The industry seems to be laying/have laid the ground work for an exclusion of competition with major equipment makers. That's very interesting and all well and good, but doesn't it create a cartel where the greatest demand, the unfettered exchange of ideas, is unadressed? The finacial rewards for a company to break with the cartel would be huge. If they had enough cash on hand to fend off the lawsuits, it would be worth the risks, they'd be a monopoly overnight. One might consider the possiblity such manufactures being forced into such a cartel having the foresight to design their products in such a way that the copy protection was easy to disable.
In the end, the market will have its way. But just the same, it might be cheaper to support the EFF now, write letters and what-not. In some ways, forcing the issue like this could be a huge boon. Open Source projects aren't beholden to any intrest, and would have significant advantages in a world created where technology is used to restrict intellectual freedoms. Distributed systems would make Sun-Tzu proud; he might be surprised to see the forms his thoughts on warfare have taken.
I'm not *that* Kibo. I'm the real Kibo. Nick Adams (Hemmingway character, his sort of alter ego I bet) had a dog named Kibo when he was a child. The other Kibo is probably too hip for 900kB sigs now, or working on a ascii postprocess filter for trueSpace 5, but it's one of the two.
Sometimes it seems like/. readers come in three flavors: those who think Cold Fusion is being supressed by big oil companies and the militray industrial complex, those who think Ponds smells fishy, and those who know magnetic stirers can help prevent convection currents from causing a hot spot under your thermometer. (Does Utah still have a state university?).
If some people wish to read something into your words other than what you wrote, where's the harm. Maybe you can even take it as a compliment. You don't have to troll, cause the fish just jump into your boat.
But just so I stay on topic....
This is hardly a new development. When I took my last microelectronics fabrication class way back in '97 printable circuits were an interesting idea looking for an application.
Who wants a somewhat cheaper and much much slower computer? No one. They won't be making anything that's high margin. It's not the first time the managment of an endevour is divested from the reality of it.
They're bucking all the helpful physics. Smaller is better. What kind of feature size can you get with a printing press?
Even a quick look at the facts would tell you to sell your stock, or that venture capitalists will buy them to sell their useful patents.
Best case? If they get their technology well developed, they'll be able to make cheaper circuit boards. Hell their business model seems to be wishful thinking and forming alliances with impossibly huge companies (like Samsung) with little or nothing to offer. But I think I've done enuff ranting....
Chucky Darwin was always clear that his theories of evolution didn't apply to us in the strictest sence. Natural selection largely does not apply to humans at the individual level. Why is that? Our use of tools, and extended social networks coupled with a diffuse sence of responsibility to one another provide a shockingly effective saftey net. Take a moment an really think about what it takes to kill someone in this day an age. Shot in the head with a 12 gauge? Don't worry we'll fly you to the trauma center. You'll never be yourself again, but you may well live. Enough about tools, I think we all have a good idea how much we can do with those.
But what about those networks.... In short others will provide resources to those who cannot provide for themselves. Humans aren't the only animals that do this, but we are certainly the only ones that do it on the scale of millions, and our effectiveness in this endevour is difficult for the animal kingdom to match. (Note that examples of bees, ants etc, and any animal raising young don't apply as they're genetically related.) We use our network sort of like karma. We constantly put a little good karma in the bank and know that if we need to make a withdrawl the bank will be there even if we need to take out more than we've put in. Hell, our taxes and FEMA help buy new houses for people who live on rivers that flood every damn year, yet who for some reason didn't think to buy flood insurance. The farther someone is from me the less responsibility I have. If someone has a heart attack in front of me, I have the obligation to at least call 911 and perform CPR if I can. Farther away? I might just contribute some of my tax dollars. Another country? Foreign aid programs, buying habbits, charity. Other social networks in other countries will work in similar fashions, but they might not be as rich and powerful as the one I enjoy. If people can choose which network to be in why wouldn't they choose the best? They will, they do. Sometimes they pay smugglers a lot of money to pack them into a shipping container for a trip they might not survive. Or maybe they're smart, or beautiful.
In short, our social network insulates us from enviromental pressures. It does however create new pressures. But Darwin's theory only applied to enviromental pressures, should one apply the hypothesis to social pressures one must draw different conclusions. People aren't rich because they're better people, they're rich because they're fortunate to be rich in the vast majority of cases. Poor people aren't poor because they deserve it. Strict application of Darwin's ideas to our social structure leads to some fairly stupid expectations. At this point in time, our only real enviromental pressures are global warming (if you believe in bad science), or a celestial object striking the earth.
Lemme pose a question: Which is better being beautiful, or smart? I'd say beautiful. If you're smart you can create opportunity, but if you're beautiful other people do that for you.
First of all, the primary source of stem cells may be fetuses, but it is certainly far from the only. Witness the 2/2001 issue of Scientific American. We all have stem cells, bunches of them. Long ago they collectivly decided to take up slacker culture and listen to Seattle garage bands, roll blunts and snack on twinkies. They won't turn water into wine, or usher in a millenium of light without darkness, but they might make life a little better, and for some worth living. Stem cells have been collected from adult marrow, and even skin. Certainly some aspects of stem cell behavior are exciting (such as neurons coaxed from stem cells seem to home in and repair damaged areas of the brain and spinal cord), but stem cells aren't the fountain of youth. (Everything I've seen on aging seems to place the blame on collections of errors in our DNA)
Perhaps it was bad science. The researchers thought they isolated only white blood cells and managed to trap some astrocyes. It wouldn't be the first scientific trap that caught something other than intended. Perhaps it was bad journalism. What kind of person wrote the article, from what resources, with what background with what purpose? I remember when the MIR space station lost pressure and the CNN science correspondant had to look up how much pressure a Torr was (maybe CNN can't afford interns).
Then the last possability (I'll bother with). It was good science and good enuff reporting. In my experience pure researchers have this insane laser like focus on their specialty. They literally don't see anything else of the world. Their time table estimates are wildly inaccurate with an optimistic bias. Perhaps that's a necessary character trait, to maintain the relentless intensity and make the breakthough. Without a good perspective on how well and how poorly researchers tend to see the world can a writer really present an accurate depiction? Given a researchers appearent success should a journalist hold a that scientists predictions as highly suspect? If they did, what would the reader think?
I think I've done enough preaching, but I'll make one final remark ala Jerry Springer. At the end of the day, we all make our own judgements as to what the objective truth really is, factoring out other peoples prejudices and factoring our own. And don't pay prostitutes with a personal check if you're the mayor of a major city.
Bill Gates doesn't want to be president, he'd rather be powerful. Look at his philosophy.
'Use the nature of people's desire to share information to foist some of the most horrible and overpriced software on an unsuspecting public.' -- Bill Gates 1995(c)
He wants to be named chairman of the Fedral Reserve. Hell, with as debt ridden as America is anytime a president wants to initiate a spending program he has to check with the bond traders, and they still make him pee in a cup. He might also desire an appointment to the FTC, because with the dilligent oversight so typical of Ashcroft and the integrity of republicans in general he'll need it.:).
When I was refering to the crystalography of diamond I wasn't refering to it's geometry relative to Si but more to its scale. Diamonds corresponding tunnels should be smaller which should prevent Cu from poisoning the crystal. Titanium would probably fit though, and of course this is all abstraction from courses I took a while back:). Anyway I was just leaving open the possibilty that there might be another weirder hole I can't visualize.
I'm not terribly sure there's a lot of value in what I'm hoping is a clarification.:) But why not, right? When I refered to dislocations, I literally ment areas of imperfection in the crystal as opposed to the actual edge of a grain. Like a missing carbon atom, or a line where if you were looking at a sheet of atoms in the diamond it would look like someone ripped and slightly seperated the torn edge above and below the plane etc.
At any rate we should get back to talking about diamond not some silly metal. It would be pretty interesting to see some high quality doped diamond, maybe with nitrogen.
Maybe I'm one of the few that saw this recently. There was a special on diamond's future on TLC iirc. DeBeer's found a slight difference between the synthetic diamond and natural diamond. Synthetic diamond would fluoresce, quite beautifly actually. They're naturally worried that soon synthetic diamond will be available and indistiguishable. Their solution: etch a microscopic DeBeer's logo into the diamond and pray to the Gods of Brand Loyalty.
Oddly enough the difficulty of using Cu (Copper) on Si (silicon) is somewhat of a special case. Si crystal has the unfortunate (or fortunate depending on your point of view) property of being shaped like Cu sized tunnels. This had been known for ages. Back in the old days researchers would put a Si crystal an a big slab of warm Cu to let the Cu migrate into and throughout the Si. The Cu would zoom through the crystal and home in on the defects, this of course made the defects in Si crystals much easier to study. But having this same thing take place when you're trying to lay down a nice pattern on your precisely doped Si is somewhat less that ideal. Now I'm not a wiz a crystalography, but I can't "see" any orientations of diamond that would be like cu sized tunnels.
Diamond chips aren't really for the mass market, obviously. But certainly all of us could come up with a few different industrial uses with out really trying that hard. Smarter nuclear reactors, smarter furnaces, smarter engines of all forms etc. The above uses don't even scratch the surface when one considers marrying them with micromechanical devices. Why approximate data with some statistical model when you can just gather it directly and in real time? But aside from the fact that there are many uses waiting for the diamond chips, I might make the observation that there was a time when these huge rooms with vacuume tubes were only useful for cracking codes and calculating artillary tables.
Also it's worth noting that diamond stops being a semiconductor at 500C. I hate to dust off ye ol wayback machine (I never know if it will work properly) but I seem to recollect that Diamond became usefull around 220C. Obviously the performance of a 300C chip would suffer somewhat due to more electrons being scattered by the high temperatures, but it's not so much their preformance, but their useability that is the issue. Besides wouldn't we all want to see ads for Cray HVAC/supercomputers?
Warning! Suspect Anecdote Follows, Use Caution.
Once upon a time I was making amorphous substoichiometric thin films of tungstun trioxide (WO3). The Air Force was interested in this (though not me specifically) because W03 could be made into WS2 which was a nice semiconductor, well at least the band gap was attractive. It was a little higher temperature than Si. What the hell would they want with that? Well they wanted to use it to replace the mechanical devices that read the fuel pressure in the tanks of their fighter (probably all planes). I know for commercial planes 1 lb of weight translates to an additional $20k of annual operating cost (for a fighter plane I'd assume it's many times greater). But not only would such devices be much lighter, they'd be much smaller, and more reliable. It's the boon of solid state physics, as one makes things smaller, nearly every property improves. There were some other characteristics of WS2's structure that made it handy from a manufacturing stand point, but it was the band gap (higher temperature operation) that made it useful. I certainly see how the air force might want high performance fighters that had more room for accessories, while being more reliable and cheaper to fly. Something to consider.
But seriously, am I one of an extream minority who doesn't see BT as the great evil? Sure, their claim is full of crap. But I don't think it is due to evil tendencies on their part. Doesn't it seem at least possible that they're simply cogs in monkey suits making descisions about technology they don't understand in the slightest? BT like many large companies, probably doesn't propigate signal as well as it propigates noise.
In that company there are people making descisions about subjects they have no understanding. You may have engineers who are loath to admit, but feel that truly the BT patent does speak specifically about hyperlinks. Again the subtleties of the law might be lost on them and their finding of fact might very well be incorrect yet honest, and honestly regreted. The lawyers on the other hand most assuredly have at most a superficial understanding of the technical issues at hand. So can their findings of fact be technically accurate? Then come the PR people they have the unsavory task of justifing the action. Fortunately for them marketing people are usually the most ignorant, and so they don't appreaciate the gravity of what they are being told. They blindly parrot, "Hyperlinks are our idea. It is wrong to steal others ideas. We're just asking for what is ours." When confronted with conflicting information, they just imagine that in some way it probably fits together ok, but the person asking the question is just as ignorant, so they don't see it either. All the while the world at large (well the part worth talking about) is also asking a different question. The world is asking, "Is it right?" Not nessecarily if its technically correct (and I think there are great many levels where you can argue that it isn't and few if any for the converse) but rather if it is ethically correct. At British Telecom, perhaps only the engineers and other barers of "The Book of Common Wisdom" (available from DelRay in paperback), understand what the lawyers are asking, and how utterly foolish the PR people are making them look. The PR people have been told by the lawyers that this is a legal request, they know naught of the law, the patent, or the tool in question. They're being asked to do something that they can't determine to be illegitimate. So are the lawyers. The engineers in the name of absolute accuracy are probably offering up a, "Yes..but..." to the Gods of Ignorance, and the process proceeds without them. These are adversarial systems in the US and UK so you can't trust your adversaries to offer up accurate depictions of the situation.
The people at the very top are probably either unaware of how much of their credibility is as stake or are keenly aware that they are low on both credibility and cash, so why not roll the dice. If either the people with the power had the knowledge or vice versa, then we wouldn't be bothering with all this. All it boils down to is a giant company where the right arm doesn't know what the left is doing, while the on lookers watch. Its silly, but what large company doesn't do things like that? Xerox? Apple? IBM? Microsoft?
This is a pretty small problem, the kind our social machinery is good at solving. After all it's not like they have anything resembling a reasonable argument. Wouldn't it be better to worry about the ones that have a case and are decidedly against the intrests to our happy little collective?
Maybe all BT offers us is a chance to laugh; both at them, and at ourselves. If you work at a large company, can you say yours is really that different?
Oh it's much farther off that mearly developing room temperature superconductors. Niobium is a metal not unlike tungston. Of the things you can make stuff with, metals are extreamly forgiving, which is really why we use them at all. High temperature superconductors (HTS here on out) are not so freindly. You will never have a metal HTS, metals are all about free electrons, if the electrons want to get bounced around by thermal energy, metal won't stop them. HTS are tyrants, they make all the electrons march lock step to one wave equation. HTS are nasty pains in the ass ceramics that would be very difficult to write or even etch out of a substrate. Superconducting that exist as more than a science kit, will bit the providence of the three B's (big science, big government and big business). I'm sure there are alternatives better than the YtBaCu oxides I had been familiar with. But barring a real breakthrough of truly Ponds-Fleishman proportions (huh wonder if a hot spot developed under the thermometer in our electrolysis experiment...naw must be neutrons. Eureka, we've discovered heating water with electricity!).
Personally, (purely speculative) I think it will take 20 years or more, and precicely doped, multiwalled buckytubes. But by then we may well have nice optical computers, and will be busy playing "My So Called Life: The Game of Teenage Angst", with patented Voxel technology.
I actually got Star Control 3 at an Office Depot about 2 years ago. In many ways the game was more linear, but somewhat more tedious. The graphics were pretty good, and the dialogue, as one might expect was funny. The short version of the plot is you need to save the galaxy by taking all the species from the 2nd game as part of a UN task force to the galactic core, to find out why hyperspace isn't working. Then meet, and sometimes throw down on new species. The 2 player part of the game has all the old ships, even if the species aren't in the 3 game, and of course sweet new ones. You can get it at least here, although I would think you could beat the price easily.
The artists know they are getting screwed by this deal. We the consumers know we are getting screwed (I would argue less than the artists). So what would prevent the evolvolution of somthing that kills the 'Man' dead? A service like Napster certainly has the distribution angle covered. How much code would it really take to setup a meter, a communal rating system like slashdot, and a play for pay scheme? A lot, sure, and more broadband. But given the later two, I will assert that the future of record companies will be in doubt. Maybe Napster, and its kin will be the new lables. If record companies die, and we have to burn our own cds (for archiving), who cares? We spend less, the artists get more, we get better music from a much wider spectrum, the artists don't have to jump through hoops, and there is less crap in our landfills. The music industry will always need recording engineers, managers, but executives? Can't software do that job?
Not to mention the creation of a huge new freelancing market....
American culture can be best summed up by the Star Spangled banner. Now that everyone thinks I'm full of crap, hear me out anyway. The Star Spangled banner, as we all know, is about the battle of Baltimore. Prior to the battle, the british sailed into washington DC, burned down the white house, kidnapped another citizen and various other british-ness. The british sailed on to Baltimore to teach our then fledgeling bananna republic a lesson in humility. But there was a fort in the way. The commander of the fort knew the british were comming, and he knew there wasn't a lot they could do, his guns didn't have as much range, so he had a local seamstress make an obnoxiously large flag. When the british came and proceeded to shell the crap out of the fort, everyone just rode it out. The british, having figured out that despite their advantage the fort wasn't going anywhere, decided that's good enough and sailed back to see who won the grey cup. The Americans, for their part, replaced the small standard flag with the new super sized banner. Because sometimes, when you filp someone the bird, they can't see you. Today this tradition survives when youths and drunken men everywhere moon the cops. Sometimes you just need to talk smack when you're getting, or might get, your ass kicked. That same attitude is the basis for almost all american action movies, certainly those with Bruce Willis. That spirit and love of change are uniquely American. Is it culture? It's a tradition that's passed from one generation to another; oddly the succeeding generation tends to express it in a manner the previous generation finds abhorrent.
A final thought: "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Are not words that would tend to be considered successful.
As an aside, I could go into other aspects of American culture, like Horatio Alger et al. But none of those involve the domestic equivalent of mooning the cops.
Some of the automotive problems are a little different. The fuel cells need to be extreamly potent, light, yet strong enough to survive a crash, and stable enough that if a train hits it, Akron doesn't need to be bulldozed into a big pit lined with clay. It's a tricky situation. That's why we're more likely to see hybrid cars that are gas/electric (so a very efficent turbine can be used). Fuel cells, at least the reactions I had studied circa 1996 were all fairly complicated to get going, let alone in a very reliable fashion, and you did use saftey equipment. They will eventually make it to automobiles, but there are a lot of hurdles, those, they take time. It's not like everyone has been throwing buckets of money at the problem like it was cancer, for the past half century. The methonol fuel cells another person mentioned earlier had shown some promise, but I bet those will be a little later comming to america. A child might fall down a well, and try to survive on the smelly water in daddy's cell phone battery.
Out of curiosity which titles should I check out to see the PS2 in all it's glory?
The snowboarding title I saw for it was absolutly foul. The polygons were so sharp I was affraid I'd cut myself. Then the snow chunks looked like bad 2-d sprites. After all the negative press I'd read, I didn't expect anything truly stagering.... But damn, it looked like crap. However, I could tell it had a really high polygon count, I had NO trouble seeing the polygons.
Overall I'd have to agree. After all I'd read about the PS2 I knew there was no way in hell I'd throw my money away on it, but I was curious to see what a really high polygon count with no antialiasing looked like. Well, it looked like virtual origami. I saw their snowboarding game at one of the local stores and was shocked at how weak the graphics were. I waited on my Dreamcast until I knew which one was better, and my God, the difference is truly night and day. The Dreamcast may occasionally crash (yay microsoft), but at least it doesn't collect dust. Maybe that's just an exceptionally horrible title; but, I can't help but feel that watching SoulCalibur's kata's is good TV, while the PS2 is as disturbing as having your Limp Bizkit rock block prempted for a new Spice Girls single.
A brilliant red is something like 6600 A. I would assume something like a shift of 100 A off normal, but, I'm not a molecular biologist. If normal Red is 6.6k A, then 6.5k A for the "off-Red", and Green should be something like 5.2k A IIRC so may be a 5.1k or 5.3k A for "off-green". Ultraviolet would be something like 3.8k A for UVA. All of this is without a textbook, so kids don't try this at home.
I remember in one of my classes, it somehow came up that during preperation for operations in WWII Americans were field testing night fighting equipment that used the UVA spectrum. Most of the observers couldn't see the trial unaided, but some of them were of Germanic descent and could. This played a large role in the decision for the US armed forces to develop more infared and lowlight optics instead. Or so the story went anyway....
I'm 5 by 5 on the whole call a mutant a spade thing. But is noticeable the right word for the job? I mean, obvious, I can get on that bus. But noticeable? Natural selection tends to be subtle, and without a girlfriend to dress me, I might well never propigate my line. Another fashion victim. Maybe in a world of 10 billion people the only ones who can survive the battle of trendy plumage will be tetrachromates and their color blind boyfriends & sons.
I think I smell SciFi Spice Girls movie in the making, at least it will be better than Starship Troopers.
Slashdot Mirror
In the end, the market will have its way. But just the same, it might be cheaper to support the EFF now, write letters and what-not. In some ways, forcing the issue like this could be a huge boon. Open Source projects aren't beholden to any intrest, and would have significant advantages in a world created where technology is used to restrict intellectual freedoms. Distributed systems would make Sun-Tzu proud; he might be surprised to see the forms his thoughts on warfare have taken.
I'm not *that* Kibo. I'm the real Kibo. Nick Adams (Hemmingway character, his sort of alter ego I bet) had a dog named Kibo when he was a child. The other Kibo is probably too hip for 900kB sigs now, or working on a ascii postprocess filter for trueSpace 5, but it's one of the two.
If some people wish to read something into your words other than what you wrote, where's the harm. Maybe you can even take it as a compliment. You don't have to troll, cause the fish just jump into your boat.
But just so I stay on topic....
This is hardly a new development. When I took my last microelectronics fabrication class way back in '97 printable circuits were an interesting idea looking for an application.
Who wants a somewhat cheaper and much much slower computer? No one. They won't be making anything that's high margin. It's not the first time the managment of an endevour is divested from the reality of it.
They're bucking all the helpful physics. Smaller is better. What kind of feature size can you get with a printing press?
Even a quick look at the facts would tell you to sell your stock, or that venture capitalists will buy them to sell their useful patents.
Best case? If they get their technology well developed, they'll be able to make cheaper circuit boards. Hell their business model seems to be wishful thinking and forming alliances with impossibly huge companies (like Samsung) with little or nothing to offer. But I think I've done enuff ranting....
As long as we're being silly.... Why not magnitized iron filings and a baggie of metal-bond epoxy.
You forgot to mention a spontanious phase transition of the vacuum triggered by a run on the Large Hadron Collider.
But what about those networks.... In short others will provide resources to those who cannot provide for themselves. Humans aren't the only animals that do this, but we are certainly the only ones that do it on the scale of millions, and our effectiveness in this endevour is difficult for the animal kingdom to match. (Note that examples of bees, ants etc, and any animal raising young don't apply as they're genetically related.) We use our network sort of like karma. We constantly put a little good karma in the bank and know that if we need to make a withdrawl the bank will be there even if we need to take out more than we've put in. Hell, our taxes and FEMA help buy new houses for people who live on rivers that flood every damn year, yet who for some reason didn't think to buy flood insurance. The farther someone is from me the less responsibility I have. If someone has a heart attack in front of me, I have the obligation to at least call 911 and perform CPR if I can. Farther away? I might just contribute some of my tax dollars. Another country? Foreign aid programs, buying habbits, charity. Other social networks in other countries will work in similar fashions, but they might not be as rich and powerful as the one I enjoy. If people can choose which network to be in why wouldn't they choose the best? They will, they do. Sometimes they pay smugglers a lot of money to pack them into a shipping container for a trip they might not survive. Or maybe they're smart, or beautiful.
In short, our social network insulates us from enviromental pressures. It does however create new pressures. But Darwin's theory only applied to enviromental pressures, should one apply the hypothesis to social pressures one must draw different conclusions. People aren't rich because they're better people, they're rich because they're fortunate to be rich in the vast majority of cases. Poor people aren't poor because they deserve it. Strict application of Darwin's ideas to our social structure leads to some fairly stupid expectations. At this point in time, our only real enviromental pressures are global warming (if you believe in bad science), or a celestial object striking the earth.
Lemme pose a question: Which is better being beautiful, or smart? I'd say beautiful. If you're smart you can create opportunity, but if you're beautiful other people do that for you.
Perhaps it was bad science. The researchers thought they isolated only white blood cells and managed to trap some astrocyes. It wouldn't be the first scientific trap that caught something other than intended. Perhaps it was bad journalism. What kind of person wrote the article, from what resources, with what background with what purpose? I remember when the MIR space station lost pressure and the CNN science correspondant had to look up how much pressure a Torr was (maybe CNN can't afford interns).
Then the last possability (I'll bother with). It was good science and good enuff reporting. In my experience pure researchers have this insane laser like focus on their specialty. They literally don't see anything else of the world. Their time table estimates are wildly inaccurate with an optimistic bias. Perhaps that's a necessary character trait, to maintain the relentless intensity and make the breakthough. Without a good perspective on how well and how poorly researchers tend to see the world can a writer really present an accurate depiction? Given a researchers appearent success should a journalist hold a that scientists predictions as highly suspect? If they did, what would the reader think?
I think I've done enough preaching, but I'll make one final remark ala Jerry Springer. At the end of the day, we all make our own judgements as to what the objective truth really is, factoring out other peoples prejudices and factoring our own. And don't pay prostitutes with a personal check if you're the mayor of a major city.
'Use the nature of people's desire to share information to foist some of the most horrible and overpriced software on an unsuspecting public.' -- Bill Gates 1995(c)
He wants to be named chairman of the Fedral Reserve. Hell, with as debt ridden as America is anytime a president wants to initiate a spending program he has to check with the bond traders, and they still make him pee in a cup. He might also desire an appointment to the FTC, because with the dilligent oversight so typical of Ashcroft and the integrity of republicans in general he'll need it. :).
I'm not terribly sure there's a lot of value in what I'm hoping is a clarification. :) But why not, right? When I refered to dislocations, I literally ment areas of imperfection in the crystal as opposed to the actual edge of a grain. Like a missing carbon atom, or a line where if you were looking at a sheet of atoms in the diamond it would look like someone ripped and slightly seperated the torn edge above and below the plane etc.
At any rate we should get back to talking about diamond not some silly metal. It would be pretty interesting to see some high quality doped diamond, maybe with nitrogen.
Maybe I'm one of the few that saw this recently. There was a special on diamond's future on TLC iirc. DeBeer's found a slight difference between the synthetic diamond and natural diamond. Synthetic diamond would fluoresce, quite beautifly actually. They're naturally worried that soon synthetic diamond will be available and indistiguishable. Their solution: etch a microscopic DeBeer's logo into the diamond and pray to the Gods of Brand Loyalty.
Oddly enough the difficulty of using Cu (Copper) on Si (silicon) is somewhat of a special case. Si crystal has the unfortunate (or fortunate depending on your point of view) property of being shaped like Cu sized tunnels. This had been known for ages. Back in the old days researchers would put a Si crystal an a big slab of warm Cu to let the Cu migrate into and throughout the Si. The Cu would zoom through the crystal and home in on the defects, this of course made the defects in Si crystals much easier to study. But having this same thing take place when you're trying to lay down a nice pattern on your precisely doped Si is somewhat less that ideal. Now I'm not a wiz a crystalography, but I can't "see" any orientations of diamond that would be like cu sized tunnels.
Also it's worth noting that diamond stops being a semiconductor at 500C. I hate to dust off ye ol wayback machine (I never know if it will work properly) but I seem to recollect that Diamond became usefull around 220C. Obviously the performance of a 300C chip would suffer somewhat due to more electrons being scattered by the high temperatures, but it's not so much their preformance, but their useability that is the issue. Besides wouldn't we all want to see ads for Cray HVAC/supercomputers?
Warning! Suspect Anecdote Follows, Use Caution.
Once upon a time I was making amorphous substoichiometric thin films of tungstun trioxide (WO3). The Air Force was interested in this (though not me specifically) because W03 could be made into WS2 which was a nice semiconductor, well at least the band gap was attractive. It was a little higher temperature than Si. What the hell would they want with that? Well they wanted to use it to replace the mechanical devices that read the fuel pressure in the tanks of their fighter (probably all planes). I know for commercial planes 1 lb of weight translates to an additional $20k of annual operating cost (for a fighter plane I'd assume it's many times greater). But not only would such devices be much lighter, they'd be much smaller, and more reliable. It's the boon of solid state physics, as one makes things smaller, nearly every property improves. There were some other characteristics of WS2's structure that made it handy from a manufacturing stand point, but it was the band gap (higher temperature operation) that made it useful. I certainly see how the air force might want high performance fighters that had more room for accessories, while being more reliable and cheaper to fly. Something to consider.
In that company there are people making descisions about subjects they have no understanding. You may have engineers who are loath to admit, but feel that truly the BT patent does speak specifically about hyperlinks. Again the subtleties of the law might be lost on them and their finding of fact might very well be incorrect yet honest, and honestly regreted. The lawyers on the other hand most assuredly have at most a superficial understanding of the technical issues at hand. So can their findings of fact be technically accurate? Then come the PR people they have the unsavory task of justifing the action. Fortunately for them marketing people are usually the most ignorant, and so they don't appreaciate the gravity of what they are being told. They blindly parrot, "Hyperlinks are our idea. It is wrong to steal others ideas. We're just asking for what is ours." When confronted with conflicting information, they just imagine that in some way it probably fits together ok, but the person asking the question is just as ignorant, so they don't see it either. All the while the world at large (well the part worth talking about) is also asking a different question. The world is asking, "Is it right?" Not nessecarily if its technically correct (and I think there are great many levels where you can argue that it isn't and few if any for the converse) but rather if it is ethically correct. At British Telecom, perhaps only the engineers and other barers of "The Book of Common Wisdom" (available from DelRay in paperback), understand what the lawyers are asking, and how utterly foolish the PR people are making them look. The PR people have been told by the lawyers that this is a legal request, they know naught of the law, the patent, or the tool in question. They're being asked to do something that they can't determine to be illegitimate. So are the lawyers. The engineers in the name of absolute accuracy are probably offering up a, "Yes..but..." to the Gods of Ignorance, and the process proceeds without them. These are adversarial systems in the US and UK so you can't trust your adversaries to offer up accurate depictions of the situation.
The people at the very top are probably either unaware of how much of their credibility is as stake or are keenly aware that they are low on both credibility and cash, so why not roll the dice. If either the people with the power had the knowledge or vice versa, then we wouldn't be bothering with all this. All it boils down to is a giant company where the right arm doesn't know what the left is doing, while the on lookers watch. Its silly, but what large company doesn't do things like that? Xerox? Apple? IBM? Microsoft?
This is a pretty small problem, the kind our social machinery is good at solving. After all it's not like they have anything resembling a reasonable argument. Wouldn't it be better to worry about the ones that have a case and are decidedly against the intrests to our happy little collective?
Maybe all BT offers us is a chance to laugh; both at them, and at ourselves. If you work at a large company, can you say yours is really that different?
Personally, (purely speculative) I think it will take 20 years or more, and precicely doped, multiwalled buckytubes. But by then we may well have nice optical computers, and will be busy playing "My So Called Life: The Game of Teenage Angst", with patented Voxel technology.
Star Control 3, Buy it today!
I think SC3 was Ok, but I did enjoy SC2 more. SC 3 was just a little tedious, although it did have the better story. Such is the nature of things.
Not to mention the creation of a huge new freelancing market....
A final thought: "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Are not words that would tend to be considered successful.
As an aside, I could go into other aspects of American culture, like Horatio Alger et al. But none of those involve the domestic equivalent of mooning the cops.
A nice link to a readable and somewhat technical overview of fuel cells.e s/pems/pems.html
http://www.memagazine.org/contents/current/featur
A nice Scientific American article.o ns.html
http://www.sciam.com/explorations/122396explorati
Two nice links to NEC's proton polymer battery.
Asian Biz Tech article.
EE Times article (short and sweet).
I'm still waiting for the car that runs on happy thoughts and chocolate that John Stewart promised me.
The snowboarding title I saw for it was absolutly foul. The polygons were so sharp I was affraid I'd cut myself. Then the snow chunks looked like bad 2-d sprites. After all the negative press I'd read, I didn't expect anything truly stagering.... But damn, it looked like crap. However, I could tell it had a really high polygon count, I had NO trouble seeing the polygons.
Overall I'd have to agree. After all I'd read about the PS2 I knew there was no way in hell I'd throw my money away on it, but I was curious to see what a really high polygon count with no antialiasing looked like. Well, it looked like virtual origami. I saw their snowboarding game at one of the local stores and was shocked at how weak the graphics were. I waited on my Dreamcast until I knew which one was better, and my God, the difference is truly night and day. The Dreamcast may occasionally crash (yay microsoft), but at least it doesn't collect dust. Maybe that's just an exceptionally horrible title; but, I can't help but feel that watching SoulCalibur's kata's is good TV, while the PS2 is as disturbing as having your Limp Bizkit rock block prempted for a new Spice Girls single.
A brilliant red is something like 6600 A. I would assume something like a shift of 100 A off normal, but, I'm not a molecular biologist. If normal Red is 6.6k A, then 6.5k A for the "off-Red", and Green should be something like 5.2k A IIRC so may be a 5.1k or 5.3k A for "off-green". Ultraviolet would be something like 3.8k A for UVA. All of this is without a textbook, so kids don't try this at home.
I remember in one of my classes, it somehow came up that during preperation for operations in WWII Americans were field testing night fighting equipment that used the UVA spectrum. Most of the observers couldn't see the trial unaided, but some of them were of Germanic descent and could. This played a large role in the decision for the US armed forces to develop more infared and lowlight optics instead. Or so the story went anyway....
when she dresses you, even your girl says your clothes match.
she killed herself in 1972
you came up with the Buccs original colors.
I think I smell SciFi Spice Girls movie in the making, at least it will be better than Starship Troopers.