There's a very simple argument as to why the Nazi "research" shouldn't be used, aside from the ethical arguments already stated here. In many scientific fields (medicine in particular), research is only credible when it has been shown to be repeatable. Clearly these particular experiments won't be repeated by any credible researcher, and so the results are useless.
Actually, that's not quite right. Your voice sounds different to yourself for two reasons. First, because it directly vibrates your skull, in which your auditory organs are housed (the Eustachian tubes are normally closed, so there's no significant acoustic pathway there). The skull tends to pass lower frequencies better, so your voice sounds deeper to yourself than to other people. Second, when you speak (or chew), your body activates muscles in your middle ear that attenuate the incoming sound on a frequency-dependent basis. So when you speak, not only does your voice sound different, but everything sounds different. It's a subtle effect, but if you pay attention you can notice it.
For example, viscosity: rarely does viscosity play any and I mean any role at a microscopic level
Actually that's not true. At a microscopic scale (although not at the molecular scale you mentioned), viscosity plays a critical role. What's counter-intuitive is that at these scales, the mass of the fluid is also important. For example, some bacteria swim by spinning a corkscrew-shaped tail. Because the fluid is viscous, the spinning tail exerts a force on the fluid (otherwise it would slip through unimpeded). That force acts on the mass of the fluid, which exerts an equal and opposite force on the bacterium, pushing it forward. Ignore either the viscosity or the mass, and the bacterium can't move.
Viscosity is typically the primary source of damping for MEMS devices, and is ultimately one of the limiting factors for the microturbine as well. Increasing the size of the gap between the moving and stationary parts can reduce the viscous drag significantly, but also makes the induction less efficient. The good news is that air is a lot less viscous than water, so it's possible to make the device pretty efficient.
A turbine does not a generator make. Show me the electricity! Silicon ain't magnetic people. OK, magnetless generators exist, how about "coils" then? Show me the coils! Until I see a working, efficient, microsized generator, I don't see any of this happening.
Funny you should mention that; a graduate student at MIT working on that very topic defended his thesis earlier this week. An old progress report describes the basic idea. It's more difficult, but not impossible.
As things get smaller and smaller, your perceived viscosity goes up and up.
Although viscous drag is a problem with MEMS (another MIT student defended his thesis this week on efficient algorithms for calculating fluid drag on MEMS), the beauty of microfabrication is that as the characteristic length gets smaller, the Reynolds number drops, so the flow stays laminar. At 1 MHz, the boundary layer thickness is pretty small, so in fact you can model the fluid (air) as nearly inviscid. It's not uncommon for resonant MEMS devices to have a Q of 50 or more in air.
The majority of damping in MEMS comes from squeeze-film damping, which occurs when you have a moving object suspended a small distance above the substrate. Motions of the object towards or away from the substrate cause fluid flow that generates a lot of damping; motions of the object parallel to the substrate cause a lot less damping. The micro-turbine is made out of 6 (!) wafers of silicon (which creates one hell of an alignment problem, by the way), so the turbine can be suspended well above the substrate. It also moves parallel to the substrate, rather than perpendicular to it. Of course, viscosity is still the ultimate limiting factor, but it's not as bad as you make it sound.
As opposed to communism, in which "society's most complex and vexing problems [are] convenienty broken down into small, manageable chunks so that millions of individuals would each be able to derive a little personal gain from voluntarily solving some small aspect of the big picture and all of them could come together to build complex and beneficial systems for all mankind!"
Yes, but the patch doesn't actually *do* what it claims.
This is exactly why I disagree with Microsoft's policy of keeping secret the details of potential security holes. If the details weren't known, we would either have to (a) trust that they fixed it, or (b) not trust them and stop using the software. Microsoft wants to believe that most people fall into the (a) camp, but this kind of response to a security hole argues that (b) is the more sensible option.
"I'll predict a much greater level of Internet usage with these privacy policies in place," Boucher said.
Boucher went on to predict that, after these privacy policies are in place, world population would increase, the Earth would rotate about its axis roughly once a day, and we would progress towards the heat death of the universe at an ever-increasing pace.
I'm still waiting for the Simpsons to finally make it to Earth, only to find out that the planet's about to be invaded by Cylons and they're the only ones with the technology to stop the attack. And that darned little robotic dog is so cute!
the organization as a whole has done a good job of finding spokespeople (like the professor) who appear "respectable"
The particularly amusing thing about this statement is that this "computer and software expert" (from the article) is not a professor in the computer science department, but a professor in the business school. I guess Ron Rivest wasn't for sale.:-)
For me, the way to get into the zone is to have a good definition of the problem I'm solving and to have an immediate deadline (positive deadlines work, too; e.g., "finish this by five and you get an extra $250"). If I've got those two things, I can work while sitting on a bed of nails, with a strobelight behind my head and a copy of Metal Machine Music blaring over the speakers, with my feet soaking in a tub full of piranha and electric eels. You should try it sometime; it's exhilirating.
You gotta admire this guy's cojones, though. He argues that because of the states' remedy, "competition would be reduced not only in operating systems, but in other key product categories where Microsoft is the strongest challenger to incumbent leaders." Specifically, he mentions online services (AOL), handhelds (Palm), and game consoles (Sony).
In other words, Microsoft will no longer be able to use its monopoly position in the OS market to heavy-handedly bash its way into new markets. And he spins it like this is a bad thing! Simply amazing.
Come to think of it, what does he mean by "competition would be reduced not only in operating systems"? Is he arguing that the states' remedy will actually increase Microsoft's stranglehold on the OS market? If so, then maybe we need some more severe remedies.:-)
From the executive summary: Microsoft today is investing heavily in XML Web Services, a next-generation computing platform that holds the potential to unleash new waives of productivity gains in the economy.
Couldn't've said it better myself.:-)
Re:Why was this classified under PHP?
on
Zope Bible
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· Score: 1
That was a typo. They meant to classify it under PHB, as in "get your PHB to peep this to see why Zope is dope!"
As far as I know linux has no problem reading the content headers of files but I'm not an expert, just a user. I assume this is done on the interface level, somone speak up!
Linux uses a file called magic (in RedHat, it's in/usr/share/magic) which describes, for each type of file, a "magic number" -- either a string or a 1, 2, or 4-byte header that appears at the beginnings of files of that type. The file program will read the magic number at the start of a file and report the file type.
The advantage of this system is that you don't have to give your files any particular extension (although doing so can be a useful mnemonic device). The disadvantage is that reading the headers of a large number of files can be slow.
But if you convert all of your files to JPEGs, it'll be much faster!;-)
Diablo II - Yes. Dungeon Siege - No.
on
WineX 2.0
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· Score: 2, Informative
This is the first official release of WineX with DirectX 8.0 support, meaning the newest games have a chance to work.
If only that were true. I just downloaded and installed the new version, and it doesn't support the "newest game" I have, Dungeon Siege. DS insists on having DirectX 8.1 before it will install. Of course, any coder worth his/her/its weight in donkey turds knows that you shouldn't change the API between minor versions, so the program shouldn't care whether I have 8.0 or 8.1. But to give Microsoft (the publisher of DS) the benefit of the doubt -- which (A) I'm still willing to do, even though they rarely deserve it, and (B) even so, doesn't make them look too good -- GPG probably found some nasty bugs in DirectX 8.0 while writing this game, so MS had to fix the bugs and release DirectX 8.1 to make this game work.
Not to dis TransGaming, though -- Diablo II works beautifully, and the LoD expansion seems to work as well (still need to test this more thoroughly), so major props to them. I'd do more tests tonight, but I have to work for a living.
Um, who do you think pays for the FTC to do this in the first place?
About 300 million Americans, only a fraction of which own computers. Of that fraction, only a miniscule percentage actually *do* something about spam (like filter it out), rather than just deleting it (or God forbid, clicking on the links). So having the cost split among 300 million people rather than the (probably) fewer than 1 million that have been actively fighting the problem is an excellent thing. I'd pay a dollar a month to never receive another spam email. I don't think I'd pay $300 a month for the same service.
Oh, come on. The incident occurred "on the way back" from a trip. He must've flown there. Even if they let him wear all that stuff on the plane over, do you think they let him run it during takeoff and landing? I can't even run my palm pilot on the runway, there's no way the flight crew would let this guy run some unshielded laptop equipment. Brain damage my ass.
> Actually, since he has worked with this equipment for 20+ years, his actual train of thought might be screwed up.
You got that right, although correlation doesn't imply causality.
Slashdot Mirror
If you invented some kind of transdermal cannabis gel
And who says the days of the lone inventor are gone?
There's a very simple argument as to why the Nazi "research" shouldn't be used, aside from the ethical arguments already stated here. In many scientific fields (medicine in particular), research is only credible when it has been shown to be repeatable. Clearly these particular experiments won't be repeated by any credible researcher, and so the results are useless.
Actually, that's not quite right. Your voice sounds different to yourself for two reasons. First, because it directly vibrates your skull, in which your auditory organs are housed (the Eustachian tubes are normally closed, so there's no significant acoustic pathway there). The skull tends to pass lower frequencies better, so your voice sounds deeper to yourself than to other people. Second, when you speak (or chew), your body activates muscles in your middle ear that attenuate the incoming sound on a frequency-dependent basis. So when you speak, not only does your voice sound different, but everything sounds different. It's a subtle effect, but if you pay attention you can notice it.
For example, viscosity: rarely does viscosity play any and I mean any role at a microscopic level
Actually that's not true. At a microscopic scale (although not at the molecular scale you mentioned), viscosity plays a critical role. What's counter-intuitive is that at these scales, the mass of the fluid is also important. For example, some bacteria swim by spinning a corkscrew-shaped tail. Because the fluid is viscous, the spinning tail exerts a force on the fluid (otherwise it would slip through unimpeded). That force acts on the mass of the fluid, which exerts an equal and opposite force on the bacterium, pushing it forward. Ignore either the viscosity or the mass, and the bacterium can't move.
Viscosity is typically the primary source of damping for MEMS devices, and is ultimately one of the limiting factors for the microturbine as well. Increasing the size of the gap between the moving and stationary parts can reduce the viscous drag significantly, but also makes the induction less efficient. The good news is that air is a lot less viscous than water, so it's possible to make the device pretty efficient.
A turbine does not a generator make. Show me the electricity! Silicon ain't magnetic people. OK, magnetless generators exist, how about "coils" then? Show me the coils! Until I see a working, efficient, microsized generator, I don't see any of this happening.
Funny you should mention that; a graduate student at MIT working on that very topic defended his thesis earlier this week. An old progress report describes the basic idea. It's more difficult, but not impossible.
As things get smaller and smaller, your perceived viscosity goes up and up.
Although viscous drag is a problem with MEMS (another MIT student defended his thesis this week on efficient algorithms for calculating fluid drag on MEMS), the beauty of microfabrication is that as the characteristic length gets smaller, the Reynolds number drops, so the flow stays laminar. At 1 MHz, the boundary layer thickness is pretty small, so in fact you can model the fluid (air) as nearly inviscid. It's not uncommon for resonant MEMS devices to have a Q of 50 or more in air.
The majority of damping in MEMS comes from squeeze-film damping, which occurs when you have a moving object suspended a small distance above the substrate. Motions of the object towards or away from the substrate cause fluid flow that generates a lot of damping; motions of the object parallel to the substrate cause a lot less damping. The micro-turbine is made out of 6 (!) wafers of silicon (which creates one hell of an alignment problem, by the way), so the turbine can be suspended well above the substrate. It also moves parallel to the substrate, rather than perpendicular to it. Of course, viscosity is still the ultimate limiting factor, but it's not as bad as you make it sound.
Getting laid is not the problem. Getting laid by somebody you'd actually enjoy seeing naked is the problem!
As opposed to communism, in which "society's most complex and vexing problems [are] convenienty broken down into small, manageable chunks so that millions of individuals would each be able to derive a little personal gain from voluntarily solving some small aspect of the big picture and all of them could come together to build complex and beneficial systems for all mankind!"
Yes, but the patch doesn't actually *do* what it claims.
This is exactly why I disagree with Microsoft's policy of keeping secret the details of potential security holes. If the details weren't known, we would either have to (a) trust that they fixed it, or (b) not trust them and stop using the software. Microsoft wants to believe that most people fall into the (a) camp, but this kind of response to a security hole argues that (b) is the more sensible option.
Driving the movie content in real-time via audience response in Digital Theaters.
You mean I can pause the movie while I run off to take a leak? That's awesome, but I imagine everyone else in the theater will be a little pissed off.
"I'll predict a much greater level of Internet usage with these privacy policies in place," Boucher said.
Boucher went on to predict that, after these privacy policies are in place, world population would increase, the Earth would rotate about its axis roughly once a day, and we would progress towards the heat death of the universe at an ever-increasing pace.
Hey, if Christina Ricci came to the local Wal-Mart in a thong to buy a PC, I'd even help her install Linux on it!
I have no clue, and I must scream.
I'm still waiting for the Simpsons to finally make it to Earth, only to find out that the planet's about to be invaded by Cylons and they're the only ones with the technology to stop the attack. And that darned little robotic dog is so cute!
Oh, no, Puthoff is definitely an expert in the concepts Priest was using -- scamming other people out of money!
he is the recent co-inventor on the patent applications ... "Data Extraction from World Wide Web Pages."
He got a patent for browsing slashdot?!?
the organization as a whole has done a good job of finding spokespeople (like the professor) who appear "respectable"
:-)
The particularly amusing thing about this statement is that this "computer and software expert" (from the article) is not a professor in the computer science department, but a professor in the business school. I guess Ron Rivest wasn't for sale.
For me, the way to get into the zone is to have a good definition of the problem I'm solving and to have an immediate deadline (positive deadlines work, too; e.g., "finish this by five and you get an extra $250"). If I've got those two things, I can work while sitting on a bed of nails, with a strobelight behind my head and a copy of Metal Machine Music blaring over the speakers, with my feet soaking in a tub full of piranha and electric eels. You should try it sometime; it's exhilirating.
You gotta admire this guy's cojones, though. He argues that because of the states' remedy, "competition would be reduced not only in operating systems, but in other key product categories where Microsoft is the strongest challenger to incumbent leaders." Specifically, he mentions online services (AOL), handhelds (Palm), and game consoles (Sony).
:-)
In other words, Microsoft will no longer be able to use its monopoly position in the OS market to heavy-handedly bash its way into new markets. And he spins it like this is a bad thing! Simply amazing.
Come to think of it, what does he mean by "competition would be reduced not only in operating systems"? Is he arguing that the states' remedy will actually increase Microsoft's stranglehold on the OS market? If so, then maybe we need some more severe remedies.
From the executive summary:
:-)
Microsoft today is investing heavily in XML Web Services, a next-generation computing platform that holds the potential to unleash new waives of productivity gains in the economy.
Couldn't've said it better myself.
That was a typo. They meant to classify it under PHB, as in "get your PHB to peep this to see why Zope is dope!"
As far as I know linux has no problem reading the content headers of files but I'm not an expert, just a user. I assume this is done on the interface level, somone speak up!
/usr/share/magic) which describes, for each type of file, a "magic number" -- either a string or a 1, 2, or 4-byte header that appears at the beginnings of files of that type. The file program will read the magic number at the start of a file and report the file type.
;-)
Linux uses a file called magic (in RedHat, it's in
The advantage of this system is that you don't have to give your files any particular extension (although doing so can be a useful mnemonic device). The disadvantage is that reading the headers of a large number of files can be slow.
But if you convert all of your files to JPEGs, it'll be much faster!
This is the first official release of WineX with DirectX 8.0 support, meaning the newest games have a chance to work.
If only that were true. I just downloaded and installed the new version, and it doesn't support the "newest game" I have, Dungeon Siege. DS insists on having DirectX 8.1 before it will install. Of course, any coder worth his/her/its weight in donkey turds knows that you shouldn't change the API between minor versions, so the program shouldn't care whether I have 8.0 or 8.1. But to give Microsoft (the publisher of DS) the benefit of the doubt -- which (A) I'm still willing to do, even though they rarely deserve it, and (B) even so, doesn't make them look too good -- GPG probably found some nasty bugs in DirectX 8.0 while writing this game, so MS had to fix the bugs and release DirectX 8.1 to make this game work.
Not to dis TransGaming, though -- Diablo II works beautifully, and the LoD expansion seems to work as well (still need to test this more thoroughly), so major props to them. I'd do more tests tonight, but I have to work for a living.
The parent should be modded up to +20 billion, permanent "I 0wn j00r 19B6-born juvenile D3V0-ign0r4nt 4$$" status.
Um, who do you think pays for the FTC to do this in the first place?
About 300 million Americans, only a fraction of which own computers. Of that fraction, only a miniscule percentage actually *do* something about spam (like filter it out), rather than just deleting it (or God forbid, clicking on the links). So having the cost split among 300 million people rather than the (probably) fewer than 1 million that have been actively fighting the problem is an excellent thing. I'd pay a dollar a month to never receive another spam email. I don't think I'd pay $300 a month for the same service.
Oh, come on. The incident occurred "on the way back" from a trip. He must've flown there. Even if they let him wear all that stuff on the plane over, do you think they let him run it during takeoff and landing? I can't even run my palm pilot on the runway, there's no way the flight crew would let this guy run some unshielded laptop equipment. Brain damage my ass.
> Actually, since he has worked with this equipment for 20+ years, his actual train of thought might be screwed up.
You got that right, although correlation doesn't imply causality.