The reasons you mention above are the exact reasons I'm leaving my current job and going back to school for Aerospace Engineering. It's a little scary to give up a secure, well paying job to go back to grad school, but it is even scaryer to think about what the world will be like for my 3-year old when he is my age.
It's time to take action instead of being wistful and just talking about it...
Many of the things you mention have definite concequences if they are a government mandate. If they are opt-in (just like owning a phone), you can make an individual choice whether or not to participate.
There are a number of obvious abuses that can occur with such a tracking system, but there are some good uses.
For the military: tracking down wounded soldiers to bring them back to medical facilities or locating captured/MIAs.
For explorers or other remote personel: tracking down wounded or missing explorers (people still die in jungles, the outback, while hiking in the mountains, etc.)
For legal defense: a lot of people are worried that the government will be able to track them; this is a good thing if you are falsely accused and can prove that you were somewhere else.
For epidemic tracking and prevention: with diseases like SARS, it might be possible to trace back and find all the people that were exposed to a pathogen or even find a common source when non is obvious by cross referencing the paths of the victims.
For disasters: this may help locate victims of floods, avalanches, collapsed buildings, etc., especially those that aren't even known to be missing or in danger.
A few years ago, some of my dad's coworkers posted an add for a brand new Harley-Davidson motorcycle in one of those trader magazines. They listed their plant manager's number and stated that he worked evenings, so the best time to call was between 1-4 AM.
Apparently, he started getting calls from several states away from irate bikers who were pissed at HIM when he told them he wasn't selling one (he never owned a motorcycle).
Hyper as in "hyper cube" (cube in more than three dimentions where every vertex is connected with every vertex that is parallel to it)? Hyper as in hyper velocity (mach 10 and above)? Hyper as in spastic or really, really, really neato?
Is "hypercopmuter" a real word with a standardized definition?
Like the squid god or crud puppy?
on
Going Cyberpunk
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Or chips in two people's brains (one monitoring input and one controlling output) so that one of the people is basically experiencing and controlling the other body. I could see a lot of market for THAT for government, celebrities, and big business...want to go somewhere but you don't want to have to be followed by bodygards? Use a puppet body so no matter what happens to the body, you're still safe at home.
Remote control of another person's body just seems...creepy. It would be a whole new way of "selling your body" that is probably worse than the current method (i.e. prostitution).
On the other hand, it would be the holy grail of women seeking a way to make men understand what childbirth is really like.;)
The Moon Walk was cool and all but how did it change your daily life?
The Apollo Luner Module development was the driving force behind development of the integrated circuit. At one time, 90% of all integrated circuits in the _world_ were in its landing computers. And we all know how important integrated circuits are in our modern PCs...
On a slightly different vein, I applied for a job after graduation with the company that is/was developing the Crusader artillary system. I asked several different people in their organization if there was any way that their work could have civilian application. The answer was always "No" and I never worked there.
I didn't (and still don't) wan't to work for a company that _only_ provided new means of destruction--even if it was to "defend" my country. IMO, we get a higher return on money spent by NASA's than money spent by the defense department when you measure by bennefits to society (I don't count new ways of killing people as a bennefit).
NTSC video is often sampled at about 10 MHz or faster with 10 or 12 bit resolution. Calculating this way, you get 10 to 16 MB/second (round up to next byte when sampled).
3600 seconds/hour * 16 MB/second gives almost 40 GB/hour/channel. Considering the size and throughput of modern disks, you may be able to capture a few channels for an hour or so before you would have to process the data. Hmmm, I guess you could do this for almost any bandwidth if you had the appropriate frequency shifting setup. Starting to sound like a softare radio...
For the amount that you are talking about spending on hardware, you might be able to afford a high-bandwidth A2D converter configured to capture the raw signal (you may have to frequency shift it). Then you can decode it off-line and in slack time when you figure out what you want.
Same idea for for HDTV, except save the data stream.
How long do you really think it would take before someone figures out an easy way to disable the RF tag before mounting the tire? Anybody that feels they need to disable this device will probably be able to do so quite easily. Everyone else probably won't care.
I'm guessing that the intent of the tags is not to invade your privacy, but to just make it simpler for the car companies and their suppliers to collect data about things like tire wear (did the tires last as long as they should), theft (were these tires reported stolen from another vehicle), and warranty abuse (was this tire returned after it was in an accident). Doesn't sound like an invasion of privacy for its own sake, rather, data collection for determining quality and cost cutting opportunities.
I've got more than enough to think about already in the area of privacy concerns (identity theft, etc.). I'm not worried about RF tags in my tires.
William Forstchen's "Lost Regiment" series is a good one about a civil war regiment who more or less falls through the Bermuda triangle while being transported.
David Drake's "The General" series is about a war of unification on a formerly space capable civilization.
Harry Turtledove has a number of series based on alternate fiction. I would recomend the "WorldWar" series and the stand-alone novel "Agent of Byzantium".
A fountain-of-youth quest would offset automatically expiring (dying) players. Alternatively, you could have "rebirths" to a different/better character.
Sounds like it might be a good way to get the metal out. Then you are just left with a pile of toxic dust that could be reprocessed chemically to recover the various elements.
What would you put in the motherboard processer socket? Perhaps a cheap intel clone that passes off control to the daughter board?
you'd need to figure out how to talk to all the other busses on the motherboard (memory, AGP, USB, Firewire). I suppose that it would be best to use a bare-bones board that has lots of PCI slots and just insert a card for each bus you want to support. Perhaps the daughterboard would have a ribbon cable that attaches to the processor slot on the motherboard to control those items it can't directly access???
You know, everyone is always accusing Europeans of anti-Americanism. I think that Americans are at least as anti-European.
Americans don't think of Europe as a threat and Europe hasn't really tried to prevent the US from doing what it wants. So what do Americans think about Europe? Most of the ones I have met don't talk about Europe much, unless it is in the context of a business trip or vacation or speaking about their family history (try asking a third-or more generation caucasian American what nationality their family is; you'll likely get a list of European countries). I'd hardly call that anti-European.
From the things I've heard Europeans say, a significant number (not necesarily a majority) seem to be anti-American. It usually depends on where they are from, their economic status or what their personal experience with Americans. But then again, many Americans are anti-government (or at least, not supportive of the current government, depending on who is currently in power) or anti-big-business. So who/what are they (and we) really for/against?
Maybe the days weren't consecutive. Think of someone telling a story: "One day I was born... Then one day, I learned to talk... Then one day I went to school..." If others are retelling the story at a later date and the original teller is not present, imagine how a question/answer session might occur. If the questioners focussed on usage of the term day for lack of any other reference, they might not grasp that there were many days in between each day in the original story. They may ask "what happened on thaty day?" "which day?" "the second day, when he learned to talk" etc.
It would be interesting to see if old copies of Genenis use if it is ambiguous in the original text, i.e. absolute references to days vs. ordered references to days.
For example, a primate's feet is very much like their hands.
The fossil record shows that the ancestors of modern humans had feet with the big toes protruding at a greater angle to the side (like apes) than that of modern humans. One could postulate that the migration of the big toe to the front would aid running ability, something that was needed more than climbing ability after our ancesters migrated out of trees.
I've always read Genesis with an eye towards the original audience. How would YOU describe the creation of the universe to an aboriginal tribe cut off from the modern world and all its scientific understanding?
It seams to me that Genesis really answers the what, not the how. Even the timeline is fuzzy (what is a day to God? How do you measure the length of a day before there was a sun?).
This is a new scheme that relies on two problems that need to be solved: 1) determining the bubble pattern of an arbitrary fob, and 2) manuafactuaring a fob with an arbitrary bubble pattern.
1) How do we know that determining the bubble pattern of the fob is difficult enough to determine? This seems to me to boil down a simple, but large, ray tracing problem. Comodity graphics cards today can do fantastic things with lighting that were dreamed by many as not even possible only 15 years ago. Perhaps it can be exploited to solve this problem in the near future. I'm not convinced that this is truely a one-way hash; the idea is too new to confidently rule out the possibility of a solution.
2) Duplication is perhaps beyond current technology, but maybe not far away. It isn't difficult to imagine a matarial that can have it's light refraction properties modified at an arbitrary point that is located at the intersection of two or more lasers. Holographic research has been focused on solving this problem for some time and may have already come up with a (albeit expensive) solution.
But didn't know if my wife was just small or it was just me. That isn't something I've wanted to ask another guy and didn't have any personal experience with until my honeymoon.
Also, I didn't notice until you mentioned it, but the act has become less, um, painful for her since our son was born (excluding the couple of months it took to heal). Since, um, we've had a better fit, she seems to genuinly enjoy it more instead of mostly doing it for me.
Some devices require too much bandwidth to use wires without some serious shielding. Any protocol that uses extreme bandwidth would require better shielding than those that comunicate at slower reletive speeds.
Fiber holds some promise, but can't supply the electrical power that some cabling systems do. If you try to create a cable that has everything for everyone, it gets expensive to manufacture (try comparing the price between phone wiring, cat 5 ethernet and optical; I don't even know of a cable that has copper and optical in it).
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It's time to take action instead of being wistful and just talking about it...
For the military: tracking down wounded soldiers to bring them back to medical facilities or locating captured/MIAs.
For explorers or other remote personel: tracking down wounded or missing explorers (people still die in jungles, the outback, while hiking in the mountains, etc.)
For legal defense: a lot of people are worried that the government will be able to track them; this is a good thing if you are falsely accused and can prove that you were somewhere else.
For epidemic tracking and prevention: with diseases like SARS, it might be possible to trace back and find all the people that were exposed to a pathogen or even find a common source when non is obvious by cross referencing the paths of the victims.
For disasters: this may help locate victims of floods, avalanches, collapsed buildings, etc., especially those that aren't even known to be missing or in danger.
Apparently, he started getting calls from several states away from irate bikers who were pissed at HIM when he told them he wasn't selling one (he never owned a motorcycle).
Is "hypercopmuter" a real word with a standardized definition?
Or chips in two people's brains (one monitoring input and one controlling output) so that one of the people is basically experiencing and controlling the other body. I could see a lot of market for THAT for government, celebrities, and big business...want to go somewhere but you don't want to have to be followed by bodygards? Use a puppet body so no matter what happens to the body, you're still safe at home.
Remote control of another person's body just seems...creepy. It would be a whole new way of "selling your body" that is probably worse than the current method (i.e. prostitution).
On the other hand, it would be the holy grail of women seeking a way to make men understand what childbirth is really like. ;)
The Apollo Luner Module development was the driving force behind development of the integrated circuit. At one time, 90% of all integrated circuits in the _world_ were in its landing computers. And we all know how important integrated circuits are in our modern PCs...
On a slightly different vein, I applied for a job after graduation with the company that is/was developing the Crusader artillary system. I asked several different people in their organization if there was any way that their work could have civilian application. The answer was always "No" and I never worked there.
I didn't (and still don't) wan't to work for a company that _only_ provided new means of destruction--even if it was to "defend" my country. IMO, we get a higher return on money spent by NASA's than money spent by the defense department when you measure by bennefits to society (I don't count new ways of killing people as a bennefit).
They're still working on that part about making more engergy than they are using...
3600 seconds/hour * 16 MB/second gives almost 40 GB/hour/channel. Considering the size and throughput of modern disks, you may be able to capture a few channels for an hour or so before you would have to process the data. Hmmm, I guess you could do this for almost any bandwidth if you had the appropriate frequency shifting setup. Starting to sound like a softare radio...
Same idea for for HDTV, except save the data stream.
I'm guessing that the intent of the tags is not to invade your privacy, but to just make it simpler for the car companies and their suppliers to collect data about things like tire wear (did the tires last as long as they should), theft (were these tires reported stolen from another vehicle), and warranty abuse (was this tire returned after it was in an accident). Doesn't sound like an invasion of privacy for its own sake, rather, data collection for determining quality and cost cutting opportunities.
I've got more than enough to think about already in the area of privacy concerns (identity theft, etc.). I'm not worried about RF tags in my tires.
David Drake's "The General" series is about a war of unification on a formerly space capable civilization.
Harry Turtledove has a number of series based on alternate fiction. I would recomend the "WorldWar" series and the stand-alone novel "Agent of Byzantium".
A fountain-of-youth quest would offset automatically expiring (dying) players. Alternatively, you could have "rebirths" to a different/better character.
Sounds like it might be a good way to get the metal out. Then you are just left with a pile of toxic dust that could be reprocessed chemically to recover the various elements.
you'd need to figure out how to talk to all the other busses on the motherboard (memory, AGP, USB, Firewire). I suppose that it would be best to use a bare-bones board that has lots of PCI slots and just insert a card for each bus you want to support. Perhaps the daughterboard would have a ribbon cable that attaches to the processor slot on the motherboard to control those items it can't directly access???
Americans don't think of Europe as a threat and Europe hasn't really tried to prevent the US from doing what it wants. So what do Americans think about Europe? Most of the ones I have met don't talk about Europe much, unless it is in the context of a business trip or vacation or speaking about their family history (try asking a third-or more generation caucasian American what nationality their family is; you'll likely get a list of European countries). I'd hardly call that anti-European.
From the things I've heard Europeans say, a significant number (not necesarily a majority) seem to be anti-American. It usually depends on where they are from, their economic status or what their personal experience with Americans. But then again, many Americans are anti-government (or at least, not supportive of the current government, depending on who is currently in power) or anti-big-business. So who/what are they (and we) really for/against?
It would be interesting to see if old copies of Genenis use if it is ambiguous in the original text, i.e. absolute references to days vs. ordered references to days.
I've always read Genesis with an eye towards the original audience. How would YOU describe the creation of the universe to an aboriginal tribe cut off from the modern world and all its scientific understanding?
It seams to me that Genesis really answers the what, not the how. Even the timeline is fuzzy (what is a day to God? How do you measure the length of a day before there was a sun?).
1) How do we know that determining the bubble pattern of the fob is difficult enough to determine? This seems to me to boil down a simple, but large, ray tracing problem. Comodity graphics cards today can do fantastic things with lighting that were dreamed by many as not even possible only 15 years ago. Perhaps it can be exploited to solve this problem in the near future. I'm not convinced that this is truely a one-way hash; the idea is too new to confidently rule out the possibility of a solution.
2) Duplication is perhaps beyond current technology, but maybe not far away. It isn't difficult to imagine a matarial that can have it's light refraction properties modified at an arbitrary point that is located at the intersection of two or more lasers. Holographic research has been focused on solving this problem for some time and may have already come up with a (albeit expensive) solution.
Also, I didn't notice until you mentioned it, but the act has become less, um, painful for her since our son was born (excluding the couple of months it took to heal). Since, um, we've had a better fit, she seems to genuinly enjoy it more instead of mostly doing it for me.
Another option would be to have a cable hooked up that is wound on a cable that you can wind or unwind to match the wave length you are monitoring.
Fiber holds some promise, but can't supply the electrical power that some cabling systems do. If you try to create a cable that has everything for everyone, it gets expensive to manufacture (try comparing the price between phone wiring, cat 5 ethernet and optical; I don't even know of a cable that has copper and optical in it).