Personally, I think even allowing HTML in email was a bad idea from the very beginning.
Though one thing that might make this better is if the mail program would STRIP your email address from any HTML it finds and replace it with something bogus.
Actually, that wasn't email he posted. Those were comments from the MacNN board. He just grabbed the more flamebait like posts and made it sound like it was emailed to him. Now who is being misleading?
Also notice the few posts he answered that were rational, all he could do was bitch about their spelling. One guy he accused of saying Intel and others should just remove integer units altogether. But the guy didn't say that. He just pointed out that many programs DO make extensive use of floating point.
Anothing hole in his logic is that he used Dell's own benchmarks to refute Apple's. So we should trust Dell to use fair benchmarks more than Apple? I think real world application performance is the real test. He seems reluctant to mention the real world software tests that were done, such as that DNA sequencer software which beat the hell out of the dual xeon machine.
So I don't think this guy knows what he is talking about. Me, I'll wait for Ars Technica and others to do tests on the real thing. Then we will see.
There are Mac versions of both of those games, as well as of many other games out on the PC as well. They still tend to come out a bit later on the Mac, but they are no less fun to play.
Most seasoned Mac users know better than to pay attention to most rumors sites. Most PC people don't read them. But this certainly got Apple mentioned on/. and there will be a lot of/.ers watching that keynote now when it is rebroadcast.
But I could be wrong, maybe it was an accident after all.
Actually the first G3's are six years old this August. I know, I still have my Rev A G3 from 1997 and it runs OS X, slowly but it is usable. It will still play some older games just fine, lkie Unreal Tournament. The 8600 is more like seven or eight years old and uses a PPC 604 or 604e at probably around 200 MHZ.
My brother has two year old G4 which runs OS X just fine. He needs a better video card, but other than that, it will run the latest games and software just fine.
I used to have a five year old PC which will barely run Win98. XP would crawl on that thing for sure. It had plenty of RAM. I sold it to a friend who has decided to build a new one and give this away to his little brother because it's junk.
My dual 1.25 GHZ (1 GB of RAM, Ti4600 graphics card) totally screams with the latest version of OS X. Maybe your dual 1GHZ needed more RAM. Or maybe you are just talking out of your ass.
Actually, it could work to their advantage, here is how!
They "leak" these specs out and it generates a huge buzz, especially when they send out cease and desists to the major rumors sites. I think Apple has actually learned how to use the rumor sites to help them generate buzz. They play these leak then cease and desist games knowing it will make people even more curious about what else was NOT leaked out, or will be more likely to watch the show just to see the new machines in action.
This will ensure a very large number of people watch their broadcast of the show. This means developers as well, ones who may not have watched this otherwise (i.e. PC software developers) but are now intrigued by this new machine buzz. It means they will see, along with the new machines being confirmed, Apple's demo of OS X 10.3, which is what Apple really wants them to see. After all, OS X is Apple's future as much as new hardware is and if they can get these guys to sit through a presentation on OS X and how easy it is to develop while watiting to see what new iron Apple has out, they might get the hint of "Wow, OS X is really cool! Along with this new hardware these guys will be going places! I think I'll get one of these and see how easy it will be to port my software over to this amazing platform".
It will also draw PC user eyeballs as well, and they will also see how cool OS X is compared to Windows. So in a way, this could well be a ploy to glue more eyeballs on the screen and fill people with marketing about OS X along with the new machines they are now so curious about.
This group represents lots of big software companies, not just IBM. IBM may well disagree with their sentiment and if they do, hopefully they will make their displeasure known.
I'm more willing to bet that Microsoft is more likely the culprit behind this move.
SCO vs IBM, that's nothing, what I would love to see is a real drop down, drag out fight between Microsoft and IBM.
It's awesome! There is a ton of information about their space program here.
Also, you might want to note that the U.S. is currently incapable of landing on the moon. All the equipment used to do it in the 60's and 70's is too old and most of it can only be found in museums now. The rest is rusting in NASA hangars. If we want to go back, we would be better off developing updated versions of the Apollo craft. So in a way, China has a bit of an edge right now if there was a sudden race to put a base on the moon.
Getting China into the race might just make the U.S. program back into what it was in the 1960's. We will hopefully return to the moon, even if because we'll be damned if we let China set up a base there first. A race to Mars would be another good next step.
Of course the reasons for going would be less than noble, just to show up a new rival, but the technological advances that would come out of the program would be of great benefit for everyone back home on Earth.
I don't think Microsoft will want to kill virtual PC off and the reason for that is that Microsoft is a software company at heart. Having Virtual PC around means that they can sell Windows to Mac users as well as PC users. Microsoft doens't care if you run on a Mac or a PC because as long as you also buy a copy of Windows, they will be happy!
Killing office for the Mac might happen to make more people buy Virtual PC, Windows AND Office as well as put the squeeze on Apple a bit more since Mac users would have to pay a LOT more to get all three of those together just to run office.
Apple would definately do well to start work on their own office software and make sure it stays compatible with MS Office to alleviate that threat. Better yet, they should pick up a copy of a current open source office package and improve it and send all changes back. If they helped make OpenOffice or some such thing run better on Linux and Windows, it would let Apple be the one to put the crunch on Microsoft instead.
In case you've had your head in a hole in the ground for the last seven weeks, Apple has already said they will bring this to Windows users later this year.
They are also rumored to be porting iTunes 4 and there was even recently a job ad out at Apple for windows developers to do exactly that. Just wait a few months, probably later this year they will get it done and the rest of you guys can join the party. As a current Mac user who has bought from the Apple store, I can tell you it will be worth the wait.
Well, they will send automated take down letters then. Look at the link I posted where it did just that to a group of astrophysicists. But I suppose if millions of people did it, it might overload their system.
Imagine a trojan which had a mini ftp or web server built in which returned a list of popular songs that the bot would fire off letters over. It would create a big fat mess, piss a lot of people off even more and create a legal headache for the RIAA when they get sued by lots of people who lost web access unfairly if their ISP just shut them down till they could determine if the claim was legit or not.
Now I'm not saying someone should go out and write something to do this, but that if someone wanted to create real havok on the net, this would be one way to do it.
Well I don't know for sure, but what other kind of bot goes through and gets a listing of every filename on the server and then tries to ftp in anonymously. I suppose it could be some kind of virus but it certainly would be a strange one to go zipping over the whole site like that just getting directory listings.
If I put up a web page on my machine or in the FTP headers and such, on my IP saying that site cannot be accessed by the RIAA, its affiliates or anyone working for the RIAA for any reason and that doing so constitutes illegal intrusion into my system, would that make the RIAA liable for accessing my system illegally. Is there any kind of electronic tresspass law which people could use to make it illegal for them to send their web crawlers and such over your website and such?
Given that I don't host their crap on my site, what gives them the right to eat up my bandwidth constantly by randomly searching for mp3's? (My personal webserver has been crawled by a suspected RIAA bot about 15 times this week) I know they are doing this as they have Embarrased themselves in the past by searching harmless systems.
This makes going over my log files when I need to a real pain too when I have access logs showing some damn bot pouring over every file name on the system.
So do those of us who are sick of them using these abusive tactics have any recourse to go after the RIAA for intruding on our systems with annoying bots? I for one am tired of them cataloging my web server and trying to FTP in anonymously every 10 hours or so just because I *might* have something of theirs posted up.
If they no longer plan on making money from it, it would be a shrewd move to weed out those copyrights they no longer care to keep. A company with thousands or even millions of copyrights could save quite a bit per year if they dumped off that old dead weight, even at $1 each.
Perhaps make it $1 for invidivuals and $1000 for corporations. I suppose a company could use the loophole of assigning all their copyrights to one person, but boy, they had better trust that individual!
I called your post a troll not because it disagreed but because you were rather nasty about it. You seemed to take my initial post rather personally when I complained about lack of quality on cable. Makes me wonder if you work for Time Warner for that matter. Oh your name on here looks like a name a/. troll would use as well what with the word pussy in it and all.
It is also interesting to see that you now feel the need to post as AC. This only helps reaffirm my suspicion you simply want to pick a fight.
I was talking about cable, I've had other cable before and it was better than this. I was not comparing cable to broadcast television, which you obviously think I was.
I've been told in the past that you MUST have standard cable to get road runner. Not lifeline, not no cable but either standard or digital. I will call them and see if that situation has changed.
I didn't say the country would collapse. Just that it hurts us when we have less diverse media. Don't believe me? Go watch the news, it's the same pro Bush government drivel everywhere on all the major news stations. There are no minor news stations. Soon newspapers will suffer the same fate, all in the hands of mega media conglomerates which feed us only what they want us to know. That is what I mean. And entertainment? You get drivel unless you pay a good 1-10% or maybe more of your salary a month (depending on what you make of course) for the good stuff.
I would imagine there are some countries as more progressive if not more so. Europe is shaping up to be a big contender and their governments are currently less fanatical and corrupt than ours.
Capitalism only works when proper checks and balances are in place. More and more industries are lobbying to dismantle those checks and balances and they are ever more successful at it of late.
Thus continues the fall of America into bland mediocrity, and that is at best. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to kill the new Low Power FM (LPFM) regulation next.
So it seems that the internet will continue to be the only source or real news and music anymore.
Hopefully people will finally get sick of the drudge TV and radio have become and demand things be put back the way they were. I mean seriously, look at what crap cable is now.
I have Time Warner Cable in Cincinatti, the standard cable and it makes me want to puke.
I get a few local channels which of course play crap. I've got CSPAN which comes in full of bars in the image, not that I watch that anyway unless I need to get to sleep fast. I've got three religious channels, which to 95% of the world is unwatchably boring, not to mention I'm not Christian anyway. I've got two PBS channels, which probably are better viewing than most the rest of it put together. A few crap movie channels like TBS and TNN and TNT. Discover channel, comedy central, cartoon network and news. That is IT. Oh and I have nine channels above 70 which show a test pattern 24/7, one of which has someone chanting the local weather over it. I pay about $40 a month for this "privilage".
If it were not the only way to get high speed internet where I am at, I would not even fucking bother with cable. I only wish I had enough techy neighbors to get a bunch of us together and buy our own T1 and set up a wireless neighborhood access point... Sadly, all my neighbors tech expertise ends at giving their John Deere an oil change.
Thought experiments on uses for this
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 1
Actually absorbsion would work, unless you eclipsed something and in space there would always be something behind you, a star or distant galaxy, but at long enough range, you would be effectively invisible unless they did a sweep with a telescope to enhance that area to notice the missing background stars and such.
So they wouldn't see the hole unless they were looking for it most likely or you were close enough to noticibly block out background objects. Otherwise their scanners (assuming radar here) would be absorbed but that would be no different to them than there being nothing there and the radar beam never reflecting back and continuing on into space. They would never know if it had hit something or kept on going forever. That is how stealth technology works today with radar absorbing and scattering materials.
However, there IS a way to know if the radar hit something. That is with entangled photons. You create entangled radar basically. You create a pair of entangled photons at radar frequency and send one out, the others you somehow hold in a loop on board the ship and a computer will see if they deflect as if they encountered something. I suppose you could kick the frequency of the ones you keep up and put them in a fiber optic loop... Hmm of course observing them probably destroys them, so not entirely sure if that would work. But its a fun thought experiment.
They have used a similar technique to see inside objects without getting an actual reflection from that object by observing the reaction of one set of the entagled pair of photons kept in a separate laser beam from the ones "injected" into the object. They were able to create a laser image of the inside of the object that way. Quite cool.
Hmm another thought occurs. If you have a pair of entangled photons and you frequency shift one of them, what happens to its sibling? Will it also change frequency or will it become disentangled from the other one?
If the sibling would change frequency, that would be awesome. Imagine... You have a patient with a deep brain tumor, the kind you can't take out without seriously messing them up or killing them. So you entagle photons in the form of radio waves which can pass through their head and beam them at the person, using a frequency which enables a fairly tight beam. A computer calculates then the photons will reach the tumor after coming out of the emitter and changes the sibling into x-rays or gamma rays causing the siblings inside the patient to also change and fry the tumor. All without any cutting or surgery at all. Of course the amount of time it takes the photons to go from the emitter to the tumor is exceedingly small. So if the time to change the photons is too long, you will miss the tumor and maybe the patient all together, frying something way behind them.
Also, and correct me if I'm wrong, the change in frequency is gradual as the photons bounce around in the crystal, so the photons may be absorbed when they hit a frequency far below x-rays which may be absorbed harmlessly by the tissue... However that may not be until infrared so you might be able to kill the tumor by heating it that way instead of using ionising radiation.
Just thoughts... free free to nitpick and add to them:)
You are better off converting the heat to microwaves, which can be converted to electricity far more efficiently than visible light can. See my post way down from here about using this in satellites to beam to ground stations.
Re:Star Trek has been completed!
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 1
Hmm cloaking device...
A ship with a skin made of these, absorbs incoming light of any frequency and radiates some other form of non visible light or simply converts it to energy to aid in powering the ship, rendering it invisible to radar, light, ect as in space it would appear to be utterly black. In fact this would be a "virtual black hole" where light would go in and never come back out.
Planes could become invisible at night and become the color of the sky during the day, though you could get a similar effect with fiber optics to just pass through whatever is behind it.
Heat from the engines could be bled away as standard light.
However it is far more important to be able to become invisible to radar and infrared which would defeat incoming missiles. The main danger would be if missiles were developed which could lock on to an object visibly and track it in real time, making radar and heat counter measures useless. Then cloaking from visible light would become rather important to fool the missiles computer.
That is actually a pretty cool idea! *runs for the patent office*
Better solar power generators
on
Mastering Light
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
By taking sunlight and turning it into microwave radiation, you could get far greater efficiency out of the generation of electricity.
This would make microwave beaming satellites highly efficient. The current idea was to have huge solar arrays which would of course alter the look of the sky during the day or night. These would convert some of the light into energy and probably reflect the rest of lose it as heat. The elctricity generated would produce a microwave signal which would be beamed down to a ground station and converted back into electricity. With this new technology, they could have far smaller arrays which convert the light directly into microwaves and transmit, eliminating the overhead of going from light->electricity->microwaves->electrici ty on the ground.
Instead you would have light->microwaves->electricity on the ground.
And you wouldn't need a mile long array of cells to collect enough power to make it worthwhile because your effeciency would be extremely high.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that is a very good point.
Personally, I think even allowing HTML in email was a bad idea from the very beginning.
Though one thing that might make this better is if the mail program would STRIP your email address from any HTML it finds and replace it with something bogus.
Actually, that wasn't email he posted. Those were comments from the MacNN board. He just grabbed the more flamebait like posts and made it sound like it was emailed to him. Now who is being misleading?
Also notice the few posts he answered that were rational, all he could do was bitch about their spelling. One guy he accused of saying Intel and others should just remove integer units altogether. But the guy didn't say that. He just pointed out that many programs DO make extensive use of floating point.
Anothing hole in his logic is that he used Dell's own benchmarks to refute Apple's. So we should trust Dell to use fair benchmarks more than Apple? I think real world application performance is the real test. He seems reluctant to mention the real world software tests that were done, such as that DNA sequencer software which beat the hell out of the dual xeon machine.
So I don't think this guy knows what he is talking about. Me, I'll wait for Ars Technica and others to do tests on the real thing. Then we will see.
There are Mac versions of both of those games, as well as of many other games out on the PC as well. They still tend to come out a bit later on the Mac, but they are no less fun to play.
Most seasoned Mac users know better than to pay attention to most rumors sites. Most PC people don't read them. But this certainly got Apple mentioned on /. and there will be a lot of /.ers watching that keynote now when it is rebroadcast.
But I could be wrong, maybe it was an accident after all.
Actually the first G3's are six years old this August. I know, I still have my Rev A G3 from 1997 and it runs OS X, slowly but it is usable. It will still play some older games just fine, lkie Unreal Tournament. The 8600 is more like seven or eight years old and uses a PPC 604 or 604e at probably around 200 MHZ.
My brother has two year old G4 which runs OS X just fine. He needs a better video card, but other than that, it will run the latest games and software just fine.
I used to have a five year old PC which will barely run Win98. XP would crawl on that thing for sure. It had plenty of RAM. I sold it to a friend who has decided to build a new one and give this away to his little brother because it's junk.
My dual 1.25 GHZ (1 GB of RAM, Ti4600 graphics card) totally screams with the latest version of OS X. Maybe your dual 1GHZ needed more RAM. Or maybe you are just talking out of your ass.
Actually, it could work to their advantage, here is how!
They "leak" these specs out and it generates a huge buzz, especially when they send out cease and desists to the major rumors sites. I think Apple has actually learned how to use the rumor sites to help them generate buzz. They play these leak then cease and desist games knowing it will make people even more curious about what else was NOT leaked out, or will be more likely to watch the show just to see the new machines in action.
This will ensure a very large number of people watch their broadcast of the show. This means developers as well, ones who may not have watched this otherwise (i.e. PC software developers) but are now intrigued by this new machine buzz. It means they will see, along with the new machines being confirmed, Apple's demo of OS X 10.3, which is what Apple really wants them to see. After all, OS X is Apple's future as much as new hardware is and if they can get these guys to sit through a presentation on OS X and how easy it is to develop while watiting to see what new iron Apple has out, they might get the hint of "Wow, OS X is really cool! Along with this new hardware these guys will be going places! I think I'll get one of these and see how easy it will be to port my software over to this amazing platform".
It will also draw PC user eyeballs as well, and they will also see how cool OS X is compared to Windows. So in a way, this could well be a ploy to glue more eyeballs on the screen and fill people with marketing about OS X along with the new machines they are now so curious about.
This group represents lots of big software companies, not just IBM. IBM may well disagree with their sentiment and if they do, hopefully they will make their displeasure known.
I'm more willing to bet that Microsoft is more likely the culprit behind this move.
SCO vs IBM, that's nothing, what I would love to see is a real drop down, drag out fight between Microsoft and IBM.
Actually their spacecraft are far more advanced than the Apollo era craft were, simply because there is newer tech today. Have you seen their space control center yet?
It's awesome! There is a ton of information about their space program here.
Also, you might want to note that the U.S. is currently incapable of landing on the moon. All the equipment used to do it in the 60's and 70's is too old and most of it can only be found in museums now. The rest is rusting in NASA hangars. If we want to go back, we would be better off developing updated versions of the Apollo craft. So in a way, China has a bit of an edge right now if there was a sudden race to put a base on the moon.
Getting China into the race might just make the U.S. program back into what it was in the 1960's. We will hopefully return to the moon, even if because we'll be damned if we let China set up a base there first. A race to Mars would be another good next step.
Of course the reasons for going would be less than noble, just to show up a new rival, but the technological advances that would come out of the program would be of great benefit for everyone back home on Earth.
I don't think Microsoft will want to kill virtual PC off and the reason for that is that Microsoft is a software company at heart. Having Virtual PC around means that they can sell Windows to Mac users as well as PC users. Microsoft doens't care if you run on a Mac or a PC because as long as you also buy a copy of Windows, they will be happy!
Killing office for the Mac might happen to make more people buy Virtual PC, Windows AND Office as well as put the squeeze on Apple a bit more since Mac users would have to pay a LOT more to get all three of those together just to run office.
Apple would definately do well to start work on their own office software and make sure it stays compatible with MS Office to alleviate that threat. Better yet, they should pick up a copy of a current open source office package and improve it and send all changes back. If they helped make OpenOffice or some such thing run better on Linux and Windows, it would let Apple be the one to put the crunch on Microsoft instead.
More like a sizzle given it is at 15000K
In case you've had your head in a hole in the ground for the last seven weeks, Apple has already said they will bring this to Windows users later this year.
They are also rumored to be porting iTunes 4 and there was even recently a job ad out at Apple for windows developers to do exactly that. Just wait a few months, probably later this year they will get it done and the rest of you guys can join the party. As a current Mac user who has bought from the Apple store, I can tell you it will be worth the wait.
Well, they will send automated take down letters then. Look at the link I posted where it did just that to a group of astrophysicists. But I suppose if millions of people did it, it might overload their system.
Imagine a trojan which had a mini ftp or web server built in which returned a list of popular songs that the bot would fire off letters over. It would create a big fat mess, piss a lot of people off even more and create a legal headache for the RIAA when they get sued by lots of people who lost web access unfairly if their ISP just shut them down till they could determine if the claim was legit or not.
Now I'm not saying someone should go out and write something to do this, but that if someone wanted to create real havok on the net, this would be one way to do it.
Well I don't know for sure, but what other kind of bot goes through and gets a listing of every filename on the server and then tries to ftp in anonymously. I suppose it could be some kind of virus but it certainly would be a strange one to go zipping over the whole site like that just getting directory listings.
If I put up a web page on my machine or in the FTP headers and such, on my IP saying that site cannot be accessed by the RIAA, its affiliates or anyone working for the RIAA for any reason and that doing so constitutes illegal intrusion into my system, would that make the RIAA liable for accessing my system illegally. Is there any kind of electronic tresspass law which people could use to make it illegal for them to send their web crawlers and such over your website and such?
Given that I don't host their crap on my site, what gives them the right to eat up my bandwidth constantly by randomly searching for mp3's? (My personal webserver has been crawled by a suspected RIAA bot about 15 times this week) I know they are doing this as they have Embarrased themselves in the past by searching harmless systems.
This makes going over my log files when I need to a real pain too when I have access logs showing some damn bot pouring over every file name on the system.
So do those of us who are sick of them using these abusive tactics have any recourse to go after the RIAA for intruding on our systems with annoying bots? I for one am tired of them cataloging my web server and trying to FTP in anonymously every 10 hours or so just because I *might* have something of theirs posted up.
Own a house or land? You likely pay property taxes.
If they no longer plan on making money from it, it would be a shrewd move to weed out those copyrights they no longer care to keep. A company with thousands or even millions of copyrights could save quite a bit per year if they dumped off that old dead weight, even at $1 each.
Perhaps make it $1 for invidivuals and $1000 for corporations. I suppose a company could use the loophole of assigning all their copyrights to one person, but boy, they had better trust that individual!
I called your post a troll not because it disagreed but because you were rather nasty about it. You seemed to take my initial post rather personally when I complained about lack of quality on cable. Makes me wonder if you work for Time Warner for that matter. Oh your name on here looks like a name a /. troll would use as well what with the word pussy in it and all.
It is also interesting to see that you now feel the need to post as AC. This only helps reaffirm my suspicion you simply want to pick a fight.
Nice troll, but I'll bite.
I was talking about cable, I've had other cable before and it was better than this. I was not comparing cable to broadcast television, which you obviously think I was.
I've been told in the past that you MUST have standard cable to get road runner. Not lifeline, not no cable but either standard or digital. I will call them and see if that situation has changed.
I didn't say the country would collapse. Just that it hurts us when we have less diverse media. Don't believe me? Go watch the news, it's the same pro Bush government drivel everywhere on all the major news stations. There are no minor news stations. Soon newspapers will suffer the same fate, all in the hands of mega media conglomerates which feed us only what they want us to know. That is what I mean. And entertainment? You get drivel unless you pay a good 1-10% or maybe more of your salary a month (depending on what you make of course) for the good stuff.
I would imagine there are some countries as more progressive if not more so. Europe is shaping up to be a big contender and their governments are currently less fanatical and corrupt than ours.
Capitalism only works when proper checks and balances are in place. More and more industries are lobbying to dismantle those checks and balances and they are ever more successful at it of late.
Thus continues the fall of America into bland mediocrity, and that is at best. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to kill the new Low Power FM (LPFM) regulation next.
So it seems that the internet will continue to be the only source or real news and music anymore.
Hopefully people will finally get sick of the drudge TV and radio have become and demand things be put back the way they were. I mean seriously, look at what crap cable is now.
I have Time Warner Cable in Cincinatti, the standard cable and it makes me want to puke.
I get a few local channels which of course play crap. I've got CSPAN which comes in full of bars in the image, not that I watch that anyway unless I need to get to sleep fast. I've got three religious channels, which to 95% of the world is unwatchably boring, not to mention I'm not Christian anyway. I've got two PBS channels, which probably are better viewing than most the rest of it put together. A few crap movie channels like TBS and TNN and TNT. Discover channel, comedy central, cartoon network and news. That is IT. Oh and I have nine channels above 70 which show a test pattern 24/7, one of which has someone chanting the local weather over it. I pay about $40 a month for this "privilage".
If it were not the only way to get high speed internet where I am at, I would not even fucking bother with cable. I only wish I had enough techy neighbors to get a bunch of us together and buy our own T1 and set up a wireless neighborhood access point... Sadly, all my neighbors tech expertise ends at giving their John Deere an oil change.
Actually absorbsion would work, unless you eclipsed something and in space there would always be something behind you, a star or distant galaxy, but at long enough range, you would be effectively invisible unless they did a sweep with a telescope to enhance that area to notice the missing background stars and such.
:)
So they wouldn't see the hole unless they were looking for it most likely or you were close enough to noticibly block out background objects. Otherwise their scanners (assuming radar here) would be absorbed but that would be no different to them than there being nothing there and the radar beam never reflecting back and continuing on into space. They would never know if it had hit something or kept on going forever. That is how stealth technology works today with radar absorbing and scattering materials.
However, there IS a way to know if the radar hit something. That is with entangled photons. You create entangled radar basically. You create a pair of entangled photons at radar frequency and send one out, the others you somehow hold in a loop on board the ship and a computer will see if they deflect as if they encountered something. I suppose you could kick the frequency of the ones you keep up and put them in a fiber optic loop... Hmm of course observing them probably destroys them, so not entirely sure if that would work. But its a fun thought experiment.
They have used a similar technique to see inside objects without getting an actual reflection from that object by observing the reaction of one set of the entagled pair of photons kept in a separate laser beam from the ones "injected" into the object. They were able to create a laser image of the inside of the object that way. Quite cool.
Hmm another thought occurs. If you have a pair of entangled photons and you frequency shift one of them, what happens to its sibling? Will it also change frequency or will it become disentangled from the other one?
If the sibling would change frequency, that would be awesome. Imagine... You have a patient with a deep brain tumor, the kind you can't take out without seriously messing them up or killing them. So you entagle photons in the form of radio waves which can pass through their head and beam them at the person, using a frequency which enables a fairly tight beam. A computer calculates then the photons will reach the tumor after coming out of the emitter and changes the sibling into x-rays or gamma rays causing the siblings inside the patient to also change and fry the tumor. All without any cutting or surgery at all. Of course the amount of time it takes the photons to go from the emitter to the tumor is exceedingly small. So if the time to change the photons is too long, you will miss the tumor and maybe the patient all together, frying something way behind them.
Also, and correct me if I'm wrong, the change in frequency is gradual as the photons bounce around in the crystal, so the photons may be absorbed when they hit a frequency far below x-rays which may be absorbed harmlessly by the tissue... However that may not be until infrared so you might be able to kill the tumor by heating it that way instead of using ionising radiation.
Just thoughts... free free to nitpick and add to them
You are better off converting the heat to microwaves, which can be converted to electricity far more efficiently than visible light can. See my post way down from here about using this in satellites to beam to ground stations.
Hmm cloaking device...
A ship with a skin made of these, absorbs incoming light of any frequency and radiates some other form of non visible light or simply converts it to energy to aid in powering the ship, rendering it invisible to radar, light, ect as in space it would appear to be utterly black. In fact this would be a "virtual black hole" where light would go in and never come back out.
Planes could become invisible at night and become the color of the sky during the day, though you could get a similar effect with fiber optics to just pass through whatever is behind it.
Heat from the engines could be bled away as standard light.
However it is far more important to be able to become invisible to radar and infrared which would defeat incoming missiles. The main danger would be if missiles were developed which could lock on to an object visibly and track it in real time, making radar and heat counter measures useless. Then cloaking from visible light would become rather important to fool the missiles computer.
That is actually a pretty cool idea! *runs for the patent office*
By taking sunlight and turning it into microwave radiation, you could get far greater efficiency out of the generation of electricity.
This would make microwave beaming satellites highly efficient. The current idea was to have huge solar arrays which would of course alter the look of the sky during the day or night. These would convert some of the light into energy and probably reflect the rest of lose it as heat. The elctricity generated would produce a microwave signal which would be beamed down to a ground station and converted back into electricity. With this new technology, they could have far smaller arrays which convert the light directly into microwaves and transmit, eliminating the overhead of going from light->electricity->microwaves->electrici ty on the ground.
Instead you would have light->microwaves->electricity on the ground.
And you wouldn't need a mile long array of cells to collect enough power to make it worthwhile because your effeciency would be extremely high.