And what's the wear-lifetime of a such a small device? And how does a "microrobot" mean that we're "one step closer to a nanorobot"? The article makes no such claim, and such an extraordinary decrease in size--at least factor a billion in terms of volume--is so dramatic it boggles the mind that it was even suggested. Let me give a good idea about the feasibility of "nanorobots": nature has been shrinking critters for/billions/ of years, look to their level of functionality, i.e. what does a bacterium do? what does a virus do? what does a prion do? to get an idea of what "nanorobots" would be capable of.
At least this company (originally russian) has been making high-quality autostereoscopic 3d LCD displays since forever; we had an old black-and-white LCD hooked up to a 286 luggable in my old lab (we helped to develop the 3d rendering software). I'm under the impression that the new color screens are quite nice and have a fairly wide viewing angle. Note that the DTI's use an "interlaced" LCD system so that no glasses are required -- you just line up an "L" and "R" character on the screen (at least with our old screen), like looking at one of those stupid magic-eye pictures, and voila! 3d.
Hrm. The Madison Building is 7 stories (including the basement) and 2.1 million square feet; or 300,000 square feet and ~80 feet tall (assuming 10 foot rooms with space between floors), or about 24,000,000 cubic feet. 1.5 billion kilometers ~ 1 million miles or 5280 million feet. The volume of a sphere that size is about 625 000 000 000 million million million cubic feet, throw in 20% change for 4/3*Pi and the loss of the.280 portion of the cube and we get ~750 000 000 000 million million million cubic feet. Divide by 24 000 000 cubic feet and we get ~ 30 000 million million million, or 30 sextillion LoCs[Madison].
I'm reminded of Joel Spolsky's article on commoditizing the products of related products to increase the value of your product. Damned if I can find the article now.
That's awesome! We should also have a test like that for voting! Hell, we should start the gross-disenfrachmisement and abrogation of rights, as soon as possible!
Uh... I believe he did that because he was trying to make a point about how gullible people were (i.e. they believed in astrology etc.); this clearly backfired.
This is a somewhat archaic view of the scientific process; a better picture is to consider: (1) descriptive power (accuracy) (2) prescriptive power (accuracy) A scientific theory A is superior to scientific theory B if it is more descriptive, prescriptive and accurate; otherwise it is `just as good.' The ambiguity comes in deciding the measure of `accuracy.' In general, I would say that creationism fails completely for (2) and is very poorly accurate for (1) with respect to the fossil record; it fails for (2) and is very accurate for (1) with respect to the Bible. Never confuse `extremely accurate' with 'true.'
Another way to think of this is to imagine the lower-bound on self-powered nano-machines. The idea is that nature can give us the lower-bound on the functionality of any machine which is both very small and self-powered; at these levels there are many examples: bacteria, nanobacteria, viruses et al. Note that none of these `machines' performs any sort of complicated task, certainly nothing on the order of supercomputing power! In fact, even if we could design `overhead' into each nano -proble/-bot it certainly would be far less effecient in computation than a singly-connected object of roughly the same mass -- consider this the reduction-to-absurdity of very-massivel-parallel-very-low-power chips. It doesn't work in theory OR in practice.
The USGS can pull down 3-4 terabytes per day with a single 1-meter-resolution satellite. I believe they use firewire harddrives as 'floppies' but they have found (from long, bitter experience) that for long term massive storage the ONLY way to go is tape. You can read more about USGS here: http://www.usgs.gov/.
I'm not a lawyer... and I don't really know how this licensing stuff works; heck, I don't even really know what you're doing or why - but here's my suggestion: (1) Tell them they owe you, oh, I dunno, 2.7 hojillion dollars. Um. Per 7/11ths copy. (2) ??? (3) Profit!
The 30" display is roughly equivalent to my side-by-side dual 18" displays... except that it doesn't have the annoying dead-pixel zone right in the middle (the one which makes my mouse hop 2 1/2 inches).
Err... no: look on Amazon.. You can some times find them packaged together for as little as $45--and that from Barnes & Nobles, nonetheless a place like half-priced-books.
We don't bomb people: we'll send a peace-keeping misssion to 'explain' that you have to 'listen' or else things could get 'very bad.' Then we use tactical-decision altering devices to change your mind when you get stubborn.
Biology (Molecular, Computational etc.) - site licensing through subcontractors to MS, plus no time to look into alternatives (even free). We are moving to PDF in some cases. I'm trying to get my lab to migrate to OpenOffice.
Perhaps we should sign up some of our gov't officials to recieve massive-anonymous-mailings (MAMs) so that they might enforce some reasonable rules about snail-mail.
I recently went through a letter-war with my postman when I recieved a bit of junkmail sent to "occupant". The result was a much-mangled envelope with the word "occupant" scribbled multiple times in green (that was the Postman, did that). I finally fed it to my neighbors dog.
My lab works with biological application of NP's. Certain types do cause apoptosis in vitro, but are not really any more dangerous than, say, bleach. All of the NP's we deal with are non-aerosolizable and come in deagglutinization media (expensive water). I suppose if you were rich enough to buy enough NP's to form an aerosol cloud there might be a problem, but then you can also shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun. No one's stopping you. These things pose as much threat, physically, as a virus, and much less biologically.
The opposite, as an analogy, is that starving is 'demand for food'. Don't misapply dubious economic theory. That we have a 'surplus' of researchers is probably more indicative of a lack of broad-based support for research.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are prophylactics, not cures.
---
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all day!
And what's the wear-lifetime of a such a small device? And how does a "microrobot" mean that we're "one step closer to a nanorobot"? The article makes no such claim, and such an extraordinary decrease in size--at least factor a billion in terms of volume--is so dramatic it boggles the mind that it was even suggested. Let me give a good idea about the feasibility of "nanorobots": nature has been shrinking critters for /billions/ of years, look to their level of functionality, i.e. what does a bacterium do? what does a virus do? what does a prion do? to get an idea of what "nanorobots" would be capable of.
http://dti3d.com/
At least this company (originally russian) has been making high-quality autostereoscopic 3d LCD displays since forever; we had an old black-and-white LCD hooked up to a 286 luggable in my old lab (we helped to develop the 3d rendering software). I'm under the impression that the new color screens are quite nice and have a fairly wide viewing angle. Note that the DTI's use an "interlaced" LCD system so that no glasses are required -- you just line up an "L" and "R" character on the screen (at least with our old screen), like looking at one of those stupid magic-eye pictures, and voila! 3d.
Dude, Quake 10 has been out for YEARS.
Hrm. The Madison Building is 7 stories (including the basement) and 2.1 million square feet; or 300,000 square feet and ~80 feet tall (assuming 10 foot rooms with space between floors), or about 24,000,000 cubic feet. 1.5 billion kilometers ~ 1 million miles or 5280 million feet. The volume of a sphere that size is about 625 000 000 000 million million million cubic feet, throw in 20% change for 4/3*Pi and the loss of the .280 portion of the cube and we get ~750 000 000 000 million million million cubic feet. Divide by 24 000 000 cubic feet and we get ~ 30 000 million million million, or 30 sextillion LoCs[Madison].
I'm reminded of Joel Spolsky's article on commoditizing the products of related products to increase the value of your product. Damned if I can find the article now.
I've already refreshed this damn thing TWICE and no one has made a comment that I could reply wittily too. WTF?
Holy CRAP! That's gonna chop YEARS off my linux-install!
er... I believe you mean `genetically engineered pigs'.
That's awesome! We should also have a test like that for voting! Hell, we should start the gross-disenfrachmisement and abrogation of rights, as soon as possible!
Uh... I believe he did that because he was trying to make a point about how gullible people were (i.e. they believed in astrology etc.); this clearly backfired.
This is a somewhat archaic view of the scientific process; a better picture is to consider:
(1) descriptive power (accuracy)
(2) prescriptive power (accuracy)
A scientific theory A is superior to scientific theory B if it is more descriptive, prescriptive and accurate; otherwise it is `just as good.' The ambiguity comes in deciding the measure of `accuracy.' In general, I would say that creationism fails completely for (2) and is very poorly accurate for (1) with respect to the fossil record; it fails for (2) and is very accurate for (1) with respect to the Bible.
Never confuse `extremely accurate' with 'true.'
Another way to think of this is to imagine the lower-bound on self-powered nano-machines. The idea is that nature can give us the lower-bound on the functionality of any machine which is both very small and self-powered; at these levels there are many examples: bacteria, nanobacteria, viruses et al. Note that none of these `machines' performs any sort of complicated task, certainly nothing on the order of supercomputing power! In fact, even if we could design `overhead' into each nano -proble/-bot it certainly would be far less effecient in computation than a singly-connected object of roughly the same mass -- consider this the reduction-to-absurdity of very-massivel-parallel-very-low-power chips. It doesn't work in theory OR in practice.
The USGS can pull down 3-4 terabytes per day with a single 1-meter-resolution satellite. I believe they use firewire harddrives as 'floppies' but they have found (from long, bitter experience) that for long term massive storage the ONLY way to go is tape. You can read more about USGS here: http://www.usgs.gov/.
You could at least have made it IPv6 compliant...
Except that the 'new' theme doesn't have matching icons for the tab and window buttons. Weird oversight.
I'm not a lawyer ... and I don't really know how this licensing stuff works; heck, I don't even really know what you're doing or why - but here's my suggestion:
(1) Tell them they owe you, oh, I dunno, 2.7 hojillion dollars. Um. Per 7/11ths copy.
(2) ???
(3) Profit!
The 30" display is roughly equivalent to my side-by-side dual 18" displays ... except that it doesn't have the annoying dead-pixel zone right in the middle (the one which makes my mouse hop 2 1/2 inches).
Err... no: look on Amazon.. You can some times find them packaged together for as little as $45--and that from Barnes & Nobles, nonetheless a place like half-priced-books.
We don't bomb people: we'll send a peace-keeping misssion to 'explain' that you have to 'listen' or else things could get 'very bad.' Then we use tactical-decision altering devices to change your mind when you get stubborn.
Biology (Molecular, Computational etc.) - site licensing through subcontractors to MS, plus no time to look into alternatives (even free). We are moving to PDF in some cases. I'm trying to get my lab to migrate to OpenOffice.
Perhaps we should sign up some of our gov't officials to recieve massive-anonymous-mailings (MAMs) so that they might enforce some reasonable rules about snail-mail.
I recently went through a letter-war with my postman when I recieved a bit of junkmail sent to "occupant". The result was a much-mangled envelope with the word "occupant" scribbled multiple times in green (that was the Postman, did that). I finally fed it to my neighbors dog.
My lab works with biological application of NP's. Certain types do cause apoptosis in vitro, but are not really any more dangerous than, say, bleach. All of the NP's we deal with are non-aerosolizable and come in deagglutinization media (expensive water). I suppose if you were rich enough to buy enough NP's to form an aerosol cloud there might be a problem, but then you can also shoot yourself in the head with a shotgun. No one's stopping you. These things pose as much threat, physically, as a virus, and much less biologically.
calculating Pi. =)
The opposite, as an analogy, is that starving is 'demand for food'. Don't misapply dubious economic theory. That we have a 'surplus' of researchers is probably more indicative of a lack of broad-based support for research.