The technology required to make computing actually secure can easily be turned into such things as protecting intellectual property.
Personally, I think the whole DRM thing is just FUD. There are so many agendas at work, the true nature of it is only known to the designers at work. And knowing how hardware architects work, I don't think theres much to fear.
would not collapse into a black hole because a photon never has mass. Ever. It is a packet of energy. It is the complement to mass - pure energy.
Energy, as far as we know, does not generate gravity (perhaps it generates the elusive dark energy? well thats just idle speculation...don't take my word on it). Without gravity, it would not collapse in on itself. Even if it did have gravity, it most certainly would not be a 'black hole' as we think of them now.
Black holes as we know of them now are stages in atomic collapse - right on past neutron degeneracy into the realm of the currently unknown. Since photons have nothing in common with atomic particles, it definately wouldn't be a black hole.
Photons move at the speed of light. By their very definition they cannot have mass.
Why do you think gravity ONLY affects mass? It does not. It also effects energy, mainly, it causes redshifts (from the outside observer's POV) Most of the time gravity is too weak to change it much, but in the case of blackholes, its enough to infinitely redshift, which is why no light escapes them.
Do a google search on 'do photons have mass' and learn something.
Photons are not particles in the sense of neutrons, electrons et. al which are massy particles.
Photons are better described as 'packets of energy'. Gravity doesn't just affect mass - it affects energy as well. Light doesnt get 'pulled into' a black hole, it just gets redshifted so much (by the gravity sucking the energy out of it), that its wavelength becomes infinite, and thus immeasureable.
Photons can exert a pressure though because they have MOMENTUM. Thus they have a 'mass equivalent', but they do not have mass, and that is not why they cannot escape black holes.
even if you filled the outside of the galaxy with a shell of dead rock, it wouldnt account for the missing mass. There is *alot* of missing mass. Plus itd be easy to spot that, because little light would get through it.
Others suggest alot of neutron stars spinning around out there, also not likely. We'd have noticed them, either by an inordinate amount of nearby pulsars, or simply from gravitational lensing. Same goes for dead hunks of carbon. To make up the missing mass, there would have to be many of these things. And with many of them, the chance of spotting several would be high.
The macho theory suggests there COULD be a *few* but *extremely* massive objects wandering around out there. Something like supermassive blackholes, or something else. If there were a few, and they emitted no light (likely), then they'd be easy to miss.
The other theory suggests that there is some kind of exotic matter which we haven't discovered yet that emits no known form of radiation, but may indeed generate gravity. This is also possible, as the newly discovered 'dark energy''s origins are also unknown. The confirmation of dark energy (which is recent) is what drives the expansion of the universe, and is indeed some kind of 'anti gravity'. Very interesting, but very strange. And we have no idea where the hell it comes from.
MACHOs are enormous objects like supermassive blackholes. There arent many of them, if they actually exist.
The reason there can't be many of them is we'd probably have detected them already by gravitational lensing. So whatever it is thats out there, its really heavy, and theres not many of them because so far we havent seen any lensing from objects near the edge of the galaxy.
In order to make up the necessary 'missing matter' from things like faint stars, neutron stars or dead stars, there would need to be alot of them.
While we're on theoretics, its also possible the phenomenon is related to dark energy, which has recently (within the past couple months) been nearly proven to exist by studying several lensing objects. 'Dark Energy' is likely whats responsible for the increasing rate of expansion in the universe. Its effectively a kind of anti-gravity. Its nature, such as where it comes from, is still totally unknown.
in astronomy, you want your ccd's to gather all the available light for one particular wavelength (or narrow range), generally.
With very dim objects (like most astronomical phenomenon), you tend to get a narrow range of light from them. Thus, you use your color filters to capture it and eliminate the other stray wavelengths. This maximizes amount of light gathered.
Then you can go back and combine the separate images into one 'full color' image, if thats what you want.
to realize just how many fields use radioactivity. This would be useful for lab workers, oil field techs (plenty or radioactive sources are sent down holes for various reasons), geology... the list goes on and on.
Just because you don't have a thorough, or even cursory, knowledge about everything in the world doesnt mean something is useless.
radiation is all around you and emitted by everything from your smoke detector (contains americium souce which emits alpha particles), to rock (especially granite).
However, most of these don't emit enough to be harmful. Working in an area with radioactive materials tends to have higher background radiation, as does going on frequent flights or other high altitude operations.
Radiation is only dangerous in large, very easily detectable doses. And unless its an extreme amount, you can even take short term exposure to a relatively large amount and suffer few ill effects. You wouldnt want to stay long in such a hot environment though.
When you add features to an engine, its not just some slap-on quickie code module. usually it entails making substantial changes to numerous parts of the engine.
When I change some module in something, I call it a 'rewrite' if its a major change. Doesn't mean i'm starting from scratch.
And what happens when the updates conflict or don't work with the changes you've made? Then you have to rewrite the updates. yes thats right - 'rewrite'.
Many people working on the bomb project were fearful of what would happen when the bomb was exploded - there was a very real fear among some of them that the fireball would stretch out for hundreds of miles, truly catching the atmosphere on fire.
I find it highly unlikely anyone at this stage in development would advocate blowing anything up so near a major, and very important city.
So you take some software thats designed to look and feel like windows, tell people it works like windows, call it 'Lindows' (say it in the same breath as 'windows', they even sound alike because of the softness of L and W)
Oh, and then market it to people who don't know much about computers. Do you think they'll really know the difference when it sounds like you're trying to intentionally confuse them?
data transmission is even worse for this because of errors and line noise. In order to keep the errors to a minimum not only is parity used, but the very waveform of transmission is a way of keeping things in check.
Most transmission waveforms do NOT translate 10101 and so on as high-low-high-low-high pulses because of the potential for error. This is true for all transmission lengths, both short and long.
As an example, Ethernet uses Manchester encoding. There are many, many other schemes for this that accomplish the same basic task.
In short, nobody uses straight binary pulses for data transfer because its unreliable. Using shifting voltages would compound the problem.
Re:Binary computers? How long before base4 compute
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 2
hardware wise switching would be a fool's errand.
I put some thought into this about, if you could create a hypothetic quadnary system with roughly the same 'speed' as a binary, I still don't see why it would be faster. Since every operation a computer does is either an add or a shift, how would going from base 2 to base 4 really be any faster? I suppose less quad bits to shift, but the adder would be more complicated. I dont even want to think about how one would design a quadnary adder.
Re:Time for "expert" editors at Slashdot?
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 1
you'll find that most slashdotters don't know all that much about computers, either.
See a post below about some guy claiming that all computers moving to 'quadnary' would be faster than binary. Anyone with a minimum education in logic design can point out a half dozen reasons why that's not likely to happen.
It is rather remarkable though at the sheer number of people who's highest accomplishment is a confusing looking shell script assume they're the genius on everything.
Re:Binary computers? How long before base4 compute
on
DNA Goes Binary
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· Score: 3, Informative
That's not a novel idea, as someone else said, beginning logic students always ask this. Then once they learn how logic design works, this kind of idea is something to send shivers up a chip designer's spine.
It would allow for for faster computers
Not likely. The complexity increase would slow things down alot. Especially since fact in every circuit you'd have to have something measure the voltage at every gate...
Not only would they be slower, they'd be far more unreliable, consume vastly more power, and the circuits would be enormous.
Optical interferometry is about to hit the big time. This kind of resolution won't be too difficult to attain.
There might be other difficulties though with it... possibly the reflecting light of the moon in general swamping what little shading might come off a lander. Interferometry will give you the arc resolution you need, but not necessarily the luminous.
when you know nothing about the topic being discussed?
There are plenty of astronomical phenomena which you cannot get pictures (at least not good ones) available for free. If you're a serious amateur astronomer (as this caters to), and are interested in investigating a particular area of space in detail, you need some damn good photos.
Damn good photos are not available to public, and they are not cheap. Professional astronomers pay hundreds of dollars for a few shots of an eclipsing binary system they may be studying. If you're an amateur who wants this kind of thing, its simply not available.
Not to mention their wacky gun policy.
on
Google vs. Evil
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Not only do they refuse to advertise for guns, but they won't advertise companies that even sell parts for guns.
To be even stranger, the advertisements are usually not even about guns - just the company may happen to also sell parts.
One case comes to mind of an outdoorsman shop wanted to advertise its dehydrated food wares. In addition to hundreds of other outdoors materials, they sold replacement pistol barrels (they did NOT however, sell actual guns)
Google refused the ads on food on the premise of this.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think the whole DRM thing is just FUD. There are so many agendas at work, the true nature of it is only known to the designers at work. And knowing how hardware architects work, I don't think theres much to fear.
Energy, as far as we know, does not generate gravity (perhaps it generates the elusive dark energy? well thats just idle speculation...don't take my word on it). Without gravity, it would not collapse in on itself. Even if it did have gravity, it most certainly would not be a 'black hole' as we think of them now.
Black holes as we know of them now are stages in atomic collapse - right on past neutron degeneracy into the realm of the currently unknown. Since photons have nothing in common with atomic particles, it definately wouldn't be a black hole.
While we think of mass and momentum being related by speed, energy and momentum are related by FREQUENCY.
Here's some equations if you want to wrap your head around them: equations
Why do you think gravity ONLY affects mass? It does not. It also effects energy, mainly, it causes redshifts (from the outside observer's POV) Most of the time gravity is too weak to change it much, but in the case of blackholes, its enough to infinitely redshift, which is why no light escapes them.
Do a google search on 'do photons have mass' and learn something.
Photons are not particles in the sense of neutrons, electrons et. al which are massy particles.
Photons are better described as 'packets of energy'. Gravity doesn't just affect mass - it affects energy as well. Light doesnt get 'pulled into' a black hole, it just gets redshifted so much (by the gravity sucking the energy out of it), that its wavelength becomes infinite, and thus immeasureable.
Photons can exert a pressure though because they have MOMENTUM. Thus they have a 'mass equivalent', but they do not have mass, and that is not why they cannot escape black holes.
Others suggest alot of neutron stars spinning around out there, also not likely. We'd have noticed them, either by an inordinate amount of nearby pulsars, or simply from gravitational lensing. Same goes for dead hunks of carbon. To make up the missing mass, there would have to be many of these things. And with many of them, the chance of spotting several would be high.
The macho theory suggests there COULD be a *few* but *extremely* massive objects wandering around out there. Something like supermassive blackholes, or something else. If there were a few, and they emitted no light (likely), then they'd be easy to miss.
The other theory suggests that there is some kind of exotic matter which we haven't discovered yet that emits no known form of radiation, but may indeed generate gravity. This is also possible, as the newly discovered 'dark energy''s origins are also unknown. The confirmation of dark energy (which is recent) is what drives the expansion of the universe, and is indeed some kind of 'anti gravity'. Very interesting, but very strange. And we have no idea where the hell it comes from.
The reason there can't be many of them is we'd probably have detected them already by gravitational lensing. So whatever it is thats out there, its really heavy, and theres not many of them because so far we havent seen any lensing from objects near the edge of the galaxy.
In order to make up the necessary 'missing matter' from things like faint stars, neutron stars or dead stars, there would need to be alot of them.
While we're on theoretics, its also possible the phenomenon is related to dark energy, which has recently (within the past couple months) been nearly proven to exist by studying several lensing objects. 'Dark Energy' is likely whats responsible for the increasing rate of expansion in the universe. Its effectively a kind of anti-gravity. Its nature, such as where it comes from, is still totally unknown.
With very dim objects (like most astronomical phenomenon), you tend to get a narrow range of light from them. Thus, you use your color filters to capture it and eliminate the other stray wavelengths. This maximizes amount of light gathered.
Then you can go back and combine the separate images into one 'full color' image, if thats what you want.
It took me awhile to figure out that 'alloy-mini-um' they kept going on about was aluminum.
Just because you don't have a thorough, or even cursory, knowledge about everything in the world doesnt mean something is useless.
However, most of these don't emit enough to be harmful. Working in an area with radioactive materials tends to have higher background radiation, as does going on frequent flights or other high altitude operations.
Radiation is only dangerous in large, very easily detectable doses. And unless its an extreme amount, you can even take short term exposure to a relatively large amount and suffer few ill effects. You wouldnt want to stay long in such a hot environment though.
When I change some module in something, I call it a 'rewrite' if its a major change. Doesn't mean i'm starting from scratch.
And what happens when the updates conflict or don't work with the changes you've made? Then you have to rewrite the updates. yes thats right - 'rewrite'.
And then you have to test..and test..and test..
Then switched to unreal.
They also likely rewrote the unreal engine to add in features they wanted. As the article says, they rewrote the engine more than once.
Of course now the unreal engine is obsolete, so they likely need a new engine.
I find it highly unlikely anyone at this stage in development would advocate blowing anything up so near a major, and very important city.
Oh, and then market it to people who don't know much about computers. Do you think they'll really know the difference when it sounds like you're trying to intentionally confuse them?
And then complain when you get sued. Idiots.
Thus mutations which propagate are quite rare.
Yeah yeah, I know cheap shot. But if you think about the purpose and outcome of most of those prior British explorations of the 18th century..
Most transmission waveforms do NOT translate 10101 and so on as high-low-high-low-high pulses because of the potential for error. This is true for all transmission lengths, both short and long.
As an example, Ethernet uses Manchester encoding. There are many, many other schemes for this that accomplish the same basic task.
In short, nobody uses straight binary pulses for data transfer because its unreliable. Using shifting voltages would compound the problem.
I put some thought into this about, if you could create a hypothetic quadnary system with roughly the same 'speed' as a binary, I still don't see why it would be faster. Since every operation a computer does is either an add or a shift, how would going from base 2 to base 4 really be any faster? I suppose less quad bits to shift, but the adder would be more complicated. I dont even want to think about how one would design a quadnary adder.
See a post below about some guy claiming that all computers moving to 'quadnary' would be faster than binary. Anyone with a minimum education in logic design can point out a half dozen reasons why that's not likely to happen.
It is rather remarkable though at the sheer number of people who's highest accomplishment is a confusing looking shell script assume they're the genius on everything.
It would allow for for faster computers
Not likely. The complexity increase would slow things down alot. Especially since fact in every circuit you'd have to have something measure the voltage at every gate...
Not only would they be slower, they'd be far more unreliable, consume vastly more power, and the circuits would be enormous.
Its kind of unfortunate to see that they havent really come out with anything new since '97. Must've fallen on hard times.
There might be other difficulties though with it... possibly the reflecting light of the moon in general swamping what little shading might come off a lander. Interferometry will give you the arc resolution you need, but not necessarily the luminous.
There are plenty of astronomical phenomena which you cannot get pictures (at least not good ones) available for free. If you're a serious amateur astronomer (as this caters to), and are interested in investigating a particular area of space in detail, you need some damn good photos.
Damn good photos are not available to public, and they are not cheap. Professional astronomers pay hundreds of dollars for a few shots of an eclipsing binary system they may be studying. If you're an amateur who wants this kind of thing, its simply not available.
To be even stranger, the advertisements are usually not even about guns - just the company may happen to also sell parts.
One case comes to mind of an outdoorsman shop wanted to advertise its dehydrated food wares. In addition to hundreds of other outdoors materials, they sold replacement pistol barrels (they did NOT however, sell actual guns)
Google refused the ads on food on the premise of this.