Maybe it *was* per square yard. That'd be more than 1.2kw for whatever you are counting as "incident sunlight". I think the source I'm remembering was counting everything from long infrared up to gamma rays. Clearly we have no direct-to-electricity converter that covers such a spectrum at any non-laughable efficiency. But I (thought I) was talking about how much energy hits a patch of earth, whether we know how to make it all do work or not.
Yes indeedy. As if a government had any other way of raising money than to take it from citizens. It's only a question of *when* you pay, not *whether*.
But I do wonder whether the cost could be covered out of fines exacted from people actually found guilty.
I'm torn. One thread says, "I'd really like to know who on earth would voluntarily install such a thing." The other thread whispers, "no, you wouldn't."
Oh, "too cheap to meter" never happens. We build better meters faster than we overtake them with falling commodity prices.
I remember when comm. satellites were going to make long-distance telephony too cheap to meter. Look around: lots of telcos meter every call you make, across the globe or over the fence.
What *does* happen is "costs us less to make the same amount of profit."
Microscopic fusion explosions don't sound much like a weapon to me, unless you're going to war against plankton or something. I'd much rather have a magnetic confinement (and aiming) technology if I wanted to make a fusion weapon.
If they can't find anybody Over There willing to take ITER due to it having scary words like "nuclear" in its description, maybe they could site it in the U.S. We probably have a facility already worked out that might be able to house it.:-/
It's worse than that, believe it or not. Ever seen how they squash the credits for a show into the left half of the screen and drop the audio, so they can squeeze in a promo. for some *other* show at the same time? That way they can have their promo. *and* the revenue from one or two ad.s it would have displaced.
For some reason this reminded me of a good Mark Twain quote: "Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I should know, for I have done it a thousand times."
Screenshots are probably not a good test. Most of the time I'd have to work pretty hard to get 256 different colors on my desktop. (My favorite background image is '-solid steelblue', though, so your mileage may vary.)
Someone was asking on a mailing list why Mozilla fanboys think their browser is so much more secure than the Internet Explorer fanboys' browser. (My words, not his.) The same day, the PNG vulnerability came out. THE SAME DAY, the patched Mozilla, Firefox, etc. were released. I was using the new Mozilla an hour after I learned (via mail from US-CERT) about the vulnerability in a third-party library that Mozilla uses.
How did Shakespeare put it? "Who steals my purse, steals trash. But he that filches my good name takes that which enriches him not, and leaves me poor indeed."
I'm told that when the fixit guy on _One Day at a Time_ announced his phone number, and it turned out to be an actual Indianapolis number (the show was set in Indy), someone had that number at the time and had to have it changed because the phone was ringing all the time with smart-alecks trying it out. Yes, some people really are that selfish.
You may not be able to profitably sit close to a huge screen, but you sure can stand back and survey, then walk right up to that gigapixel display and examine an interesting bit closely. This is for *work*, not play. Forget Frank.
Wanna bet there wasn't somebody from NOAA in the back, jumping up and down and trying to ask a question? Really high-res displays have a lot of uses.
Many of those uses aren't just for regurgitating an image taken in by a camera, either. What if you had a dense network of billions of simple, cheap sensors blanketing an area (the entire Atlantic Ocean, say, or all of southeastern Afghanistan in a grid of one-meter cells) and needed to visualize the patterns they are returning? Those little postage-stamp 2048x1532 monitors would be useless.
What if you had a trillion measurements from some high-energy physics experiment and wanted to look at them all at once without any loss of detail? Would that help? It's hard to say for sure until someone tries it.
Most of the exciting uses for something like this involve things you *can't* see just by looking.
Exactly. You could conceivably make a 140-*mile* display with existing technology, but if each pixel is the size of a family farm then what's the point? We don't need bigger displays so much as we need displays that can show more information at once.
I found the article viciously tantalizing. "High resolution...high resolution...high resolution." No numbers. If I'm gonna pay for a wall-sized display, I want to be able to put twenty pages of text and a couple of blueprints up all at the same time without eyestrain or overcrowding.
Right, your car doesn't have two axles*; it has four. What do you think the wheels rotate around? The inner bearing races have to be attached to *something*.
--------------- * "Axel" is a man's name; "axle" is a load-bearing projection from an object which locates the rotational axis of a rotating member.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it *was* per square yard. That'd be more than 1.2kw for whatever you are counting as "incident sunlight". I think the source I'm remembering was counting everything from long infrared up to gamma rays. Clearly we have no direct-to-electricity converter that covers such a spectrum at any non-laughable efficiency. But I (thought I) was talking about how much energy hits a patch of earth, whether we know how to make it all do work or not.
Yes indeedy. As if a government had any other way of raising money than to take it from citizens. It's only a question of *when* you pay, not *whether*.
But I do wonder whether the cost could be covered out of fines exacted from people actually found guilty.
I'm torn. One thread says, "I'd really like to know who on earth would voluntarily install such a thing." The other thread whispers, "no, you wouldn't."
...I'd like to see some discussion of sending the robots out in teams, so they can rescue or repair each other.
It's not waste; it's a resource you haven't bothered to exploit.
Oh, "too cheap to meter" never happens. We build better meters faster than we overtake them with falling commodity prices.
I remember when comm. satellites were going to make long-distance telephony too cheap to meter. Look around: lots of telcos meter every call you make, across the globe or over the fence.
What *does* happen is "costs us less to make the same amount of profit."
A dim memory says "three horsepower per square foot" if we could use it all. (It may be per square yard -- eh, that's only one order of magnitude.)
Of course, we're "using" a good deal of that power to operate the atmosphere and the ocean currents and the food supply.
Microscopic fusion explosions don't sound much like a weapon to me, unless you're going to war against plankton or something. I'd much rather have a magnetic confinement (and aiming) technology if I wanted to make a fusion weapon.
You "black hole" guys have been reading _Thrice Upon a Time_ again, haven't you.
If they can't find anybody Over There willing to take ITER due to it having scary words like "nuclear" in its description, maybe they could site it in the U.S. We probably have a facility already worked out that might be able to house it. :-/
It's worse than that, believe it or not. Ever seen how they squash the credits for a show into the left half of the screen and drop the audio, so they can squeeze in a promo. for some *other* show at the same time? That way they can have their promo. *and* the revenue from one or two ad.s it would have displaced.
For some reason this reminded me of a good Mark Twain quote: "Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I should know, for I have done it a thousand times."
Why don't you just call your UDP against the spammers? Oh, that's hard to do? Guess why we've not yet got rid of them.
Daimler Chrysler? The same DC that certified that they haven't used SCO products in more than seven years? That Daimler Chrysler?
If all of SCO's targets are big companies like DC, the next year should be extremely entertaining.
So now we'll be expected to pay them even more for something they have been unable, after roughly a year in court, to demonstrate that they own?
Screenshots are probably not a good test. Most of the time I'd have to work pretty hard to get 256 different colors on my desktop. (My favorite background image is '-solid steelblue', though, so your mileage may vary.)
"...will we soon need firewalls for...."
Silly question. The answer is always, "yes, and you should have designed them in from the beginning."
If it connects to a network, it needs protection. It's as simple as that.
Someone was asking on a mailing list why Mozilla fanboys think their browser is so much more secure than the Internet Explorer fanboys' browser. (My words, not his.) The same day, the PNG vulnerability came out. THE SAME DAY, the patched Mozilla, Firefox, etc. were released. I was using the new Mozilla an hour after I learned (via mail from US-CERT) about the vulnerability in a third-party library that Mozilla uses.
I consider the question answered.
How did Shakespeare put it? "Who steals my purse, steals trash. But he that filches my good name takes that which enriches him not, and leaves me poor indeed."
I'm told that when the fixit guy on _One Day at a Time_ announced his phone number, and it turned out to be an actual Indianapolis number (the show was set in Indy), someone had that number at the time and had to have it changed because the phone was ringing all the time with smart-alecks trying it out. Yes, some people really are that selfish.
You may not be able to profitably sit close to a huge screen, but you sure can stand back and survey, then walk right up to that gigapixel display and examine an interesting bit closely. This is for *work*, not play. Forget Frank.
Wanna bet there wasn't somebody from NOAA in the back, jumping up and down and trying to ask a question? Really high-res displays have a lot of uses.
Many of those uses aren't just for regurgitating an image taken in by a camera, either. What if you had a dense network of billions of simple, cheap sensors blanketing an area (the entire Atlantic Ocean, say, or all of southeastern Afghanistan in a grid of one-meter cells) and needed to visualize the patterns they are returning? Those little postage-stamp 2048x1532 monitors would be useless.
What if you had a trillion measurements from some high-energy physics experiment and wanted to look at them all at once without any loss of detail? Would that help? It's hard to say for sure until someone tries it.
Most of the exciting uses for something like this involve things you *can't* see just by looking.
Exactly. You could conceivably make a 140-*mile* display with existing technology, but if each pixel is the size of a family farm then what's the point? We don't need bigger displays so much as we need displays that can show more information at once.
I found the article viciously tantalizing. "High resolution...high resolution...high resolution." No numbers. If I'm gonna pay for a wall-sized display, I want to be able to put twenty pages of text and a couple of blueprints up all at the same time without eyestrain or overcrowding.
"I am a CMU alumni."
:-)
I found the problem. The prints showing how to make the axles strong enough were annotated in Latin, and so nobody at CMU could read them.
A Purdue Alumnus.
Right, your car doesn't have two axles*; it has four. What do you think the wheels rotate around? The inner bearing races have to be attached to *something*.
---------------
* "Axel" is a man's name; "axle" is a load-bearing projection from an object which locates the rotational axis of a rotating member.