is that with C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do you end up blowing your whole leg off... With C++0x will it be nearly impossible, but when it does happen you end up blowing up the whole city?
and all our internal stuff runs on MS SQL 7 (Yeah, I know. If we're going to use MS we should use 2000, but it's a pain to switch everything over and the stuff we are doing doesn't require the additional features). The only time we use Access is on projects where the client only has Access to work with.
Biometric room safe -- so that the prostitute you bring in doesn't steal your stuff while you're sleeping
Unless the reason you are sleeping is because she wacked you in the back of the head with the desklamp so she could press your thumb against the scanner. Maybe they need to add a voiceprint analyser too.
I think Harlan Ellison put it best when he said "I'm five foot five. I am a little person. YOU are a midget."
Personally, I think the term 'little person' is more demeaning.
Re:Invisibility possible now?
on
Mastering Light
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· Score: 1
Can the crystals tell the difference between the light wave coming from the sun|other light source and the radio waves coming from the inside of the jet?
Could semiconductor technology do for material science what it has for computing?
Imagine a solid wall that, as the occasion demands, becomes completely transparent or transforms on one side into a giant video screen while the other side becomes either a solar panel or a heat pump that cools a room on a hot day. This is the promise of programmable matter--and it could make the technology revolution wrought by semiconductors to date look like a warm-up for the main act.
The idea of programmable matter began to seep into the popular consciousness in recent years through the works of aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy [right], who dubbed the new material wellstone in novels like The Collapsium (Del Rey, 2000). Now McCarthy has written his first nonfiction book about programmable matter, Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. Associate Editor Stephen Cass talked to him about this bleeding-edge technology and how McCarthy himself is helping to transform science fiction into science fact.
What is programmable matter? Programmable matter is fundamentally a solid-state technology--something that can change its optical, physical, magnetic, or electrical behavior without any moving parts except for electrons or photons. In that sense, there are certain things now that already qualify as programmable matter, like an LCD [liquid-crystal display] screen. This is an assembly of devices, but you can also look at it as carefully arranged material that has the interesting property of changing color under electrical stimulation. By adjusting quantum dots instead of pixels, you can make artificial atoms and adjust a lot more than just the color of the material.
What are quantum dots and how do you use them to make artificial atoms? A natural atom is a particular means for confining electrons--the positively charged nucleus gathers electrons around it and doesn't let them escape. By confining the electrons, you force them to behave as standing waves. And those standing waves are responsible for nearly all the chemical, electrical, and optical properties that we associate with atoms.
But you don't have to have an atomic nucleus to get that sort of behavior out of electrons; you just have to confine them in a small space. There are a lot of ways to do this. One way is to use the standard techniques of semiconductor chip design to create junctions that will herd electrons into an area of choice, known as a quantum dot. Once confined, the electrons will form a structure known as an artificial atom. With artificial atoms, unlike natural atoms, there is no reason why you can't pump electrons in and out and change their characteristics dynamically, making them programmable.
But if these programmable atoms are buried in a semiconductor substrate, how do they interact with anything? How do you make the entire material behave like it's made out of, say, gold? With programmable atoms in a substrate, what you are really doing is creating controlled impurities--dopant atoms--so the properties of your semiconductors are going to be very important in determining the final properties of the programmable substance. You can get a very high level of doping with a properly designed quantum dot array and overwhelm the normal behavior of the semiconductor. You can never ignore the fact that the semiconductor is there, but you can change its properties almost beyond recognition.
So would you have to combine different types of artificial atoms to end up with a material whose net behavior is like that of gold? Probably. An artificial atom of gold-- pseudo-gold--is almost certainly going to be a lot larger than an atom of natural gold. One consequence of this is that its absorption and reflection spectrum will be redshifted, because the electrons are less tightly bound so they will be at lower energies. So even if you could somehow have atoms of pseudo-gold without any substrate,
We may not completly understand the laws of nature and there are obviously things that transcend our understanding of the laws of nature, but the laws of nature by definition can not be transcended.
BlitzBasic has some great game dev tools specifically made for manipulating 2D/3D graphics on the screen. It is essentially a full-blown language with elements borrowed from both basic and C. Very easy to learn/use. You can do in a few lines what would take hundreds or thousands of lines in other languages. Plus, there is already a wide user base that you can get help and tips from.
Tacheon beams are apparently the 24th century equivelent of duct tape.
I am not as impressed...
on
Tetris AI System
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I am not as impressed with the AI's ability to make decisions about what to do in the game as I am with its ability to dicern the shapes and locations of the pieces on the screen! Now THAT is cool.
by Linden Labs called Second Life is currently in closed beta, but are accepting applications. Your avatar's appearence is fully configurable, you can buy land and build on it, and you can create (3d model) just about any object you can think of and script its behavior using their java-inspired scripting language. Upload texture and sound files to use in objects. It is a great MMOG for techies.
I liked in the book "Inferno" where the 4 new laws of robotics were introduced. Apparently, robots had become so advanced and so intelligent that the 3 laws were more of a hinderence than a help.
Law 1) A robot must not harm a human
Law 2) A robot must cooperate with a human except where such cooperation conflicts with the first law.
Law 3) A robot must protect it's own existance except where such protection conflicts with the first law
Law 4) A robot may do whatever it wishes so long as it does not conflict with the first second or third laws
These new laws allowed the robots to fulfill a greater potential, allowing them to become individuals in their own right, in addition to forcing humans to fend for themselves more so they would not become fat and lazy.
Slashdot Mirror
is that with C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do you end up blowing your whole leg off... With C++0x will it be nearly impossible, but when it does happen you end up blowing up the whole city?
Dude, when I first opened the page, I did a search on "IANAGL", knowing, KNOWING that I would find something. lol
Umm, actually he never said that
Hey! That's my phone number!
and all our internal stuff runs on MS SQL 7 (Yeah, I know. If we're going to use MS we should use 2000, but it's a pain to switch everything over and the stuff we are doing doesn't require the additional features). The only time we use Access is on projects where the client only has Access to work with.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
/.
:)
I've seen that sig all over the place on
at last it's appropriate
Biometric room safe -- so that the prostitute you bring in doesn't steal your stuff while you're sleeping
Unless the reason you are sleeping is because she wacked you in the back of the head with the desklamp so she could press your thumb against the scanner. Maybe they need to add a voiceprint analyser too.
I think Harlan Ellison put it best when he said "I'm five foot five. I am a little person. YOU are a midget." Personally, I think the term 'little person' is more demeaning.
Can the crystals tell the difference between the light wave coming from the sun|other light source and the radio waves coming from the inside of the jet?
until Microsoft sues this guy?
Not really neccessary at this point, is it?
Ok, I forgot to yank out the ad for the book. Sorry.
The New Alchemy
Could semiconductor technology do for material science what it has for computing?
Imagine a solid wall that, as the occasion demands, becomes completely transparent or transforms on one side into a giant video screen while the other side becomes either a solar panel or a heat pump that cools a room on a hot day. This is the promise of programmable matter--and it could make the technology revolution wrought by semiconductors to date look like a warm-up for the main act.
The idea of programmable matter began to seep into the popular consciousness in recent years through the works of aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy [right], who dubbed the new material wellstone in novels like The Collapsium (Del Rey, 2000). Now McCarthy has written his first nonfiction book about programmable matter, Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms. Associate Editor Stephen Cass talked to him about this bleeding-edge technology and how McCarthy himself is helping to transform science fiction into science fact.
What is programmable matter?
Programmable matter is fundamentally a solid-state technology--something that can change its optical, physical, magnetic, or electrical behavior without any moving parts except for electrons or photons. In that sense, there are certain things now that already qualify as programmable matter, like an LCD [liquid-crystal display] screen. This is an assembly of devices, but you can also look at it as carefully arranged material that has the interesting property of changing color under electrical stimulation. By adjusting quantum dots instead of pixels, you can make artificial atoms and adjust a lot more than just the color of the material.
What are quantum dots and how do you use them to make artificial atoms?
A natural atom is a particular means for confining electrons--the positively charged nucleus gathers electrons around it and doesn't let them escape. By confining the electrons, you force them to behave as standing waves. And those standing waves are responsible for nearly all the chemical, electrical, and optical properties that we associate with atoms.
But you don't have to have an atomic nucleus to get that sort of behavior out of electrons; you just have to confine them in a small space. There are a lot of ways to do this. One way is to use the standard techniques of semiconductor chip design to create junctions that will herd electrons into an area of choice, known as a quantum dot. Once confined, the electrons will form a structure known as an artificial atom. With artificial atoms, unlike natural atoms, there is no reason why you can't pump electrons in and out and change their characteristics dynamically, making them programmable.
But if these programmable atoms are buried in a semiconductor substrate, how do they interact with anything? How do you make the entire material behave like it's made out of, say, gold?
With programmable atoms in a substrate, what you are really doing is creating controlled impurities--dopant atoms--so the properties of your semiconductors are going to be very important in determining the final properties of the programmable substance. You can get a very high level of doping with a properly designed quantum dot array and overwhelm the normal behavior of the semiconductor. You can never ignore the fact that the semiconductor is there, but you can change its properties almost beyond recognition.
So would you have to combine different types of artificial atoms to end up with a material whose net behavior is like that of gold?
Probably. An artificial atom of gold-- pseudo-gold--is almost certainly going to be a lot larger than an atom of natural gold. One consequence of this is that its absorption and reflection spectrum will be redshifted, because the electrons are less tightly bound so they will be at lower energies. So even if you could somehow have atoms of pseudo-gold without any substrate,
No, it just means you have to wait a few minutes until someone posts the content
Don't you mean "one day your loved one might BE a diamond CPU"?
That line takes on an whole new meaning if you remember this story
We may not completly understand the laws of nature and there are obviously things that transcend our understanding of the laws of nature, but the laws of nature by definition can not be transcended.
BlitzBasic has some great game dev tools specifically made for manipulating 2D/3D graphics on the screen. It is essentially a full-blown language with elements borrowed from both basic and C. Very easy to learn/use. You can do in a few lines what would take hundreds or thousands of lines in other languages. Plus, there is already a wide user base that you can get help and tips from.
The Scratchware Manifesto
Super-black
Umm, how exactly would it do that? A CPU on a chip is one thing, but how would it tell if someone's eyes are scanning it?
Tacheon beams are apparently the 24th century equivelent of duct tape.
I am not as impressed with the AI's ability to make decisions about what to do in the game as I am with its ability to dicern the shapes and locations of the pieces on the screen! Now THAT is cool.
by Linden Labs called Second Life is currently in closed beta, but are accepting applications. Your avatar's appearence is fully configurable, you can buy land and build on it, and you can create (3d model) just about any object you can think of and script its behavior using their java-inspired scripting language. Upload texture and sound files to use in objects. It is a great MMOG for techies.
I'm gonna live forever
I liked in the book "Inferno" where the 4 new laws of robotics were introduced. Apparently, robots had become so advanced and so intelligent that the 3 laws were more of a hinderence than a help.
Law 1) A robot must not harm a human
Law 2) A robot must cooperate with a human except where such cooperation conflicts with the first law.
Law 3) A robot must protect it's own existance except where such protection conflicts with the first law
Law 4) A robot may do whatever it wishes so long as it does not conflict with the first second or third laws
These new laws allowed the robots to fulfill a greater potential, allowing them to become individuals in their own right, in addition to forcing humans to fend for themselves more so they would not become fat and lazy.