Dont get me wrong, I completely agree with you, the responsibility is all the user. However, when Philip Morris manufactures their cigarettes, they add extra nicotine to it to make the users dependant on their products. This makes me feel that they are somewhat responsible to the health hazzards. They can easily not add nicotine and harmful 'tar' to thier products, but they refuse to.
If a user decides to start, then that was entirely his decision, whether or not influenced by ads. But when he chooses to stop, and cannot because the product was purposly made more physically addictive, whose fault is it?
My father started smoking at the ripe age of 14, sometime in the 1960's. He said there were many times when he was able to stop smoking for months at a time. But as the years progressed, he tells me that it becomes increasingly harder to stop. Now, he can't stop smoking at all. He has tried every method, from hypnosis to perscription medicine. Do you really think most 14 year olds realize that in 30-40 years that they will not have the energy to ride a bike?
My father is also a recovering alcoholic. He was involved in a high-speed auto accident while under the influence. Yes, he realizes that he should have never consumed so much alcohol. But one problem is that when you are drunk, you never really think you are to drunk to drive.
I do not think the companies should be held responsible for alcohol consumption, but I do feel that cigarettes take advantage of human weaknesses to line the pockets of the companies (drug companies do this too). Gun manufacturers are not responsible for killings because they don't make you shoot people. Cigarettes make you have health problems. A big difference in my mind.
Isn't it funny to watch those Philip Morris commercials, in which they act like they are such a great company and all. Stuff like (these are not exact quotes, but the idea is conveyed) "We gave Kraft Macaroni to homeless people" and "We stopped bottling beer to bottle water for flood victims." But they do leave stuff out: like how their products kill more people than products from most any other company. Their tobacco products cause 50,000+ deaths from just lung cancer alone, not to mention an almost equal number killed by people under the influence of alcohol in auto accidents (I do realize, though, that not everyone in the world drinks Miller Beer, so their resonsibility is somewhat lowered). What other companies can kill off people by the tens of thousands and still make money doing it? Philip Morris can!
In some places, you can find KTacoHuts, a combo KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut store. These are rare, and I know of one around Cranberry, Pa. Ther e is also a KFBell in Philipsburg, Pa., which only has a KFC and Taco Bell.
Anyway, to avoid being too far off subject, I find that purchasing CD's from local bands is the best way to go. Even in small towns, there are many good bands to choose from. One of my favorite local bands is Savage Pastry. They put out their own CD's (on CD-R's of course) for $7 a piece. None goes to the RIAA, or even any record label for that matter. It all goes to the band, like it rightfully should. Just look around, you may find a band that suits your tastes, and if you can buy the music from them, no money will go to greedy record companies.
We were supposed to include these sort of experiments in our advanced electronics classes at our school. We ordered 10 Basic Stamp Kits, a bunch 'o hardware (LEDs, caps, resistors, various chips, etc.) and all other kinds of stuff. Then 2 people signed up for the class. They had to remove it from the curriculum, but now I can take it as an independant study course, and have all the parts to myself. Hopefully other schools will be more successful, but I have no problem being the only one with access to 10 basic stamps in my school. Hmm... maybe I should make an SMP configuration of basic stamps... hehe... that would be cool... (Won't work, but I will give it a try!)
In highschool, most of the programming that we did had to deal with databases. I remeber my 10th Grade QBasic final was making a database for a car parts company. We were provided a file that had thousands of parts, prices, and details for a variety of products. We were given 2 Weeks (that's 10 days X 80 minutes per class) to develop the program with a partner. The teacher set goals to accomplish. If you could meet this criteria, you would get X% for you grade. For example, if you could get your program to list the parts in order of part number, you would get like 60 percent. If you can have it break down the products into categories or by price, you would get about 70 percent. 80% if you can add items to the database. It was possible to earn 120% for making a program that had some sort of a GUI , multiple search options (part#, name, description, etc.), and meeting all other requirements. With about 13 hours in class (and a few at home) to work on it, I was able to meet all requirements to get 120%. Doing the database was much more thought provoking than having us make games. With the games, the students would often make something simple, then dress it up with graphics. The database required us to really think how to do things. I think I have a disc laying around somewhere with the program on it, I'll try to find it and post the program somewhere. It is really neat, it supports the mouse (thanks to some guy that wrote a QBasic Mouse Routine) and a keyboard if the mouse doesn't work (the routine will not work with some mouses). Databases management programs are the best things, in my mind, to have students develop because of the creative power that it requires.
www.sweeet.com does not seem to work. Also, I believe you are incorrect, if there are two images of the pair are side by side (which I assume that is how these images are represented), you must stare beyond the monitor to focus, and the further your eyes focus, the more they go towards center. For instance, to focus on an object 3 inches away, you must cross your eyes, and the nearer the object is to an infinite distance, the more centered they are. To view a stereogram, say on a monitor, you must focus beyond the image to bring them 'together' to get the stereo effect. Believe me, I have been studying artificial stero imagery for many years.
This probably work well in most circumstances, but there may be one downside. Some objects show a completely different image for either eye, thus requiring each viewpoint to have varying information. To see what I mean, get something flat, like a playing card or a piece of paper with something on each side. Hold it a few inches in front of your eyes, and rotate it 90 degrees on the Y axis (you know, the one that runs up and down), so now you are looking at it edgewise. close one eye, and you will see one side of it. Then close your other eye, and looking through the previously-closed eye, you will see a completely different image. Also, notice how it's position relative to the background has changed when switching eyes (the parrallax effect). Also, the reason that stereograms work in the first place is that the brain interprets the miniscule difference between each eye. But this is why objects far in the distance appear flatter than they do up close, the difference becomes too small and the brain cannot read the difference. When using MPEG motion compensation, minor details can be lost, and this would make for less-than-accurate stereograms, most likely the images will not appear with the proper depth, and because MPEG compression causes "mosquitos" (A compression artifact) in certain conditions, the stereo effect may become distorted, maybe even causing parts of objects to appear at different depths than the rest. However, if both images are compressed separately, and care was taken to make sure that artifacts do not cause depth-distortions (probably possible through good coding), there should be no serious problems. When I get home from work today, I will try to make a small demonstration MPEG to show what I am talking about (hopefully you know how to view stereograms without equiptment by speading your eyes (opposite of crossing them (double, no make that triple nested parenthesis!))).
um.. one problem here, a 1 gig microdrive would not be able to hold a 24 terabyte picture (assuming 24bit color precision). Oh well, maybe holographic storage is the answer;)
true, true. I've been "lurking" around slashdot for over 2 years now, but untill I got a full day job, I never had an account here. User number has no correlation to clue, though.
You don't need a second brick for another monitor. Each graphics brick has 2 InfiniteReality3 piplines, each capable of driving 2 to 8 displays. That was on the second link, you know.
Remember, when an author publishes a regular (paper) book, he may not get very much money from it. The publisher takes a good chunk off for it's profit and the cost of production. The author may only see a very small percentage of the cost of the book. With Stephen selling the online book for $1, he makes out pretty good. No publishers to pay, most all of it goes straight to his pockets. This way, he can probably make more money than selling 'conventional' books. If there are 10 million downloads, and 10% choose to pay, that is a cool million dollars. If it was a paper book, which retailed for $10, he may have to sell a few million copies just to make a million dollars. It is really quite simple if you think about it.
Boy are you guys not knowing whats up. Tesla, my favorite scientist, did not invent the CRT, nor the Television. The TV, or more precisely, the scanning CRT, was invented by Philo Farnsworth (or somthing like that). However, without Tesla, we would not have good, high quality electricity to use. We would be stuck with Edison's DC transmition method, requiring a power plant about every 2 miles, because DC loses a lot of energy in long transmitions. We wouldn't have efficient cooling fans to keep our CPU's cold, nor would we have refrigerators to keep our Bawls cold (the AC induction motor in the compressor is what he invented, not the fridge). Before fluffing of Tesla as an other scientist, remember that his inventions changed the world more than any other scientist, and remember that most of Edison's patents are for things that his workers invented, not his own personal creations. But be warned: when reading books on Tesla, stop immediately when they start talking about time travel and Atlantis and the such, it is all made up garbage (duh). Anyways, just be a little bit more considerate about ALL inventors, but remember that some of the less popular ones made the biggest impact.
Here in the city of State College, Pa (Home of the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, if you care), we use natural gas powered busses. They look pretty normal, except for the storage tanks on the top. They are quieter than the standard diesel busses, and are almost totally clean burning. if you want, you can check them out at www.catabus.com . The city saves a lot of money this way, for it is cheaper for the natural gas than diesel fuel, and they also get some tax benefits from it. Hopefully, more cities will follow suit.
This seems sort of like when Intel released the "Pentium Processor with MMX Technology." Soon some games appeared (POD is the most memorable) that supported MMX instructions. These games ran much faster on an MMX enabled system than on a non-MMX enabled system. I tested this myself; I had a P200, while my friend had a P200 with MMX. We had equal amounts of RAM, same mobo, and same graphics card. The MXX system showed significant speed ups. What I'm trying to say here, is that for a time, Intel (A big, evil company like Micro$oft at the time) used a proprietary technology that proved useful (although MMX never really had a killer app, it still is in every processor produced today). Intel, owning nearly the total market for CPU's at the time, released a new technology to try to push even farther ahead of rivals AMD and Cyrix. Eventually AMD and Cyrix were able to implement MMX technology in some way, but even today, AMD still lags behind Intel. The same most likely will be true with these new tags, Microsoft dominates the market, brings (very little) innovation to the market, in the form of a few HTML tags, and will most likely continue to dominate (which is unfortunate). The article said that most likely, M$ will submit the tags to implement in the DHTML standards. Hopefully, M$ will play fair so everyone can benefit from these slightly innovative technologies.
Many people seem to complain about being harassed online, whether it be through email, chat programs, or what have you. The thing is, though, that no matter where you go, online or real-world, you run the risk of running into someone who does not agree with you. A prime example, school. I know when I went to high school, many people were abused, harassed, or even assulted because of different beliefs. And most of the time, they would not even be disciplined by a faculty member. I guess this is the way of life. If you want to avoid being beat up in school, either don't go, or hire someone to protect you the whole time. If you don't want to be harassed online, don't use ICQ, mIRC, read you email, or browse the internet. Unfortunatly, in any activity that involves many people in one place, someone is bound to disagree with someone. It should not be the ISP's responsibility to log everything, that should be the software developer's choice. For example, mIRC is able to log a session to a text file, and can be printed out later if necessary. One thing that should be tracked are the origin and destination of packets. This way, someone can be identified if they like to deliver DOS attacks. But again, as long as you are online, I feel that you must accept that there are people out there who don't like you, and like in real life, may do something to make you a little mad.
That article did a fantastic job of explaining the basics of RAM. I read many articles before, but none were as in-depth or as clear as this one. I suggest everyone takes the time to read this. I know many people say, "sure, I know exactly how RAM works, because I'm a computer geek." Well, I thought this too, and was partially right, but the articles really makes me feel like I was the guy who first designed DRAM, it really tells you that much. A must read article.
I wonder that if someone makes a Dreamcast emulator, that I will be able to pop in my Bleemcast disc and emulate a playstation on my emulation of dreamcast on my XBox. Even better! How about emulating Dreamcast and using Bleemcast to play the emulation of those "Arcade Classics" that Namco and a few others made. Nothing is better than 3rd order emulation! (Ok, well, there are plenty of things better, like the cool KLAT2 computer, but just think of the emulating possibilities!)
Extending the above analogy (simile?), selling a converter to let Sony's blades work on Microsoft's razor is not something that will not make Microsoft happy. Microsoft will get the licence fees from the blade converter (emulator software), but will get none from Sony's blades. Here is where Sony makes the profit for selling blades. Since the razors are sold at litte to no (sometimes even negative) profit, there is no way that Microsoft would allow emulator software for at least the first few months. This way, they can guarantee licence fees from their blades and make a profit from them. Once the hype has died down slightly, then Microsoft will allow the blade adapters to be in use, because they now have a large installed base and can let the hardcore gamers purchase the blade converters. Of course, nobody would want to buy an expensive razor to use with cheap blades. Almost everyone likes the idea that they can use their favorite old blades on a new razor, but it may not be the best of ideas when the new razor is fresh on the market. I hope that whole razor/blade thing is not too confusing, but we are all smart people here.
Imagine what these things would do at airports. If you have some money in your hand, the trace residues of cocaine that are on just about every bill may be detected, and you will be a drug suspect. Imagine shaking hands with a criminal, and then having his skin flakes come off from you and be detected. The only place this thing belongs is in Los Alamos, to make sure the people stealing harddrives are right people. And another thing, the quote "your choice" of detection devices, well, you won't get to choose. Oh well, the guy that invented this lives about 15 miles from here, maybe I can go talk some sense into him about privacy.
Hmm... Anyone who is a hardcore gamer knows that Sega's Dreamcast uses proprietary CD's, which are called GD-ROMs. These special CDs hold 10^9 bytes of data, thus making it impossible to copy on a standard 650-700MB CD. Now that it will be possible to write 1.3GB disks, it won't take long until someone is able to adjust the track pitch when recording to make it about the same as GD-ROM disc. The security codes for the system have already been cracked, which makes it even easier to pirate games. The thing that scares me the most is that it will be licenced in September, just one month sooner than the Playstation2 is released. Although I strongly doubt this is technology will take off, I feel as though Sega has something to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
If a user decides to start, then that was entirely his decision, whether or not influenced by ads. But when he chooses to stop, and cannot because the product was purposly made more physically addictive, whose fault is it?
My father started smoking at the ripe age of 14, sometime in the 1960's. He said there were many times when he was able to stop smoking for months at a time. But as the years progressed, he tells me that it becomes increasingly harder to stop. Now, he can't stop smoking at all. He has tried every method, from hypnosis to perscription medicine. Do you really think most 14 year olds realize that in 30-40 years that they will not have the energy to ride a bike? My father is also a recovering alcoholic. He was involved in a high-speed auto accident while under the influence. Yes, he realizes that he should have never consumed so much alcohol. But one problem is that when you are drunk, you never really think you are to drunk to drive. I do not think the companies should be held responsible for alcohol consumption, but I do feel that cigarettes take advantage of human weaknesses to line the pockets of the companies (drug companies do this too). Gun manufacturers are not responsible for killings because they don't make you shoot people. Cigarettes make you have health problems. A big difference in my mind.
Isn't it funny to watch those Philip Morris commercials, in which they act like they are such a great company and all. Stuff like (these are not exact quotes, but the idea is conveyed) "We gave Kraft Macaroni to homeless people" and "We stopped bottling beer to bottle water for flood victims." But they do leave stuff out: like how their products kill more people than products from most any other company. Their tobacco products cause 50,000+ deaths from just lung cancer alone, not to mention an almost equal number killed by people under the influence of alcohol in auto accidents (I do realize, though, that not everyone in the world drinks Miller Beer, so their resonsibility is somewhat lowered). What other companies can kill off people by the tens of thousands and still make money doing it? Philip Morris can!
Anyway, to avoid being too far off subject, I find that purchasing CD's from local bands is the best way to go. Even in small towns, there are many good bands to choose from. One of my favorite local bands is Savage Pastry. They put out their own CD's (on CD-R's of course) for $7 a piece. None goes to the RIAA, or even any record label for that matter. It all goes to the band, like it rightfully should. Just look around, you may find a band that suits your tastes, and if you can buy the music from them, no money will go to greedy record companies.
We were supposed to include these sort of experiments in our advanced electronics classes at our school. We ordered 10 Basic Stamp Kits, a bunch 'o hardware (LEDs, caps, resistors, various chips, etc.) and all other kinds of stuff. Then 2 people signed up for the class. They had to remove it from the curriculum, but now I can take it as an independant study course, and have all the parts to myself. Hopefully other schools will be more successful, but I have no problem being the only one with access to 10 basic stamps in my school. Hmm... maybe I should make an SMP configuration of basic stamps... hehe... that would be cool... (Won't work, but I will give it a try!)
In highschool, most of the programming that we did had to deal with databases. I remeber my 10th Grade QBasic final was making a database for a car parts company. We were provided a file that had thousands of parts, prices, and details for a variety of products. We were given 2 Weeks (that's 10 days X 80 minutes per class) to develop the program with a partner. The teacher set goals to accomplish. If you could meet this criteria, you would get X% for you grade. For example, if you could get your program to list the parts in order of part number, you would get like 60 percent. If you can have it break down the products into categories or by price, you would get about 70 percent. 80% if you can add items to the database. It was possible to earn 120% for making a program that had some sort of a GUI , multiple search options (part#, name, description, etc.), and meeting all other requirements. With about 13 hours in class (and a few at home) to work on it, I was able to meet all requirements to get 120%. Doing the database was much more thought provoking than having us make games. With the games, the students would often make something simple, then dress it up with graphics. The database required us to really think how to do things. I think I have a disc laying around somewhere with the program on it, I'll try to find it and post the program somewhere. It is really neat, it supports the mouse (thanks to some guy that wrote a QBasic Mouse Routine) and a keyboard if the mouse doesn't work (the routine will not work with some mouses). Databases management programs are the best things, in my mind, to have students develop because of the creative power that it requires.
www.sweeet.com does not seem to work. Also, I believe you are incorrect, if there are two images of the pair are side by side (which I assume that is how these images are represented), you must stare beyond the monitor to focus, and the further your eyes focus, the more they go towards center. For instance, to focus on an object 3 inches away, you must cross your eyes, and the nearer the object is to an infinite distance, the more centered they are. To view a stereogram, say on a monitor, you must focus beyond the image to bring them 'together' to get the stereo effect. Believe me, I have been studying artificial stero imagery for many years.
My bad, I forgot the linebreaks.
This probably work well in most circumstances, but there may be one downside. Some objects show a completely different image for either eye, thus requiring each viewpoint to have varying information. To see what I mean, get something flat, like a playing card or a piece of paper with something on each side. Hold it a few inches in front of your eyes, and rotate it 90 degrees on the Y axis (you know, the one that runs up and down), so now you are looking at it edgewise. close one eye, and you will see one side of it. Then close your other eye, and looking through the previously-closed eye, you will see a completely different image. Also, notice how it's position relative to the background has changed when switching eyes (the parrallax effect). Also, the reason that stereograms work in the first place is that the brain interprets the miniscule difference between each eye. But this is why objects far in the distance appear flatter than they do up close, the difference becomes too small and the brain cannot read the difference. When using MPEG motion compensation, minor details can be lost, and this would make for less-than-accurate stereograms, most likely the images will not appear with the proper depth, and because MPEG compression causes "mosquitos" (A compression artifact) in certain conditions, the stereo effect may become distorted, maybe even causing parts of objects to appear at different depths than the rest. However, if both images are compressed separately, and care was taken to make sure that artifacts do not cause depth-distortions (probably possible through good coding), there should be no serious problems. When I get home from work today, I will try to make a small demonstration MPEG to show what I am talking about (hopefully you know how to view stereograms without equiptment by speading your eyes (opposite of crossing them (double, no make that triple nested parenthesis!))).
my bad. i guess i needed some more caffiene to stimulate those neurons.
um.. one problem here, a 1 gig microdrive would not be able to hold a 24 terabyte picture (assuming 24bit color precision). Oh well, maybe holographic storage is the answer ;)
true, true. I've been "lurking" around slashdot for over 2 years now, but untill I got a full day job, I never had an account here. User number has no correlation to clue, though.
You don't need a second brick for another monitor. Each graphics brick has 2 InfiniteReality3 piplines, each capable of driving 2 to 8 displays. That was on the second link, you know.
Remember, when an author publishes a regular (paper) book, he may not get very much money from it. The publisher takes a good chunk off for it's profit and the cost of production. The author may only see a very small percentage of the cost of the book. With Stephen selling the online book for $1, he makes out pretty good. No publishers to pay, most all of it goes straight to his pockets. This way, he can probably make more money than selling 'conventional' books. If there are 10 million downloads, and 10% choose to pay, that is a cool million dollars. If it was a paper book, which retailed for $10, he may have to sell a few million copies just to make a million dollars. It is really quite simple if you think about it.
Boy are you guys not knowing whats up. Tesla, my favorite scientist, did not invent the CRT, nor the Television. The TV, or more precisely, the scanning CRT, was invented by Philo Farnsworth (or somthing like that). However, without Tesla, we would not have good, high quality electricity to use. We would be stuck with Edison's DC transmition method, requiring a power plant about every 2 miles, because DC loses a lot of energy in long transmitions. We wouldn't have efficient cooling fans to keep our CPU's cold, nor would we have refrigerators to keep our Bawls cold (the AC induction motor in the compressor is what he invented, not the fridge). Before fluffing of Tesla as an other scientist, remember that his inventions changed the world more than any other scientist, and remember that most of Edison's patents are for things that his workers invented, not his own personal creations. But be warned: when reading books on Tesla, stop immediately when they start talking about time travel and Atlantis and the such, it is all made up garbage (duh). Anyways, just be a little bit more considerate about ALL inventors, but remember that some of the less popular ones made the biggest impact.
yes, the laws of thermodynamics are great. I though everyone here would understand them. No perpetual motion for you!
Here in the city of State College, Pa (Home of the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, if you care), we use natural gas powered busses. They look pretty normal, except for the storage tanks on the top. They are quieter than the standard diesel busses, and are almost totally clean burning. if you want, you can check them out at www.catabus.com . The city saves a lot of money this way, for it is cheaper for the natural gas than diesel fuel, and they also get some tax benefits from it. Hopefully, more cities will follow suit.
This seems sort of like when Intel released the "Pentium Processor with MMX Technology." Soon some games appeared (POD is the most memorable) that supported MMX instructions. These games ran much faster on an MMX enabled system than on a non-MMX enabled system. I tested this myself; I had a P200, while my friend had a P200 with MMX. We had equal amounts of RAM, same mobo, and same graphics card. The MXX system showed significant speed ups. What I'm trying to say here, is that for a time, Intel (A big, evil company like Micro$oft at the time) used a proprietary technology that proved useful (although MMX never really had a killer app, it still is in every processor produced today). Intel, owning nearly the total market for CPU's at the time, released a new technology to try to push even farther ahead of rivals AMD and Cyrix. Eventually AMD and Cyrix were able to implement MMX technology in some way, but even today, AMD still lags behind Intel. The same most likely will be true with these new tags, Microsoft dominates the market, brings (very little) innovation to the market, in the form of a few HTML tags, and will most likely continue to dominate (which is unfortunate). The article said that most likely, M$ will submit the tags to implement in the DHTML standards. Hopefully, M$ will play fair so everyone can benefit from these slightly innovative technologies.
Many people seem to complain about being harassed online, whether it be through email, chat programs, or what have you. The thing is, though, that no matter where you go, online or real-world, you run the risk of running into someone who does not agree with you. A prime example, school. I know when I went to high school, many people were abused, harassed, or even assulted because of different beliefs. And most of the time, they would not even be disciplined by a faculty member. I guess this is the way of life. If you want to avoid being beat up in school, either don't go, or hire someone to protect you the whole time. If you don't want to be harassed online, don't use ICQ, mIRC, read you email, or browse the internet. Unfortunatly, in any activity that involves many people in one place, someone is bound to disagree with someone. It should not be the ISP's responsibility to log everything, that should be the software developer's choice. For example, mIRC is able to log a session to a text file, and can be printed out later if necessary. One thing that should be tracked are the origin and destination of packets. This way, someone can be identified if they like to deliver DOS attacks. But again, as long as you are online, I feel that you must accept that there are people out there who don't like you, and like in real life, may do something to make you a little mad.
That article did a fantastic job of explaining the basics of RAM. I read many articles before, but none were as in-depth or as clear as this one. I suggest everyone takes the time to read this. I know many people say, "sure, I know exactly how RAM works, because I'm a computer geek." Well, I thought this too, and was partially right, but the articles really makes me feel like I was the guy who first designed DRAM, it really tells you that much. A must read article.
I wonder that if someone makes a Dreamcast emulator, that I will be able to pop in my Bleemcast disc and emulate a playstation on my emulation of dreamcast on my XBox. Even better! How about emulating Dreamcast and using Bleemcast to play the emulation of those "Arcade Classics" that Namco and a few others made. Nothing is better than 3rd order emulation! (Ok, well, there are plenty of things better, like the cool KLAT2 computer, but just think of the emulating possibilities!)
Extending the above analogy (simile?), selling a converter to let Sony's blades work on Microsoft's razor is not something that will not make Microsoft happy. Microsoft will get the licence fees from the blade converter (emulator software), but will get none from Sony's blades. Here is where Sony makes the profit for selling blades. Since the razors are sold at litte to no (sometimes even negative) profit, there is no way that Microsoft would allow emulator software for at least the first few months. This way, they can guarantee licence fees from their blades and make a profit from them. Once the hype has died down slightly, then Microsoft will allow the blade adapters to be in use, because they now have a large installed base and can let the hardcore gamers purchase the blade converters. Of course, nobody would want to buy an expensive razor to use with cheap blades. Almost everyone likes the idea that they can use their favorite old blades on a new razor, but it may not be the best of ideas when the new razor is fresh on the market. I hope that whole razor/blade thing is not too confusing, but we are all smart people here.
Imagine what these things would do at airports. If you have some money in your hand, the trace residues of cocaine that are on just about every bill may be detected, and you will be a drug suspect. Imagine shaking hands with a criminal, and then having his skin flakes come off from you and be detected. The only place this thing belongs is in Los Alamos, to make sure the people stealing harddrives are right people. And another thing, the quote "your choice" of detection devices, well, you won't get to choose. Oh well, the guy that invented this lives about 15 miles from here, maybe I can go talk some sense into him about privacy.
Hmm... Anyone who is a hardcore gamer knows that Sega's Dreamcast uses proprietary CD's, which are called GD-ROMs. These special CDs hold 10^9 bytes of data, thus making it impossible to copy on a standard 650-700MB CD. Now that it will be possible to write 1.3GB disks, it won't take long until someone is able to adjust the track pitch when recording to make it about the same as GD-ROM disc. The security codes for the system have already been cracked, which makes it even easier to pirate games. The thing that scares me the most is that it will be licenced in September, just one month sooner than the Playstation2 is released. Although I strongly doubt this is technology will take off, I feel as though Sega has something to worry about.