lost by increased number of polluting devices. That said, I am all for fuel cells. They do indeed represent a marked improvement in efficiency and emissions. It's just the way they are sold to the public that upsets me.
Not quite, but I see where you are going. With that logic, burning fossil fuels results in no net increases in pollutants either. However, they have changed form and locale. As in real estate, the 3 big things with pollution are location, location, and location. No one cares about veins of Uranium buried deep down in the earths crust, but put that stuff in your local park and people might have a problem with it. Ozone in the upper atmosphere, no big deal, at street level it's a problem. CFC's in a can... who cares, in the atmosphere look out. H2 locked up in some field, big whoop, but floating around free in our atmosphere at increasing levels... problems. Nothing we do changes the net value of anything on our planet very much, it's the form and position of pollutants that causes a problem. If I lived in an old building with asbestos insulation it would make a hell of a difference to me if the asbestos was free floating or sealed up in the walls... I wouldn't care that as a closed system, the net amount of asbestos in my apartment is the same in both situations.
That's pretty vacuous. Look up at the sky... you see tons of CO2 (well you don't actually see it, but since all plant life on earth hasn't wilted and died, there's a pretty good chance that it is out there). According to your logic, we shouldn't care about the CO2 emmissions of our vehicles. But we do.
Looking at a fuel cell vehicle, if you exhaust all of the H2 in your tank, all of the H2 is converted to H20... that's more than a few drops. Your position is basicly that we can't effect the environment with our tailpipe emissions; a position which has been, to everyone but the U.S. gov't, definitively proven wrong.
I see your point. Internal combustion does produce H20 as well. I'm not sure what the relative amounts are between fuel cells using H2 or methane or other suitable fuels and ICE's so I can't really say with any certainty that the car produced H20 emissions would go up/down/stay the same.
However when we start talking about replacing batteries with fuel cells we are taking a whole spectrum of products that used to produce solid chemical waste (used batteries) and turning them into producers of green house gases.
As for what to do with the condensed water, I say store it on board. Yes there is a cost in space (space for water tank) and weight (added weight of the Oxygen from the reaction), but now there is also added utility. You could use solar power (even a small installation of panels could be helpfull) to slowly electrolyze the water and produce H2 again. You could also plug the car in at home to electrolyze the water in the tank. There would be loss in the system, so occasionally you would have to top off with some H2, but the benefit is that you rarely have to visit an H2 station and so the infrastructure demands on an H2 economy decrease. Also if you start with a fuel like methane, after 1 pass through your system you've converted it all to pollutants (some Carbon compounds released into the air)and water/available H2 so next time you use it (after electrolyzing the water again) your emissions are zero again even though you started with a "dirty" fuel to begin with.
I didn't read this article, mainly because I'm tired of seeing the same old rosy picture of fuel cells presented without talking about their one big problem. I don't think I've read one article that mentions this, but water vapor is a green house gas. In the latest Scientific American issue, there is an article about the Hy-Wire fuel cell concept. In this article they mention how clean burning fuel cells can be. When fueled with pure hydrogen, the only emissions come in the form of water vapor. That's great, no Ozone, no CO2, no sulfer, no soot. Indeed a huge improvement. Not to mention that they are twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. But all of those plusses aside, there is no talk of the fact that water vapor is a green house gas. Plus, if you are living in a dry climate that can get rather warm (read the desert southwest) and you start pumping out tons of water vapor from all of the new clean cars in your city, pretty soon it's going to be muggy, miserable, and it will effect the local environment. There's a simple solution, condense the water vapor out of your exhaust and store the water in a collection tank. It can be electrolyzed later to reclaim the hydrogen. But no one talks about this. Sorry to rant, but I find it a little bothersome. There are of course issues that would have to be addressed in a water collection scheme, but I'm done typing for now. Just my opinion... I could be wrong.
The OMAP chip integrates a DSP and an ARM processor. There is no analog circuitry in the OMAP. I haven't read the intel article, but my guess is they are talking about integrating true analog components onto a chip such as simple mixers and VCO's. These would serve to perform a final downconvert for the incoming signal which would then be fed into an on chip A/D so the information could pass to the digital circuitry. This would be a fixed architecture targetted to a specific comm standard. There are already some chips that have both digital and analog components integrated onto the same wafer. The Programmable System on a Chip (PSOC) line from Cypress Semiconductor allows for programmable digital and analog blocks on one chip giving you the core of a CPLD and the ability to graft on custom filters and amps (abliet simple ones) and varying A/D's and DACS all on the same piece of silicon. That can mean some truely usefull real estate savings when laying out your design.
I totally agree with the concepts in this article. The level of interest in a message goes down the more people there are on the list. However for spam I don't think this matters. Basicly what we're talking about here is a law of diminishing returns. The more people you send it to the less likely each person is to respond. But so what? If you are a spammer you can overcome the resulting reluctance to act on the part of your targets by simply hitting many more targets. For these people any extra response, even at a diminishing rate, is a success. And I'm sure sales people don't see an extra cost in sending a message to 1 million people over 100,000. There may be a cost in bandwidth, but I'd bet the ad people can't even spell it. So to them if 100,000 mails gets you 300 responses and 1 million gets you an extra 100 for a total of 400, then send the 1 million. Plus, I'm willing to bet that this bystander issue mentioned in the article peters out at a certain level. If I get a message sent to 1,000 people and then I get one sent to 2,000 people, I'm not going to know the difference. It's not like I'd count the number of people on the list. My guess is that the law of diminishing returns, in this case, stops diminishing at some point.
Mass is certainly the issue. I think anti-matter will find applications in exploration of the solar system including far flung regions like the oort cloud; however I agree with you that on its own it can't solve the intersteller dilemma.
I think your concern about anti-matter technology falling into the wrong hands is a little bit premature. Let's not forget that propulsion difficulties really originate from the fact that the energy densities of any fuel are so low that to generate enough energy for significant propulsion you have to have so much fuel that the fuels own mass becomes a problem. The more energy you need the more massive the craft has to be to contain the fuel. If a craft didn't have the mass of the fuel/propulsion system it wouldn't need anywhere neer the amount of energy produced by today's launch vehicles/space craft to satisfy their thrust needs.
What all this means is that the amount of anti-matter fuel needed to propel a craft would be very small and would in fact need to produce less energy than todays rockets do. It wouldn't have to lift as much (no real mass contribution from the propulsion system). Basicly this means that the amount of anti-matter needed to be usefull wouldn't have as much punch as the booster rockets on the space shuttle, so it certainly wouldn't be capable of destroying the planet. I know this was a little bit rambling, but I hope you get my point. The Zero-Point stuff is also very interesting. It get's to the main crux of the problem of lowering the mass of the craft. And that's really what an anti-matter propulsion system does. It doesn't give the craft more punch (it actually lowers it), it simply lowers the mass of the craft more than it lowers the punch of the propulsion system.
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ahhh, I see. I just thought the first one was a typo, or maybe some kind of range, as in " from 10 to 10^1.42 meters". Actually I thought the whole distance thing was a typo.
It sounds like you are living in a very small universe. From the numbers in your post it sounds like the farthest observable object in your universe is ~26.3 meters away from you (that is 10^1.42 meters if I'm not mistaken). Time to leave the house I think.
I don't know about that. An ideal car has a 50-50 front/rear weight distribution. Most likely the car in the add is a little front heavy (that's where the engine is). But if it were at 50-50 or even biased toward the rear a little, it wouldn't take much weight added to the front to cause it to tip. Technically speaking, in a frictionless world, you would only have to have a miniscule amount of extra weight (ounces... grams) in the front to get it to tip that way. In the real world, all you need is enough weight up front (e.g. enough force) to overcome the static friction of the pivot point. The more front heavy the setup, the faster the front end would accelerate downward, that's all.
This is an old lesson. When Ford Motor Company was first founded they built the best cars possible. They never broke down, and they needed little maintanance. This happened very early on... we're talking Model T times here. The result was, that after the first round of sales Ford had saturated the market with long lasting cars, and the number of potential customers plummeted. The company almost folded. Ford wised up and started manufacturing their cars differently so that the cars would undergo increased wear and tear and eventually need repair. This, along with some clever marketing, is known as "Engineered Obsolescence". It allows a company to maintain a customer base by not putting itself out of business.
It was Ben Franklin who said it (he said most of the good stuff didn't he) and I believe it went something (although not exactly) like this:
"He who would trade a little freedom for a little security deserves neither."
EvDo looks interesting, but this article reads like a paid advertisement. The article says that EvDo is "10 times faster than any modem"... well since modems (and I do believe they are talking about dial up modems, not cable modems) only get up to 56kbps, we're talking about a whopping big 560kbs... My 802.11g gives me 54Mbps. The spectrum concerns are also real. Cell phone companies are not going to give up revenue generating bandwidth for a new service that people aren't screaming for.
Now let's say you are talking to someone for the very first time. Do you instantly recognize their voice? Of course not, you've never heard it before. Do you recognize it as a human voice? Yes you do, unless they've had a trachiotomy or something. The brain of course makes this determination and tells you that it's a person not a dog or a cat, etc.. Now the next time you speak with this person, the voice may be more familiar. Each successive time you speak with them, your chances of accurately identifying the voice without having to think about it go up.
Certainly some aspects of our visual system are inherited, the fact that we can distinguish between red and green even thought there is little contrast in their brightness. Or the fact that our vision is best suited to naturally lighted (read sunlight) situations. These are basic adaptations of our visual system, both sensors and processing, to the environment in which it evolved.
What the article seems to be saying is that all less basic aspects of our visual system are learned. For example, you may not know what type of car is driving in front of you in traffic, however after you get the latest Road & Track and read about model X, you begin to recognize the car without having to think about it. I'm not saying the article is banal, I'm simply saying that what it talks about seems like common sense. That said, I think it is important to scientifically explore things that seem like common sense, because if we were to simply dismiss a line of inquiry because the answer seemed like common sense, we would often miss out on some very interesting discoveries.
Compression technology works on the underlying information in a signal. Lossy compression throws away different information in different circumstances, so even if the preposterous concepts proposed in this article were true, there would be no overarching set of data we were no longer subjected to and so no long term alteration of our perception would be evident.
That said, this article is probably a joke. At least I hope it is.
I don't know about you folks, but I'm of the opinion that the CD/DVD format is on it's way out. I don't mean that CD's or DVD's are going away, simply that newer denser media won't look like those disks. The problem is this, as the spacial density of the data on the disk increases, the impact due to scratching increases. Instead of obliterating x number of bits, a scratch on a more dense media obliterates many times x bits.
This can be mitigated by using error correcting codes. The cost of these codes is that the number of bits required to represent the same amount of real data goes up. At some point on the density curve we will reach a point where the amount of error correction bits required to make the media immune to most normal scratches will equal the added amount of information storage due to a higher density.
We are already starting to see this with DVD's. How many times have you rented a DVD and it gets skippy and/or halts. Then when you eject it and look to see if it is scratched you see a few scratches that you know wouldn't even give your CD player pause were they to occur on a CD. That's because when the CD format was created they had a quarter inch rule in the standard. The error correction had to be able to withstand a quarter inch hole being punched in the CD. A DVD certainly can't handle that.
What we will begin to find in our exposed media disks is that a higher and higher percentage of the available bit positions on the disk will have to be devoted to error correction. Thus a boost of n in the density won't corrispond to a boost in the actual amount of usable data stored on the disk. The solution, of course, is to put the media in a case, like a 3 1/2" disk for example. This mitigates the risk of actually scratching the disk and so we wouldn't need such a high degree of error correction. We would have those bits to store actual data in.
Exactly. I find, especially in the arena of communications and RF (my fields), that the things making the news are laughably old-hat most of the time. That said, the ways in which these basic technologies are commercialized are often, as in this case, quite nifty.
One interesting thing is that, given enough elements in the arrays, they could sharpen or broaden the beamwidths as demand required it. For example if you had 10 users up close and one far away, you could broaden one beam and serve the 10 close users, and then narrow up another beam and direct it to the distant user. Alot of possibilities here. Again, very interesting, but not ground breaking.
Nothing new here. All it is is a phased array. By definition a phased array is directive, meaning it only covers a portion of the spherical space around the antenna. The reason this is good, is because directivity means gain. So yes, this new antenna will increase range, but only in a given direction. There are antenna schemes for 802.11b that get 10's of miles in range by using very directive antennas. There have been some articles on slashdot about this. The only interesting thing here is that the directivity is achieved by a phased array so it should be stearable. They may scan the 3 dimensional space (but this will cut availabitlity and thus bandwidth at any point). Or they may be able to stear multiple beams to point at areas with a concentration of devices. They may even be able to do it on the fly as demand changes, but there is no big breakthrough here. This technology is older than I am and probably older than most of you too.
True, but no one died. There was a great article on CNN's website last year detailing soccer deaths over the years and the numbers were staggering. Hundreds killed at some games: Riots, stampedes, brawls, people being crushed under foot or up against fences, balconies collapsing under the pressure of people rushing to the front. I particularly like the list of some of the more interesting things confiscated from hooligans as they entered the stadiums. My personal favorite was a radial saw. And let's not forget, that soccer hooligans have their own video game. Face it... soccer is a violent sport.
So if they've got human DNA do they taste like chicken now... or do they still taste like pork?
No one thinks that the calculator has hobled todays engineer simply because he no longer has to do long division. The calculator let's the engineer think about what the numbers mean without having to worry about whether or not he/she has remembered to carry the one.
Also, the fact that fuel cells will be placed in other devices to replace their batteries does mean that some of the gains made in the automotive field will be lost by increased number of polluting devices. That said, I am all for fuel cells. They do indeed represent a marked improvement in efficiency and emissions. It's just the way they are sold to the public that upsets me.
Not quite, but I see where you are going. With that logic, burning fossil fuels results in no net increases in pollutants either. However, they have changed form and locale. As in real estate, the 3 big things with pollution are location, location, and location. No one cares about veins of Uranium buried deep down in the earths crust, but put that stuff in your local park and people might have a problem with it. Ozone in the upper atmosphere, no big deal, at street level it's a problem. CFC's in a can... who cares, in the atmosphere look out. H2 locked up in some field, big whoop, but floating around free in our atmosphere at increasing levels... problems. Nothing we do changes the net value of anything on our planet very much, it's the form and position of pollutants that causes a problem. If I lived in an old building with asbestos insulation it would make a hell of a difference to me if the asbestos was free floating or sealed up in the walls... I wouldn't care that as a closed system, the net amount of asbestos in my apartment is the same in both situations.
Looking at a fuel cell vehicle, if you exhaust all of the H2 in your tank, all of the H2 is converted to H20... that's more than a few drops. Your position is basicly that we can't effect the environment with our tailpipe emissions; a position which has been, to everyone but the U.S. gov't, definitively proven wrong.
However when we start talking about replacing batteries with fuel cells we are taking a whole spectrum of products that used to produce solid chemical waste (used batteries) and turning them into producers of green house gases.
As for what to do with the condensed water, I say store it on board. Yes there is a cost in space (space for water tank) and weight (added weight of the Oxygen from the reaction), but now there is also added utility. You could use solar power (even a small installation of panels could be helpfull) to slowly electrolyze the water and produce H2 again. You could also plug the car in at home to electrolyze the water in the tank. There would be loss in the system, so occasionally you would have to top off with some H2, but the benefit is that you rarely have to visit an H2 station and so the infrastructure demands on an H2 economy decrease. Also if you start with a fuel like methane, after 1 pass through your system you've converted it all to pollutants (some Carbon compounds released into the air)and water/available H2 so next time you use it (after electrolyzing the water again) your emissions are zero again even though you started with a "dirty" fuel to begin with.
I didn't read this article, mainly because I'm tired of seeing the same old rosy picture of fuel cells presented without talking about their one big problem. I don't think I've read one article that mentions this, but water vapor is a green house gas. In the latest Scientific American issue, there is an article about the Hy-Wire fuel cell concept. In this article they mention how clean burning fuel cells can be. When fueled with pure hydrogen, the only emissions come in the form of water vapor. That's great, no Ozone, no CO2, no sulfer, no soot. Indeed a huge improvement. Not to mention that they are twice as efficient as internal combustion engines. But all of those plusses aside, there is no talk of the fact that water vapor is a green house gas. Plus, if you are living in a dry climate that can get rather warm (read the desert southwest) and you start pumping out tons of water vapor from all of the new clean cars in your city, pretty soon it's going to be muggy, miserable, and it will effect the local environment. There's a simple solution, condense the water vapor out of your exhaust and store the water in a collection tank. It can be electrolyzed later to reclaim the hydrogen. But no one talks about this. Sorry to rant, but I find it a little bothersome. There are of course issues that would have to be addressed in a water collection scheme, but I'm done typing for now. Just my opinion... I could be wrong.
The OMAP chip integrates a DSP and an ARM processor. There is no analog circuitry in the OMAP. I haven't read the intel article, but my guess is they are talking about integrating true analog components onto a chip such as simple mixers and VCO's. These would serve to perform a final downconvert for the incoming signal which would then be fed into an on chip A/D so the information could pass to the digital circuitry. This would be a fixed architecture targetted to a specific comm standard. There are already some chips that have both digital and analog components integrated onto the same wafer. The Programmable System on a Chip (PSOC) line from Cypress Semiconductor allows for programmable digital and analog blocks on one chip giving you the core of a CPLD and the ability to graft on custom filters and amps (abliet simple ones) and varying A/D's and DACS all on the same piece of silicon. That can mean some truely usefull real estate savings when laying out your design.
Only a former microsoft security executive would suggest hooking someones pacemaker up to the internet.... Asinine!
I totally agree with the concepts in this article. The level of interest in a message goes down the more people there are on the list. However for spam I don't think this matters. Basicly what we're talking about here is a law of diminishing returns. The more people you send it to the less likely each person is to respond. But so what? If you are a spammer you can overcome the resulting reluctance to act on the part of your targets by simply hitting many more targets. For these people any extra response, even at a diminishing rate, is a success. And I'm sure sales people don't see an extra cost in sending a message to 1 million people over 100,000. There may be a cost in bandwidth, but I'd bet the ad people can't even spell it. So to them if 100,000 mails gets you 300 responses and 1 million gets you an extra 100 for a total of 400, then send the 1 million. Plus, I'm willing to bet that this bystander issue mentioned in the article peters out at a certain level. If I get a message sent to 1,000 people and then I get one sent to 2,000 people, I'm not going to know the difference. It's not like I'd count the number of people on the list. My guess is that the law of diminishing returns, in this case, stops diminishing at some point.
Mass is certainly the issue. I think anti-matter will find applications in exploration of the solar system including far flung regions like the oort cloud; however I agree with you that on its own it can't solve the intersteller dilemma.
I think your concern about anti-matter technology falling into the wrong hands is a little bit premature. Let's not forget that propulsion difficulties really originate from the fact that the energy densities of any fuel are so low that to generate enough energy for significant propulsion you have to have so much fuel that the fuels own mass becomes a problem. The more energy you need the more massive the craft has to be to contain the fuel. If a craft didn't have the mass of the fuel/propulsion system it wouldn't need anywhere neer the amount of energy produced by today's launch vehicles/space craft to satisfy their thrust needs.
What all this means is that the amount of anti-matter fuel needed to propel a craft would be very small and would in fact need to produce less energy than todays rockets do. It wouldn't have to lift as much (no real mass contribution from the propulsion system). Basicly this means that the amount of anti-matter needed to be usefull wouldn't have as much punch as the booster rockets on the space shuttle, so it certainly wouldn't be capable of destroying the planet. I know this was a little bit rambling, but I hope you get my point. The Zero-Point stuff is also very interesting. It get's to the main crux of the problem of lowering the mass of the craft. And that's really what an anti-matter propulsion system does. It doesn't give the craft more punch (it actually lowers it), it simply lowers the mass of the craft more than it lowers the punch of the propulsion system.