"However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology. Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals." I fail to see the similarities between relying on a human owner and using "gadgets designed to meet our every needs". Technology doesn't think for itself, but who knows where we'll be in such a long time?
That's not true at all. The fact that we have open source 2d drivers is a continuation of what we had before. Hardware manufacterers used to document their chips so programmers made use of them. And because 2d tech is so old, everything is already known about them. This actually continued into the early line of 3d chips. All the major manufacterers, 3dfx, ATI, nvidia, were actually working on open source 3d drivers because of linux. When they discovered ways to cheat on benchmarks, they started closing up their source code so people wouldn't see. This is what they call trade secrets.
Well, 2d parts are not continuation at all. For example, for a while we did not have specs for mach64 chips and these were totally unusable. Right now R5xx series (all the X1xxx cards) have a brand new 2d engine with no specs again.
It's about DRM. With a closed source driver AND no specs how to access the hardware, vendors like NVidia and ATI can effectively prevent you from displaying (or capturing) material with nasties like MacroVision etc... If they opened the HW-specs, circumventing this crippling feature^Wbug would be easy as pie. Therefore, they don't.
Could be, but this is not it. The MacroVision features are isolated and completely separate. In fact on the occasions we did get the documentation they had MacroVision access cut out, but were usable anyway.
This is due to the fact that they are using liscenced code from other people/companies, and they would need to open source that as well.
Thing is, if NVidia (and ATI) just told us how to talk to the hardware, we would have had open source drivers without their code. No need for license issues.
As it was (with ATI) we would get incomplete, bare-bones specs months (if not years) after the hardware is released and nowadays we don't even have that. NVidia never provided any specs, but they saw value in having open source 2d-only driver.
And no, I don't have the faintest idea why things are this way.
Yes! And then a big nose! Will we really have to wait 1000 years for somebody to invent a Smelloscope?
Actually, this has been done in a number of ways. Nose is just an instrument to analyze chemical composition of substances.
An incomplete list of existing techniques:
Original Mars landers had chemical tests on board (in particular to test for presence of life)
Comet dust gathering probes
Radiation-based chemical composition testing (Mossbauer spectrometer)
spectrometers: X-ray, radio (hydrogen line, ammonia line, etc - though, afaik these are mostly Earth based), optical
This is just off the top of head, I am sure I am forgetting some - and don't know about many others.
Actually I do. I see no lies in anything Bush has said. Everyone goes back to the WMD question but that was based on intelligence that nearly all levels of government believed going back to Clinton. The UK STILL hold to the notion that the evidence they obtained was true. Others note the NSA. It is not lying to simply not reveal what's going on. This happens in government all the time. We all agree there is a shitload that the government has been doing for years that we just don't know about. In most cases, nor should we. I realize it's cool to smoke and bash Bush but people need to really grow up. This "absolutely nothing he says is ever right or good" mentality regarding Bush is beyond politics, it's clinical and psychotic.
I did not say "lie" I said manipulate the information - in particular omit relevant facts. And face it, whether the person lies outright or omits what he does not like you still can't take his words at face value, can you ?
Bush could advocate an end to the DMCA, banning DRM, and making OSS manditory in all government entities and people on slashdot would STILL bitch. The only debate this article should be sparking on slashdot is between the "let's do all we can to explore space" crowd and the "we should be spending this money on my favorite agenda" crowd. Shit, people, get a hobby.
Why I don't agree with some comments myself, there is no denying the fact that Bush did exhibit ability to manipulate information and ignore laws and constitution - at least where public is concerned - so one simply cannot take his words at face value. And, of course, when one starts to read between words all kinds of interpretations become possible.
I am just as eager as most slashdotters to see more push for space and programs in nuclear propulsion, but, honestly, do you truly believe that, even if Bush was to say exactly these words, this would be the end result ? Now, if we have military supporting this one might have some chance..
The US has or had satellites that can detect particle bursts from nuclear explosions. If such satellites are still in operation (though likely any current ones are generations improved from the originals), then the US intelligence system would know for certain.
As an aside, that type of satellite was the type that originally detected gamma ray bursts from billions of years ago and they were almost a total mystery until the last decade.
Actually, those satellites were designed to monitor explosions in space i.e. for compliance with a treaty. Ironically, it was thought that making nuclear tests in space will pollute it with radiation (they did not know there was already lots of it there).
As you can imagine the first thing they detected after launching them were gamma ray bursts which - fortunately - were determined to come from beyound the solar system.
That way when they're looking at us with their giant telescopes, they'd see it and know. I'm sure we could get pepsi to sponsor that billboard, they sponsor anything.
With that attitude, don't go asking why Earth is listed "see Pepsi" in next edition of Hitchhikers guide.
But from what others say, even with a mirror, you're still going to lose that extra coherency because of photon collision, from what I understad about simple angles and how light usually reflects. Now that I've had my eyes opened to that, it's a bit clear you may need more than 30 meters. I notice they dont' exactly say the specifications of any mirros, if used, and they're not certainly giving the pure exact gas measurement if they're doing this. No blaming them, though, they made this process, and it's most likely not out of patent range, yet.
If, by photon collision, you mean photon-photon interaction than I am not aware that this is a problem with using mirrors. The reason is that this (nonlinear) effect requires extremely high energy densities and is simple to workaround by simply widening the beam (and using a telescope to narrow it down at the exit point).
With regard to other comments, my understanding is that even though the acceleration range is 1 meter, the 30 meters are needed for the rest of laser optics.
I.e. they need to generate the beam and make sure it has the proper shape, etc while not encountering the nonlinear effects you mention.
But if you only need 30 meters of laser path, wouldn't it be possible to just use different mirrors to reflect within the chamber to obtain the length needed, and can't you do it thanks to the light wavelength in nano (or pico??) meters?
I'm not that educated in lasers, it wasn't as big of a study as mass-power mini railguns (no joking) to me. Someone PLEASE inform me and nobody bother modding me, I just want answers for my education.
It might be that's what they mean by "laser path" above, i.e. even though the size of the instrument is 1 meter, the light travels for 30 meters.
There is nothing wrong with modding - if someone asked the same question earlier, there is no reason for all the people to look at it twice, right ?
A weakness in the binary format? OK, who's to blame here, the ones or the zeroes?
You'd have thought they'd have caught this sooner. It's not like it's that long of a list to exhaustively test.
Actually it is a binary flood attack: when one issues a command su followed by a stream of ones and zeroes (different for each system, but usually about 64 bit long) one can get root access.
The only thing special about inert gases is that their electron shells are full and so it takes a large amount of energy to take an electron away. However, that energy decreases with atom number and for argon is small enough that fluoride can do it.
In fact, the elements with almost complete shells (like O, Cl, F, etc) are even harder to oxidize, however they readily oxidize other elements and thus are not inert.
I might be wrong, but I seem to remember that someone managed to use HF in combination with nitric acid to oxidize oxygen (i.e. form a compound where oxygen was a positive ion).
It dissolves glass (HCl does not) (practical application - permanent markings on glass tubes)
It dissolves gold
It can be used to oxidize argon (inert gas)
The chemical notion of "weak" stems from a technical issue - the acid does not dissotiate much in water. In a way this is similar to oxygen - water would have been an acid except for a definition that involves water in the first place.
If we didn't have all this intellectual property everywhere, I feel very certain that we as a society would never write a line of code again.
Indeed.
In fact it is the second biggest thing after paper money: paper thought.
Re:Designing in the margins of a older spec -- NOT
on
A Triple-Standard Disk
·
· Score: 1
I had somewhat bad experience with regular double-sided DVD disks lately - several I bought were warped resulting in unplayable areas. Does anyone else have the same experience ?
From what I recall in physics class electrons travel at 2/3 c. So at best this means that memories and chips can be 50% further apart, or that clocks can go 50% faster. Or is there more to this?
The simplest way to explain this is to note that a wire is an inductor - and at high frequencies this matters. What is more, a 1Ghz digital signal needs bandwidth much larger than 1Ghz - or the edges of ones and zeros get distorted too much. If CPUs used analog signals inside to transmit information between chips (like a miniature wireless card) one would get similar speed, but this is hard and requires antennas much larger than a single transistor.
With light one gets the best of both worlds - the laser beam is analog, coherent medium which is modulated with a digital signal. So you can use a waveguide to distribute it, but a "simple" photodiode would be sufficient to receive the information.
What's more that wave guide can be fairly long without distorting the injected signal - compared to the size of the computer system even multimode fiber is very good. So it becomes easy to connect chips with 1Gbps (or faster) links. Compare this with todays state of the art - the links between cpus or between cpu and northbridge top out around 1Ghz per line and there is a limit on how many you can have.
If this technology gets developed one can imagine that instead of plugging CPU into the socket one hooks it up to a heatsink, attaches two large wires (power supply) and bunch of fiber-optic links - which go to other cpus, memory, drives, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps he meant that sysadmins will rule ?
Could be, but this is not it. The MacroVision features are isolated and completely separate. In fact on the occasions we did get the documentation they had MacroVision access cut out, but were usable anyway.
Thing is, if NVidia (and ATI) just told us how to talk to the hardware, we would have had open source drivers without their code. No need for license issues.
As it was (with ATI) we would get incomplete, bare-bones specs months (if not years) after the hardware is released and nowadays we don't even have that. NVidia never provided any specs, but they saw value in having open source 2d-only driver.
And no, I don't have the faintest idea why things are this way.
Actually, this has been done in a number of ways. Nose is just an instrument to analyze chemical composition of substances. An incomplete list of existing techniques:
- Original Mars landers had chemical tests on board (in particular to test for presence of life)
- Comet dust gathering probes
- Radiation-based chemical composition testing (Mossbauer spectrometer)
- spectrometers: X-ray, radio (hydrogen line, ammonia line, etc - though, afaik these are mostly Earth based), optical
This is just off the top of head, I am sure I am forgetting some - and don't know about many others.No use.. someone will apply the word "hack" literally.
I did not say "lie" I said manipulate the information - in particular omit relevant facts. And face it, whether the person lies outright or omits what he does not like you still can't take his words at face value, can you ?
Why I don't agree with some comments myself, there is no denying the fact that Bush did exhibit ability to manipulate information and ignore laws and constitution - at least where public is concerned - so one simply cannot take his words at face value. And, of course, when one starts to read between words all kinds of interpretations become possible.
I am just as eager as most slashdotters to see more push for space and programs in nuclear propulsion, but, honestly, do you truly believe that, even if Bush was to say exactly these words, this would be the end result ? Now, if we have military supporting this one might have some chance..
Want a free kubuntu disk ? Just ask..
Actually, those satellites were designed to monitor explosions in space i.e. for compliance with a treaty. Ironically, it was thought that making nuclear tests in space will pollute it with radiation (they did not know there was already lots of it there).
As you can imagine the first thing they detected after launching them were gamma ray bursts which - fortunately - were determined to come from beyound the solar system.
Did the chair fly in the opposite direction ?
Our black hole is located near Sagittarius A.
With that attitude, don't go asking why Earth is listed "see Pepsi" in next edition of Hitchhikers guide.
If, by photon collision, you mean photon-photon interaction than I am not aware that this is a problem with using mirrors. The reason is that this (nonlinear) effect requires extremely high energy densities and is simple to workaround by simply widening the beam (and using a telescope to narrow it down at the exit point).
With regard to other comments, my understanding is that even though the acceleration range is 1 meter, the 30 meters are needed for the rest of laser optics. I.e. they need to generate the beam and make sure it has the proper shape, etc while not encountering the nonlinear effects you mention.
It might be that's what they mean by "laser path" above, i.e. even though the size of the instrument is 1 meter, the light travels for 30 meters.
There is nothing wrong with modding - if someone asked the same question earlier, there is no reason for all the people to look at it twice, right ?
Actually it is a binary flood attack: when one issues a command su followed by a stream of ones and zeroes (different for each system, but usually about 64 bit long) one can get root access.
American education is indeed in a bad shape..
EMP ?
Titanium implants ?
The only thing special about inert gases is that their electron shells are full and so it takes a large amount of energy to take an electron away. However, that energy decreases with atom number and for argon is small enough that fluoride can do it.
In fact, the elements with almost complete shells (like O, Cl, F, etc) are even harder to oxidize, however they readily oxidize other elements and thus are not inert.
I might be wrong, but I seem to remember that someone managed to use HF in combination with nitric acid to oxidize oxygen (i.e. form a compound where oxygen was a positive ion).
Depends on your definition of "strong":
- It dissolves glass (HCl does not) (practical application - permanent markings on glass tubes)
- It dissolves gold
- It can be used to oxidize argon (inert gas)
The chemical notion of "weak" stems from a technical issue - the acid does not dissotiate much in water. In a way this is similar to oxygen - water would have been an acid except for a definition that involves water in the first place.Indeed.
In fact it is the second biggest thing after paper money: paper thought.
I had somewhat bad experience with regular double-sided DVD disks lately - several I bought were warped resulting in unplayable areas. Does anyone else have the same experience ?
Don't bother - just turn up the power !
The simplest way to explain this is to note that a wire is an inductor - and at high frequencies this matters. What is more, a 1Ghz digital signal needs bandwidth much larger than 1Ghz - or the edges of ones and zeros get distorted too much. If CPUs used analog signals inside to transmit information between chips (like a miniature wireless card) one would get similar speed, but this is hard and requires antennas much larger than a single transistor.
With light one gets the best of both worlds - the laser beam is analog, coherent medium which is modulated with a digital signal. So you can use a waveguide to distribute it, but a "simple" photodiode would be sufficient to receive the information.
What's more that wave guide can be fairly long without distorting the injected signal - compared to the size of the computer system even multimode fiber is very good. So it becomes easy to connect chips with 1Gbps (or faster) links. Compare this with todays state of the art - the links between cpus or between cpu and northbridge top out around 1Ghz per line and there is a limit on how many you can have.
If this technology gets developed one can imagine that instead of plugging CPU into the socket one hooks it up to a heatsink, attaches two large wires (power supply) and bunch of fiber-optic links - which go to other cpus, memory, drives, etc.