I second this. As far as a general intro to Physics these are by far the best set you can get. Here's the amazon link. There are audio copies of the lectures as well.
One caveat, many Physics & Astrophysics/Astronomy Departments are separated & have little overlap so take a careful look at your MSc course curriculum before leaping to the conclusion that you need to learn large amounts of general physics.
A similar thing happened with Rogers in Canada a few years ago, except in that case the connections were completely killed. Encrypted https connections to the store worked OK. It seems likely that they're packet shaping for bittorrent & the device they're using also manages to throttle iTunes connections. Here's the ehmac.ca thread and the dslreports thread. Then it was a P-cube box (pdf) that was causing the problem & Rogers managed to reconfigure it (through Cisco) to fix the problem. The best way to speed up the solution was to complain to the ISP.
Open letter to Bram (this would have gone in his Livejournal comments but Anonymous postings are disabled).
Ignoring the encryption issue for the moment, the primary problem with your argument is that you're assuming a rationality and a level of technical expertise from the ISPs that simply doesn't exist. 1) The simple fact is that "end-users" cannot work with ISPs, period. Rogers & Shaw are both shaping bittorrent traffic, they've received many complaints about this, lost clients & gotten lots of bad press but their stance has not changed. The shaping is there to stay & this means that for users of their networks your protocol is useless for ANY purpose. Bittorrent is dead, deceased, pushing up the daisies. If this spreads then any and all bittorrent-related technologies are useless so you'd best find another line of work. 2) These traffic shapers are stand-alone hardware boxes the the ISPs purchase from Cisco & stick into their network configurations. They're not simple tech & they aren't easily configured, if at all, by the ISPs themselves. They're also buggy as hell. Rogers' collection of shaping-boxes decided that iTunes Music Store traffic was peer-to-peer and as such killed it. So to presume that the ISPs will be able to analyze 'random traffic' and shape it dynamically is a little far-fetched.
My point is simply that though you may now think that encryption and & obfuscating packets is pointless, you have yet to provide a functional alternative other then 'work with the ISPs'. The death knell of bittorrent has sounded & you might want to worry about that a little bit.
This is an interesting question that's getting a range of responses. My take on it is fairly straightforward, the comparisons to Buffy/Angel are appropriate only in that they have the same creator, otherwise they would probably not be compared at all.
Perhaps a more interesting question is whether Firefly would have become more similar to Buffy/Angel had it made it through several seasons ? Buffy was an entertaining show but to a certain extent it also became quite serialized and impenetrable as it aged. Firefly's first season is much more accessible and required much less subtext per episode for enjoyment, as would be expected for the first season. I suspect however that had it survived through multiple seasons it too would have succumbed to the nested, opaque plotlines that plagued Buffy. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, long-time viewers are rewarded for their persistence, but few shows outside the Simpsons have managed the balance between rewarding the-Comic-Book-Guy-viewer and the brand-new-viewer and I suspect that based on Joss Whedon's history, Firefly's initial broad appeal would have quickly been lost.
said Massimo Marcone, a professor of food science at the University of Guelph
he's a professor (adjunct faculty) not a medical doctor so you're doubly correct to be concerned about his medical facts. as a matter of fact, based on what the rest of the faculty appears to be working on (cheese making, food safety, microbial films...) i don't know what the hell he's doing making comments about the medical implications of caffeine.
This isn't bloody insightful it's ignorant. spamhaus.org is the website for an RBL & you can/. it all you like it shouldn't affect the RBL. what the original message meant was that the RBL run by spamhaus is under heavy DOS attack from parties unknown. this has brought down other RBL sites like SPEWS, monkeys.com & osirusoft which means that ISPs that were using them to filter out spam servers or open relays are now MUCH less protected then they were before. the tide of spam is rising.
the spammers are attacking these lists sequentially & slowly destroying them. this has absolutely nothing to do with a webserver running at spamhaus.org. that doesn't mean we should try to bring their webserver down of course...
the interesting bit is whether or not MAPS is being attacked. since MAPS is now charging for their RBL services i would imagine that sort of attack would provoke legal responses which, as far as i can tell, these previous attacks haven't.
This 'material' is an electrical circuit in a transmission line. They were simulated using Agilent's ADS software, which is used for design of "products such as cellular and portable phones, pagers, wireless networks, and radar and satellite communications systems" (from Agilent's page). The electrical fields are closer to microwaves then visible light & can be measured in voltages. No-one is going to beat data-density records using microwaves & to even talk about lenses is a trifle far-fetched. The principles & physics behind this breakthrough are general but in practice these man-made materials are going to have to be manufactured & we're nowhere close to that. This discovery was published in Applied Physics Letters (Vol. 82, No. 12, 24 March 2003, p. 1815 for those of you with institutional subscriptions).
This is somewhat akin to applying rules for radio waves to infrared photons, sure the equations all work but in practice the two electromagnetic fields behave somewhat differently.
Chris
PhD candidate Dept. of Chemistry University of Toronto
This study is a pile of crap. You might as well call it "Typos prevalent when lots of numbers are involved". These two guys must be complete morons to have come to the conclusion that authours aren't reading papers because they're mis-citing a volume or page number. Here's a typical reference for a Chemistry journal: G. Hura, J. M. Sorenson, R. M. Glaeser, and T. Head-Gordon, J. Chem. Phys. 113, 9140 (2000). There are a number of names & numbers all associated with the reference. Imagine how easy it is to get either the Volume (113) or the page number (9140) slightly off. For the most part the famous papers are referred to by the primary authour (T. Head-Gordon), the journal (Journal of Chemical Physics) & the year (2000). Given that information it's extremely simple to track down the paper whether or not a typo has been made.
It gets even worse if you're referencing a modern American Physical Society journal like Physical Review Letters. Here's a typical reference: Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 260401 (2002) They've replaced the page number with a nasty 6 digit code to refer to the article (a by-product of online publication occurring well before a hard copy was coming out).
Frickin idiots, as someone who's actually written some of these scientific papers it's really irritating to have to defend one's papers because some fool decided a typo was equivalent to not reading a reference.
bah, that comment could easily be applied to practically any genre - all plots are tired, unless you're planning on reinventing human relationships. and frankly none of the fantasy i've read recently can be pigeonholed with the above paragraph.
decent fantasy isn't that hard to find, though accidentally stumbling on crud can make the search kind of painful. since you asked here follows my humble opinions.
The good stuff includes :
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time (a continuing saga so if you're just starting it, take your time the end is not yet in sight) - one word : EPIC
Steven Brust's Jhereg series (short, simple, well written in an extremely full-blown world) - massively enjoyable stuff, bit of magic, bit of sorcery (an important distinction) some good swordplay and an introspective hero with a sarcastic bent
David Eddings' The Belgariad (The Mallorean/Tamuli/Elenium etc. are good too but they don't really compare to the Belgariad) - he likes gods that you can talk to and writes good characters - gotta love Silk
Weis & Hickman's original Dragonlance 3 book saga (prototypical fantasy with elves, dragons and magic - damn good) - they drop off pretty precipitously in their other series (though the Twins trilogy is good if you liked the Raistlin/Caramon characters)
Ursula K. LeGuin Earthsea trilogy - though i think this is another misnamed trilogy. this series is the prototypical hinted-at-but-never-revealed fantasy
David Gemmell - i'll read pretty much anything this guy writes, he likes heroes with problems and he also likes to mix unexplained history with current events
Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry is a good series that mixes a little Arthurian legend into the story
Raymond Feist's The Riftwar Saga is another classic, he brought Midkemia to life and managed to keep things interesting through the first three books, the later additions aren't quite as compelling he's gotten a little to carried away with a particular type of character & has kind of lost track of the plots
The stuff that shows promise :
George R.R. Martin's A song of fire & ice is starting pretty well though it is kind of uneven - he enjoys killing characters off and it's rapidly turning into a medieval soap opera
David Farland's The Runelords is also moving apace, it's a bit more typical fantasy & less soap opera with an interesting twist on the magic (though it's tending slightly towards the Shannara series which isn't necessarily a good thing)
The crap :
Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth is pretty much unredeemable junk - the characters are almost completely one-dimensional and his writing is painful to read, though the plots are definitely original which explains why i keep reading them i guess...
The best unmentioned fantasy series to date :
C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy - this is an excellent set of books, i've read more then enough fantasy & these books blew me away. well written, complex characters - the interplay of good and evil and the shades in between. ask for it for Xmas, you won't regret it.
cjm
Did anyone finish Bard's Tale ?
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 1
Did anyone actually manage to finish the Bard's Tale ? I played it for what seems an insane amount of time & I have no idea how close I got to the end. Even after hacking the characters for infinite hit points and enabling multiple diamond armours on every character the game seemed to never end. I remember getting through most of the castle & then teleporting somewhere but then it's just a blur....
for those of you who remember, boot beget Maximum PC which beget Maximum Linux. boot was the original tweaker's mag, with emphasis on getting what YOU wanted out of your computer (and pioneering the kick ass award). these guys did know what they were talking about, and the organization has a long history of supporting linux and promoting it. as evidence their November 97 CD included Debian (1.3 probably) on it and the issue itself was dedicated to installation & configuration of your brand-new linux box.
as with every other magazine on the planet you can't cater to all tastes, and the linux community is substantially more diverse then most. say what you will about Maximum Linux, the fact is these folk have been in this field for quite a while & their presence will be missed. fingers crossed, they'll end up as regular contributors to MaxPC. i for one appreciate the attempt & wish them the best of luck.
cjm
the latest issue of Maximum Linux was stuck into my drugstore's puny magazine collection, when i spotted it i nearly had a heart attack, now i guess i'll have to go pick it up as a collector's item. c'mon, linux, in my DRUGSTORE ?....i never saw that coming.
"organic" chemicals are not chemicals made by mother nature & sold in your health food store. they're not bacteria or any other biological system, including proteins. organic chemicals are exactly what the topic said : carbon based molecules. anything made of solely carbon, nitrogen, oxygen & hydrogen is generally considered organic. this would be as opposed to inorganic chemicals which contain metals, non-metals (like silicon) or either of the lanthanides or actinides.
when this article refers to organic chemicals it means stuff made in a lab by chemists & includes, as was mentioned previously, polymers, plastics etc.
the reason these systems are so interesting is their versatility. bell labs, uh sorry, lucent scientists recently showed some really neat behaviour in the anthracene/tetracene family (as in mothballs) including lasing (albeit at low temperatures, but you've got to cool most lasers anyways) & superconductivity. they've managed to build field-effect transistors out of single crystals of pentacene. all very cool stuff & some of it came out recently in either PRL or nature, ok now i can tell you it's science. if you do an authour search for batlogg you'll get a chronological list of what they've been up to. i will attempt to link the search results here (fingers crossed). you should be able to read the abstracts at least.
hope this clears up why organic chemicals have nothing to do with the organic world & why the NY times is so excited about organics.
So the Star's article is completely devoid of details - it's a newspaper ! I'll add a few more details so people can get as much information about this topic as they want. First and foremost the latest issue of Nature has an article entitled "Photonics: Opal appeal" specifically about this breakthrough (subscription required). The catch phrase used is a "three-dimensional photonic bandgap material". The team that's accomplished this is a bit more international then indicated so far, consisting of a Spanish team making the opal template, Geoff Ozin's group filling the lattices & then dissolving the template, Henry VanDriel's group performing the laser experiments, and Sajeev John's group providing the theory framework.
For those of you who just want pretty pictures, here are some images of the opals.
So that should give you more then enough to visit & read. Basically what these materials do is prevent propagation of light of a specific frequency in 3-dimensions. The 'bandgap' of the light can be controlled during the fabrication process allowing these things to block different frequencies. So you could imagine placing one of these materials into an optical fibre & selectively blocking one of the data streams but allowing all others to pass through unimpeded. The current breakthrough is twofold, first these aren't imaginary, they've been made & tested and they aren't decades removed from insertion into optical networks, they're months or years from it, second, this is the first example of a 3D PBG material, previous versions have generally been 2D. One of the neater experiments performed involved putting liquid crystals into the opal holes & then by putting an electric field across the liquid crystals, controlling the transmission through the crystal. A variable transmission photonic bandgap device. Light is fast, electrons are slow, an all optical network would be blazingly fast & these devices bring us a step closer to making that happen.
OK, this I can appreciate. But the next sentence makes me wonder how useful it will be :
"In the event of a failure IRIS FailSafe automatically fails over applications from one system in the cluster to the other."
so if i understand correctly, if an application fails, Iris makes sure that the failure is spread out over the whole cluster. Distributed failing ? Interesting approach.....
couple of quick points :
1) there's no indication that any 'traditional scientist' thinks you're a loony for thinking the way you do, you'll also notice that no 'traditional scientist' has any plans on proving god doesn't exist either - your beliefs are your beliefs and science has nothing to do with them.
2) if you can't reproduce something then how on earth are you going to study it ? did you want the answer to your questions or a nice guess based on a single occurrence where the description of events is hearsay ?
3) science has to have strict rules controlling it's boundaries to avoid or at least minimize everything mentioned in the above article. without restrictions on what & how science can look at things (like say that it has to occur more then once) you'd get no theories at all that you could trust. science has done its damndest to isolate itself from societal pressures and you want to drag it back into an discussion it can't help clear up anyways.
so to close : there's no scientist worth his salt that's going to dismiss your pseudo-scientific theories, all he's going to do is explain to you that he can't study them & that they can't be called science. that's all.
Slashdot Mirror
I second this. As far as a general intro to Physics these are by far the best set you can get. Here's the amazon link. There are audio copies of the lectures as well.
One caveat, many Physics & Astrophysics/Astronomy Departments are separated & have little overlap so take a careful look at your MSc course curriculum before leaping to the conclusion that you need to learn large amounts of general physics.
CJM
A similar thing happened with Rogers in Canada a few years ago, except in that case the connections were completely killed. Encrypted https connections to the store worked OK. It seems likely that they're packet shaping for bittorrent & the device they're using also manages to throttle iTunes connections. Here's the ehmac.ca thread and the dslreports thread. Then it was a P-cube box (pdf) that was causing the problem & Rogers managed to reconfigure it (through Cisco) to fix the problem. The best way to speed up the solution was to complain to the ISP.
Open letter to Bram (this would have gone in his Livejournal comments but Anonymous postings are disabled).
Ignoring the encryption issue for the moment, the primary problem with your argument is that you're assuming a rationality and a level of technical expertise from the ISPs that simply doesn't exist.
1) The simple fact is that "end-users" cannot work with ISPs, period. Rogers & Shaw are both shaping bittorrent traffic, they've received many complaints about this, lost clients & gotten lots of bad press but their stance has not changed. The shaping is there to stay & this means that for users of their networks your protocol is useless for ANY purpose. Bittorrent is dead, deceased, pushing up the daisies. If this spreads then any and all bittorrent-related technologies are useless so you'd best find another line of work.
2) These traffic shapers are stand-alone hardware boxes the the ISPs purchase from Cisco & stick into their network configurations. They're not simple tech & they aren't easily configured, if at all, by the ISPs themselves. They're also buggy as hell. Rogers' collection of shaping-boxes decided that iTunes Music Store traffic was peer-to-peer and as such killed it. So to presume that the ISPs will be able to analyze 'random traffic' and shape it dynamically is a little far-fetched.
My point is simply that though you may now think that encryption and & obfuscating packets is pointless, you have yet to provide a functional alternative other then 'work with the ISPs'. The death knell of bittorrent has sounded & you might want to worry about that a little bit.
cjm
This is an interesting question that's getting a range of responses. My take on it is fairly straightforward, the comparisons to Buffy/Angel are appropriate only in that they have the same creator, otherwise they would probably not be compared at all.
Perhaps a more interesting question is whether Firefly would have become more similar to Buffy/Angel had it made it through several seasons ? Buffy was an entertaining show but to a certain extent it also became quite serialized and impenetrable as it aged. Firefly's first season is much more accessible and required much less subtext per episode for enjoyment, as would be expected for the first season. I suspect however that had it survived through multiple seasons it too would have succumbed to the nested, opaque plotlines that plagued Buffy. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, long-time viewers are rewarded for their persistence, but few shows outside the Simpsons have managed the balance between rewarding the-Comic-Book-Guy-viewer and the brand-new-viewer and I suspect that based on Joss Whedon's history, Firefly's initial broad appeal would have quickly been lost.
Chris
said Massimo Marcone, a professor of food science at the University of Guelph
he's a professor (adjunct faculty) not a medical doctor so you're doubly correct to be concerned about his medical facts. as a matter of fact, based on what the rest of the faculty appears to be working on (cheese making, food safety, microbial films...) i don't know what the hell he's doing making comments about the medical implications of caffeine.
Food Science, University of Guelph
This isn't bloody insightful it's ignorant. spamhaus.org is the website for an RBL & you can /. it all you like it shouldn't affect the RBL. what the original message meant was that the RBL run by spamhaus is under heavy DOS attack from parties unknown. this has brought down other RBL sites like SPEWS, monkeys.com & osirusoft which means that ISPs that were using them to filter out spam servers or open relays are now MUCH less protected then they were before. the tide of spam is rising.
the spammers are attacking these lists sequentially & slowly destroying them. this has absolutely nothing to do with a webserver running at spamhaus.org. that doesn't mean we should try to bring their webserver down of course...
the interesting bit is whether or not MAPS is being attacked. since MAPS is now charging for their RBL services i would imagine that sort of attack would provoke legal responses which, as far as i can tell, these previous attacks haven't.
chris
This 'material' is an electrical circuit in a transmission line. They were simulated using Agilent's ADS software, which is used for design of "products such as cellular and portable phones, pagers, wireless networks, and radar and satellite communications systems" (from Agilent's page). The electrical fields are closer to microwaves then visible light & can be measured in voltages. No-one is going to beat data-density records using microwaves & to even talk about lenses is a trifle far-fetched. The principles & physics behind this breakthrough are general but in practice these man-made materials are going to have to be manufactured & we're nowhere close to that. This discovery was published in Applied Physics Letters (Vol. 82, No. 12, 24 March 2003, p. 1815 for those of you with institutional subscriptions).
This is somewhat akin to applying rules for radio waves to infrared photons, sure the equations all work but in practice the two electromagnetic fields behave somewhat differently.
Chris
PhD candidate
Dept. of Chemistry
University of Toronto
This study is a pile of crap. You might as well call it "Typos prevalent when lots of numbers are involved". These two guys must be complete morons to have come to the conclusion that authours aren't reading papers because they're mis-citing a volume or page number. Here's a typical reference for a Chemistry journal :
:
G. Hura, J. M. Sorenson, R. M. Glaeser, and T. Head-Gordon, J. Chem. Phys. 113, 9140 (2000).
There are a number of names & numbers all associated with the reference. Imagine how easy it is to get either the Volume (113) or the page number (9140) slightly off. For the most part the famous papers are referred to by the primary authour (T. Head-Gordon), the journal (Journal of Chemical Physics) & the year (2000). Given that information it's extremely simple to track down the paper whether or not a typo has been made.
It gets even worse if you're referencing a modern American Physical Society journal like Physical Review Letters. Here's a typical reference
Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 260401 (2002)
They've replaced the page number with a nasty 6 digit code to refer to the article (a by-product of online publication occurring well before a hard copy was coming out).
Frickin idiots, as someone who's actually written some of these scientific papers it's really irritating to have to defend one's papers because some fool decided a typo was equivalent to not reading a reference.
Chris
bah, that comment could easily be applied to practically any genre - all plots are tired, unless you're planning on reinventing human relationships. and frankly none of the fantasy i've read recently can be pigeonholed with the above paragraph.
...
decent fantasy isn't that hard to find, though accidentally stumbling on crud can make the search kind of painful. since you asked here follows my humble opinions.
The good stuff includes :
Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time (a continuing saga so if you're just starting it, take your time the end is not yet in sight) - one word : EPIC
Steven Brust's Jhereg series (short, simple, well written in an extremely full-blown world) - massively enjoyable stuff, bit of magic, bit of sorcery (an important distinction) some good swordplay and an introspective hero with a sarcastic bent
David Eddings' The Belgariad (The Mallorean/Tamuli/Elenium etc. are good too but they don't really compare to the Belgariad) - he likes gods that you can talk to and writes good characters - gotta love Silk
Weis & Hickman's original Dragonlance 3 book saga (prototypical fantasy with elves, dragons and magic - damn good) - they drop off pretty precipitously in their other series (though the Twins trilogy is good if you liked the Raistlin/Caramon characters)
Ursula K. LeGuin Earthsea trilogy - though i think this is another misnamed trilogy. this series is the prototypical hinted-at-but-never-revealed fantasy
David Gemmell - i'll read pretty much anything this guy writes, he likes heroes with problems and he also likes to mix unexplained history with current events
Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry is a good series that mixes a little Arthurian legend into the story
Raymond Feist's The Riftwar Saga is another classic, he brought Midkemia to life and managed to keep things interesting through the first three books, the later additions aren't quite as compelling he's gotten a little to carried away with a particular type of character & has kind of lost track of the plots
The stuff that shows promise :
George R.R. Martin's A song of fire & ice is starting pretty well though it is kind of uneven - he enjoys killing characters off and it's rapidly turning into a medieval soap opera
David Farland's The Runelords is also moving apace, it's a bit more typical fantasy & less soap opera with an interesting twist on the magic (though it's tending slightly towards the Shannara series which isn't necessarily a good thing)
The crap :
Terry Goodkind's The Sword of Truth is pretty much unredeemable junk - the characters are almost completely one-dimensional and his writing is painful to read, though the plots are definitely original which explains why i keep reading them i guess
The best unmentioned fantasy series to date :
C.S. Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy - this is an excellent set of books, i've read more then enough fantasy & these books blew me away. well written, complex characters - the interplay of good and evil and the shades in between. ask for it for Xmas, you won't regret it.
cjm
Did anyone actually manage to finish the Bard's Tale ? I played it for what seems an insane amount of time & I have no idea how close I got to the end. Even after hacking the characters for infinite hit points and enabling multiple diamond armours on every character the game seemed to never end. I remember getting through most of the castle & then teleporting somewhere but then it's just a blur....
cjm
as with every other magazine on the planet you can't cater to all tastes, and the linux community is substantially more diverse then most. say what you will about Maximum Linux, the fact is these folk have been in this field for quite a while & their presence will be missed. fingers crossed, they'll end up as regular contributors to MaxPC. i for one appreciate the attempt & wish them the best of luck.
cjm
the latest issue of Maximum Linux was stuck into my drugstore's puny magazine collection, when i spotted it i nearly had a heart attack, now i guess i'll have to go pick it up as a collector's item. c'mon, linux, in my DRUGSTORE ?....i never saw that coming.
"organic" chemicals are not chemicals made by mother nature & sold in your health food store. they're not bacteria or any other biological system, including proteins. organic chemicals are exactly what the topic said : carbon based molecules. anything made of solely carbon, nitrogen, oxygen & hydrogen is generally considered organic. this would be as opposed to inorganic chemicals which contain metals, non-metals (like silicon) or either of the lanthanides or actinides.
when this article refers to organic chemicals it means stuff made in a lab by chemists & includes, as was mentioned previously, polymers, plastics etc.
the reason these systems are so interesting is their versatility. bell labs, uh sorry, lucent scientists recently showed some really neat behaviour in the anthracene/tetracene family (as in mothballs) including lasing (albeit at low temperatures, but you've got to cool most lasers anyways) & superconductivity. they've managed to build field-effect transistors out of single crystals of pentacene. all very cool stuff & some of it came out recently in either PRL or nature, ok now i can tell you it's science. if you do an authour search for batlogg you'll get a chronological list of what they've been up to. i will attempt to link the search results here (fingers crossed). you should be able to read the abstracts at least.
hope this clears up why organic chemicals have nothing to do with the organic world & why the NY times is so excited about organics.
chris
So the Star's article is completely devoid of details - it's a newspaper ! I'll add a few more details so people can get as much information about this topic as they want. First and foremost the latest issue of Nature has an article entitled "Photonics: Opal appeal" specifically about this breakthrough (subscription required). The catch phrase used is a "three-dimensional photonic bandgap material". The team that's accomplished this is a bit more international then indicated so far, consisting of a Spanish team making the opal template, Geoff Ozin's group filling the lattices & then dissolving the template, Henry VanDriel's group performing the laser experiments, and Sajeev John's group providing the theory framework.
For those of you who just want pretty pictures, here are some images of the opals.
Here's the ultimate resource for photonic bandgap materials.
So that should give you more then enough to visit & read. Basically what these materials do is prevent propagation of light of a specific frequency in 3-dimensions. The 'bandgap' of the light can be controlled during the fabrication process allowing these things to block different frequencies. So you could imagine placing one of these materials into an optical fibre & selectively blocking one of the data streams but allowing all others to pass through unimpeded. The current breakthrough is twofold, first these aren't imaginary, they've been made & tested and they aren't decades removed from insertion into optical networks, they're months or years from it, second, this is the first example of a 3D PBG material, previous versions have generally been 2D. One of the neater experiments performed involved putting liquid crystals into the opal holes & then by putting an electric field across the liquid crystals, controlling the transmission through the crystal. A variable transmission photonic bandgap device. Light is fast, electrons are slow, an all optical network would be blazingly fast & these devices bring us a step closer to making that happen.
CJM
"IRIS FailSafe runs in a cluster environment"
.....
OK, this I can appreciate. But the next sentence makes me wonder how useful it will be :
"In the event of a failure IRIS FailSafe automatically fails over applications from one system in the cluster to the other."
so if i understand correctly, if an application fails, Iris makes sure that the failure is spread out over the whole cluster. Distributed failing ? Interesting approach
CJM
couple of quick points :
1) there's no indication that any 'traditional scientist' thinks you're a loony for thinking the way you do, you'll also notice that no 'traditional scientist' has any plans on proving god doesn't exist either - your beliefs are your beliefs and science has nothing to do with them.
2) if you can't reproduce something then how on earth are you going to study it ? did you want the answer to your questions or a nice guess based on a single occurrence where the description of events is hearsay ?
3) science has to have strict rules controlling it's boundaries to avoid or at least minimize everything mentioned in the above article. without restrictions on what & how science can look at things (like say that it has to occur more then once) you'd get no theories at all that you could trust. science has done its damndest to isolate itself from societal pressures and you want to drag it back into an discussion it can't help clear up anyways.
so to close : there's no scientist worth his salt that's going to dismiss your pseudo-scientific theories, all he's going to do is explain to you that he can't study them & that they can't be called science. that's all.
cjmilne