I've seen a few outraged posts about the ps2 on xbox error in the writeup. Out of curosity, if you chipped your xbox, would you be able to run a playstation emulator under xbox linux? Maybe msft should rent xboxes if they really don't want people dicking with them. Or they could just pour each one full of epoxy, so it's just one solid brick;-)
or you could get a roll up keyboard to carry around with it. Another option is just to type one handed. If you can span the whole keyboard with one hand, why not? I do it with my 3com audrey's little IR keyboard, and that old-school GoType!/LandWare keyboard for the PalmIII (right before they came out with the sexy folding ones). It's not as fast as two handed touch typing, but it's not like your'e wirting a novel on this thing, right?
I would like to see laptops, especially the ones like this where you probably don't get many ports, with Logitech or IR peripheral receivers built in. It can't take that much space in there.
Last i checked, LCDs don't really flicker, so you can run it at a lower frequency if you need to. My compaq armada is pretty old (PII 400 - okay, sorry, kinda old) and has a rage mobility agp with 8 meg, and windows seems content to let me crank it to 1600x1200, 24 bit, 75hz. BUT, this is me closing the screen and playing with it over VNC, cause i don't feel like moving the monitor plug over there. It may know that it isn't actually outputting video and say whatever it wants, but i somehow doubt that. Couldn't tell you about X right now, i'd think you should be able to get 24 bit.
What boggles my mind is that, in the face of pushing the limits of other constitutional protections, he refuses to impinge on the _privacy_ of gun ownership.
Not letting the government keep perfect records of who owns what firearms makes more sense if you think the government may turn on the citizens in violation of the constitution. Granted, usually only people in compounds is Montana or Texas think that, but there was a time you may remember, about 220 years ago, when it became necessary to overthrow the government with, yeah, guns. Then the clever people who did this put in a new Constitution which had avenues for ammendment and checks and balances and all sorts of good stuff, so we wouldn't have to go to war over it again. And then they put in some ammendments to make sure it worked as planned. Including the second one, which would ensure that people could have armed malitias, which would make the government think twice before abandoning those avenues of change and checks and ballances and such and switching to marital law. If the government does plan to switch to martial law, and they have a list of everyone who can oppose them, then they just accuse those people of domestic terrorism or similar, raid their compounds, and eliminate the threat.
So that's really the catch-22 situation with the second ammendment. As long as the government doesn't try fucking with it, you don't need it. But once they mess with your right to bear arms, who knows which ammendment they'll take next, now that you can't fight back.
Of course, if you trust that W. and Co. are always working their hardest to protect everyone's best interest, and that the US government in general is just the most benevolent organization under the sun, you don't need to worry about it. Just eat your cheeseburges and wave your flag and do what Ashcroft says.
(no, i'm not really that paranoid. I just didn't want your mind to have to keep being boggled. My mind gets boggled sometimes and i hate that.)
ok, WTF is this? Granted, i don't have the best ear for music, but I think 128kbps audio streams genearally sound fine. A standard audio CD, at 1X, has like 689kbps, per channel? I'm sure it'll sound just fine at 320, and you can fit twice as much (or 4x- cant remember is 128 is per channel or stereo), without drastically changing the technology.
Point being, they're just trying to justify releasing as little content as they do per disk. Yeah, with a normal CD you can only fit an hour and 15 minutes, but with a DVD, you could release the Complete Works of Pink Floyd on one disk, and probably have room for The Wizzard of Oz on the other side. But if each track is recorded in eleventeen channels, well then obviously you can still only fit an hour of music per disk and charge through the nose for double albums.
Steam crushing a can- Hold a soda can with a little water in it in some tongs. Heat it up over a bunsen burner or similar so the can is full of steam. Then place it mouth end down in a plate of water. The temperatre will drop, and PV=nRT will crush the can in a fraction of a second.
Barbells and an office chair. Not too difficult- sit in the chair, hold the barbells (or even just your arms and legs out), get them to spin you up, then pull the weight in to increase angular velocity. Just don't puke.
Baloon in a car You'll probably have to videotape this unless you can fit everyone in a vehicle with good acceleration and cornering. Anyways, get a helium baloon, hold it in the most spacious area of the car, and subject the car to acceleration. Floor it, hit the breaks, take some corners at speed. Maybe some steep climbs or drops if you're adventurous. (Don't try this on a busy street). When you're getting pressed back into your seat as the car speeds up, the baloon is going forward. When you take a hard right and get pressed up against the door on your left, the baloon leans right. Basically, it's 'anti-acceleration' in the same way that it's 'anty-gravity'. When my physics prof asked the class to think about this and tell him what the baloon would do, the only person to get it right was my friend who was being a jackass and trying to give the obviously wrong answer.
dispatch tr.v. dispatched, dispatching, dispatches
1. To relegate to a specific destination or send on specific business. See Synonyms at send1.
2.
1. To complete, transact, or dispose of promptly.
2. To eat up (food); finish off (a dish or meal).
3. To put to death summarily.
insert clever punchline here, such as "stop teasing."
Hmmm. I think i'm going to move my logitech optical wireless mouse's pointer from my laptop over to my desktop, copy this text: At one desk, users can move a wireless mouse's pointer from the screen of one computer to the screen of a laptop, with no wire or wireless connection between the computers themselves. That allows copying or moving material between the computers, a task that would otherwise be more difficult. move the cursor back, and paste it into this comment box. Damn. I like win2vnc. Granted, it requires the computers to be networked and have software installed, and i've never really tried moving images, but it makes it easy for me to use my email and 'personal' stuff on my own laptop and do work on my desktop with just one keyboard and mouse, and plenty of real estate.
Yet again, Microsoft's vision of the future is where we could all have been 5 years ago if it hadn't been for their 'help.'
One solution i've heard was to make emails computationially expensive. Like, if my mailserver doesn't recognize your address, you have to factor the product of a few smallish primes before it will deliver the message. Something not too nasty, but hopefully big enough that you can't just have lookup tables. If you're sending a message to 10 people, it takes maybe a few seconds. If you're sending to thousands of people, it takes longer. You could even set preferences for how ugly you want the factorization to be: if the headers all match up, it's addressed to one person, and there's no html or images or links, make 'em factor 2*7*13. If the subject contains 'debt' or is in all caps, or there are removal instructions in the body, they have to factor something that's almost crypto-grade. Put in some work-arounds where someone can email a list admin for permission to mail the list, etc.
A friend's grandfather asked her how he was supposed to tell the internet that he'd moved the modem to a separate phone line, so they'd know where to deliver his email...
So does this mean it could buffer a few minutes ahead on the hard drive, and go download short sections of movies off the internet (assuming they were available) when there's a read error (such as when my roommate borrowed my DVDs without asking and scratched some...), all transparent to the player app?
(You could be required to submit a hash of the 10 minutes before (or after) the minute you want to download in order to prove that you actually have the DVD version of the movie, or an indistinguishable copy).
I'm sure glad that micrsoft, hollywood, and washington are working so hard to protect me from evil software like this....
Ok, flash site is one thing. Has so many useless little files that it throws the browser into spasms where the stop button and mozilla logo blink at around 1 Hz site is a little more annoying. Perhaps their precious little flash animations don't do so well against a friday afternoon slashdotting....
It sounds like what you're saying is that it's too difficult to track the groove in the image to extract useful information from it. While a computer can't represent a perfect circle in cartesian coordinates, it can come arbitrarily close. I don't know what lengths this guy's program goes to, but if you have the whole record image, or component parts of it (and if you're doing it right it's probably better to have the computer assemble the component parts), you can do a least squares (or better) fit of a parametric eqation for the spiral groove. You can do this to nearly arbitrary accuracy- the scan resolution will be the limiting factor. So, there's no theoretical problem with determining where the groove should be and where it actually is and determining the sound from that. Technically, though.....
Can this be done with computer media? Could you just scan in two halves of a broken cdrom and extract the info? (Or has the NSA been able to do this for years and not told us about it? They just dig the CD shards out of your trash, reassemble the electron micrscope output, and read off the bits.) He said he had to scan the record in multiple sections, so it might not matter if those sections are all attached to each other.
On a related note, is there any technology for using a high res laser scanner to read records? It might actually sound decent.
from the article The light emitters on the front surface then generate light beams that exactly mimic the same measured intensity, color and trajectory.
So, the difference between this and what most people here seem to be talking about is that the light beams would come out in the right direction, meaning that you don't have to look at it straight on. You still might have perspective problems if you get close, but those will fade with distance. Now, if he can develop technology to detect, process, and appropriately reconstruct all the rays which would pass through an object were it invisible (basically a badass image based rendering system and really really bad ass display) then he probably deserves a pattent.
A point on detection technology, though: if this is designed to hide from humans, it will only produce output colors from mixes of red, green, and blue. If you make a camera which sees in more colors (prev discussion on IR), it could detect the cloak. The cloak's emitters must be as advanced as the sensors it wants to avoid.
It also doesn't do much for your heat signiture. Since so much military surveillance is done with IR, you'd think that the extra heat generated by the thing being cloacked and the cloaking mechanism that it'd glow like a light bulb under IR.
So your concern is that although this thing will take on the appearance of the background in the human visible spectrum (approx 380(blue) to 780(red) nanometers), it will not resemble the background radiation at other wavelengths. Not a trivial problem, but not impossible. As long as the cloaking system has the same sensory capabilites as the entity it's hiding from, it knows what appearance to present. Generating more radiation is seldom a problem. Reducing radiation is harder, especially in the longwave IR (heat) section of the spectrum, which seems to be at issue here. Generally, you can block eletromagnetic radiatiton, but the energy goes to heat. If you want to hide a heat signature, you could do it with the appropriate combination of thermally massive shields, active and/or very good thermal control systems, and something to do with the excess heat. You could try to radiate it in another direction, but the beam would probably be visible to a thermal camera. You might be able to store it if you have a thermos full of butt-ass cold. I'd probably use a flask of liquid nitrogen to absorb the heat, and then release a nitrogen stream at ambient temp. (This could in theory be detected as well, but nitrogen is the majority of the atmosphere, so it's probably hard to detect as long as you get the temp right. Once you block the heat that you and your cloaking device emit, you can then use you radiation emitters (leds, OLEDs, incandescents, whathaveyou) to emit the right intensities in the right wavelengts as your background. How you get the direction of the light rigth for all obsevrers is beyond me, but that's why it's not my patent. (If you just want to hide from one observer, you basically just get a tv and a camera, hold the tv between you and the observer, and the camera colinear with all three of you (observer, tv, you).)
ok. now then, for the rest of this discussion. Where to start? How bout polar bears, 'cause they kick azz. Polar bears are supposedly (google it yourself) so well insulated that if you use a thermal camera from an airplane, all you see is footprints because the only points where they leak enough heat to differ from ambient temp is the pads of their feet.
Next: The em spectrum. As i said, humans (most of you, anyways) see from about 380nm to 780nm. Shorter wavelength, higher energy photons are ultraviolet (above violet, hence the sunburn) and so on up to X and gamma rays. Longer wavelength photons are infrared (lower energy, below red) and microwaves and radio and such. Current topic: IR. Near IR (close to visible) is from like 800nm up to around 1100 (depending on who you ask). This is what you tend to get from IRLEDs. Think remote controls, sony camcorder night vision, and other stuff you can see with a black and white camera with no IR filter. (You can't see much further 'cause silicon starts being transparent around 1050nm). And then there's far IR, more in the 3000 to 8000 nm range, AKA heat. (to see this look into vidicon tubes or thermistor sensors by hamamatsu or indigo). This is even lower energy than near IR. Its everywhere you look, if you could see it, cause everything radiates in this range according to its temp. The spectrum being continuous (as spetcra generally are), if you take something at body temp it will radiate in this range, and if you heat it up enough it will start radiating in near IR and then red (AKA glowing) and then up to white if you get it hot enough.
Military night vision. Don't know too much about that, but if it's not heat-based you can basically use really sensitive equipment for detecting ambient light (huge lenses and high-gain CCDs) or use near IR illumination (most of your commerical 'night vision' systems).
Tree huggers and radiation. It's the high energy radiation from i.e. nuclear plants (isotope decay is a good source of gamma radiation) that a lot of people worry about. Granted, there are those who worry about microwave radiotion from ovens and cordelss phones (and probably 802.11 if you told them it was microwave), but their mistake is not understanding the EM spectrum and thinking that all radiation is dangerous, not just high energy radiation. (and yes, i could be wrong and low energy radiation could be really harmful too. but i'm still not buying any kind of cellphone shield).
IR going through contrete walls. No. The wall will absorb heat, heat up, and then radiate at a higher energy than the other walls, but the energy is not going through like visible light through glass.
IR blocking polymers. Mylar.
Thermoelectric heat transfer. Peltier junctions. about %10 efficient. if you dont mind expending a lot of energy to cool your chip and have a good place to dump the heat, they rock. They dont get read of heat, they just move it, so unless you have somewhere to move it to, they wont hide you from a thermal camera.
Ok, think that's about it. Hopefully this clears some stuff up.
So admittedly this is a bit off topic, but, having been frustrated with my RCA lyra for 2 years now (esp. 'cause i got it as a gift so i feel bad selling it on ebay, but owning it makes it hard to justify buying a real player), i thought "schweet. soon i can get an ogg codec for it, and maybe it won't be like their proprietary brain-damaged MPX format which is like MP3 but 'unpiratable' and requires a particular CF device and software to load onto the card." Well, lyrazone.com has links for an mp3pro codec, wma, etc, but no mention of an ogg codec. Ok, it's a little early for that, it did just come out after all. But there's no way to contact them to inquire about ogg support, request it, etc. Not even in help. Not even in help help.
So the short story is, if i can prevent anyone from buying an rca lyra, please allow me to do so. Their product sucks, their customer service more, and i'll be surprised if they release a vorbis codec which could possibly redeem the lyra.
This whole wedding photo thing is overrated. The last wedding i went to wasn't bad, but the first time one of my friends got married after college, there was like an hour of picture takin' downtime between the ceremony and the food. This whole process could be done away with by a high-end image based rendering package. You could get a few good images of each guest as they came in, maybe a 3D laser scan, and a few really detailed datasets for the bride and groom while they're being fitted for the dress and tux (or whathaveyou). Render up a few group shots with the romantic background of your choosing, some closeups of the couple, and you're set. If you wanted to, you could add capabilities for candid reception shots (although you might need some training data for the system to transform 'respectable wedding guest' photos into 'drunken reception partygoer' photos). Plus, you don't have to worry about real life situations like that one 8 year old who refuses to smile for the camera, and you can do Orwellian modifications if you later decide you wish you hadn't invited some particular person. Or you could just hire a decent photographer, maybe do the time consuming stuff ahead of time, and leave a bunch of disposable cameras around for the reception. Not that i can in any way fault the robot idea. It does, in fact, kick ass. (And one last nitpick, it's not really fire engine red, it's Research Robot Red. If it's anything similar to what ActivMedia uses on the Pioneer robots, it's an amazingly impervious, apparently epoxy-based coating which can only be removed with a grinding wheel or similarly serious abrasive.)
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen a few outraged posts about the ps2 on xbox error in the writeup. Out of curosity, if you chipped your xbox, would you be able to run a playstation emulator under xbox linux? ;-)
Maybe msft should rent xboxes if they really don't want people dicking with them. Or they could just pour each one full of epoxy, so it's just one solid brick
Roger niner, engage targeting computer. over
Turn off the targeting computer. Use the Force. Duh.
"She's gone from suck...to blow!"
There's a difference?
Huh. And the news media refered to our avatar system as an R2D2-like "dustbin on wheels."
or you could get a roll up keyboard to carry around with it. Another option is just to type one handed. If you can span the whole keyboard with one hand, why not? I do it with my 3com audrey's little IR keyboard, and that old-school GoType!/LandWare keyboard for the PalmIII (right before they came out with the sexy folding ones). It's not as fast as two handed touch typing, but it's not like your'e wirting a novel on this thing, right?
I would like to see laptops, especially the ones like this where you probably don't get many ports, with Logitech or IR peripheral receivers built in. It can't take that much space in there.
Last i checked, LCDs don't really flicker, so you can run it at a lower frequency if you need to.
My compaq armada is pretty old (PII 400 - okay, sorry, kinda old) and has a rage mobility agp with 8 meg, and windows seems content to let me crank it to 1600x1200, 24 bit, 75hz. BUT, this is me closing the screen and playing with it over VNC, cause i don't feel like moving the monitor plug over there. It may know that it isn't actually outputting video and say whatever it wants, but i somehow doubt that.
Couldn't tell you about X right now, i'd think you should be able to get 24 bit.
What boggles my mind is that, in the face of pushing the limits of other constitutional protections, he refuses to impinge on the _privacy_ of gun ownership.
Not letting the government keep perfect records of who owns what firearms makes more sense if you think the government may turn on the citizens in violation of the constitution. Granted, usually only people in compounds is Montana or Texas think that, but there was a time you may remember, about 220 years ago, when it became necessary to overthrow the government with, yeah, guns. Then the clever people who did this put in a new Constitution which had avenues for ammendment and checks and balances and all sorts of good stuff, so we wouldn't have to go to war over it again. And then they put in some ammendments to make sure it worked as planned. Including the second one, which would ensure that people could have armed malitias, which would make the government think twice before abandoning those avenues of change and checks and ballances and such and switching to marital law.
If the government does plan to switch to martial law, and they have a list of everyone who can oppose them, then they just accuse those people of domestic terrorism or similar, raid their compounds, and eliminate the threat.
So that's really the catch-22 situation with the second ammendment. As long as the government doesn't try fucking with it, you don't need it. But once they mess with your right to bear arms, who knows which ammendment they'll take next, now that you can't fight back.
Of course, if you trust that W. and Co. are always working their hardest to protect everyone's best interest, and that the US government in general is just the most benevolent organization under the sun, you don't need to worry about it. Just eat your cheeseburges and wave your flag and do what Ashcroft says.
(no, i'm not really that paranoid. I just didn't want your mind to have to keep being boggled. My mind gets boggled sometimes and i hate that.)
ok, WTF is this? Granted, i don't have the best ear for music, but I think 128kbps audio streams genearally sound fine. A standard audio CD, at 1X, has like 689kbps, per channel? I'm sure it'll sound just fine at 320, and you can fit twice as much (or 4x- cant remember is 128 is per channel or stereo), without drastically changing the technology.
Point being, they're just trying to justify releasing as little content as they do per disk. Yeah, with a normal CD you can only fit an hour and 15 minutes, but with a DVD, you could release the Complete Works of Pink Floyd on one disk, and probably have room for The Wizzard of Oz on the other side. But if each track is recorded in eleventeen channels, well then obviously you can still only fit an hour of music per disk and charge through the nose for double albums.
Steam crushing a can-
Hold a soda can with a little water in it in some tongs. Heat it up over a bunsen burner or similar so the can is full of steam. Then place it mouth end down in a plate of water. The temperatre will drop, and PV=nRT will crush the can in a fraction of a second.
Barbells and an office chair.
Not too difficult- sit in the chair, hold the barbells (or even just your arms and legs out), get them to spin you up, then pull the weight in to increase angular velocity. Just don't puke.
Baloon in a car
You'll probably have to videotape this unless you can fit everyone in a vehicle with good acceleration and cornering. Anyways, get a helium baloon, hold it in the most spacious area of the car, and subject the car to acceleration. Floor it, hit the breaks, take some corners at speed. Maybe some steep climbs or drops if you're adventurous. (Don't try this on a busy street). When you're getting pressed back into your seat as the car speeds up, the baloon is going forward. When you take a hard right and get pressed up against the door on your left, the baloon leans right. Basically, it's 'anti-acceleration' in the same way that it's 'anty-gravity'.
When my physics prof asked the class to think about this and tell him what the baloon would do, the only person to get it right was my friend who was being a jackass and trying to give the obviously wrong answer.
If you are planning on offering the RIAA's music, what do you really have to do to play their music legally?
Hey kid, how much you got? Really? What a coincidence!
dispatch
tr.v. dispatched, dispatching, dispatches
1. To relegate to a specific destination or send on specific business. See Synonyms at send1.
2.
1. To complete, transact, or dispose of promptly.
2. To eat up (food); finish off (a dish or meal).
3. To put to death summarily.
insert clever punchline here, such as "stop teasing."
Put your hands up and step away from the mouse... slowly...
But you forget that "A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb".
Hmmm. I think i'm going to move my logitech optical wireless mouse's pointer from my laptop over to my desktop, copy this text:
At one desk, users can move a wireless mouse's pointer from the screen of one computer to the screen of a laptop, with no wire or wireless connection between the computers themselves. That allows copying or moving material between the computers, a task that would otherwise be more difficult.
move the cursor back, and paste it into this comment box. Damn. I like win2vnc. Granted, it requires the computers to be networked and have software installed, and i've never really tried moving images, but it makes it easy for me to use my email and 'personal' stuff on my own laptop and do work on my desktop with just one keyboard and mouse, and plenty of real estate.
Yet again, Microsoft's vision of the future is where we could all have been 5 years ago if it hadn't been for their 'help.'
One solution i've heard was to make emails computationially expensive. Like, if my mailserver doesn't recognize your address, you have to factor the product of a few smallish primes before it will deliver the message. Something not too nasty, but hopefully big enough that you can't just have lookup tables. If you're sending a message to 10 people, it takes maybe a few seconds. If you're sending to thousands of people, it takes longer. You could even set preferences for how ugly you want the factorization to be: if the headers all match up, it's addressed to one person, and there's no html or images or links, make 'em factor 2*7*13. If the subject contains 'debt' or is in all caps, or there are removal instructions in the body, they have to factor something that's almost crypto-grade.
Put in some work-arounds where someone can email a list admin for permission to mail the list, etc.
A friend's grandfather asked her how he was supposed to tell the internet that he'd moved the modem to a separate phone line, so they'd know where to deliver his email...
So does this mean it could buffer a few minutes ahead on the hard drive, and go download short sections of movies off the internet (assuming they were available) when there's a read error (such as when my roommate borrowed my DVDs without asking and scratched some...), all transparent to the player app?
(You could be required to submit a hash of the 10 minutes before (or after) the minute you want to download in order to prove that you actually have the DVD version of the movie, or an indistinguishable copy).
I'm sure glad that micrsoft, hollywood, and washington are working so hard to protect me from evil software like this....
Ok, flash site is one thing. Has so many useless little files that it throws the browser into spasms where the stop button and mozilla logo blink at around 1 Hz site is a little more annoying. Perhaps their precious little flash animations don't do so well against a friday afternoon slashdotting....
It sounds like what you're saying is that it's too difficult to track the groove in the image to extract useful information from it. While a computer can't represent a perfect circle in cartesian coordinates, it can come arbitrarily close. I don't know what lengths this guy's program goes to, but if you have the whole record image, or component parts of it (and if you're doing it right it's probably better to have the computer assemble the component parts), you can do a least squares (or better) fit of a parametric eqation for the spiral groove. You can do this to nearly arbitrary accuracy- the scan resolution will be the limiting factor. So, there's no theoretical problem with determining where the groove should be and where it actually is and determining the sound from that. Technically, though.....
Can this be done with computer media? Could you just scan in two halves of a broken cdrom and extract the info? (Or has the NSA been able to do this for years and not told us about it? They just dig the CD shards out of your trash, reassemble the electron micrscope output, and read off the bits.) He said he had to scan the record in multiple sections, so it might not matter if those sections are all attached to each other.
On a related note, is there any technology for using a high res laser scanner to read records? It might actually sound decent.
from the article
The light emitters on the front surface then generate light beams that exactly mimic the same measured intensity, color and trajectory.
So, the difference between this and what most people here seem to be talking about is that the light beams would come out in the right direction, meaning that you don't have to look at it straight on. You still might have perspective problems if you get close, but those will fade with distance.
Now, if he can develop technology to detect, process, and appropriately reconstruct all the rays which would pass through an object were it invisible (basically a badass image based rendering system and really really bad ass display) then he probably deserves a pattent.
A point on detection technology, though: if this is designed to hide from humans, it will only produce output colors from mixes of red, green, and blue. If you make a camera which sees in more colors (prev discussion on IR), it could detect the cloak. The cloak's emitters must be as advanced as the sensors it wants to avoid.
It also doesn't do much for your heat signiture. Since so much military surveillance is done with IR, you'd think that the extra heat generated by the thing being cloacked and the cloaking mechanism that it'd glow like a light bulb under IR.
So your concern is that although this thing will take on the appearance of the background in the human visible spectrum (approx 380(blue) to 780(red) nanometers), it will not resemble the background radiation at other wavelengths. Not a trivial problem, but not impossible. As long as the cloaking system has the same sensory capabilites as the entity it's hiding from, it knows what appearance to present.
Generating more radiation is seldom a problem. Reducing radiation is harder, especially in the longwave IR (heat) section of the spectrum, which seems to be at issue here. Generally, you can block eletromagnetic radiatiton, but the energy goes to heat. If you want to hide a heat signature, you could do it with the appropriate combination of thermally massive shields, active and/or very good thermal control systems, and something to do with the excess heat. You could try to radiate it in another direction, but the beam would probably be visible to a thermal camera. You might be able to store it if you have a thermos full of butt-ass cold. I'd probably use a flask of liquid nitrogen to absorb the heat, and then release a nitrogen stream at ambient temp. (This could in theory be detected as well, but nitrogen is the majority of the atmosphere, so it's probably hard to detect as long as you get the temp right.
Once you block the heat that you and your cloaking device emit, you can then use you radiation emitters (leds, OLEDs, incandescents, whathaveyou) to emit the right intensities in the right wavelengts as your background. How you get the direction of the light rigth for all obsevrers is beyond me, but that's why it's not my patent. (If you just want to hide from one observer, you basically just get a tv and a camera, hold the tv between you and the observer, and the camera colinear with all three of you (observer, tv, you).)
ok. now then, for the rest of this discussion. Where to start? How bout polar bears, 'cause they kick azz.
Polar bears are supposedly (google it yourself) so well insulated that if you use a thermal camera from an airplane, all you see is footprints because the only points where they leak enough heat to differ from ambient temp is the pads of their feet.
Next: The em spectrum. As i said, humans (most of you, anyways) see from about 380nm to 780nm. Shorter wavelength, higher energy photons are ultraviolet (above violet, hence the sunburn) and so on up to X and gamma rays. Longer wavelength photons are infrared (lower energy, below red) and microwaves and radio and such. Current topic: IR. Near IR (close to visible) is from like 800nm up to around 1100 (depending on who you ask). This is what you tend to get from IRLEDs. Think remote controls, sony camcorder night vision, and other stuff you can see with a black and white camera with no IR filter. (You can't see much further 'cause silicon starts being transparent around 1050nm).
And then there's far IR, more in the 3000 to 8000 nm range, AKA heat. (to see this look into vidicon tubes or thermistor sensors by hamamatsu or indigo). This is even lower energy than near IR. Its everywhere you look, if you could see it, cause everything radiates in this range according to its temp. The spectrum being continuous (as spetcra generally are), if you take something at body temp it will radiate in this range, and if you heat it up enough it will start radiating in near IR and then red (AKA glowing) and then up to white if you get it hot enough.
Military night vision. Don't know too much about that, but if it's not heat-based you can basically use really sensitive equipment for detecting ambient light (huge lenses and high-gain CCDs) or use near IR illumination (most of your commerical 'night vision' systems).
Tree huggers and radiation. It's the high energy radiation from i.e. nuclear plants (isotope decay is a good source of gamma radiation) that a lot of people worry about. Granted, there are those who worry about microwave radiotion from ovens and cordelss phones (and probably 802.11 if you told them it was microwave), but their mistake is not understanding the EM spectrum and thinking that all radiation is dangerous, not just high energy radiation. (and yes, i could be wrong and low energy radiation could be really harmful too. but i'm still not buying any kind of cellphone shield).
IR going through contrete walls. No. The wall will absorb heat, heat up, and then radiate at a higher energy than the other walls, but the energy is not going through like visible light through glass.
IR blocking polymers. Mylar.
Thermoelectric heat transfer. Peltier junctions. about %10 efficient. if you dont mind expending a lot of energy to cool your chip and have a good place to dump the heat, they rock. They dont get read of heat, they just move it, so unless you have somewhere to move it to, they wont hide you from a thermal camera.
Ok, think that's about it. Hopefully this clears some stuff up.
So admittedly this is a bit off topic, but, having been frustrated with my RCA lyra for 2 years now (esp. 'cause i got it as a gift so i feel bad selling it on ebay, but owning it makes it hard to justify buying a real player), i thought "schweet. soon i can get an ogg codec for it, and maybe it won't be like their proprietary brain-damaged MPX format which is like MP3 but 'unpiratable' and requires a particular CF device and software to load onto the card." Well, lyrazone.com has links for an mp3pro codec, wma, etc, but no mention of an ogg codec. Ok, it's a little early for that, it did just come out after all. But there's no way to contact them to inquire about ogg support, request it, etc. Not even in help. Not even in help help.
So the short story is, if i can prevent anyone from buying an rca lyra, please allow me to do so. Their product sucks, their customer service more, and i'll be surprised if they release a vorbis codec which could possibly redeem the lyra.
ok. done ranting. mod at will.
This whole wedding photo thing is overrated. The last wedding i went to wasn't bad, but the first time one of my friends got married after college, there was like an hour of picture takin' downtime between the ceremony and the food. This whole process could be done away with by a high-end image based rendering package. You could get a few good images of each guest as they came in, maybe a 3D laser scan, and a few really detailed datasets for the bride and groom while they're being fitted for the dress and tux (or whathaveyou). Render up a few group shots with the romantic background of your choosing, some closeups of the couple, and you're set. If you wanted to, you could add capabilities for candid reception shots (although you might need some training data for the system to transform 'respectable wedding guest' photos into 'drunken reception partygoer' photos). Plus, you don't have to worry about real life situations like that one 8 year old who refuses to smile for the camera, and you can do Orwellian modifications if you later decide you wish you hadn't invited some particular person.
Or you could just hire a decent photographer, maybe do the time consuming stuff ahead of time, and leave a bunch of disposable cameras around for the reception.
Not that i can in any way fault the robot idea. It does, in fact, kick ass.
(And one last nitpick, it's not really fire engine red, it's Research Robot Red. If it's anything similar to what ActivMedia uses on the Pioneer robots, it's an amazingly impervious, apparently epoxy-based coating which can only be removed with a grinding wheel or similarly serious abrasive.)
- Can be submerged in a degoba swamp
- Can interface with major computer systems via rotating phallic appendage thingie
- Projects holograms of hot chicks in mid-air
- Has a built-in stun gun
- Repairs space ships in mid-flight
- Can traverse miles of scorching desert
- and of course can fire a light saber out of it's head
Schweet.as opposed to my half, who forget which form of to/too/two to use...