I seem to recall that the VentureStar was unmanned. And I agree. Sending men into orbit is completely different than sending equipment up, and cost is completely different. (But, I think that longer stints ala ISS is definitely good to bring the cost down) It just doesn't make sense to compare manned and unmanned flights, and while I agree that the shuttle should be loaded as full as possible every time it launches, an SSTO could bring the cost down so much that it doesn't make sense to launch most types of payload via shuttle any more...
I imagine the paper phone people are looking into this seriously though. One of the problems with the phones is that the microphone/speaker is sold seperately and currently costs $20. They can probably get it down to $5, but you still have to buy it seperately. Or they bundle it with the phone, the cost being passed down to the consumer.
Piezoelectric elements can be not only speakers but microphones... actually, due to the Heisenberg principle, ANY speaker can also be a microphone (and any LED a light sensor, etc. It breaks down for some of todays components, like electrolytic capacitors or almost anything involving semiconductor technology)... so they could print the entire phone on paper...
Now if only they could print my monitor on rice paper as well... <G>
I found the research lab's website here, but couldn't find anything about this technology... anyone else find it?
While I hate to see the military taking over this project, at least the X-33 has a chance to fly. I just hope they'll build a couple and lob them over the fence to NASA (who did spend $400 million, after all) when they're done.
We seriously need this technology. As a community and as a species. It currently costs $10,000 USD / pound to send stuff into space. That's just plain old too expensive. How is space supposed to open up and be profitable at that price level? Thank god for the cold war, or the US wouldn't even have the aging shuttle fleet it has now.
The X-34 (the real plane to be built based on the X-33) is supposed to bring that cost down to about $1000 USD / pound (including development costs). Lots of companies can afford that kind of price tag. For $30,000, you can lob up a decent geosync satellite. Or I could lob up a couple microsats for my weekly salerie...
Hey, I like that idea. What do you think? maybe an integrated imaging array, ala BEAM? Or a laser? Solar cells would be most of the weight for a laser, and I'd need a decent thermal mass to help cool off the laser... or just make sure it's in the shade.
Actually, rockets take off horizontally. The vertical distance is nothing compared to the change in velocity required to STAY up there... And they would, in fact, slow down the earth. If they didn't come back down. Since they come back down, you can consider it a closed system, therefore no changes are possible.
And tidal energy slows down ROTATION, not orbital velocity. That's why the same face of the moon points towards either at all times.
IANAL, but from what I know of trademark law, there has to be a marketplace conflict. For instance, my company has registered several trademarks, one of which is trademarked by two OTHER companies.
We're a web design firm. The other companies are a restaurant and a law firm. Since we don't share a marketplace, we can all own the same trademark and we don't conflict with each other.
A good example of this would be if I had created a mining company and produced a robotic digging machine and named it OpenGL (or something similar)... it would be questionable whether SGI's trademark were enforceable.
Now, as far as OpenIL goes, you could argue that it doesn't conflict with OpenGL. OpenGL is a 3D description language, produced and optimized for communication with hardware 3D renderers. OpenIL is an image manipulation library (from what I saw on their homepage)... so their claim is iffy at best.
Add in there prior use. If you can reasonably prove that you were using OpenIL BEFORE their trademark was registered (which I'm assuming is relatively recent that their registration was approved, if they're just now getting around to sending out warning notices), then you can continue to use the name regardless.
Nonetheless, it would be a lengthy, messy, and extremely expensive court battle. I think it would be worth pushing the point, however. Remember, civil cases rarely go to court. If they go to court, then its an indication that the system has failed. So my advice: push the matter. Insist that it's not a trademark conflict, since you're in slightly different markets, and (if applicable) that you were using the name OpenIL before they registered the trademark. At the least, they're likely to offer a decent settlement. You might even get to keep your name!
Also, since this is an open source and presumably not for profit application, do trademark laws apply here? You're not selling anything or even licensing technology (except under the GPL or LGPL or similar agreement)... it might be worth persuing that angle a little...
This is really old hat. I've seen this in several guides to IP scanning and IP impersonation. Everyone acknowledges that it's a potential hack, but that it's also somewhat difficult to pull off. The funniest part is that I've never heard of anyone actually doing it, and most of the hypothetical situations I've heard of didn't list how a cracker could profit from such a thing.
It doesn't allow you to completely hijack a TCP/IP conversation, just to impersonate a particular user. For one message. Because if the server sends a reply to that message and you can't predict how many bytes it's sending, then the ISN will be messed up again. Because you still don't get the return packets.
Come on people, news from this decade (or at least the last one) would be really great.
Not to get too far off topic, there are two big problems with Gnutella... one of the reasons I want to see Napster to go to a Gnutella-like model.
It's bandwidth intensive - It costs a ton of bandwidth for a search, and actual downloading is usually hobbled to 20Kbps, with the default client settings
User connectivity - it just doesn't have the number of users Napster has. Even if it did, with a TTL of 5 and only so many outgoing connections, you still can't reach a huge number of users. At home, I bump up the outgoing connections to 50, but then I choke all my bandwidth with the connections.
Of course, there are two big problems with Napster too...
File types - Why must I trade only mp3's? I'd like to be able to trade videos, text documents, alternative audio formats, even software (if I had a reasonable virus scanner)
Legal issues - duh.
So, what I really want to see is a combination of the two initiatives. Napster like connectivity with Gnutella's file sharing and lack of legal issues (so far)
That's what you get on Sealand for $15,000. After reading this and several other articles about it, it just looks like Sealand isn't for Napster. The bandwidth is WAY too low, and Sealand isn't setup for people with the kinds of legal problems Napster is having. It really looks like it caters to the other kind of legal problems... problems where you want your transactions themselves to remain entirely private and anonymous. And protected by a small army^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H heavily armed body guard.
The real solution for Napster, if they want to continue with doing busines... which despite the great idealism and the wonderful technological revolution they've helped to start, may not be the best idea in the world at this point... anyways... the REAL solution for Napster is to go Gnutella. You know, multiple anonymous servers, except for Napster, just rotate among them. Go underground in such a way that there is no legal entity who owns and manages the service. Just like with Gnutella clients, the company from which you download your client only sells the client, not the service. Napster needs to go the same way. My only problem is that I just don't see any way to do that...
From my understanding, fair use includes the ability to produce 1 archive copy for backup purposes. Copyright lawyers I've asked in the past defined it that way. Other than that, fair use is pretty much private home viewing/listening...
I would like to issue an apology to the music industry. Apparently, making a copy of The Matrix soundtrack because I had left mine at the house was simply aggrevious. I'm sure that making that compilation CD of love songs for my girlfriend last Valentine's Day cost the industry billions. And encoding all my CDs into MP3 and burning a single disk with all that audio data on it, so my new MP3 player in my car will work, must have put several recording companies out of business.
Once again, my apologies to a bloated industry which seems to be concerned only with stopping a technological revolution, at the cost of freedom, dignity, and profit.
I've got a legitimate use of modchips for you; making games. If you're writing your own code for PS (requires the PS version of codewarrior, ca. $3000), then having a modded PS is the only way to test it out. You can get them from Sony, but it's a long arduous process where you prove that:
You are a legitimate developer
You have a desire to make a game
You will license that game through Sony
You have at least one of the following items: Jade idol, two-headed goat, authentic first edition lara croft doll (from back when she was still just a double-d cup)
You know how to perform the ritual of obeisance to our new Nipponese Emperor, the great, powerful, and all knowledgable Sony Consumer Entertainment
Needless to say, that makes it really hard to develop something on your playstation just for fun...
Actually, according to my current contract, they DO own it. And most of the larger consulting firms have this kind of contract, because you never know what an employee will work on in any particular project.
I'd be happy with my normal pay for 3 or 6 months or whatever it is. As long as I can do work during that time period for myself.
Basically, this would give me time to prepare a resume and work on private work and brush up my skills. If someone is paying you not to work, that doesn't mean you can't keep your skills sharp! And most companies give you a package if you're fired, so this is a perfect opportunity.
The only condition is that my IP becomes my own. A surprising number of companies own your KNOWLEDGE while you work for them; if you patent anything or write some really cool software outside of work, then that information belongs to them, not you. That's the real problem. I mean, if I go home tonight and write the "Killer App", there's nothing I can do legally (short of lying) to keep my company from claiming all rights to it.
But, if the my IP becomes my own immediately on termination, and I'm paid at least 100% of my salary for the length of the NC contract, then I'm a happy/.er
So, anyone out there want to actually TRY this? I'm interested in composing a message and sending it out and having the/. community try to pick it apart. If anyone can do this, we should be able to.
Interested parties, e-mail me at merlin_jim@hotmail.com... I'm looking for encoders AND decoders here...
Actually, you need more than that, but I agree. They're talking about building a language. I say go one better. Build a Turing Machine! But give it a couple extra, useless (from the machine's point of view) instruction to mark data as important. You'll need a start mark block and an end mark block, since a Turing Machine is inherently a one-bit device.
To do that symbolically, you need True, False, NAND, OR, and Copy symbols. And an infinite memory storage device. Random Accesible Linear Addressing is a plus, but serial would work too (though you'd need commands to change the direction of serialization) Luckily, you can design such a device so that it only needs to be infinite in one direction. And then, infinite no longer means infinite, just big enough.
Since a Turing Machine can simulate any other Turing Machine (including all CPUs), you can then write meta-code for it and send it down. And since it's such a simple concept, they'll be able to build one very easily. With the mark instruction, we can then mark particular information within our programs for them.
Just, please, DON'T SEND WINDOWS!!!! We want to communicate, not frustrate. I can just see the catastrophe if we send Windows... we'll push their civilization to develop FTL technology millenia before it would have otherwise, which they'll do just to make sure that the civilization which could create such a plague on the universe would be justly punsihed for their indiscretions. ID4 all over again...
Re:Wouldn't it be easier to use The Bible
on
Anticryptography
·
· Score: 1
Well, you have a few flawed assumptions here.
a) the bible is true. As far as I know, this hasn't been conclusively proven yet. So why would we go with a maybe cultural correlation, when there is a provable correlation in the language of algorithms?
b) If the bible is true, then Jehovah, or Yahweh, or whoever... call him The God Of The Israelites (TGOTI)... chose to give its message identically to all of creation. If so, why didn't TGOTI give us a concrete clue that he did so? I don't really understand your use of the number 66 above, but I'm guessing it's an esoteric interpretation to a biblical verse. But I'm guessing lots of other interpretations abound.
c) That the civilization you're speaking to also believes the Bible, and used the same numbering system. The chapters and verses applied to the books in the Bible were not assigned by their author, but assigned later by monks wishing to preserve the text they were copying, and applying a numbering scheme for basis of quality control. Also, who's to say that they haven't completly rejected the works of TGOTI, as many scientists in our world have done. Or that they've even heard of TGOTI? Nearly two-thirds of the humans on OUR planet haven't.
No, I think at the end of the day, you need a provably correct method of communicating with aliens. One that you can give to any decently educated culture here on earth and they would be able to decode it. The criteria for this culture is that they have the technology and understanding to receive interstellar transmissions. If they can't do that, then they wouldn't be able to decode the message anyways. But if even one of these cultures CAN'T understand the message, then its back to the drawing board, because there's no way a 7-armed, 3-eared, sightless carnivore the size of a 3 story office building will ever be able to understand it.
There's SO much wrong with this post. Let me cover the simple stuff:
Superconductors do not "draw more electricity to achieve greater power"... any wire does that. All conductors use all the available electricity to do their work. Superconductors do not resist the flow of electricity at all, leading to 100% efficient energy transfer.
Heat is not generated by current, it's generated by resisting current. Conductors convert a portion of the current flowing through them into heat; that's where the inefficiency lies. 100% efficient = 0 heat.
I don't have the figures, but assume a.1% efficiency loss (that's gold wire folks, one of the best conductors known to man) and a per-capita usage of 500 Watts/hour... which is just about enough to run your computer, the fridge, and the lights at the same time. That's.5 W/hour being turned into heat... or 1800 Joules of heat per hour... or 7533 calories of heat per hour... enough to heat a liter of water seven-and-a-half degrees. It's probably a LOT more for first-worlders and a LOT less for third-worlders, but you get the idea. That's a lot of waste heat that superconducting technology can help us get rid of.
Materials exist that do this. The problem is that it's not the energy you convert, it's the energy potential, as in potential difference.
Top-down in efficiency:
Peltier junctions, an existing technology, are produced by junctions of two metals. When electricity is applied, heat energy flows from one metal to the other. If the current is reversed, heat energy flows the other direction. If heat energy flows from one metal to the other, then a potential voltage is produced. However, in all cases, the Peltier junction, if viewed as an enclosed system with two inputs, increases in temperature and decreases in potential energy.
The second idea is that you harness the kinetic energy of the nucleus itself to create electric energy. This happens in ALL materials, and is why cold materials glow in the infrared. Warmer materials glow in the visible wavelengths (red-hot poker, etc.) The problem here is, to get usable energy out of this system, you have to be at a lower energy point. Meaning you have to be colder than whatever is providing you energy. This provides a theoretical limit on any kind of heat engine. It is against this limit that the efficiency of a heat engine is measured; even if you get a 100% heat engine, that doesn't mean that ALL the heat energy in it is being converted to another type of energy, only that it is at the theoretical limit for efficiency.
And last but not least, zero-flux vacuum energy. I won't go into the details, go here if you want them. The short of it is, virtual particles exist everywhere and there should be ways to tap them. It is often said in this field that there's enough energy in a cup of coffee to boil all the oceans of the world. And there is a way to tap it:
Take two large metal plates in relatively empty space. Infinite plates are ideal, but that's not going to happen any time soon. The important part is that they are reflective and lightweight. Place them close together, parallel, so that the space between them is a resonating cavity for EM radiation. If the empty space is empty enough (i.e. no light energy, etc.), then they will be repelled from each other slightly. This is because the virtual particles forming between them cause light pressure on the reflective surfaces, pushing them apart.
I've heard that this has actually been tried and proven to work, but don't have any concrete documentation. Anyone know any more details?
Anyways, the point is that, with this method, you STILL need a lower-energy point. By setting up the resonating cavity between the two plates, you've basically created a region where zero-point energy is higher than in the area outside the plates.
But don't let me be a complete downer. The energy holding an atom together was untappable at one point for the exact same reasons. Through a combination of superconducting technology for fast efficient energy exchange, nanotechnology for creating quantum cavities, and some as yet undiscovered technology, this could be the way we finally realize the dream of Athena (goddess of the technology of war); to become gods ourselves.
Trademarks are indeed all about commerce. The problem being that what they're used to enforce these days isn't commerce, but brand equity.
Hey all you/.'ers, what do you think about a BrandMark? Branding is exceptionally important these days, even if you're not engaging in commerce. It's important on the OSS level to differentiate between products. It's also important on a personal level. If you build up a brand and promote it, it's kind of like your personal reputation. But if you don't do commerce, ergo can't trademark your brand, then someone else can effectively "steal" your brand by trademarking it.
What we need is an ammendment to the trademark laws that allow brandmarking... reply back and give me some good ideas, then lets write our congressmen...
Okay, this is slightly off topic, but I thought I'd point out to the slashdot community the true potential of open-source hardware, which we just don't seem to be getting:
a) It's field programmable. That means that if I discover a bug, it's not going to result in a huge recall. It'll result in a new source file or possibly asking your customers to visit the service desk to fix.
b) It's highly parallelizable. Make a standard bus and come up with a simple processor that you can put on one of the lower-end FPGAs (usually under 1$) and you can build a HUGE cluster very cheaply. If you setup your bus right, it can even be reconfigurable live. So most of your FPGA stack is running executable code, but if you need to make a buffer chip for USB, just pick one of your FPGAs and reprogram it. If you need a motor driver, pick an FPGA and reprogram it. You get the idea; TRUE plug-n-play, using the standardized hardware design languages (HDL) out tehre. Combine this highly parallelizable computer with a standard connection format and you have hardware device drivers.
c) Prototyping. If you are a hardware manufacturer, you can cheaply prototype your design and test it without having to make a die each time (HUGE cost savings)
d) May be used as an analog device, or simply as a digital logic device. You don't have to run a core on it... and if you think of the HDL as your programming language, then you compile to the chip. These chips aren't setup such that they have to run a Turing machine; if you can design your code right, then you don't have to run a CPU. Works great for Embedded apps. The real benefit to Open Source Hardware will be when it merges with Open Source Software. Like a C-compiler for FPGAs. Sure, the lower-end chips can only respond at a fixed rate (usually 16MHz or so), but if you have a program that doesn't need to respond faster than that and is relatively small, you get huge speed savings... not to mention the fact that you can offload computations from your main CPU.
Does anyone out there have any more ideas for this sort of thing? I'm trying to get together a group to do this... especially the Open Source firmware idea... any takers?
I have the same problem with the PDF viewer, but I can explain the concepts behind any sort of light-based 3D capture.
It basically depends on polarization. All light is polarized, meaning that the electric wave and the magnetic wave that make up a photon are orthogonal (at right-angles within a plane) to each other. Most light is randomly polarized... that is, it bounces around at random with no structure to it. That's why lasers are commonly used in holography; it provides a polarized constant.
A traditional hologram is made by bouncing polarized light off an object (possibly from several different angles) and then exposing a piece of film to both the original, highly polarized light, and the light that is reflected off the object. When light is reflected, you change it's polarization to be (typically) parallel to the incident of reflection.
This makes miniature "grooves" in the image... they're virtual grooves, meaning they have no height, but all the same they selectively reflect only light of certain polarizations. Then, by shining the same type of polarized light on the exposed image, different angles of viewing select different polarizations, meaning different angles of viewing on the target object.
As for how this technology works, from what I can tell they're capturing the color and polarization of all the photons. This, combined with the width of the CCD, allows you to capture 3D information about the subject matter. If you were to add a source of polarized light to this thing, you could probably through the use of mirrors capture EVERY angle, just like a traditional hologram.
As a matter of fact, it doesn't even have to be visible light. Infrared will work fine, though you'll only get a rough gray-scale. But then, you don't need to be shining red/green/blue laser light around everywhere...
Won't the matrix people be mad at this! They spent Some Great Value Of Hard Earned Cash (SGVOHEC) to develop bullet-time, and now they can just use what turns out to be existing technology, making that expenditure of SGVOHEC a moot point.
Oh well, maybe the superbowl people will get with it next time so that my super-zooming rotating image of the QB won't jerk around like a 10-year-old computer trying to run quake...
Well, this actually fits in PERFECTLY with a project I've been working on... a Linux-based car MP3 player. Up till now I was looking at making my own case, complete with removeable hard drive bay, right-angle sound card adapter, and built-in inverter for this.
MUCH easier if I can just build a docking bay and take the whole computer inside with me. Especially if I can just plug it into my cable modem and use it as my desktop computer, too.
My only problem is how to figure out whether it's in the bay or not... when I'm in the docking bay, I want to use the infrared port to get ASCII characters from the MP3 player remote, and redirect the output to the parallel port for displaying on my HUD... any ideas of an easy way to do that? Anyone?
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, wouldn't that be an awesome use of this thing? Have a built-in disconnected mode where it understands that the input/output paradigm has fundamentally changed. Go from VGA to parallel for graphic or text LCD displays, use the sound output for additional feedback, and come up with several different alternative input methods... the quick list that comes to mind is to use speech recognition, a generic remote decoder, and a USB-based mini keyboard/control board that is flush with the case when plugged in.
Maybe use the chord system for one-handed typing, plus common player controls which can be useful in so many apps... (previous, next, play/pause, stop, rewind, fast forward) Add a decent battery with a belt clip, and you have a wearable computer.
Now if only I can get the USB periphs I REALLY want... VR glasses, ergonomic adaptive shoes, and smart wheels on my skateboard all come to mind...
Actually, with most digital silicon technologies (CMOS and related), power consumption and cycle speed have a very tight correlation. Not sure how this relates to the Pentium series (pretty sure they're using a CMOS or HCMOS process... anyone out there know for sure?), but typically half the clock speed can mean 1/4 the power consumption in these types of chips. This is because it doesn't take much power at all for the chip to operate... it's for the chip to change state that takes all the juice.
In a CMOS circuit, the electricity involved is static (non-changing) and does not require a current flow. For those interested in electronics design, this is why you need pull-up resistors when interfacing CMOS to TTL. You need to explicitly supply a return path for the voltages, because the chip doesn't connect them through normally.
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall that the VentureStar was unmanned. And I agree. Sending men into orbit is completely different than sending equipment up, and cost is completely different. (But, I think that longer stints ala ISS is definitely good to bring the cost down) It just doesn't make sense to compare manned and unmanned flights, and while I agree that the shuttle should be loaded as full as possible every time it launches, an SSTO could bring the cost down so much that it doesn't make sense to launch most types of payload via shuttle any more...
Piezoelectric elements can be not only speakers but microphones... actually, due to the Heisenberg principle, ANY speaker can also be a microphone (and any LED a light sensor, etc. It breaks down for some of todays components, like electrolytic capacitors or almost anything involving semiconductor technology)... so they could print the entire phone on paper... Now if only they could print my monitor on rice paper as well... <G>
I found the research lab's website here, but couldn't find anything about this technology... anyone else find it?
We seriously need this technology. As a community and as a species. It currently costs $10,000 USD / pound to send stuff into space. That's just plain old too expensive. How is space supposed to open up and be profitable at that price level? Thank god for the cold war, or the US wouldn't even have the aging shuttle fleet it has now.
The X-34 (the real plane to be built based on the X-33) is supposed to bring that cost down to about $1000 USD / pound (including development costs). Lots of companies can afford that kind of price tag. For $30,000, you can lob up a decent geosync satellite. Or I could lob up a couple microsats for my weekly salerie...
Hey, I like that idea. What do you think? maybe an integrated imaging array, ala BEAM? Or a laser? Solar cells would be most of the weight for a laser, and I'd need a decent thermal mass to help cool off the laser... or just make sure it's in the shade.
And tidal energy slows down ROTATION, not orbital velocity. That's why the same face of the moon points towards either at all times.
We're a web design firm. The other companies are a restaurant and a law firm. Since we don't share a marketplace, we can all own the same trademark and we don't conflict with each other.
A good example of this would be if I had created a mining company and produced a robotic digging machine and named it OpenGL (or something similar)... it would be questionable whether SGI's trademark were enforceable.
Now, as far as OpenIL goes, you could argue that it doesn't conflict with OpenGL. OpenGL is a 3D description language, produced and optimized for communication with hardware 3D renderers. OpenIL is an image manipulation library (from what I saw on their homepage)... so their claim is iffy at best.
Add in there prior use. If you can reasonably prove that you were using OpenIL BEFORE their trademark was registered (which I'm assuming is relatively recent that their registration was approved, if they're just now getting around to sending out warning notices), then you can continue to use the name regardless.
Nonetheless, it would be a lengthy, messy, and extremely expensive court battle. I think it would be worth pushing the point, however. Remember, civil cases rarely go to court. If they go to court, then its an indication that the system has failed. So my advice: push the matter. Insist that it's not a trademark conflict, since you're in slightly different markets, and (if applicable) that you were using the name OpenIL before they registered the trademark. At the least, they're likely to offer a decent settlement. You might even get to keep your name!
Also, since this is an open source and presumably not for profit application, do trademark laws apply here? You're not selling anything or even licensing technology (except under the GPL or LGPL or similar agreement)... it might be worth persuing that angle a little...
It doesn't allow you to completely hijack a TCP/IP conversation, just to impersonate a particular user. For one message. Because if the server sends a reply to that message and you can't predict how many bytes it's sending, then the ISN will be messed up again. Because you still don't get the return packets.
Come on people, news from this decade (or at least the last one) would be really great.
- It's bandwidth intensive - It costs a ton of bandwidth for a search, and actual downloading is usually hobbled to 20Kbps, with the default client settings
- User connectivity - it just doesn't have the number of users Napster has. Even if it did, with a TTL of 5 and only so many outgoing connections, you still can't reach a huge number of users. At home, I bump up the outgoing connections to 50, but then I choke all my bandwidth with the connections.
Of course, there are two big problems with Napster too...- File types - Why must I trade only mp3's? I'd like to be able to trade videos, text documents, alternative audio formats, even software (if I had a reasonable virus scanner)
- Legal issues - duh.
So, what I really want to see is a combination of the two initiatives. Napster like connectivity with Gnutella's file sharing and lack of legal issues (so far)The real solution for Napster, if they want to continue with doing busines... which despite the great idealism and the wonderful technological revolution they've helped to start, may not be the best idea in the world at this point... anyways... the REAL solution for Napster is to go Gnutella. You know, multiple anonymous servers, except for Napster, just rotate among them. Go underground in such a way that there is no legal entity who owns and manages the service. Just like with Gnutella clients, the company from which you download your client only sells the client, not the service. Napster needs to go the same way. My only problem is that I just don't see any way to do that...
Macrovision has done it once before; VHS is an analog format. Therefore they can do it again.
From my understanding, fair use includes the ability to produce 1 archive copy for backup purposes. Copyright lawyers I've asked in the past defined it that way. Other than that, fair use is pretty much private home viewing/listening...
Once again, my apologies to a bloated industry which seems to be concerned only with stopping a technological revolution, at the cost of freedom, dignity, and profit.
- You are a legitimate developer
- You have a desire to make a game
- You will license that game through Sony
- You have at least one of the following items: Jade idol, two-headed goat, authentic first edition lara croft doll (from back when she was still just a double-d cup)
- You know how to perform the ritual of obeisance to our new Nipponese Emperor, the great, powerful, and all knowledgable Sony Consumer Entertainment
Needless to say, that makes it really hard to develop something on your playstation just for fun...Actually, according to my current contract, they DO own it. And most of the larger consulting firms have this kind of contract, because you never know what an employee will work on in any particular project.
Basically, this would give me time to prepare a resume and work on private work and brush up my skills. If someone is paying you not to work, that doesn't mean you can't keep your skills sharp! And most companies give you a package if you're fired, so this is a perfect opportunity.
The only condition is that my IP becomes my own. A surprising number of companies own your KNOWLEDGE while you work for them; if you patent anything or write some really cool software outside of work, then that information belongs to them, not you. That's the real problem. I mean, if I go home tonight and write the "Killer App", there's nothing I can do legally (short of lying) to keep my company from claiming all rights to it.
But, if the my IP becomes my own immediately on termination, and I'm paid at least 100% of my salary for the length of the NC contract, then I'm a happy /.er
Interested parties, e-mail me at merlin_jim@hotmail.com... I'm looking for encoders AND decoders here...
To do that symbolically, you need True, False, NAND, OR, and Copy symbols. And an infinite memory storage device. Random Accesible Linear Addressing is a plus, but serial would work too (though you'd need commands to change the direction of serialization) Luckily, you can design such a device so that it only needs to be infinite in one direction. And then, infinite no longer means infinite, just big enough.
Since a Turing Machine can simulate any other Turing Machine (including all CPUs), you can then write meta-code for it and send it down. And since it's such a simple concept, they'll be able to build one very easily. With the mark instruction, we can then mark particular information within our programs for them.
Just, please, DON'T SEND WINDOWS!!!! We want to communicate, not frustrate. I can just see the catastrophe if we send Windows... we'll push their civilization to develop FTL technology millenia before it would have otherwise, which they'll do just to make sure that the civilization which could create such a plague on the universe would be justly punsihed for their indiscretions. ID4 all over again...
a) the bible is true. As far as I know, this hasn't been conclusively proven yet. So why would we go with a maybe cultural correlation, when there is a provable correlation in the language of algorithms?
b) If the bible is true, then Jehovah, or Yahweh, or whoever... call him The God Of The Israelites (TGOTI)... chose to give its message identically to all of creation. If so, why didn't TGOTI give us a concrete clue that he did so? I don't really understand your use of the number 66 above, but I'm guessing it's an esoteric interpretation to a biblical verse. But I'm guessing lots of other interpretations abound.
c) That the civilization you're speaking to also believes the Bible, and used the same numbering system. The chapters and verses applied to the books in the Bible were not assigned by their author, but assigned later by monks wishing to preserve the text they were copying, and applying a numbering scheme for basis of quality control. Also, who's to say that they haven't completly rejected the works of TGOTI, as many scientists in our world have done. Or that they've even heard of TGOTI? Nearly two-thirds of the humans on OUR planet haven't.
No, I think at the end of the day, you need a provably correct method of communicating with aliens. One that you can give to any decently educated culture here on earth and they would be able to decode it. The criteria for this culture is that they have the technology and understanding to receive interstellar transmissions. If they can't do that, then they wouldn't be able to decode the message anyways. But if even one of these cultures CAN'T understand the message, then its back to the drawing board, because there's no way a 7-armed, 3-eared, sightless carnivore the size of a 3 story office building will ever be able to understand it.
Top-down in efficiency:
Peltier junctions, an existing technology, are produced by junctions of two metals. When electricity is applied, heat energy flows from one metal to the other. If the current is reversed, heat energy flows the other direction. If heat energy flows from one metal to the other, then a potential voltage is produced. However, in all cases, the Peltier junction, if viewed as an enclosed system with two inputs, increases in temperature and decreases in potential energy.
The second idea is that you harness the kinetic energy of the nucleus itself to create electric energy. This happens in ALL materials, and is why cold materials glow in the infrared. Warmer materials glow in the visible wavelengths (red-hot poker, etc.) The problem here is, to get usable energy out of this system, you have to be at a lower energy point. Meaning you have to be colder than whatever is providing you energy. This provides a theoretical limit on any kind of heat engine. It is against this limit that the efficiency of a heat engine is measured; even if you get a 100% heat engine, that doesn't mean that ALL the heat energy in it is being converted to another type of energy, only that it is at the theoretical limit for efficiency.
And last but not least, zero-flux vacuum energy. I won't go into the details, go here if you want them. The short of it is, virtual particles exist everywhere and there should be ways to tap them. It is often said in this field that there's enough energy in a cup of coffee to boil all the oceans of the world. And there is a way to tap it:
Take two large metal plates in relatively empty space. Infinite plates are ideal, but that's not going to happen any time soon. The important part is that they are reflective and lightweight. Place them close together, parallel, so that the space between them is a resonating cavity for EM radiation. If the empty space is empty enough (i.e. no light energy, etc.), then they will be repelled from each other slightly. This is because the virtual particles forming between them cause light pressure on the reflective surfaces, pushing them apart.
I've heard that this has actually been tried and proven to work, but don't have any concrete documentation. Anyone know any more details?
Anyways, the point is that, with this method, you STILL need a lower-energy point. By setting up the resonating cavity between the two plates, you've basically created a region where zero-point energy is higher than in the area outside the plates.
But don't let me be a complete downer. The energy holding an atom together was untappable at one point for the exact same reasons. Through a combination of superconducting technology for fast efficient energy exchange, nanotechnology for creating quantum cavities, and some as yet undiscovered technology, this could be the way we finally realize the dream of Athena (goddess of the technology of war); to become gods ourselves.
Hey all you /.'ers, what do you think about a BrandMark? Branding is exceptionally important these days, even if you're not engaging in commerce. It's important on the OSS level to differentiate between products. It's also important on a personal level. If you build up a brand and promote it, it's kind of like your personal reputation. But if you don't do commerce, ergo can't trademark your brand, then someone else can effectively "steal" your brand by trademarking it.
What we need is an ammendment to the trademark laws that allow brandmarking... reply back and give me some good ideas, then lets write our congressmen...
merlin_jim, the mad computer ninja juggalo
a) It's field programmable. That means that if I discover a bug, it's not going to result in a huge recall. It'll result in a new source file or possibly asking your customers to visit the service desk to fix.
b) It's highly parallelizable. Make a standard bus and come up with a simple processor that you can put on one of the lower-end FPGAs (usually under 1$) and you can build a HUGE cluster very cheaply. If you setup your bus right, it can even be reconfigurable live. So most of your FPGA stack is running executable code, but if you need to make a buffer chip for USB, just pick one of your FPGAs and reprogram it. If you need a motor driver, pick an FPGA and reprogram it. You get the idea; TRUE plug-n-play, using the standardized hardware design languages (HDL) out tehre. Combine this highly parallelizable computer with a standard connection format and you have hardware device drivers.
c) Prototyping. If you are a hardware manufacturer, you can cheaply prototype your design and test it without having to make a die each time (HUGE cost savings)
d) May be used as an analog device, or simply as a digital logic device. You don't have to run a core on it... and if you think of the HDL as your programming language, then you compile to the chip. These chips aren't setup such that they have to run a Turing machine; if you can design your code right, then you don't have to run a CPU. Works great for Embedded apps. The real benefit to Open Source Hardware will be when it merges with Open Source Software. Like a C-compiler for FPGAs. Sure, the lower-end chips can only respond at a fixed rate (usually 16MHz or so), but if you have a program that doesn't need to respond faster than that and is relatively small, you get huge speed savings... not to mention the fact that you can offload computations from your main CPU.
Does anyone out there have any more ideas for this sort of thing? I'm trying to get together a group to do this... especially the Open Source firmware idea... any takers?
It basically depends on polarization. All light is polarized, meaning that the electric wave and the magnetic wave that make up a photon are orthogonal (at right-angles within a plane) to each other. Most light is randomly polarized... that is, it bounces around at random with no structure to it. That's why lasers are commonly used in holography; it provides a polarized constant.
A traditional hologram is made by bouncing polarized light off an object (possibly from several different angles) and then exposing a piece of film to both the original, highly polarized light, and the light that is reflected off the object. When light is reflected, you change it's polarization to be (typically) parallel to the incident of reflection.
This makes miniature "grooves" in the image... they're virtual grooves, meaning they have no height, but all the same they selectively reflect only light of certain polarizations. Then, by shining the same type of polarized light on the exposed image, different angles of viewing select different polarizations, meaning different angles of viewing on the target object.
As for how this technology works, from what I can tell they're capturing the color and polarization of all the photons. This, combined with the width of the CCD, allows you to capture 3D information about the subject matter. If you were to add a source of polarized light to this thing, you could probably through the use of mirrors capture EVERY angle, just like a traditional hologram.
As a matter of fact, it doesn't even have to be visible light. Infrared will work fine, though you'll only get a rough gray-scale. But then, you don't need to be shining red/green/blue laser light around everywhere...
Won't the matrix people be mad at this! They spent Some Great Value Of Hard Earned Cash (SGVOHEC) to develop bullet-time, and now they can just use what turns out to be existing technology, making that expenditure of SGVOHEC a moot point.
Oh well, maybe the superbowl people will get with it next time so that my super-zooming rotating image of the QB won't jerk around like a 10-year-old computer trying to run quake...
MUCH easier if I can just build a docking bay and take the whole computer inside with me. Especially if I can just plug it into my cable modem and use it as my desktop computer, too.
My only problem is how to figure out whether it's in the bay or not... when I'm in the docking bay, I want to use the infrared port to get ASCII characters from the MP3 player remote, and redirect the output to the parallel port for displaying on my HUD... any ideas of an easy way to do that? Anyone?
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, wouldn't that be an awesome use of this thing? Have a built-in disconnected mode where it understands that the input/output paradigm has fundamentally changed. Go from VGA to parallel for graphic or text LCD displays, use the sound output for additional feedback, and come up with several different alternative input methods... the quick list that comes to mind is to use speech recognition, a generic remote decoder, and a USB-based mini keyboard/control board that is flush with the case when plugged in.
Maybe use the chord system for one-handed typing, plus common player controls which can be useful in so many apps... (previous, next, play/pause, stop, rewind, fast forward) Add a decent battery with a belt clip, and you have a wearable computer.
Now if only I can get the USB periphs I REALLY want... VR glasses, ergonomic adaptive shoes, and smart wheels on my skateboard all come to mind...
In a CMOS circuit, the electricity involved is static (non-changing) and does not require a current flow. For those interested in electronics design, this is why you need pull-up resistors when interfacing CMOS to TTL. You need to explicitly supply a return path for the voltages, because the chip doesn't connect them through normally.