I'm not talking about exception behaviour here; I'm talking about majority.
The question is; will low-quality renderings of my work substantially reduce my profit margin?
And I'm not talking about collector's editions of multibillion dollar releases. I'm talking about mediocre editions that they're practically having to shovel the DVD at their market anyways.
This would make piracy tolerable, since it would be more of a "try-before-you-buy" sort of system.
Except for the fact that with a movie what you are selling is not quality. You're telling a story.
Sure the story is better with higher quality; but once you've already told someone a story, are they likely to want to hear it again with slightly higher fidelity anytime in the next six months?
Take a metal, and cool it off very rapidly, and it becomes very hard but also very brittle. Cool if off fast enough apparantly, before the atoms have a chance to properly align themselves, and it becomes transparent, which is what happens with Silica to make glass. They just found a way to cool off Alumina fast enough.
I'm a jeweler and metalworker. Metal phase transitions are my speciality.
First off let me say that neither silica nor alumina is a metal; they are (respectively) the oxides of silicon and aluminum. Metals have mostly empty outer shells which is what causes their impressive conductivity, hardness, and quite a few other properties.
The oxide of a metal has its outer electron shells completely filled; it is no longer metallic in any way.
However you are right in that the quenching is key. The important part is to cool it off quicker than crystals form. A crystal structure is like an electromagnetic net, allowing the material to catch photons. No crystals, no net.
Actually, each crystal is more like a filter; crystals typically are polarized in special ways. If you have lots of small crystals throughout a material (star rubies are like this), then each one only lets some of the light through; the more layers you have, the less light gets through. Enough of them and absolutely zero photons can make it through the set of polarization filters.
Oh and regards metal heating...
Metals form grains in their solid state; small areas of material that are atomically aligned, similarly to a crystal. When a metal splits or bends, it tends to split or bend on grain boundaries.
A material with large grains tends to be hard but brittle; a force large enough to break the grain boundaries tends to cleave it straight through. We call this state "tempered" A material with small grains tends to be soft and flexible; it can bend without breaking. We call this state "annealed"
Most materials will work harden; as you bend and flex the material, grains tend to aggregate together as the opportunity arises. Take a sheet of dead soft copper and start bending it back and forth; it'll quickly become hard on the bend line, then snap in two. You could probably do the same with a paper clip if you have one handy.
When you heat up a material, you add kinetic energy and dissolve the grains. If you quench it rapidly, it'll stay in this small-grained state. If you quench before it gets that hot, you'll lock it into a large-grained state... the grains actually grow as you heat it, because you're adding kinetic energy enabling the atoms to adhere to the grains. Most metals have a particular temperature where the grains are the largest, after which they rapidly dissolve.
Jewelers know not the temperatures but the colors. If I make a steel tool and I want to temper it I heat it until straw-yellow, then quench it. If I want to anneal it, I hold it at cherry red for ten minutes then quench it. With silver, the temper heat is in the infrared and the anneal heat is dull red.
A nuclear bomb is simply enough nuclear material in one place to cause out of control heating due to nuclear chain reaction.
The trigger for a normal nuclear bomb is a bunch of blasting caps (or equivalent) that push a bunch of nuclear material together to form a sphere over a certain mass (I believe the critical limit is 6 kg for uranium)
If you melt enough of it together, you *will* get the same effect.
The moderator material was graphite. Which, while being pretty good at slowing down neutrons, is probably the worst material they could've chosen.
In a meltdown scenario, the core gets hot very fast. The nuclear reaction gets out of control, starts producing too much heat, and before long the fuel melts together to make a nice nuclear bomb.
Graphite is a poor choice for a moderator for several reasons:
1. It has a pretty high thermal expansion coefficient. It gets hot, and all of a sudden you can't retract your moderator rods.
2. It melts pretty easily. Suddenly, your moderator rods become slag at the bottom of your core, surrounding the nuclear fuel and ensuring that the maximum rate of nuclear reaction is occuring.
3. It burns when hot. And not just a little. It burns so hot that you can't pour water on a graphite fire; the fire breaks apart the water molecules and just uses the oxygen. That's right; pouring water on a graphite fire actually makes it hotter.
I remember reading somewhere that the amount of radiation released at chernobyl wasn't due to a nuclear explosion; it was due to radioactive smoke from the burning rods...
FWIW, all US reactors use a water moderated design that fails-safe
Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
It was my understanding that the exact process involved in a transistor is still not completely predicted...
That is, that while we know pretty precisely WHAT happens, we still don't know WHY. This is from a college professor of Quantum mechanics giving a guest lecture at SAPC in 1994. The name of the gentleman escapes me but I remember his point (and slide) quite well... the slide BTW, depicted the P-material as blue with white holes and the n-material as white with red balls all through it.
So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?
We have no reason to believe otherwise.
Well we have no proof otherwise. However, many people have suggested that human level reasoning cannot be assembled from a purely deterministic system and that therefore we must be able to tap some sort of quantum mechanical effect in our logic processes.
If one believes the mutliple universes theory of quantum mechanics, then one could call this ability to tap quantum mechanical effects for reasoning, a soul.
maybe this gravitational shielding works like magnetic shielding using ferromagnetic substances...
If you put a magnet against a steel plate the steel will pass the magnetic effect through. If you put some kind of non-magnetic (ok, very slightly diamagnetic... only because there is no non-magnetic substance) between the magnet and the plate however, the field does not pass through, instead it flows across the steel plate and back down to the magnet.
Maybe the gravitational effect is the same way; if you're in close proximity to the gravitational shield, then you receive the same amount of gravitation as you would if the shield were not there...
I seem to remember that the chairs in the cockpits magically transported them to the center of the robot, high-speed elevator style, after the link up... this would be required unless some sort of artificial-gravity system were introduced
One of the properties necessary to a good hash function is that one finds it extremely difficult to find two documents that hash to the same value. These guys managed to do it. That in itself isn't such a big deal; we knew that throwing enough compute cycles at the problem would eventually allow someone to find a collision.
But that period of time should be measured in decades. The author of this paper did it in just a little over 13 days. I'm not quite sure what he did; something about neutral bits... which sounds an awful lot like a way to predict which bits can be switched together to produce the same hash.
Cryptographic strength is based on np complete problems. The problems that you have to solve to break a hash function are typically characterized as one that can only be solved in less than polynomial time by having an oracle function; that is, some way to know the result of a calculation without having to actually do that calculation.
Neutral bits sounds like an oracle function. 80 000 CPU hours on a 256-way system is just a little over 14 days. Now I'm just waiting to see if SHA-1 is vulnerable. (let's hope not!!!)
Unfortunately, I wonder if that puts NVidia in an ugly place. It does set the bar for what the Geforce 7's have a minimum to do. But... that aint bad for us, now is it?:)
A properly run free market company should be able to implement any innovation they want, and as long as they charge a fair market price for it, stay in business no matter what.
If Singer was charging what their sewing machines were really worth back in the day when they lasted for centuries, they would still be making them like that and you wouldn't have a world of disposable sewing machines, disposable cameras, disposable cars...
In this case when I say disposable I am of course referring to planned obselesence. Which is good when you alert the consumer to your intentions, bad when you don't.
hahaha maybe that's what nVidia should do... make the NV core start to lose stability about 3 years after manufacture...
SLI was such an obvious way to make graphics rendering parallelized! I'm glad they're bringing it back... I've been missing it.
Does anyone have any idea how many PCI Express ports this uses? It's my understanding that you have a total of 20 and most motherboards are allocating 16x to the video... will this card require 8x? Or do you need a special motherboard for this?
I've worked with steel wire a bit in the past doing chainmail for SCA stuff. Graduated into chainmail jeweler, then just plain jeweler.
The particular wire they use is a strandad high tensile strength steel. The individual strands are probably 12-16 guage, the cable as a whole cladding included might be 4 guage.
To cut 16 guage half-soft steel wire takes a medium sized pair of bolt cutters and a lot of elbow grease. You could PROBABLY worry the cable through with those, but because you can't close the jaws on each individual strand, it's going to be more of a sawing motion.
To get through that cable you'll need a pair of bolt cutters whose jaws are large enough that the entire cable fits between them with no more than a 15-20 degree angle. And the leverage is going to be immense; 2-3 feet at least.
Not exactly a tool you could fit in your pocket:) The tool *is* available, you can probably find it for under $20. Most every hardware store will have one. They're used in construction to do exactly what the name implies; cut bolts:)
When you purchase a handgun in the state where I live, you have to pass a background check, plus a 24-hour "cooling off" period. At the end of this period you get a handgun permit. All handguns purchased in the state must be registered.
And I'm not even going to get into the concealed weapon laws in this state.
I think you're going to be in trouble from Homeland Security, but not necessarily the regular police. You have a right to bear arms. While you can carry a rifle without a license in plain sight downtown (barring municipal codes), it's illegal to have a handgun in a safe at your home unless you're licensed, registered, and have passed a background check.
But Homeland Security throws that out the window; any "terrorist activity", as they define it, is susceptible to their rules.
One of the reasons why laws should be written as precisely as possible...
Reality 1024X768 is NOT a surveleance camera. NTSC video is 740X480 then it's composite which blur's the image further.
specalized cameras are needed and they are not commonplace by any means.
now, a tiny 15X15 studio and you are at most 10 probably more accurate is 7.5 feet from the camera?? get real. nobody has cameras that heavily placed. not even in a Casino.
let's talk about the fact that in most areas where such a thing woudl be useful the target would be a minimum of 30 feet from the lens.
cameras will have to be completely redone. no more video cameras, but you have to go to digital rapid frame cameras of high resolution (about 1.5 Megapixel... more if you want to ensure it works good... so let's say 2) now we need to add high end lenses with zoom and autofocus and auto iris.. even more expensive, oh add pan/tilt.
It's a surveilance camera because I'm cost effectively monitoring a large area for security purposes.
The specialized cameras are easy to get these days. I got high frame rate (100 fps @ 640x480) scientific cameras. Max res is 1024x768 @ 30 fps.
And they cost less than $1000 each. Got good lenses surplus (my other hobby is home projector building... I end up with a lot of unused lenses from buying broken equipment for parts)... fixed focus lenses, irising is handled in software, pan/tilt not needed. I just want documentation for police; point it at the door and let the resolution/frame rate take care of getting a good picture.
For a modest audio studio that already runs on computers, the additional cost of a system like this is well worth the price. At $35/hr equipment fees I'll make back the cost real quick. And I can sleep safe at night knowing my sizeable investment in my hobby that I'm finally getting paid for is protected and secure.
Nobody has a surveillance system with cameras that have $30,000.00US lenses on them and $50,000.00 cameras.
You're right. Noone has that. I do however have a surveillance system whose cameras meet the specs required to do this processing. Two cameras, $2500 total including lenses.
RTFA... 1024x768 is good enough. And the eye only needs to take up a 120x120 area. I did some checking in my audio studio that's 15x15. If I stand in the middle of the room and look at the camera my eye is roughly 200x200. So call it 10 feet or so.
Well actually, reverse engineering is explicitly illegal in the USA--that's what part of the fuss over the DMCA is. Secondly, if Apple can claim either trade secret or copyright, then Real is in the wrong even without the benefit of bad law.
It would be more accurate to say that in many cases reverse engineering is now explicitly illegal; there's nothing wrong with reverse engineering; the problem is that the DMCA so broadly makes the various uses of reverse engineering illegal that there's practically nothing left that is legal.
Oh and you can't copyright an algorithm. You can patent it, or you can decide it's a proprietary trade secret. But you can't copyright, trademark, or servicemark an idea.
But FairPlay is AAC with a tiny bit of DRM on top. It would be hard to argue that it is a trade secret, being a slightly modified open standard...
You'd not have to worry at all about the ionization temperature.
When designing a laser, the only thing you need to worry about is what energy levels are stable for the medium you are working with.
I'm familiar with the principles behind the operation of a laser, thank you.
I've even built a TEA nitrogen and a flowing CO2 laser myself.
My point about the ionization temperature is that is one definite way to hit population inversion. You hit the right temperature, your lasing medium becomes a plasma and starts emitting photons...
I was just wondering if there was another way to go about building a laser that operated solely on heat...
It was a take-home test for a learning-by-satellite course, because my high-school didn't offer AP Physics. And this was the obvious "you're not going to pass every question on MY final!" question...
Yeah continuous burn you'll never see in real life, but it's pretty much required to solve this kind of problem using only techniques learned in Physics 101... the hard part, as I recall, was integrating the time dilation factor over the course of the slingshot.
And keep in mind it was simplified; we were to consider only the spacecraft and an airless featureless world of mass x. This is one of those "Let's assume the horse is a sphere" kind of problems. No three body gravitations, no solar radiation, no black-body radiation pressure, no relativistic drag from blue-shift.
Actually now that I'm thinking about it, I never compared the velocities involved to any real life situations. I know the mass was that of Jupiter... and the acceleration was 1G continuous from earth, using water as reaction mass expelled at.01c (consider the water to be subject to the newtonian laws of physics... another horse-to-sphere simplification). That's a long time to be accelerating 9.98 m/s*s...
Maybe this example doesn't apply to real vessels? I'm beginning to think not... at least until we find a cheap and plentiful reservoir of water outside the earth's gravity well and some miracle engine to push it out very quickly for months...
I recall using them. It was long enough ago that I can't tell you whether I needed them... though it sticks out in my mind as being a surprising answer.
few too many SciFi books, my friend. These spacecraft never exceed about 25,000 miles per hour, which means that relativistic effects are totally and completely negligible. I mean totally
One of the problems on my physics final was to calculate the difference in delta v measured as a scalar possible in a space craft burning a specific amount of fuel continuously from a tank of such and such capacity, with and without gravity assist. The professor congratulated me in private for being the only student to correctly answer that question.
The effect was small but noticeable. With lift costs at $10,000 a pound every drop of fuel saved on the mission plan is money in the taxpayers pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not talking about exception behaviour here; I'm talking about majority.
The question is; will low-quality renderings of my work substantially reduce my profit margin?
And I'm not talking about collector's editions of multibillion dollar releases. I'm talking about mediocre editions that they're practically having to shovel the DVD at their market anyways.
Like Blade II
This would make piracy tolerable, since it would be more of a "try-before-you-buy" sort of system.
Except for the fact that with a movie what you are selling is not quality. You're telling a story.
Sure the story is better with higher quality; but once you've already told someone a story, are they likely to want to hear it again with slightly higher fidelity anytime in the next six months?
Take a metal, and cool it off very rapidly, and it becomes very hard but also very brittle. Cool if off fast enough apparantly, before the atoms have a chance to properly align themselves, and it becomes transparent, which is what happens with Silica to make glass. They just found a way to cool off Alumina fast enough.
I'm a jeweler and metalworker. Metal phase transitions are my speciality.
First off let me say that neither silica nor alumina is a metal; they are (respectively) the oxides of silicon and aluminum. Metals have mostly empty outer shells which is what causes their impressive conductivity, hardness, and quite a few other properties.
The oxide of a metal has its outer electron shells completely filled; it is no longer metallic in any way.
However you are right in that the quenching is key. The important part is to cool it off quicker than crystals form. A crystal structure is like an electromagnetic net, allowing the material to catch photons. No crystals, no net.
Actually, each crystal is more like a filter; crystals typically are polarized in special ways. If you have lots of small crystals throughout a material (star rubies are like this), then each one only lets some of the light through; the more layers you have, the less light gets through. Enough of them and absolutely zero photons can make it through the set of polarization filters.
Oh and regards metal heating...
Metals form grains in their solid state; small areas of material that are atomically aligned, similarly to a crystal. When a metal splits or bends, it tends to split or bend on grain boundaries.
A material with large grains tends to be hard but brittle; a force large enough to break the grain boundaries tends to cleave it straight through. We call this state "tempered" A material with small grains tends to be soft and flexible; it can bend without breaking. We call this state "annealed"
Most materials will work harden; as you bend and flex the material, grains tend to aggregate together as the opportunity arises. Take a sheet of dead soft copper and start bending it back and forth; it'll quickly become hard on the bend line, then snap in two. You could probably do the same with a paper clip if you have one handy.
When you heat up a material, you add kinetic energy and dissolve the grains. If you quench it rapidly, it'll stay in this small-grained state. If you quench before it gets that hot, you'll lock it into a large-grained state... the grains actually grow as you heat it, because you're adding kinetic energy enabling the atoms to adhere to the grains. Most metals have a particular temperature where the grains are the largest, after which they rapidly dissolve.
Jewelers know not the temperatures but the colors. If I make a steel tool and I want to temper it I heat it until straw-yellow, then quench it. If I want to anneal it, I hold it at cherry red for ten minutes then quench it. With silver, the temper heat is in the infrared and the anneal heat is dull red.
Okay I'll take the bait...
Doors that swish open when you walk towards them
Computers that play __3-D chess__ !
(People that play 3-D chess)
Glasses (or contacts) that automatically fog up when looking at a beautiful foreign woman that you're destined to seduce and abandon
These are all reality today. Of course, the 3D chess is based and inspired by the show itself so you could call that one self-fulfilling prophecy.
A nuclear bomb is simply enough nuclear material in one place to cause out of control heating due to nuclear chain reaction.
The trigger for a normal nuclear bomb is a bunch of blasting caps (or equivalent) that push a bunch of nuclear material together to form a sphere over a certain mass (I believe the critical limit is 6 kg for uranium)
If you melt enough of it together, you *will* get the same effect.
The moderator material was graphite. Which, while being pretty good at slowing down neutrons, is probably the worst material they could've chosen.
In a meltdown scenario, the core gets hot very fast. The nuclear reaction gets out of control, starts producing too much heat, and before long the fuel melts together to make a nice nuclear bomb.
Graphite is a poor choice for a moderator for several reasons:
1. It has a pretty high thermal expansion coefficient. It gets hot, and all of a sudden you can't retract your moderator rods.
2. It melts pretty easily. Suddenly, your moderator rods become slag at the bottom of your core, surrounding the nuclear fuel and ensuring that the maximum rate of nuclear reaction is occuring.
3. It burns when hot. And not just a little. It burns so hot that you can't pour water on a graphite fire; the fire breaks apart the water molecules and just uses the oxygen. That's right; pouring water on a graphite fire actually makes it hotter.
I remember reading somewhere that the amount of radiation released at chernobyl wasn't due to a nuclear explosion; it was due to radioactive smoke from the burning rods...
FWIW, all US reactors use a water moderated design that fails-safe
Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
It was my understanding that the exact process involved in a transistor is still not completely predicted...
That is, that while we know pretty precisely WHAT happens, we still don't know WHY. This is from a college professor of Quantum mechanics giving a guest lecture at SAPC in 1994. The name of the gentleman escapes me but I remember his point (and slide) quite well... the slide BTW, depicted the P-material as blue with white holes and the n-material as white with red balls all through it.
So then the phenomenon of life is merely a complex arrangement of atoms and nothing more?
We have no reason to believe otherwise.
Well we have no proof otherwise. However, many people have suggested that human level reasoning cannot be assembled from a purely deterministic system and that therefore we must be able to tap some sort of quantum mechanical effect in our logic processes.
If one believes the mutliple universes theory of quantum mechanics, then one could call this ability to tap quantum mechanical effects for reasoning, a soul.
I read that book just last month. Now I can't even remember the author! I do remember the name of the protagonist though... Jason Worthing...
Ahh yes that's it! The Worthing Saga!
maybe this gravitational shielding works like magnetic shielding using ferromagnetic substances...
If you put a magnet against a steel plate the steel will pass the magnetic effect through. If you put some kind of non-magnetic (ok, very slightly diamagnetic... only because there is no non-magnetic substance) between the magnet and the plate however, the field does not pass through, instead it flows across the steel plate and back down to the magnet.
Maybe the gravitational effect is the same way; if you're in close proximity to the gravitational shield, then you receive the same amount of gravitation as you would if the shield were not there...
I seem to remember that the chairs in the cockpits magically transported them to the center of the robot, high-speed elevator style, after the link up... this would be required unless some sort of artificial-gravity system were introduced
One of the properties necessary to a good hash function is that one finds it extremely difficult to find two documents that hash to the same value. These guys managed to do it. That in itself isn't such a big deal; we knew that throwing enough compute cycles at the problem would eventually allow someone to find a collision.
But that period of time should be measured in decades. The author of this paper did it in just a little over 13 days. I'm not quite sure what he did; something about neutral bits... which sounds an awful lot like a way to predict which bits can be switched together to produce the same hash.
Cryptographic strength is based on np complete problems. The problems that you have to solve to break a hash function are typically characterized as one that can only be solved in less than polynomial time by having an oracle function; that is, some way to know the result of a calculation without having to actually do that calculation.
Neutral bits sounds like an oracle function. 80 000 CPU hours on a 256-way system is just a little over 14 days. Now I'm just waiting to see if SHA-1 is vulnerable. (let's hope not!!!)
Unfortunately, I wonder if that puts NVidia in an ugly place. It does set the bar for what the Geforce 7's have a minimum to do. But... that aint bad for us, now is it? :)
A properly run free market company should be able to implement any innovation they want, and as long as they charge a fair market price for it, stay in business no matter what.
If Singer was charging what their sewing machines were really worth back in the day when they lasted for centuries, they would still be making them like that and you wouldn't have a world of disposable sewing machines, disposable cameras, disposable cars...
In this case when I say disposable I am of course referring to planned obselesence. Which is good when you alert the consumer to your intentions, bad when you don't.
hahaha maybe that's what nVidia should do... make the NV core start to lose stability about 3 years after manufacture...
SLI was such an obvious way to make graphics rendering parallelized! I'm glad they're bringing it back... I've been missing it.
Does anyone have any idea how many PCI Express ports this uses? It's my understanding that you have a total of 20 and most motherboards are allocating 16x to the video... will this card require 8x? Or do you need a special motherboard for this?
Anyone know?
I've worked with steel wire a bit in the past doing chainmail for SCA stuff. Graduated into chainmail jeweler, then just plain jeweler.
:) The tool *is* available, you can probably find it for under $20. Most every hardware store will have one. They're used in construction to do exactly what the name implies; cut bolts :)
The particular wire they use is a strandad high tensile strength steel. The individual strands are probably 12-16 guage, the cable as a whole cladding included might be 4 guage.
To cut 16 guage half-soft steel wire takes a medium sized pair of bolt cutters and a lot of elbow grease. You could PROBABLY worry the cable through with those, but because you can't close the jaws on each individual strand, it's going to be more of a sawing motion.
To get through that cable you'll need a pair of bolt cutters whose jaws are large enough that the entire cable fits between them with no more than a 15-20 degree angle. And the leverage is going to be immense; 2-3 feet at least.
Not exactly a tool you could fit in your pocket
I'm in the states.
When you purchase a handgun in the state where I live, you have to pass a background check, plus a 24-hour "cooling off" period. At the end of this period you get a handgun permit. All handguns purchased in the state must be registered.
And I'm not even going to get into the concealed weapon laws in this state.
I think you're going to be in trouble from Homeland Security, but not necessarily the regular police. You have a right to bear arms. While you can carry a rifle without a license in plain sight downtown (barring municipal codes), it's illegal to have a handgun in a safe at your home unless you're licensed, registered, and have passed a background check.
But Homeland Security throws that out the window; any "terrorist activity", as they define it, is susceptible to their rules.
One of the reasons why laws should be written as precisely as possible...
Reality 1024X768 is NOT a surveleance camera. NTSC video is 740X480 then it's composite which blur's the image further.
specalized cameras are needed and they are not commonplace by any means.
now, a tiny 15X15 studio and you are at most 10 probably more accurate is 7.5 feet from the camera?? get real. nobody has cameras that heavily placed. not even in a Casino.
let's talk about the fact that in most areas where such a thing woudl be useful the target would be a minimum of 30 feet from the lens.
cameras will have to be completely redone. no more video cameras, but you have to go to digital rapid frame cameras of high resolution (about 1.5 Megapixel... more if you want to ensure it works good... so let's say 2) now we need to add high end lenses with zoom and autofocus and auto iris.. even more expensive, oh add pan/tilt.
It's a surveilance camera because I'm cost effectively monitoring a large area for security purposes.
The specialized cameras are easy to get these days. I got high frame rate (100 fps @ 640x480) scientific cameras. Max res is 1024x768 @ 30 fps.
And they cost less than $1000 each. Got good lenses surplus (my other hobby is home projector building... I end up with a lot of unused lenses from buying broken equipment for parts)... fixed focus lenses, irising is handled in software, pan/tilt not needed. I just want documentation for police; point it at the door and let the resolution/frame rate take care of getting a good picture.
For a modest audio studio that already runs on computers, the additional cost of a system like this is well worth the price. At $35/hr equipment fees I'll make back the cost real quick. And I can sleep safe at night knowing my sizeable investment in my hobby that I'm finally getting paid for is protected and secure.
Probably a bigger problem is communicating over 5km
[snip]
Hmmm, I wonder if you could mount a laser.. What do you mean, why?
A properly tuned blue laser will penetrate relatively clean ocean water surprisingly well... that's why!
Nobody has a surveillance system with cameras that have $30,000.00US lenses on them and $50,000.00 cameras.
You're right. Noone has that. I do however have a surveillance system whose cameras meet the specs required to do this processing. Two cameras, $2500 total including lenses.
RTFA... 1024x768 is good enough. And the eye only needs to take up a 120x120 area. I did some checking in my audio studio that's 15x15. If I stand in the middle of the room and look at the camera my eye is roughly 200x200. So call it 10 feet or so.
Well actually, reverse engineering is explicitly illegal in the USA--that's what part of the fuss over the DMCA is.
Secondly, if Apple can claim either trade secret or copyright, then Real is in the wrong even without the benefit of bad law.
It would be more accurate to say that in many cases reverse engineering is now explicitly illegal; there's nothing wrong with reverse engineering; the problem is that the DMCA so broadly makes the various uses of reverse engineering illegal that there's practically nothing left that is legal.
Oh and you can't copyright an algorithm. You can patent it, or you can decide it's a proprietary trade secret. But you can't copyright, trademark, or servicemark an idea.
But FairPlay is AAC with a tiny bit of DRM on top. It would be hard to argue that it is a trade secret, being a slightly modified open standard...
You'd not have to worry at all about the ionization temperature.
When designing a laser, the only thing you need to worry about is what energy levels are stable for the medium you are working with.
I'm familiar with the principles behind the operation of a laser, thank you.
I've even built a TEA nitrogen and a flowing CO2 laser myself.
My point about the ionization temperature is that is one definite way to hit population inversion. You hit the right temperature, your lasing medium becomes a plasma and starts emitting photons...
I was just wondering if there was another way to go about building a laser that operated solely on heat...
Unless this was a take-home test
.01c (consider the water to be subject to the newtonian laws of physics... another horse-to-sphere simplification). That's a long time to be accelerating 9.98 m/s*s...
It was a take-home test for a learning-by-satellite course, because my high-school didn't offer AP Physics. And this was the obvious "you're not going to pass every question on MY final!" question...
Yeah continuous burn you'll never see in real life, but it's pretty much required to solve this kind of problem using only techniques learned in Physics 101... the hard part, as I recall, was integrating the time dilation factor over the course of the slingshot.
And keep in mind it was simplified; we were to consider only the spacecraft and an airless featureless world of mass x. This is one of those "Let's assume the horse is a sphere" kind of problems. No three body gravitations, no solar radiation, no black-body radiation pressure, no relativistic drag from blue-shift.
Actually now that I'm thinking about it, I never compared the velocities involved to any real life situations. I know the mass was that of Jupiter... and the acceleration was 1G continuous from earth, using water as reaction mass expelled at
Maybe this example doesn't apply to real vessels? I'm beginning to think not... at least until we find a cheap and plentiful reservoir of water outside the earth's gravity well and some miracle engine to push it out very quickly for months...
I recall using them. It was long enough ago that I can't tell you whether I needed them... though it sticks out in my mind as being a surprising answer.
few too many SciFi books, my friend. These spacecraft never exceed about 25,000 miles per hour, which means that relativistic effects are totally and completely negligible. I mean totally
One of the problems on my physics final was to calculate the difference in delta v measured as a scalar possible in a space craft burning a specific amount of fuel continuously from a tank of such and such capacity, with and without gravity assist. The professor congratulated me in private for being the only student to correctly answer that question.
The effect was small but noticeable. With lift costs at $10,000 a pound every drop of fuel saved on the mission plan is money in the taxpayers pocket.