If anybody tries/has tried this, I implore them to please post links to photos.
Sorry, no photos, but I, er, a friend was once involved in trashing someone's dorm room by a similar method involving, not paint, but a couple of custard tarts (residence food -- what else is it good for?) and a large firecracker. As luck (and a bit of planning) would have it, the firecracker detonated just as the occupant was about to open the door, so he heard the BANG!
Cringely, and the comments I've seen here, miss a significant point. Suppose Eolas is bought out by IBM or AOLTW or some such. If whoever buys them out has a patent cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft (and such agreements are pretty common, letting company A use B's patents in return for company B using A's patents), then Microsoft still gets to use it.
But nobody who is not a party to such cross-licensing does. (This is what companies mean about software patents "for defensive purposes".)
The term "flash crowd" goes back waaay before Slashdot ever existed (1973). It was coined by Larry Niven in a short story of that name (concerning *actual* crowds in an era where teleport booths are as ubiquitous as phone booths).
Aluminum makes a far better ceramic when oxidized: extremely hard, temperature resistant, transparent in crystalline form, and if you mix a bit of chromium in, it'll even lase. It's called corundum, or sapphire in crystalline form (or ruby with a little chromium added).
I'd call a calutron more of a mass spectrometer than a "modified cyclotron". Sure, Lawrence modified his cyclotron to demonstrate electromagnetic separation, but the beam in a calutron doesn't continuously circle to boost to higher energies as it does in a cyclotron, it just bends a half-turn (with slight variation depending on ion mass).
explaining why those tubes are no kind of evidence at all.
Actually that story does nothing of the sort. Oh sure, it ridicules some of the evidence, but it neither denies the existence of the tubes nor provides an alternative, innocent use for them.
A much more even-handed story is this one, which goes into considerable detail about the Iraqi centrifuge program and also details some other possible (but still weapons-related) uses for the tubing.
Ah, but the real trick is in clicking those subcritical masses together quickly enough, and holding them together long enough, for the whole thing to go "KABOOM!" rather than just fizzle into a scattered mess of melted and shattered chunks of fissionable material that has just showered you and some of the neighbors with a very lethal dose of gamma and neutrons.
Recall that some nuclear workers have seen the pretty blue flash from nuclear material accidentally going critical and lived long enough to tell the cleanup crew about it.
Same principle as burning gunpowder in a little pile (makes a nice ball of flame) vs confined as in a firecracker (makes a nice if not Earth-shattering kaboom).
This should not have been modded up as insightful, but rather modded down as disinformative.
Where to begin?
Yes, the Hiroshima bomb ("Little Boy") was of the enriched-uranium type, but the uranium was enriched in gas centrifuges, not cyclotrons. (As uranium hexafluoride gas, with the U235 hexafluoride being somewhat lighter than U238 hexafluoride).
The Nagasaki bomb ("Fat Man") was of the plutonium implosion type, no uranium involved. It was originally targeted for the arsenal at Kokura, but the weather forced diversion to the backup target (Nagasaki).
The actual yield of the Nagasaki bomb was about 33% greater than Hiroshima (21kt vs 15-16kt), not "not that much smaller".
The only thing a cyclotron has in common with a gas centrifuge is that stuff goes around in circles in both.
It's useful for those badly-written apps that are too stupid to adapt themselves to the display model (resolution, color depth, etc) that the user has chosen, and instead insist on assuming or setting the display to whatever the original lazy programmer wanted.
These tend to be more prevalent in the proprietary software world.
Everyone is treating this like it's some super great accomplishment. Windows has allowed this since Windows 95, and the Mac since System 7.x.
Windows has never had -- and still doesn't -- rotation, which the XRandR also provides. Cool, now I can tilt my monitor on its side and view things in portrait mode.
The Mac supported this with certain display hardware (the Radius Pivot comes to mind), but most Mac hardware (of System 7 vintage, anyway) didn't support any resizing, dynamic or otherwise.
I can click the [Windows] start menu and it draws instantly. I can still see Gnome and KDE menus paint across the screen chunkily -- yes, this is on a P-4 machine with whizzy graphics cards, a gig of RAM, etc.
Then something is seriously fucked up with your Linux/X server configuration. I'm typing this on a P-III 550 with 512 MB RAM and a Matrox 200 graphics card, and "instant" is the word I'd use for the graphics. On a P-166 with 64MB and cheap S3 ViRGE graphics, it's a little slower to start drawing a menu, but once it does start the menu appears quickly, none of this "chunkily" stuff.
Makes you wonder why all those thin clients that boot Linux + X11 do it not to connect to an X server, but to run Citrix's ICA client for Linux to connect to a Windows 2000 server.
Umm, maybe because Windows 2000 server doesn't speak X Windows? (So, how do I set the DISPLAY variable in Win2K?)
Worker bees are genetically related to (daughters or sisters) the hive queen. Anything they do that helps the queen ultimately produce more queens (new hives) is an evolutionary plus.
It's actually a gene expression thing. Female bee larvae normally turn into workers unless fed a special diet ("royal jelly") which causes the genes for queendom to express themselves. If a hive loses it's queen, the workers will switch the diet of a handful of larvae (the first queen to hatch will kill the rest).
Actually we do have a lot of 2D tools available, if not exactly pre-press tools. Many of them were originally developed under Unix and Xlib rather than using the Gtk or Qt toolkits, so aren't part of either of the "standard" Linux desktops (although are certainly usable with same). Some of them are under oddball licenses (eg 'tgif' has free-as-in-beer and QPL type licenses).
Examples: tgif, xfig, pstoedit, gnuplot, xgraph, fig2java, xv, and so on. I find tgif useful for laying out EPS and PS files (you can draw and edit too), xfig is a nice general vector draw tool.
I recall the Burroughs B6500/6700/etc machines (late 1960s original design) had a linked-list-lookup instruction (which among other things was used in memory allocation), also some instructions for doing edits on strings. The VAX of course had instructions for calculating polynomials and do cyclic redundancy checks.
So now we get opcodes to do 'send TCP/IP packet' and such? Cool, I'm all for moving functionality to hardware if it's standardized and if it speeds things up. (Which is why we all like real modems over winmodems, right?)
Writing compilers for that stuff gets interesting, though.
Nice comparison. Lego and Meccano (aka "Erector Set" in the US) are toys too, but can be darn educational and occasionally useful. And fun.
Re:Why does a 15" LCD TV cost 3x an LCD display?
on
15" OLED Display Prototype
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I can't say I know the reason for the price difference, but possible reasons are related to the different requirements of an NTSC video vs computer VGA (SVGA, etc) display:
different gamma curves
different persistence (you don't want ghosting on the TV)
wider viewing angle (without color change) for the TV
Actually the INS is part of the Department of Justice. I think the only reason State gets involved is because they're running the embassy. Or perhaps there's a split in responsibility between visitor visas and immigration visas.
Just have the INS issue Dmitry a K-1 visa, which will automatically expire in a couple of months when he doesn't marry a US citizen. (The K-1 is a "fiance(e) visa" to allow someone into the country to get married.) (And yes, I'm kidding.)
You are correct. Most rubbing alcohol is about 70% isopopyl alchol (isopropanol), the rest being water and maybe some scents or oils or whatnot.
Methanol (aka methyl alcohol or wood alcohol) is widely available as gas-line antifreeze for cars. (Well, widely in climates cold enough to need it. You might not find it south of the snow belt.) Since the methanol is hygroscopic, it absorbs any water in the gas tank/gas line and also lowers its freezing point.
Take a 2 liter empty pop bottle (plastic!). Drill a 1/4 inch hole in the cap. Pour about a spoonful of alcohol (eg rubbing alcohol -- it has to be concentrated enough to burn) into the bottle, swirl around, and dump out the excess. Put the cap (with hole) on the bottle and carefully hold a flame to the hole.
If you get the fuel-air mixture right (this may take some practise) the rocket will launch itself a good 10 feet or so vertically, maybe 20 or 30 foot range if launched at an angle.
I've never seen one of these burst (those bottles ought to hold over 100 psi), but you never know -- you might have a defective bottle. And you are playing with fire. Beware bursting and fire hazards.
(Or, in the words of the motto of the Denver Mad Scientists Club, "sumus scientes, noli hic domi temptare" (we're scientists, don't try this at home).)
Well, you could patent the idea of wrangling sprockets if nobody had ever done that before and a wrangled sprocket was somehow useful (and the PTO can stretch the definition of "useful" to amazing lengths sometimes). You'd have to show at least one method/apparatus for wrangling sprockets, but in the claims you could cover the whole idea.
That wouldn't prevent somebody else from patenting a different method of wrangling sprockets, but anyone wanting to use that method would have to licences both that patent (the specific implementation) and your original patent (the idea) so as not to infringe.
There are lots of patented inventions that are refinements or alternative implementations to other existing patents -- to which they must refer. As long as they're not duplicating a claim in the original patent (ie they're only claiming the improvement or alternative) those patents will be issued, but whoever wants to build the improved sprocket wrangler will also need a license for the idea of wrangling sprockets.
It all depends on the specific claims, and yes, the idea can be claimed. But it also needs to be reduced to practise for the patent to issue. (Thus, Arthur Clarke might have been issued a patent for geosynchronous communication satellites back in 1945 when he described the idea, had he applied. He definitely would have been issued such if he'd shown a way to get them up there. Since he never applied, the point is moot, and in any case it would have expired by the time we had rockets capable of putting sats there.)
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This belongs on your virtual refrigerator with nice big virtual magnet.
Dang! That big virtual magnet just erased my virtual disk...
If anybody tries/has tried this, I implore them to please post links to photos.
Sorry, no photos, but I, er, a friend was once involved in trashing someone's dorm room by a similar method involving, not paint, but a couple of custard tarts (residence food -- what else is it good for?) and a large firecracker. As luck (and a bit of planning) would have it, the firecracker detonated just as the occupant was about to open the door, so he heard the BANG!
The result was well, if not evenly, distributed.
After all, Microsoft has insisted over and over and over again that MSIE is an inseperable part of the Windows operating system.
So if Eolas wins an injunction, I guess that means that Microsoft has to stop distributing Windows, too.
Sigh. We can dream, can't we?
Cringely, and the comments I've seen here, miss a significant point. Suppose Eolas is bought out by IBM or AOLTW or some such. If whoever buys them out has a patent cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft (and such agreements are pretty common, letting company A use B's patents in return for company B using A's patents), then Microsoft still gets to use it.
But nobody who is not a party to such cross-licensing does. (This is what companies mean about software patents "for defensive purposes".)
But a drive running at 7200 RPM at greater densities can be faster than a 10000 RPM drive at lower densities
Faster at transfer rate, yes.
Faster at track-to-track seek time, very likely (tracks being closer together).
But faster in rotational latency, which is the major bottleneck, no fscking way.
The term "flash crowd" goes back waaay before Slashdot ever existed (1973). It was coined by Larry Niven in a short story of that name (concerning *actual* crowds in an era where teleport booths are as ubiquitous as phone booths).
Aluminum makes a far better ceramic when oxidized: extremely hard, temperature resistant, transparent in crystalline form, and if you mix a bit of chromium in, it'll even lase. It's called corundum, or sapphire in crystalline form (or ruby with a little chromium added).
I'd call a calutron more of a mass spectrometer than a "modified cyclotron". Sure, Lawrence modified his cyclotron to demonstrate electromagnetic separation, but the beam in a calutron doesn't continuously circle to boost to higher energies as it does in a cyclotron, it just bends a half-turn (with slight variation depending on ion mass).
Nice link, though.
explaining why those tubes are no kind of evidence at all.
Actually that story does nothing of the sort. Oh sure, it ridicules some of the evidence, but it neither denies the existence of the tubes nor provides an alternative, innocent use for them.
A much more even-handed story is this one, which goes into considerable detail about the Iraqi centrifuge program and also details some other possible (but still weapons-related) uses for the tubing.
Ah, but the real trick is in clicking those subcritical masses together quickly enough, and holding them together long enough, for the whole thing to go "KABOOM!" rather than just fizzle into a scattered mess of melted and shattered chunks of fissionable material that has just showered you and some of the neighbors with a very lethal dose of gamma and neutrons.
Recall that some nuclear workers have seen the pretty blue flash from nuclear material accidentally going critical and lived long enough to tell the cleanup crew about it.
Same principle as burning gunpowder in a little pile (makes a nice ball of flame) vs confined as in a firecracker (makes a nice if not Earth-shattering kaboom).
This should not have been modded up as insightful, but rather modded down as disinformative.
Where to begin?
Yes, the Hiroshima bomb ("Little Boy") was of the enriched-uranium type, but the uranium was enriched in gas centrifuges, not cyclotrons. (As uranium hexafluoride gas, with the U235 hexafluoride being somewhat lighter than U238 hexafluoride).
The Nagasaki bomb ("Fat Man") was of the plutonium implosion type, no uranium involved. It was originally targeted for the arsenal at Kokura, but the weather forced diversion to the backup target (Nagasaki).
The actual yield of the Nagasaki bomb was about 33% greater than Hiroshima (21kt vs 15-16kt), not "not that much smaller".
The only thing a cyclotron has in common with a gas centrifuge is that stuff goes around in circles in both.
It's useful for those badly-written apps that are too stupid to adapt themselves to the display model (resolution, color depth, etc) that the user has chosen, and instead insist on assuming or setting the display to whatever the original lazy programmer wanted.
These tend to be more prevalent in the proprietary software world.
and now dynamic sizing/resizing in X.
Everyone is treating this like it's some super great accomplishment. Windows has allowed this since Windows 95, and the Mac since System 7.x.
Windows has never had -- and still doesn't -- rotation, which the XRandR also provides. Cool, now I can tilt my monitor on its side and view things in portrait mode.
The Mac supported this with certain display hardware (the Radius Pivot comes to mind), but most Mac hardware (of System 7 vintage, anyway) didn't support any resizing, dynamic or otherwise.
I can click the [Windows] start menu and it draws instantly. I can still see Gnome and KDE menus paint across the screen chunkily -- yes, this is on a P-4 machine with whizzy graphics cards, a gig of RAM, etc.
Then something is seriously fucked up with your Linux/X server configuration. I'm typing this on a P-III 550 with 512 MB RAM and a Matrox 200 graphics card, and "instant" is the word I'd use for the graphics. On a P-166 with 64MB and cheap S3 ViRGE graphics, it's a little slower to start drawing a menu, but once it does start the menu appears quickly, none of this "chunkily" stuff.
Makes you wonder why all those thin clients that boot Linux + X11 do it not to connect to an X server, but to run Citrix's ICA client for Linux to connect to a Windows 2000 server.
Umm, maybe because Windows 2000 server doesn't speak X Windows? (So, how do I set the DISPLAY variable in Win2K?)
D'you mean /etc/sendmail.cf, perhaps?
Worker bees are genetically related to (daughters or sisters) the hive queen. Anything they do that helps the queen ultimately produce more queens (new hives) is an evolutionary plus.
It's actually a gene expression thing. Female bee larvae normally turn into workers unless fed a special diet ("royal jelly") which causes the genes for queendom to express themselves. If a hive loses it's queen, the workers will switch the diet of a handful of larvae (the first queen to hatch will kill the rest).
Actually we do have a lot of 2D tools available, if not exactly pre-press tools. Many of them were originally developed under Unix and Xlib rather than using the Gtk or Qt toolkits, so aren't part of either of the "standard" Linux desktops (although are certainly usable with same). Some of them are under oddball licenses (eg 'tgif' has free-as-in-beer and QPL type licenses).
Examples: tgif, xfig, pstoedit, gnuplot, xgraph, fig2java, xv, and so on. I find tgif useful for laying out EPS and PS files (you can draw and edit too), xfig is a nice general vector draw tool.
Not to worry. Master Control Program (MCP) is a Burroughs operating system, not IBM.
And we cycle back to CISC machines again...
I recall the Burroughs B6500/6700/etc machines (late 1960s original design) had a linked-list-lookup instruction (which among other things was used in memory allocation), also some instructions for doing edits on strings. The VAX of course had instructions for calculating polynomials and do cyclic redundancy checks.
So now we get opcodes to do 'send TCP/IP packet' and such? Cool, I'm all for moving functionality to hardware if it's standardized and if it speeds things up. (Which is why we all like real modems over winmodems, right?)
Writing compilers for that stuff gets interesting, though.
Nice comparison. Lego and Meccano (aka "Erector Set" in the US) are toys too, but can be darn educational and occasionally useful. And fun.
Interesting troll (or joke, whatever). But even if the organic LEDs were filled with bacteria (they're not), bacteria aren't animals.
They're not plants, either. Bacteria are a kingdom all their own, neither plant nor animal (nor fungus, nor archaea).
Besides, some bacteria like to be bombarded with radiation (see Deinococcus radiodurans, for example, also known as "Conan the Bacterium").
Actually the INS is part of the Department of Justice. I think the only reason State gets involved is because they're running the embassy. Or perhaps there's a split in responsibility between visitor visas and immigration visas.
Just have the INS issue Dmitry a K-1 visa, which will automatically expire in a couple of months when he doesn't marry a US citizen. (The K-1 is a "fiance(e) visa" to allow someone into the country to get married.) (And yes, I'm kidding.)
You are correct. Most rubbing alcohol is about 70% isopopyl alchol (isopropanol), the rest being water and maybe some scents or oils or whatnot.
Methanol (aka methyl alcohol or wood alcohol) is widely available as gas-line antifreeze for cars. (Well, widely in climates cold enough to need it. You might not find it south of the snow belt.) Since the methanol is hygroscopic, it absorbs any water in the gas tank/gas line and also lowers its freezing point.
Take a 2 liter empty pop bottle (plastic!). Drill a 1/4 inch hole in the cap. Pour about a spoonful of alcohol (eg rubbing alcohol -- it has to be concentrated enough to burn) into the bottle, swirl around, and dump out the excess. Put the cap (with hole) on the bottle and carefully hold a flame to the hole.
If you get the fuel-air mixture right (this may take some practise) the rocket will launch itself a good 10 feet or so vertically, maybe 20 or 30 foot range if launched at an angle.
I've never seen one of these burst (those bottles ought to hold over 100 psi), but you never know -- you might have a defective bottle. And you are playing with fire. Beware bursting and fire hazards.
(Or, in the words of the motto of the Denver Mad Scientists Club, "sumus scientes, noli hic domi temptare" (we're scientists, don't try this at home).)
Well, you could patent the idea of wrangling sprockets if nobody had ever done that before and a wrangled sprocket was somehow useful (and the PTO can stretch the definition of "useful" to amazing lengths sometimes). You'd have to show at least one method/apparatus for wrangling sprockets, but in the claims you could cover the whole idea.
That wouldn't prevent somebody else from patenting a different method of wrangling sprockets, but anyone wanting to use that method would have to licences both that patent (the specific implementation) and your original patent (the idea) so as not to infringe.
There are lots of patented inventions that are refinements or alternative implementations to other existing patents -- to which they must refer. As long as they're not duplicating a claim in the original patent (ie they're only claiming the improvement or alternative) those patents will be issued, but whoever wants to build the improved sprocket wrangler will also need a license for the idea of wrangling sprockets.
It all depends on the specific claims, and yes, the idea can be claimed. But it also needs to be reduced to practise for the patent to issue. (Thus, Arthur Clarke might have been issued a patent for geosynchronous communication satellites back in 1945 when he described the idea, had he applied. He definitely would have been issued such if he'd shown a way to get them up there. Since he never applied, the point is moot, and in any case it would have expired by the time we had rockets capable of putting sats there.)