I think the 4004 was clocked in KHz. That's often fast enough to control a machine that takes seconds to do anything. Capacitor leakage might be a problem, but it's not impossible to translate those old designs into static CMOS. And the patents have expired! Once they get decent plastic transistors (not a problem that's been solved to my knowledge, but it will be), the real problem as far as doing a low performance microcontroller in plastic isn't space or speed, it's cost. Tying up an expensive printer for hours to make one CPU, vs etching 10,000 at a time into silicon -- maybe it will eventually make economic sense, but I doubt it.
I hate to spoil all this dreaming with realism, but you'd really be pushing this technology to make even an 8-bit CPU. (See the third page of the article.) The smallest elements you can print are about 25 micrometers (.001 inch), which is over 100 times the linear dimensions in a modern Pentium chip. And that means the transistors will be 10,000 times the area, and 10,000 times the capacitance. Add the inferior performance of the plastic transistors to the complexity limitation implied by the dimensions, and what you wind up with is something like a 6502, but running at a few KHz...
There are actually many control applications where a small 8-bitter running at KHz speeds is quite sufficient. But you can buy good 8-bit silicon CPU's for $0.50 to $15 (depending mainly on how many pins you need), and I don't see any chance of these plastic circuits beating those prices.
What this might be good for is the custom interface circuits that are virtually always needed between the CPU and the world. These usually wind up either as a large number of generic components, soldered onto a fair-sized circuit board, costing perhaps $20 to $100 to utilize a $5 CPU. Or you can use a few programmable logic device chips -- but these cost more than the CPU. So if they can get reasonable price/performance, you might eventually see printed plastic circuits containing the "glue logic" as well as the resistors, capacitors, and ESD-suppressing diodes -- so you just solder on the CPU chip and its ready to go. (But not for a Pentium motherboard -- think about the speed.)
More realistically, there are many applications where large, low-performance circuits would be ideal. Displays, for instance -- you can etch a wonderful display into a silicon chip, but you need a microscope or a good projection system to read it. Maybe they will soon be able to print the same circuit in plastic at readable size.
"In the Corporate Republic, the land of AOL/Time-Warner and the Disney Corp., is Microsoft really that unusual, or even particularly predatory?" Yes. It has about 90% of the desktop OS market, which is well within the legal definition of "monopoly". AOL/Time-Warner, etc., doesn't have 50% of any one market. One more merger could change that--but that would be illegal. (I am a bit concerned that they might buy the Justice Dept. so they can get away with it.) Until they do attempt that last merger, there is no legal basis for anti-trust action. IANAL, but I think the legal side of this argument is just that simple.
On another note, if you don't like AOL or Disney, just don't buy from them, and don't watch their movies and TV channels. You don't lose anything but time- and mind-wasting diversions. Likewise, it is possible to avoid using MS OS's. But MS has used 18 years of guaranteed income and name recognition (at least) from it's OS's to gain almost as big a lock on the office software market. So if you are in business, you will have customers and vendors sending you data in Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and you've got to be able to decode those formats. To some extent you can use third party software, but this was created by reverse-engineering Word and Excel files, not by using published documentation. When MS changes the format, it will be a year or so before other vendors can catch up, and probably some obscure features will never be properly interpreted. And so virtually every business in the US winds up buying at least one Windows box and MS Office, and buying it again every few years, because you can't afford to risk faulty communications with your customers.
Of course, that doesn't seem to be what Judge Jackson focused on. Trust the federal judiciary--even when they do the right thing, it will be for the wrong reason...
IANAL, but coming out a few years apart makes all the difference. The key to trademark law is whether similar names are likely to be confused. Most movies are soon forgotten by everyone except film historians, so if the title is a common word like "Diablo", it can be re-used every few years without the public becoming confused. And if Diablo the game goes off the market, soon that title will become free to the next comer. But given the frequent tie-ins between one kind of entertainment and another, anyone who knows there is a video game named "Diablo" would assume that a movie of the same title was related to the game. So even if they hadn't taken out a trademark on Diablo the movie, I think Blizzard entertainment would have a case.
But I don't think they'd have a case against a similar title that clearly wasn't related to their game, e.g. "Diablo the Drug Lord." Watch cable on Tuesday night: "Angel", the good vampire on WB, fighting for market share with "Dark Angel", the genetically engineered runaway on Fox.
"No purely esoteric study is classified as a science." Except for certain branches of physics that is: Particle physics where they need $ billions to do the next experiment and even that is not enough --they don't really expect to get unambiguous results until they get an accelerator the size of Texas. Or all the areas where they speculate without concern that any possible experiment could invalidate their theories (Grand Unification Theories, the creation and composition of the universe...). IMO, it's not really science, but they have most people fooled. This is why I switched to engineering.
"Simply put, once you are notified that content you are hosting isn't legal, you are risking being held liable for what is there." True, so you delete it, and you are off the hook legally. Tomorrow they put it onto someone else's computer. Get the copyright police busy sending out 100,000 cease and desist (or whatever you'd call it) notices a day, and they won't have time to track down the originators...
A lot of states have higher taxes -- at least most of the East Coast, and probably CA also. There are worse things for business than high taxes: inadequate infrastructure (roads, power plants, phone lines), an uneducated workforce, or thugs running the government. You'll find all three of those problems in Detroit, but most places west of US 23 or north of Flint have good roads, plenty of power, a fairly literate English-speaking work force, and almost honest government. I've lived in several other states. I'll take rural MI over any of them.
I think the Romans just left the water running continuously, and hoped that eventually this trickle would wash away the "deposits". Maybe we ought to get back on topic now...
It is fairly rough service for the bearings though -- the built-in lubrication has to work over perhaps a 70 degrees C range without getting too thick when cold (so the fan won't start) or getting too thin when hot. If they figured they could trust you to take it apart and change the grease every 3 months, the design would be trivial, but most users never take the covers off, so the lube must not dry out, leak out, or otherwise fail through several years of spinning at a fairly high speed and temperature. That's a bit of a challenge in materials design.
Someone mentioned disk drive bearings by comparison. I think hard drive bearings float on a film of air once it's up to speed, so the surfaces are in contact only at spin up and spin down--total miles traveled with surfaces in contact is thus normally much less than with a fan. Also note that disk bearings only support the weight of the disk, fan bearings have to support a thrust load due to fan reaction (that is, it's pushing air so there's a push back). I suspect the fan bearings are getting the heavier duty by far. And the budget is tighter on a $9 fan than a $100 disk drive.
I might be wrong here, but I think superconducting cables don't let the magnetic fields change easily, so they would require conversion to high-voltage DC for transmission. This is not a new thing, incidentally, it's sometimes done with long-distance copper wires, both to avoid power radiating away (an 800 mile wire with 60 Hz current is a radio transmitting antenna), and because the AC magnetic effects tend to force the current to the surface of the wire, while with DC you get current evenly distributed throughout the wire.
The cooling system would be interesting. You have to circulate LN2 through the cable, which implies coming up to refrigeration & pump units every few miles. As for leak prevention, first you've got an expensive jacket covering the wires and holding the LN2 (like a fat garden hose, but made out of something that won't crack at LN2 temperatures), then outside of that there's a thick layer of insulation, with some sort of armor outside of everything. Then it's buried.
I expect small leaks would be self-limiting in a buried cable, pretty soon they'd be plugged with ice. Digging it up to fix the leaks is something I'd rather not know about, though.
As for what happens if they lose cooling: the ceramics become insulators rather suddenly, and the current drops by orders of magnitude. I hope that a fault-detector shuts it off entirely pretty fast, since that silver tube is utterly inadequate to carry the load by itself, but if 50KV is dropped across a few feet of silver it just might conduct enough current to burn out.
I think these would be buried cables. Ceramic superconductors are inherently about as flexible as a china dinner plate. They give them a little flexibility by stuffing ceramic grains into a silver tube -- that allows winding them up on a big reel and straightening them out once, very carefully. Unless someone's found a whole lot better process, they certainly wouldn't survive the continuous flexing of wire hanging from poles. Underground high-voltage lines do take quite a lot of (electrical) insulation, but they are often used in urban areas for safety considerations. But liquid-nitrogen cables are going to need massive (thermal) insulation anyhow, and it shouldn't be that hard to find materials that provide both electrical and thermal insulation.
I've seen a lot of comments about "not so bright" people getting hit by viruses. There's quite a lot of truth in that--every virus that's run through my company's mail system was introduced by someone at headquarters, and I know they're all a pack of dolts. 8-) And I spend less than 5 minutes a week updating my virus protection and the only virus I ever got hit by was not one I opened, but a boot-sector virus spread by the corporate servers. But really it doesn't depend on intelligence; the people at risk are anyone who simply uses their computer as a tool without spending weeks learning about the bizarre inner workings of Windows & Outlook.
Now if Outlook's default setting was to display the message text only, then ask "There is a program of unknown origin embedded in here. It could be a virus, and may not have been sent by the purported sender of this e-mail. Do you want to run it?" then anyone infected by an e-mail virus would indeed be a dolt. But the default settings are to conceal whether an attachment is executable or not, and Microsoft "thoughtfully" provided several ways to still conceal an executable even after you've disabled scripting in e-mails and set it to display the filename extension on attachments -- if you even know all the extensions that might contain some sort of program. Then there are all the other security holes in Windows, such as whatever it was that let the servers reach out and touch my boot sector--I don't know why McAfee running on both the servers and my computer didn't catch it, but regardless of anti-virus software, no damn way should an OS allow a remote program to change the boot sector without notifying the user!
I don't really believe that conspiracy theory, but as for motive -- wouldn't it be nice to own the one virus filter that has the cure before the virus is discovered in the wild? 8-)
No, they don't calibrate rulers by that chunk of metal any longer. The meter is now defined as so many wavelengths of the light emitted by a particular kind of laser -- that's more accurate than marks incised on a platinum beam, and the setup can be replicated in any calibration lab that wants to spend the money. The second is defined in terms of the frequency of a laser. But I think the third fundamental unit, the kilogram, is still an actual hunk of metal. You could define it as the mass of some very large number of protons, but that is too difficult to measure to the required accuracy.
About spelling, according to what I learned back in first grade, "meter" is pronounced meet-ur, while "metre" should be pronounced meet-ree, unless you are a Frenchman (who can't spell phonetically at all), or a Brit who is so convinced of French cultural superiority that he won't use his own judgement concerning French foibles... Do you spell the unit of mass "kilogramme" also?
But your script is not embedded in the e-mail, it's running in your computer, right?
The one non-virus application of scripts embedded in e-mail I have heard of is a HTML script that silently sends back copies of all replies and forwarded mail to the originator, so he can track what was done with his e-mail. That's not a very friendly application either, but the infectiousness is too low to count as a virus. Or there may be people that put an animated picture into their e-mails -- I'd figure anyone doing that has way too much free time...
That was indeed a bone-headed over-reaction. But you do have to down the e-mail servers or whatever is spreading the virus immediately, otherwise the problem can get much worse in just minutes. So if you are doing it right, you've got a considerable cost in virus protection, and no cost in virus damages...
Sounds like Russian computers can't run Windows. That doesn't make you totally immune (the very first majorly destructive virus was a Unix worm intended to make Unix administrators pay a little attention to security, and I have heard of exactly one Linux worm), but it certainly reduces your exposure.
It does get written off -- but not as an explicit line item. Rather, you have lost sales or delayed projects because people were busy chasing viruses rather than doing their normal jobs, possibly overtime for the computer sanitizing crew, and so on. Costs go up and profits go down, and that goes into the tax return. Charging a "casualty loss" on top of that would be double-dipping.
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I think the 4004 was clocked in KHz. That's often fast enough to control a machine that takes seconds to do anything. Capacitor leakage might be a problem, but it's not impossible to translate those old designs into static CMOS. And the patents have expired! Once they get decent plastic transistors (not a problem that's been solved to my knowledge, but it will be), the real problem as far as doing a low performance microcontroller in plastic isn't space or speed, it's cost. Tying up an expensive printer for hours to make one CPU, vs etching 10,000 at a time into silicon -- maybe it will eventually make economic sense, but I doubt it.
I hate to spoil all this dreaming with realism, but you'd really be pushing this technology to make even an 8-bit CPU. (See the third page of the article.) The smallest elements you can print are about 25 micrometers (.001 inch), which is over 100 times the linear dimensions in a modern Pentium chip. And that means the transistors will be 10,000 times the area, and 10,000 times the capacitance. Add the inferior performance of the plastic transistors to the complexity limitation implied by the dimensions, and what you wind up with is something like a 6502, but running at a few KHz...
There are actually many control applications where a small 8-bitter running at KHz speeds is quite sufficient. But you can buy good 8-bit silicon CPU's for $0.50 to $15 (depending mainly on how many pins you need), and I don't see any chance of these plastic circuits beating those prices.
What this might be good for is the custom interface circuits that are virtually always needed between the CPU and the world. These usually wind up either as a large number of generic components, soldered onto a fair-sized circuit board, costing perhaps $20 to $100 to utilize a $5 CPU. Or you can use a few programmable logic device chips -- but these cost more than the CPU. So if they can get reasonable price/performance, you might eventually see printed plastic circuits containing the "glue logic" as well as the resistors, capacitors, and ESD-suppressing diodes -- so you just solder on the CPU chip and its ready to go. (But not for a Pentium motherboard -- think about the speed.)
More realistically, there are many applications where large, low-performance circuits would be ideal. Displays, for instance -- you can etch a wonderful display into a silicon chip, but you need a microscope or a good projection system to read it. Maybe they will soon be able to print the same circuit in plastic at readable size.
"In the Corporate Republic, the land of AOL/Time-Warner and the Disney Corp., is Microsoft really that unusual, or even particularly predatory?" Yes. It has about 90% of the desktop OS market, which is well within the legal definition of "monopoly". AOL/Time-Warner, etc., doesn't have 50% of any one market. One more merger could change that--but that would be illegal. (I am a bit concerned that they might buy the Justice Dept. so they can get away with it.) Until they do attempt that last merger, there is no legal basis for anti-trust action. IANAL, but I think the legal side of this argument is just that simple.
On another note, if you don't like AOL or Disney, just don't buy from them, and don't watch their movies and TV channels. You don't lose anything but time- and mind-wasting diversions. Likewise, it is possible to avoid using MS OS's. But MS has used 18 years of guaranteed income and name recognition (at least) from it's OS's to gain almost as big a lock on the office software market. So if you are in business, you will have customers and vendors sending you data in Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, and you've got to be able to decode those formats. To some extent you can use third party software, but this was created by reverse-engineering Word and Excel files, not by using published documentation. When MS changes the format, it will be a year or so before other vendors can catch up, and probably some obscure features will never be properly interpreted. And so virtually every business in the US winds up buying at least one Windows box and MS Office, and buying it again every few years, because you can't afford to risk faulty communications with your customers.
Of course, that doesn't seem to be what Judge Jackson focused on. Trust the federal judiciary--even when they do the right thing, it will be for the wrong reason...
Usually you don't have to fire. Show them the gun, they run away.
IANAL, but coming out a few years apart makes all the difference. The key to trademark law is whether similar names are likely to be confused. Most movies are soon forgotten by everyone except film historians, so if the title is a common word like "Diablo", it can be re-used every few years without the public becoming confused. And if Diablo the game goes off the market, soon that title will become free to the next comer. But given the frequent tie-ins between one kind of entertainment and another, anyone who knows there is a video game named "Diablo" would assume that a movie of the same title was related to the game. So even if they hadn't taken out a trademark on Diablo the movie, I think Blizzard entertainment would have a case.
But I don't think they'd have a case against a similar title that clearly wasn't related to their game, e.g. "Diablo the Drug Lord." Watch cable on Tuesday night: "Angel", the good vampire on WB, fighting for market share with "Dark Angel", the genetically engineered runaway on Fox.
But what are the chances he brought a half-dozen friends with him?
How do you know where the crown jewels are on an alien?
"No purely esoteric study is classified as a science." Except for certain branches of physics that is: Particle physics where they need $ billions to do the next experiment and even that is not enough --they don't really expect to get unambiguous results until they get an accelerator the size of Texas. Or all the areas where they speculate without concern that any possible experiment could invalidate their theories (Grand Unification Theories, the creation and composition of the universe...). IMO, it's not really science, but they have most people fooled. This is why I switched to engineering.
"Simply put, once you are notified that content you are hosting isn't legal, you are risking being held liable for what is there." True, so you delete it, and you are off the hook legally. Tomorrow they put it onto someone else's computer. Get the copyright police busy sending out 100,000 cease and desist (or whatever you'd call it) notices a day, and they won't have time to track down the originators...
A lot of states have higher taxes -- at least most of the East Coast, and probably CA also. There are worse things for business than high taxes: inadequate infrastructure (roads, power plants, phone lines), an uneducated workforce, or thugs running the government. You'll find all three of those problems in Detroit, but most places west of US 23 or north of Flint have good roads, plenty of power, a fairly literate English-speaking work force, and almost honest government. I've lived in several other states. I'll take rural MI over any of them.
I seem to remember President Jimmy Carter quoting that once. In a Playboy interview.
I think then your neighbors are supposed to kill you, or God will do whatever He did to Sodom & Gomorrah...
I think the Romans just left the water running continuously, and hoped that eventually this trickle would wash away the "deposits". Maybe we ought to get back on topic now...
It is fairly rough service for the bearings though -- the built-in lubrication has to work over perhaps a 70 degrees C range without getting too thick when cold (so the fan won't start) or getting too thin when hot. If they figured they could trust you to take it apart and change the grease every 3 months, the design would be trivial, but most users never take the covers off, so the lube must not dry out, leak out, or otherwise fail through several years of spinning at a fairly high speed and temperature. That's a bit of a challenge in materials design.
Someone mentioned disk drive bearings by comparison. I think hard drive bearings float on a film of air once it's up to speed, so the surfaces are in contact only at spin up and spin down--total miles traveled with surfaces in contact is thus normally much less than with a fan. Also note that disk bearings only support the weight of the disk, fan bearings have to support a thrust load due to fan reaction (that is, it's pushing air so there's a push back). I suspect the fan bearings are getting the heavier duty by far. And the budget is tighter on a $9 fan than a $100 disk drive.
I might be wrong here, but I think superconducting cables don't let the magnetic fields change easily, so they would require conversion to high-voltage DC for transmission. This is not a new thing, incidentally, it's sometimes done with long-distance copper wires, both to avoid power radiating away (an 800 mile wire with 60 Hz current is a radio transmitting antenna), and because the AC magnetic effects tend to force the current to the surface of the wire, while with DC you get current evenly distributed throughout the wire.
The cooling system would be interesting. You have to circulate LN2 through the cable, which implies coming up to refrigeration & pump units every few miles. As for leak prevention, first you've got an expensive jacket covering the wires and holding the LN2 (like a fat garden hose, but made out of something that won't crack at LN2 temperatures), then outside of that there's a thick layer of insulation, with some sort of armor outside of everything. Then it's buried.
I expect small leaks would be self-limiting in a buried cable, pretty soon they'd be plugged with ice. Digging it up to fix the leaks is something I'd rather not know about, though.
As for what happens if they lose cooling: the ceramics become insulators rather suddenly, and the current drops by orders of magnitude. I hope that a fault-detector shuts it off entirely pretty fast, since that silver tube is utterly inadequate to carry the load by itself, but if 50KV is dropped across a few feet of silver it just might conduct enough current to burn out.
I think these would be buried cables. Ceramic superconductors are inherently about as flexible as a china dinner plate. They give them a little flexibility by stuffing ceramic grains into a silver tube -- that allows winding them up on a big reel and straightening them out once, very carefully. Unless someone's found a whole lot better process, they certainly wouldn't survive the continuous flexing of wire hanging from poles. Underground high-voltage lines do take quite a lot of (electrical) insulation, but they are often used in urban areas for safety considerations. But liquid-nitrogen cables are going to need massive (thermal) insulation anyhow, and it shouldn't be that hard to find materials that provide both electrical and thermal insulation.
I've seen a lot of comments about "not so bright" people getting hit by viruses. There's quite a lot of truth in that--every virus that's run through my company's mail system was introduced by someone at headquarters, and I know they're all a pack of dolts. 8-) And I spend less than 5 minutes a week updating my virus protection and the only virus I ever got hit by was not one I opened, but a boot-sector virus spread by the corporate servers. But really it doesn't depend on intelligence; the people at risk are anyone who simply uses their computer as a tool without spending weeks learning about the bizarre inner workings of Windows & Outlook.
Now if Outlook's default setting was to display the message text only, then ask
"There is a program of unknown origin embedded in here. It could be a virus, and may not have been sent by the purported sender of this e-mail. Do you want to run it?"
then anyone infected by an e-mail virus would indeed be a dolt. But the default settings are to conceal whether an attachment is executable or not, and Microsoft "thoughtfully" provided several ways to still conceal an executable even after you've disabled scripting in e-mails and set it to display the filename extension on attachments -- if you even know all the extensions that might contain some sort of program. Then there are all the other security holes in Windows, such as whatever it was that let the servers reach out and touch my boot sector--I don't know why McAfee running on both the servers and my computer didn't catch it, but regardless of anti-virus software, no damn way should an OS allow a remote program to change the boot sector without notifying the user!
I don't really believe that conspiracy theory, but as for motive -- wouldn't it be nice to own the one virus filter that has the cure before the virus is discovered in the wild? 8-)
No, they don't calibrate rulers by that chunk of metal any longer. The meter is now defined as so many wavelengths of the light emitted by a particular kind of laser -- that's more accurate than marks incised on a platinum beam, and the setup can be replicated in any calibration lab that wants to spend the money. The second is defined in terms of the frequency of a laser. But I think the third fundamental unit, the kilogram, is still an actual hunk of metal. You could define it as the mass of some very large number of protons, but that is too difficult to measure to the required accuracy.
About spelling, according to what I learned back in first grade, "meter" is pronounced meet-ur, while "metre" should be pronounced meet-ree, unless you are a Frenchman (who can't spell phonetically at all), or a Brit who is so convinced of French cultural superiority that he won't use his own judgement concerning French foibles... Do you spell the unit of mass "kilogramme" also?
But your script is not embedded in the e-mail, it's running in your computer, right?
The one non-virus application of scripts embedded in e-mail I have heard of is a HTML script that silently sends back copies of all replies and forwarded mail to the originator, so he can track what was done with his e-mail. That's not a very friendly application either, but the infectiousness is too low to count as a virus. Or there may be people that put an animated picture into their e-mails -- I'd figure anyone doing that has way too much free time...
That was indeed a bone-headed over-reaction. But you do have to down the e-mail servers or whatever is spreading the virus immediately, otherwise the problem can get much worse in just minutes. So if you are doing it right, you've got a considerable cost in virus protection, and no cost in virus damages...
Sounds like Russian computers can't run Windows. That doesn't make you totally immune (the very first majorly destructive virus was a Unix worm intended to make Unix administrators pay a little attention to security, and I have heard of exactly one Linux worm), but it certainly reduces your exposure.
It does get written off -- but not as an explicit line item. Rather, you have lost sales or delayed projects because people were busy chasing viruses rather than doing their normal jobs, possibly overtime for the computer sanitizing crew, and so on. Costs go up and profits go down, and that goes into the tax return. Charging a "casualty loss" on top of that would be double-dipping.
It's simple -- Eros is outside of the Martian space defence perimeter. 8-)