Integrating protheses in the neural loop
on
Think And Click
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The real nifty applications will come when this neuronal interfacing technology will be used to bypass deficient nerve links (spine damage) or to supplement/replace deficient muscle (muscular dystrophy and a ton of other debilitating illnesses).
I think focusing on computers is missing the point. It's not the ability to send email that is important here. It's the possibility of having protheses and artificial capacities integrated in the neural feedback loop. Prothesic legs that 1) you can contol by thought instead of having to provide commands, and 2) send back balance information, now that would be a revolution.
Let's build lots of empty buildings and equip them with deadly traps. Chances are that the script kiddies and the vandals are the same. When the 1 in 500 perp walks in with a spray can, ZZAAAP! Followed by the CLUNK of the spray can hitting the ground and the WOOSH of the collective sigh of relief from the other 499 people.
Whaddya mean, inhumane? Only the spray can industry will suffer, and just a tad at that.
-- SysKoll
P.S. In France, the government recently reversed its stance on security. Rampant crime was "right-wing propaganda", they know admit it is a "major concern". The change occured shortly after the son of an important minister was mugged outside a movie theater in Paris. See how if works? So let's all give our Congresscritter's email addresses to as many spammers as possible!
(Quoted from the EFF Overview article) If new digital VCRs... never
became available, some entertainment industry lawyers would lose
little sleep. After all, they fought the introduction of the original
analog VCR when it was first introduced; Motion Picture Association of
America president Jack Valenti insisted the technology would be the
death of the movie industry.
[Soundtrack: documentary music. Off voice recites:] Note that the
movie industry now heavily relies on revenue from home video sales and
rentals, which is often higher than box-office revenue. Which proves
that MPAA is clueless and not even able to understand the benefits of
analog recording technology. This alone should definitely disqualify
anything than Valenti ever says.
[Soundtrack: grinding cogs.] Wait, Valenti is still president of the
MPAA. In spite of having fought against a technology that
generated tens of billions of dollars of profits for the very movie
producers he is supposed to represent. So Hollywood actually supports
Valenti.
But then it means that... Ohmygod... [SFX: blinding flash] Oh no!
It can only mean that HOLLYWOOD IS CLUELESS! AAARGH! How can that be?
[Fade to black, soundtrack plays Wagner's Götterdämmerung finale, the
part where the world comes to an end.]
But seriously...
Seriously, Hollywood's worst nightmare seems to be that every home
has its own high-speed Internet connection and will copy the latest
movies off the equivalent of Napster. That's why they oppose the
growth of broadband.
Hollywood should realize that grown-ups with even just a bit of
disposable income do not have either the time or inclination to boot
their PC, fire up a search engine and slurp a huge file through a
hypothetical broadband connection. Even at broadband speed, an IP
connection cannot deliver the same "bandwidth" as a trip to the local
video rental store, which is a full 2-hour movie (6 Gig on a DVD) in 15 minutes. Or 20 if they pick beer on the way home.
Adult with disposable income see their relaxation time as a
precious commodity. If they can get a movie on DVD for $3, they won't
have the patience to download anything even if it's free. The only
potential users of movie download sites are students with ample
bandwidth, no money and plenty of available time. They aren't a
potential customer anyway (no money) and they accept to watch a movie
on a PC screen, which most consumers sternly refuse to do. Marketing
101 teaches that you shouldn't harass regular, paying customers to
attempt to deter a minority of shoplifters. Valenti slept through that
class, obviously.
In summary, Hollywood, misled by Valenti et. al., does not have its
facts right and is trying to shoot itself in the foot again. The MPAA
cries wolf to justify its own existence and reinforces that kneejerk reflex.
Let's hope the producers will realize it and get out of the MPAA.
Reading this article made me jump way back in time. At that time, I
worked in a Big Company located in the same campus as PixTech, a
startup that had a deal with Japanese display specialist Futaba to
produce microtip displays in a European lab in Montpellier,
France. Pixtech produced a monochrome prototype, then the price of LCD
collapsed and the funding dried up. That was in 1993 or 94 if I
remember correctly.
PixTech wanted to create a technology and then licence it to mass
producers. They entered an agreement with Texas Instrument, but after
LCDs started to be dirt cheap, the agreement collapsed.
The principle in these screens seems to be the same as the
technology explained in the article. Behind each phosphorus dot (1/3
pixel roughly), a few dozens to a few hundreds cold cathode cones emit
electrons and replace electron guns. The European technology was using
silicon tips instead of diamond, but the principle stays the same: In
an electrical field, a tip tends to concentrate charges, hence a cone
easily releases electrons when negatively charged.
The beauty of the scheme is that even if the yield of the microtip
fabrication is not perfect, you don't care because there are many of
them behind each phophorus dot. Compare and contrast with LCD screens,
where a single defective transistor will leave a permanent dead pixel.
I am a strong supporter of this technology, because it allies the
advantages of CRTs with the flatness of LCDs. But I have seen several
startups fail while trying to market microtip screens, so I am
wondering if it's not jinxed or something...
At stake in this war, says Eisner, who's the acknowledged leader of the Content Faction, is
"the future of the American entertainment industry, the future of American consumers, the
future of America's balance of international trade."
We know the SSSCA does not make sense from a technical point of view. We know that it is akin to smothering basic freedoms. But of course, these considerations do not compute in the dollar terms that are the only things filtering through your average executive's thick ears (not to mention many Congresscritters).
So let's humor Eisner's point of view and talk greenbacks here. Let's see: Unless my sources are totally wrong, Hollywood's revenue is about $9 to $13 billion a year. Among which a lot of derived products reimported in the USA (e.g. console games on movie licenses) which actually degrade the US trade balance. But let's retain the $13 billion/year for the sake of this discussion.
On the other hand, the IT industry represents $600 billion at least. Heck, just adding up IBM, Microsoft, HP/Compaq and EDS gives you more than $300 billion/year.
So let me get this straight, Mr. Eisner: in order to "protect" a $13B/year industry branch against a problem that isn't an effective threat yet, and might never be, you and other SSSCA supporters want to hamper and possibly seriously harm an industry that is at least 25 times bigger?
And this is going to help the US economy?
So even from a strickly financial point, SSSCA does not make any sense. Eisner is a fraud. He is athreat to the IT industry, which produced far more jobs, wealth and well-being than any other industry since WWII.
With business executives like that at the head of American corporations, who needs Ben Laden?
-- SysKoll
P.S.
Actually, from the moment Eisner started draping himself into patriotic self-righteousness, it sounded fishy. The guy is a patriot the way a televangelist is a believer.
If this is so, then why bother with this system at all?
Well, considering the price of industrial real estate, the cost of an Earth installation is still staggering. A space installation, as you mentioned, is more efficiently (no night, no weather). If the cost of a high power space-based microwave beamer system is reasonable, then it makes sense.
But first, of course, we'd need cheaper space access cost. The cost of lift-off per kilogram that NASA can offer is heavily subsidized, and even so, it is totally prohibitive. The ruinous shuttle has to go, and some form of price-lowering competition has to take place. We are still very far away from this.
Still, when you see the cost of orbiting even an experimental microwave beam plant, you wonder if we'd not be better off investing this pile of money into, say, fusion research.
-- SysKoll
Re:This is a weapon of massless destruction
on
Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 2
Weapon? Calm down. The article talks about a beam that has 20% of the sun's power density, i.e., less than 150 W per square meter. Hardly enough to kill anyone.
Of course, planes should avoid the beam.
But overall, I am skeptical about the project. Not about its feasability of safety (mere engineering problems), but over its economical realism. Why bother going to the moon? If microwave-beamed power production becomes a reality, then a geosynchronous satellite is the obvious answer.
Installing a solar power plant on the moon would make sense only if raw materials could be mined and processed on the moon instead of being lifted off from the Earth's gravity well. Otherwise, installation on the moon would introduce yet another gravity well to overcome each time you have to move something back and forth (and a power plant would require shuttling personnel and material constantly). At least, a stallite doesn't require you to fly rockets back and forth from the moon surface.
You are right of course. A 100 HP engine, in the sense of my calculations above, would be rated 30HP by the car manufacturer.
33% is about right. I was recently investigating the fate of the turbine car (remember the projects in the Sixties?) and found out that the proposed designs relied on a gas turbine that had a maximum efficiency of about 25%. At the time, it sounded attractive, but due to the 1973 oil crisis, car manufacturers improved the efficiency of their internal combustion engine, and the turbine was doomed.
I have no doubt that these guys performed some incredibly tricks that would have been dubbed impossible by any semicon physics textbook five years ago.
However, we were here discussing the impact of this innovation on a very practical scale, especially transportation.
As previous answers pointed out, this new converter does not alleviate the need of a radiator, of course. Any semiconductor device (or any device, period) converting heat into power must work with a heat source and a heat sink.
Also, the order of magnitude required in automotive applications (see my back-of-envelope calculations above) imply that this device would have to be pretty cheap (in dollars per watt) and able to genereate huge currents. Some posters doubted that this would be possible.
And besides, in this applicaiton, you'd still need a battery and an alternate generator to allow electricity productions while the engine is cold (winter, short runs, etc.).
So, overall, one should'nt be too enthusiastic over possible application in the automotive industry.
Now, if we examine applications in, say, space probes, we see that this device would double the electricity production in radioactive isotopic generators such as those aboard the Pioneer probe. That's definitely a big improvement. And cost isn't too much a factor if you can gain weight thanks to the efficiency increase. So, yes, in this application, it's quite a breakthrough.
Before you call people idiots, make sure you understand the context.
According to the article, this "breakthrough" is a reverse Peltier junction with about twice the efficiency of current semiconductor thermoconverters. Nice, but nothing revolutionary.
I think it's quite excessive to claim this will reduce entropy. Although I agree that if it's economically deployed in, say, cars, it will supplement the alternator.
Could this new junction actually replace the alternator for producing electricity in a car? Let's see: assume a car has a 100 HP internal combustion engine. That's 75 kW. Two third of this is wasted in heat. Typically, the radiator gets about half of this heat (the other half is dissipated away in radiant heat or through the exhaust. Assume further that 20 percent of this can be recovered and converted to electricity (for a really efficient semicon pile). That's 75 * 2/3 * 0.50 * 0.20, or 5 kW. That's more than a good SUV alternator. So this could actually work, provided it's reliable and not too expensive.
Everyone here is assuming that the fuel cell based auxiliary generator discussed in the article will be using hydrogen.
Actually, a lot of work is being done on fuel cells burning alcohol (ethanol). Either you use a cracking step to produce hydrogen on-the-fly by decomposing the alcohol molecule with a catalytic grid, or you use a pretty fancy membrane to rip the hydrogen directly from the alcohol molecule.
Either way, you don't need to carry a hydrogen tank. So save the Hindenburg references for a more appropriate topic.
Since alcohol is actually less energetic per kilogram than kerosen, I don't see why it would be dangerous. The only problem is that it's one more fluid to carry in airports, and that would probably require even more work and red tape than getting an alcohol-burning fuel cell approved by the FAA.
The residue of such a fuel cell is alcohol remains mixed with water and various catalytic by-products. In other terms, watered-down alcohol with metalic salt traces and a few moderately toxic molecules. Not very dangerous either. Heck,
with a bit of luck, airlines will decide to tap this residue and sell it to passengers in lieue of the horrible Californian el cheapo wine they serve with meals.:-)
In his novel "The Door into Summer", Heinlein describes an automatic drawing machine that can be used to automate a lot of the boring tasks associated with mechanical drawing. It is a draftman's dream.
It turns out that a modern parametric CAD (Computer Assisted Design) software has a lot of the functions dreamed up by Heinlein. As for the form, RAH envisioned circuits within the body of a drawing table and some actuators for printing on paper, much like a full size blueprint plotter, instead of our modern computer with a totally non-paper work space.
However, this idea was there. So RAH gets credit for that one too.
That's right, evaporator coolers are a variety of steam engine.
Which are a variety of thermic machine. They evaporate something (here, coolant) at the heat source and drop that heat at the sink (the radiator) to liquefy the coolant. My point was that this class of machines are not one-source thermic machine, which would defy thermodynamics.
The average Intel CPU dissipate a waste heat much greater than the
few watts absorbed by your average fan. So the idea seems reasonable.
Alas! The laws of thermodynamics often fly in the face of
reasonable ideas. See, if you want to passively cool off the CPU, all
you have to do is let it radiate its heat. But what you seem to wish
for here is some kind of device that actively cools off that CPU, by
taking some of that waste heat as its energy source. That's called a
thermic engine. And here, thermodynamics get you: You can generate
power from a heat source only if you have a cold "sink". All
thermic engines work by getting heat from a heat source and moving it to a heat
sink. E.g., for a car, the heat sink is the radiator.
Here, your contraption would use the CPU as a heat source and
would require some sink, such as, oh, a radiator. Maybe with a
fan. Which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.
So it's a nice catch-22. But think about it: if it worked, we would
have big ships moving smoothly on all oceans, powered by the extracted
heat of sea water and leaving a trail of ice cubes in their wake...
Since snail mail sent to Washington DC is probably sanitized with a flame thrower these days, I left a message on Sen. Hollings web site. Dunno if anyone reads these things, but it cannot hurt. At least it will not be burnt in fear of anthrax.
Dear Senator Hollings,
I'd like to let you know that as an information technology professional, I am deeply concerned about the SSSCA. In its present wording, this bill would make our job almost impossible. Also, as a consumer, I am concerned about the implications. This bill would mean that all the media I buy would be rendered useless at the whim of the media player manufacturers.
Please drop this bill. It is a very bad idea, and it would backfire.
A few thousand like that, and even Disney's soft money will not be enough to convince Hollings that this bill is worth the spanking he'll get at the next election.
Mark Twain wrote that buying a senator back then cost about $30,000. Anyone knows the current price? (And I wish I could insert a smiley here.)
I agree. I do not think that ID cards would lead to some kind of smothering dictatorship either.
If you don't have the political willingness to keep tabs on your citizens or frontiers, then no smart card in the world can possibly help you (hence the European problem of illegal aliens not even bothering to get a fake ID, knowing they will not be expelled for lack of governmental motivation).
On another hand, for example the Chinese, Soviet, Cambodian or Birman dictatorships never used any high-tech means for the extremely intrusive control of their citizen's daily life.
My point was that I don't think the US government needs to get distracted into implementing a costly ID card program. As I pointed out, Europe's example shows such a card is not going to solve the problems that it is supposed to address. So why bother?
Unless of course your goal is to give money to Oracle and other companies that will provide the required equipment.
What is the point in this proposal? Is it to make the country more
secure against illegal aliens that might be dormant terrorists? Is it
to prevent criminals from usurping other people's ID?
If these are indeed the goals, then I'd suggest to take a look at
developed countries that already have implemented nation-wide ID
cards. Namely, Europe. Why, it's fascinating.
Because you see, illegal immigration is totally out of
control in Europe. As for terrorism, Spain (Basque Separatist
movements), France (Corsican Separatists, Basques, Muslims), UK (IRA),
as well as Greece, Italy and Germany have had severe terrorist attacks
in the 1990s in spite of strict ID card policies.
How come these countries can harbor terrorists in spite of
mandatory ID cards, you ask? It's because ID cards are not a silver
bullet against crime. First, they can be forged. Always. France
recently replaced its obsolete ID card with an embossed, hologramed,
specially printed ID card, the deployment of which was a very
expensive program. All this achieved was to raise the cost of a fake
ID to about 5000FF ($600-700) on the black market. The best forgeries
come of course from corrupt officials who fabricated cards with fake
IDs using the state-approved machines.
So unless you have totally non-corrupt officials, all you're going
to achieve is put terrorism out of reach of poor students. That's a
tempting solution considering what is said in some literature circles
after a few vodkas. But I don't think it will be the best one.
Look at Europe, for Heaven's sake, because they already did all the
stupid things before us!
The article has a section titled "Withholding Payment: The Brute Force Option". Well, that would really do miracles for solving many QA-related problems. I know. Been there, done that.
Scene: The year is 1992. A computer manufacturer has sold a big mainframe to a local bank. There is a glitch somewhere in the interface between a network driver and a particular model of ATM machine. Nobody cares except of course the bank. No resource is available nowhere to debug the problem. Nobody want to pay for it.
So the bank's boss holds a meeting and tells the computer manufacturer that he will suspend payments on the mainframe until said mainframe could talk to the ATM as promised. The cost of the mainframe: a few millions. The look on the sales guys: Priceless.:-)
It took only a few calls ("he suspended WHAT???") to suddenly find the required resources. Mysteriously, money appeared to send people (me!) and debug the problem. Of course, the manufacturer could have sued the customer, but I am not sure it would have been a smart move. Satisfied customers are nice to have, ya know.
That's why I really think this article is an excellent thing. A Revolt of the CEOs is the only thing that can prevent (some) software to be delivered with swarms of bugs on purpose. It's one more step toward making software a science instead of a black art.
And if this revolt could tip the balance towards open source, so much the better.
Here is a slightly more elegant proposal: Network providers have a garanteed uptime. If your leased line or fiber drops below a certain minimum uptime, the provider starts refunding you. That's a standard clause.
How about suggesting such clauses to CEOs for their critical systems?
This is what I hope we will finally start hearing: "We replaced Sendmail with Exchange. Since then, I barely get any email and MS is paying us." Hmmm.
I was wondering if Microsoft would get away with putting a crappy OS in a consumer box.
Now, arcades are not exactly the place where you tolerate crashes or BSODs. The mobo has to be glitch-free, and the software shouldn't crash ever.
Point 1 (mobo never crashing) is hard enough with server PCs. Considering the speed of the XBox graphics subsystem and the corner-cutting (a.k.a. price-reduction engineering) required in a high-volume chipset, this will be no mean feat.
Obviously, Sega will develop specific motherboards for this application, but they'll need to use the same chip set, which already suffered from the usual bane of highly complex chips (bugs founds in production). Sega can't allow these chips to glitch their arcade machines.
The arcade manager would pull the plug at the first crash and call service. How are they going to solve this problem? Sorting and cooling? Anyone knows?
Point 2 is interesting. If the XBox's OS and DirectX layer can really withstand the day-long, intensive use of a high-perf game machine without crashing, then Microsoft should be commended for a great QA job.
And if it cannot stand the intensive load, then a lot of gamers will see these "XBox Inside" Sega machines with the plug pulled and an out-of-use sign. This will not look too good for the sales of the XBox.
If MS can survive this, they'll have an impressive product on their hands. Hyperactive teens pounding on your mobo are no substitute for good design, but they are a good substitude for a high-speed test vector generator!:-)
Yep, very true. I don't know if the design of something as delicate as a new car engine can be really entrusted to someone who thinks he has invented anti-gravity. Let's get real here: If he has anto-grav, then he needs to mount a jet engine on a floating car, not something to apply a torque on wheels.
Also, what I don't like is the mention of solar panel on the car's roof as the source of energy. Excuse me for doing some arithmetics here, but let's assume a 40 percent efficiency in solar panels (hah! 20 is more like it) and an 800W/m2 solar power.
Then a perfectly-exposed (90-degree incident angle), 6-sq. meter (about 60 sq. feet) solar panel would only supply 1920 W. That's less than 3 HP. And a 60 sq. ft panel is already very bulky.
So I am afraid the whole concept is based on very shaky fundations. I'd rather put my money and my hopes on the people who are working on fuel cell for car (nice summary at RMI here).
Cell fuels have the potential to truly make PDA and portable computers these semi-magical thingies that SF authors keep raving about. Add an SVGA microscreen in goggles, a yet-to-be invented data entry method to replace keyboards, and wearable computers are suddenly not a mad dream anymore.
Chemical energy has an energy density (in terms of Watt.hour per kilogram) easily 10-100 times higer than even lithium batteries. And methane is not a neurotoxic, contrary to lithium, cadmium and other nastiums that are used in regular rechargeable batteries.
Of course, I tend to favor alcohol-based fuel cells. Not only do they present less explosion risks than methane cartridges or tanks, you could also refuel your laptop with a squirt of vodka...:-)
Now, before long, some journalists will misread that press release and start ranting about revolution in transportation. As a slashdotter, your sacred duty is to thwap them with a physics manual. Or even better, write to their editors and remind them that fuel cells are not a generating but a storage technology.
In order to produce methane or alcohol, you need either petroleum byproducts (and hence oil) or a lot of energy. And do I mean a lot. Of course, you can produce methanol artisanally, but a sustained production cannot rely on cottage industry methods that, BTW, generate huge quantities of waste. Have you ever been downwind of a still when it's dumped after a batch of fermented molasses has been boiled? Not a pretty smell, believe me.
So next time you hear a tree-hugger^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H environmentally conscious fluffhead raving about nature-friendly, fuel-cell powered busses, heartily approve and remind them to support the construction of that nuclear power plant we'll need to generate said nature-friendly fuel. That generally does the trick.
A Romanian refugee living in the US wrote an article about his plight, back in the good old Cold War days. He said that he often called his father who was still in Romania, and since his family had been tagged as politically bad by the son's escape, the father's phone line was tapped by the secret police.
So since both his father and him were erudites and spoke Latin, they sometimes used that language over the phone to discuss family matters. Then a polite voice came in the conversation and firmly reminded them that only approved languages could be used in an international phone call, and please revert to Romanian or the call would be cut.
Don't know if it's true, but it's very much in character of the secret police mentality: "Of COURSE we tap your phone, you little sneaky counter-revolutionary! And be glad we don't send you to reeducation camp!". So this story seems likely, alas.
Let's hope the US will not abase itself to the encryption-with-mandatory-trapdoor equivalent of that in-you-face eavesdropping.
You are right about the CC mechanism (and the dumb typo). However, the resulting cost-passing is the same. Its effects are diluted among countless merchants instead of a few hundred credit card emitters, but we consumers end up paying for it.
The current lack of wide-spread Internet authentication/encryption mechanism acts to deter service providers and deprive us all, in the same way as fraud acts to raise costs and allow thieves to pick a penny from each pocket.
Michael writes: Yay, yet another way to be tracked on the Internet
Well, a tool such as Passport or LAP can be used to track users, that's true. No one said tools cannot be misused. But remember: Programs don't track people, marketdroids do.
The keyword here is convenience. The only way of protecting our information on the Internet is through encryption. Which implies passwords and key management. Something that 99% of users are not willing to do.
Unfortunately, this unwillingness to use the Net securely affects all of us. Cool products and services that could be available today are not offered because of lack of good security models. If they are offered at all, they are either too cumbersome to use, or rely on such simplistic security that they cannot be trusted (Hotmail anyone?)
This is an old problem. An analog is the credit card industry. Even if you carefully protect your credit card info, you're still paying for all the people who get their CC number and expiry date stolen. CC companies past the cost to all of us clients.
So we need ease of use for security products, or they won't get used. If LAP can spread the use of a safe, easy-to-use, one-time Internet-wide authentication, then it's welcome.
Did anyone notice that French company Gemplus is among the LAP supporters? This company provides smart cards. Several projects touting smart cards for web authentication have already been proposed. Maybe we'll see a new, more successful approach this time. It's certainly easier to carry a smart card and enter a 4-digit PIN than to remember and type 20 different passwords.
I am not saying that this new LAP initiative is going to solve all authentication and privacy problems. But these problems are real and need to be addressed. It doesn't boil down just to marketdroid tracking us.
Back in the '80s, a young police officer (with whom I used to play D&D when we were teens, and no, he wasn't a lawful good ranger) once told me he was facing a ring of drug traffickers. He was bitter about not able to keep up with them. These mobsters knew that they were under constant phonetap surveillance. This didn't stop them from using the (tapped) phone lines for setting up appointments and deliveries. And the law enforcement agencies never knew about these dug deals until way too late.
Their trick? The mobsters had imported a few natives from a remote North-African village, speaking a dialect that nobody else on Earth spoke. One of these guys on each end of a phone, and even tapped phones become secure! Of course, they used code words for street name and subway stations.
The Navajo code speakers used by the US transmissions during WWII also used the same principle. Not high-tech at all, but very efficient.
So I strongly suggest that all these laws against cryptography include an article mandating the use of a State-approved language on a phone line. Just like in the former Eastern European countries. Why, anything less stringent would put freedom itself at risk, right?
Slashdot Mirror
The real nifty applications will come when this neuronal interfacing technology will be used to bypass deficient nerve links (spine damage) or to supplement/replace deficient muscle (muscular dystrophy and a ton of other debilitating illnesses).
I think focusing on computers is missing the point. It's not the ability to send email that is important here. It's the possibility of having protheses and artificial capacities integrated in the neural feedback loop. Prothesic legs that 1) you can contol by thought instead of having to provide commands, and 2) send back balance information, now that would be a revolution.
We are getting closer. That's an excellent news.
sPhealley has given us the obvious solution.
Let's build lots of empty buildings and equip them with deadly traps. Chances are that the script kiddies and the vandals are the same. When the 1 in 500 perp walks in with a spray can, ZZAAAP! Followed by the CLUNK of the spray can hitting the ground and the WOOSH of the collective sigh of relief from the other 499 people.
Whaddya mean, inhumane? Only the spray can industry will suffer, and just a tad at that.
P.S. In France, the government recently reversed its stance on security. Rampant crime was "right-wing propaganda", they know admit it is a "major concern". The change occured shortly after the son of an important minister was mugged outside a movie theater in Paris. See how if works? So let's all give our Congresscritter's email addresses to as many spammers as possible![Soundtrack: documentary music. Off voice recites:] Note that the movie industry now heavily relies on revenue from home video sales and rentals, which is often higher than box-office revenue. Which proves that MPAA is clueless and not even able to understand the benefits of analog recording technology. This alone should definitely disqualify anything than Valenti ever says.
[Soundtrack: grinding cogs.] Wait, Valenti is still president of the MPAA. In spite of having fought against a technology that generated tens of billions of dollars of profits for the very movie producers he is supposed to represent. So Hollywood actually supports Valenti.
But then it means that... Ohmygod... [SFX: blinding flash] Oh no! It can only mean that HOLLYWOOD IS CLUELESS! AAARGH! How can that be? [Fade to black, soundtrack plays Wagner's Götterdämmerung finale, the part where the world comes to an end.]
But seriously...
Seriously, Hollywood's worst nightmare seems to be that every home has its own high-speed Internet connection and will copy the latest movies off the equivalent of Napster. That's why they oppose the growth of broadband.
Hollywood should realize that grown-ups with even just a bit of disposable income do not have either the time or inclination to boot their PC, fire up a search engine and slurp a huge file through a hypothetical broadband connection. Even at broadband speed, an IP connection cannot deliver the same "bandwidth" as a trip to the local video rental store, which is a full 2-hour movie (6 Gig on a DVD) in 15 minutes. Or 20 if they pick beer on the way home.
Adult with disposable income see their relaxation time as a precious commodity. If they can get a movie on DVD for $3, they won't have the patience to download anything even if it's free. The only potential users of movie download sites are students with ample bandwidth, no money and plenty of available time. They aren't a potential customer anyway (no money) and they accept to watch a movie on a PC screen, which most consumers sternly refuse to do. Marketing 101 teaches that you shouldn't harass regular, paying customers to attempt to deter a minority of shoplifters. Valenti slept through that class, obviously.
In summary, Hollywood, misled by Valenti et. al., does not have its facts right and is trying to shoot itself in the foot again. The MPAA cries wolf to justify its own existence and reinforces that kneejerk reflex.
Let's hope the producers will realize it and get out of the MPAA.
SET MODE=OLD FART
Reading this article made me jump way back in time. At that time, I worked in a Big Company located in the same campus as PixTech, a startup that had a deal with Japanese display specialist Futaba to produce microtip displays in a European lab in Montpellier, France. Pixtech produced a monochrome prototype, then the price of LCD collapsed and the funding dried up. That was in 1993 or 94 if I remember correctly.
PixTech wanted to create a technology and then licence it to mass producers. They entered an agreement with Texas Instrument, but after LCDs started to be dirt cheap, the agreement collapsed.
The principle in these screens seems to be the same as the technology explained in the article. Behind each phosphorus dot (1/3 pixel roughly), a few dozens to a few hundreds cold cathode cones emit electrons and replace electron guns. The European technology was using silicon tips instead of diamond, but the principle stays the same: In an electrical field, a tip tends to concentrate charges, hence a cone easily releases electrons when negatively charged.
The beauty of the scheme is that even if the yield of the microtip fabrication is not perfect, you don't care because there are many of them behind each phophorus dot. Compare and contrast with LCD screens, where a single defective transistor will leave a permanent dead pixel.
I am a strong supporter of this technology, because it allies the advantages of CRTs with the flatness of LCDs. But I have seen several startups fail while trying to market microtip screens, so I am wondering if it's not jinxed or something...
We know the SSSCA does not make sense from a technical point of view. We know that it is akin to smothering basic freedoms. But of course, these considerations do not compute in the dollar terms that are the only things filtering through your average executive's thick ears (not to mention many Congresscritters).
So let's humor Eisner's point of view and talk greenbacks here. Let's see: Unless my sources are totally wrong, Hollywood's revenue is about $9 to $13 billion a year. Among which a lot of derived products reimported in the USA (e.g. console games on movie licenses) which actually degrade the US trade balance. But let's retain the $13 billion/year for the sake of this discussion.
On the other hand, the IT industry represents $600 billion at least. Heck, just adding up IBM, Microsoft, HP/Compaq and EDS gives you more than $300 billion/year.
So let me get this straight, Mr. Eisner: in order to "protect" a $13B/year industry branch against a problem that isn't an effective threat yet, and might never be, you and other SSSCA supporters want to hamper and possibly seriously harm an industry that is at least 25 times bigger?
And this is going to help the US economy?
So even from a strickly financial point, SSSCA does not make any sense. Eisner is a fraud. He is athreat to the IT industry, which produced far more jobs, wealth and well-being than any other industry since WWII.
With business executives like that at the head of American corporations, who needs Ben Laden?
P.S. Actually, from the moment Eisner started draping himself into patriotic self-righteousness, it sounded fishy. The guy is a patriot the way a televangelist is a believer.
Well, considering the price of industrial real estate, the cost of an Earth installation is still staggering. A space installation, as you mentioned, is more efficiently (no night, no weather). If the cost of a high power space-based microwave beamer system is reasonable, then it makes sense.
But first, of course, we'd need cheaper space access cost. The cost of lift-off per kilogram that NASA can offer is heavily subsidized, and even so, it is totally prohibitive. The ruinous shuttle has to go, and some form of price-lowering competition has to take place. We are still very far away from this.
Still, when you see the cost of orbiting even an experimental microwave beam plant, you wonder if we'd not be better off investing this pile of money into, say, fusion research.
Weapon? Calm down. The article talks about a beam that has 20% of the sun's power density, i.e., less than 150 W per square meter. Hardly enough to kill anyone.
Of course, planes should avoid the beam.
But overall, I am skeptical about the project. Not about its feasability of safety (mere engineering problems), but over its economical realism. Why bother going to the moon? If microwave-beamed power production becomes a reality, then a geosynchronous satellite is the obvious answer.
Installing a solar power plant on the moon would make sense only if raw materials could be mined and processed on the moon instead of being lifted off from the Earth's gravity well. Otherwise, installation on the moon would introduce yet another gravity well to overcome each time you have to move something back and forth (and a power plant would require shuttling personnel and material constantly). At least, a stallite doesn't require you to fly rockets back and forth from the moon surface.
33% is about right. I was recently investigating the fate of the turbine car (remember the projects in the Sixties?) and found out that the proposed designs relied on a gas turbine that had a maximum efficiency of about 25%. At the time, it sounded attractive, but due to the 1973 oil crisis, car manufacturers improved the efficiency of their internal combustion engine, and the turbine was doomed.
Gus2000,
I have no doubt that these guys performed some incredibly tricks that would have been dubbed impossible by any semicon physics textbook five years ago.
However, we were here discussing the impact of this innovation on a very practical scale, especially transportation.
As previous answers pointed out, this new converter does not alleviate the need of a radiator, of course. Any semiconductor device (or any device, period) converting heat into power must work with a heat source and a heat sink.
Also, the order of magnitude required in automotive applications (see my back-of-envelope calculations above) imply that this device would have to be pretty cheap (in dollars per watt) and able to genereate huge currents. Some posters doubted that this would be possible.
And besides, in this applicaiton, you'd still need a battery and an alternate generator to allow electricity productions while the engine is cold (winter, short runs, etc.).
So, overall, one should'nt be too enthusiastic over possible application in the automotive industry.
Now, if we examine applications in, say, space probes, we see that this device would double the electricity production in radioactive isotopic generators such as those aboard the Pioneer probe. That's definitely a big improvement. And cost isn't too much a factor if you can gain weight thanks to the efficiency increase. So, yes, in this application, it's quite a breakthrough.
Before you call people idiots, make sure you understand the context.
According to the article, this "breakthrough" is a reverse Peltier junction with about twice the efficiency of current semiconductor thermoconverters. Nice, but nothing revolutionary.
I think it's quite excessive to claim this will reduce entropy. Although I agree that if it's economically deployed in, say, cars, it will supplement the alternator.
Could this new junction actually replace the alternator for producing electricity in a car? Let's see: assume a car has a 100 HP internal combustion engine. That's 75 kW. Two third of this is wasted in heat. Typically, the radiator gets about half of this heat (the other half is dissipated away in radiant heat or through the exhaust. Assume further that 20 percent of this can be recovered and converted to electricity (for a really efficient semicon pile). That's 75 * 2/3 * 0.50 * 0.20, or 5 kW. That's more than a good SUV alternator. So this could actually work, provided it's reliable and not too expensive.
You'll need a battery for the short runs, though.
Everyone here is assuming that the fuel cell based auxiliary generator discussed in the article will be using hydrogen.
Actually, a lot of work is being done on fuel cells burning alcohol (ethanol). Either you use a cracking step to produce hydrogen on-the-fly by decomposing the alcohol molecule with a catalytic grid, or you use a pretty fancy membrane to rip the hydrogen directly from the alcohol molecule.
Either way, you don't need to carry a hydrogen tank. So save the Hindenburg references for a more appropriate topic.
Since alcohol is actually less energetic per kilogram than kerosen, I don't see why it would be dangerous. The only problem is that it's one more fluid to carry in airports, and that would probably require even more work and red tape than getting an alcohol-burning fuel cell approved by the FAA.
The residue of such a fuel cell is alcohol remains mixed with water and various catalytic by-products. In other terms, watered-down alcohol with metalic salt traces and a few moderately toxic molecules. Not very dangerous either. Heck, with a bit of luck, airlines will decide to tap this residue and sell it to passengers in lieue of the horrible Californian el cheapo wine they serve with meals. :-)
In his novel "The Door into Summer", Heinlein describes an automatic drawing machine that can be used to automate a lot of the boring tasks associated with mechanical drawing. It is a draftman's dream.
It turns out that a modern parametric CAD (Computer Assisted Design) software has a lot of the functions dreamed up by Heinlein. As for the form, RAH envisioned circuits within the body of a drawing table and some actuators for printing on paper, much like a full size blueprint plotter, instead of our modern computer with a totally non-paper work space.
However, this idea was there. So RAH gets credit for that one too.
That's right, evaporator coolers are a variety of steam engine.
Which are a variety of thermic machine. They evaporate something (here, coolant) at the heat source and drop that heat at the sink (the radiator) to liquefy the coolant. My point was that this class of machines are not one-source thermic machine, which would defy thermodynamics.
So I rest my case. :-)
The average Intel CPU dissipate a waste heat much greater than the few watts absorbed by your average fan. So the idea seems reasonable.
Alas! The laws of thermodynamics often fly in the face of reasonable ideas. See, if you want to passively cool off the CPU, all you have to do is let it radiate its heat. But what you seem to wish for here is some kind of device that actively cools off that CPU, by taking some of that waste heat as its energy source. That's called a thermic engine. And here, thermodynamics get you: You can generate power from a heat source only if you have a cold "sink". All thermic engines work by getting heat from a heat source and moving it to a heat sink. E.g., for a car, the heat sink is the radiator.
Here, your contraption would use the CPU as a heat source and would require some sink, such as, oh, a radiator. Maybe with a fan. Which is exactly what we are trying to avoid.
So it's a nice catch-22. But think about it: if it worked, we would have big ships moving smoothly on all oceans, powered by the extracted heat of sea water and leaving a trail of ice cubes in their wake...
Since snail mail sent to Washington DC is probably sanitized with a flame thrower these days, I left a message on Sen. Hollings web site. Dunno if anyone reads these things, but it cannot hurt. At least it will not be burnt in fear of anthrax.
A few thousand like that, and even Disney's soft money will not be enough to convince Hollings that this bill is worth the spanking he'll get at the next election.
Mark Twain wrote that buying a senator back then cost about $30,000. Anyone knows the current price? (And I wish I could insert a smiley here.)
I agree. I do not think that ID cards would lead to some kind of smothering dictatorship either.
If you don't have the political willingness to keep tabs on your citizens or frontiers, then no smart card in the world can possibly help you (hence the European problem of illegal aliens not even bothering to get a fake ID, knowing they will not be expelled for lack of governmental motivation).
On another hand, for example the Chinese, Soviet, Cambodian or Birman dictatorships never used any high-tech means for the extremely intrusive control of their citizen's daily life.
My point was that I don't think the US government needs to get distracted into implementing a costly ID card program. As I pointed out, Europe's example shows such a card is not going to solve the problems that it is supposed to address. So why bother?
Unless of course your goal is to give money to Oracle and other companies that will provide the required equipment.
What is the point in this proposal? Is it to make the country more secure against illegal aliens that might be dormant terrorists? Is it to prevent criminals from usurping other people's ID?
If these are indeed the goals, then I'd suggest to take a look at developed countries that already have implemented nation-wide ID cards. Namely, Europe. Why, it's fascinating.
Because you see, illegal immigration is totally out of control in Europe. As for terrorism, Spain (Basque Separatist movements), France (Corsican Separatists, Basques, Muslims), UK (IRA), as well as Greece, Italy and Germany have had severe terrorist attacks in the 1990s in spite of strict ID card policies.
How come these countries can harbor terrorists in spite of mandatory ID cards, you ask? It's because ID cards are not a silver bullet against crime. First, they can be forged. Always. France recently replaced its obsolete ID card with an embossed, hologramed, specially printed ID card, the deployment of which was a very expensive program. All this achieved was to raise the cost of a fake ID to about 5000FF ($600-700) on the black market. The best forgeries come of course from corrupt officials who fabricated cards with fake IDs using the state-approved machines.
So unless you have totally non-corrupt officials, all you're going to achieve is put terrorism out of reach of poor students. That's a tempting solution considering what is said in some literature circles after a few vodkas. But I don't think it will be the best one.
Look at Europe, for Heaven's sake, because they already did all the stupid things before us!
The article has a section titled "Withholding Payment: The Brute Force Option". Well, that would really do miracles for solving many QA-related problems. I know. Been there, done that.
Scene: The year is 1992. A computer manufacturer has sold a big mainframe to a local bank. There is a glitch somewhere in the interface between a network driver and a particular model of ATM machine. Nobody cares except of course the bank. No resource is available nowhere to debug the problem. Nobody want to pay for it.
So the bank's boss holds a meeting and tells the computer manufacturer that he will suspend payments on the mainframe until said mainframe could talk to the ATM as promised. The cost of the mainframe: a few millions. The look on the sales guys: Priceless. :-)
It took only a few calls ("he suspended WHAT???") to suddenly find the required resources. Mysteriously, money appeared to send people (me!) and debug the problem. Of course, the manufacturer could have sued the customer, but I am not sure it would have been a smart move. Satisfied customers are nice to have, ya know.
That's why I really think this article is an excellent thing. A Revolt of the CEOs is the only thing that can prevent (some) software to be delivered with swarms of bugs on purpose. It's one more step toward making software a science instead of a black art.
And if this revolt could tip the balance towards open source, so much the better.
Here is a slightly more elegant proposal: Network providers have a garanteed uptime. If your leased line or fiber drops below a certain minimum uptime, the provider starts refunding you. That's a standard clause.
How about suggesting such clauses to CEOs for their critical systems?
This is what I hope we will finally start hearing: "We replaced Sendmail with Exchange. Since then, I barely get any email and MS is paying us." Hmmm.
I was wondering if Microsoft would get away with putting a crappy OS in a consumer box.
Now, arcades are not exactly the place where you tolerate crashes or BSODs. The mobo has to be glitch-free, and the software shouldn't crash ever.
Point 1 (mobo never crashing) is hard enough with server PCs. Considering the speed of the XBox graphics subsystem and the corner-cutting (a.k.a. price-reduction engineering) required in a high-volume chipset, this will be no mean feat.
Obviously, Sega will develop specific motherboards for this application, but they'll need to use the same chip set, which already suffered from the usual bane of highly complex chips (bugs founds in production). Sega can't allow these chips to glitch their arcade machines. The arcade manager would pull the plug at the first crash and call service. How are they going to solve this problem? Sorting and cooling? Anyone knows?
Point 2 is interesting. If the XBox's OS and DirectX layer can really withstand the day-long, intensive use of a high-perf game machine without crashing, then Microsoft should be commended for a great QA job.
And if it cannot stand the intensive load, then a lot of gamers will see these "XBox Inside" Sega machines with the plug pulled and an out-of-use sign. This will not look too good for the sales of the XBox.
If MS can survive this, they'll have an impressive product on their hands. Hyperactive teens pounding on your mobo are no substitute for good design, but they are a good substitude for a high-speed test vector generator! :-)
Yep, very true. I don't know if the design of something as delicate as a new car engine can be really entrusted to someone who thinks he has invented anti-gravity. Let's get real here: If he has anto-grav, then he needs to mount a jet engine on a floating car, not something to apply a torque on wheels.
Also, what I don't like is the mention of solar panel on the car's roof as the source of energy. Excuse me for doing some arithmetics here, but let's assume a 40 percent efficiency in solar panels (hah! 20 is more like it) and an 800W/m2 solar power.
Then a perfectly-exposed (90-degree incident angle), 6-sq. meter (about 60 sq. feet) solar panel would only supply 1920 W. That's less than 3 HP. And a 60 sq. ft panel is already very bulky.
So I am afraid the whole concept is based on very shaky fundations. I'd rather put my money and my hopes on the people who are working on fuel cell for car (nice summary at RMI here).
Cell fuels have the potential to truly make PDA and portable computers these semi-magical thingies that SF authors keep raving about. Add an SVGA microscreen in goggles, a yet-to-be invented data entry method to replace keyboards, and wearable computers are suddenly not a mad dream anymore.
Chemical energy has an energy density (in terms of Watt.hour per kilogram) easily 10-100 times higer than even lithium batteries. And methane is not a neurotoxic, contrary to lithium, cadmium and other nastiums that are used in regular rechargeable batteries.
Of course, I tend to favor alcohol-based fuel cells. Not only do they present less explosion risks than methane cartridges or tanks, you could also refuel your laptop with a squirt of vodka... :-)
Now, before long, some journalists will misread that press release and start ranting about revolution in transportation. As a slashdotter, your sacred duty is to thwap them with a physics manual. Or even better, write to their editors and remind them that fuel cells are not a generating but a storage technology.
In order to produce methane or alcohol, you need either petroleum byproducts (and hence oil) or a lot of energy. And do I mean a lot. Of course, you can produce methanol artisanally, but a sustained production cannot rely on cottage industry methods that, BTW, generate huge quantities of waste. Have you ever been downwind of a still when it's dumped after a batch of fermented molasses has been boiled? Not a pretty smell, believe me.
So next time you hear a tree-hugger^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H environmentally conscious fluffhead raving about nature-friendly, fuel-cell powered busses, heartily approve and remind them to support the construction of that nuclear power plant we'll need to generate said nature-friendly fuel. That generally does the trick.
#insert<cynicalsmirk.h>
A Romanian refugee living in the US wrote an article about his plight, back in the good old Cold War days. He said that he often called his father who was still in Romania, and since his family had been tagged as politically bad by the son's escape, the father's phone line was tapped by the secret police.
So since both his father and him were erudites and spoke Latin, they sometimes used that language over the phone to discuss family matters. Then a polite voice came in the conversation and firmly reminded them that only approved languages could be used in an international phone call, and please revert to Romanian or the call would be cut.
Don't know if it's true, but it's very much in character of the secret police mentality: "Of COURSE we tap your phone, you little sneaky counter-revolutionary! And be glad we don't send you to reeducation camp!". So this story seems likely, alas.
Let's hope the US will not abase itself to the encryption-with-mandatory-trapdoor equivalent of that in-you-face eavesdropping.
You are right about the CC mechanism (and the dumb typo). However, the resulting cost-passing is the same. Its effects are diluted among countless merchants instead of a few hundred credit card emitters, but we consumers end up paying for it.
The current lack of wide-spread Internet authentication/encryption mechanism acts to deter service providers and deprive us all, in the same way as fraud acts to raise costs and allow thieves to pick a penny from each pocket.
Yay, yet another way to be tracked on the Internet
Well, a tool such as Passport or LAP can be used to track users, that's true. No one said tools cannot be misused. But remember: Programs don't track people, marketdroids do.
The keyword here is convenience. The only way of protecting our information on the Internet is through encryption. Which implies passwords and key management. Something that 99% of users are not willing to do.
Unfortunately, this unwillingness to use the Net securely affects all of us. Cool products and services that could be available today are not offered because of lack of good security models. If they are offered at all, they are either too cumbersome to use, or rely on such simplistic security that they cannot be trusted (Hotmail anyone?)
This is an old problem. An analog is the credit card industry. Even if you carefully protect your credit card info, you're still paying for all the people who get their CC number and expiry date stolen. CC companies past the cost to all of us clients.
So we need ease of use for security products, or they won't get used. If LAP can spread the use of a safe, easy-to-use, one-time Internet-wide authentication, then it's welcome.
Did anyone notice that French company Gemplus is among the LAP supporters? This company provides smart cards. Several projects touting smart cards for web authentication have already been proposed. Maybe we'll see a new, more successful approach this time. It's certainly easier to carry a smart card and enter a 4-digit PIN than to remember and type 20 different passwords.
I am not saying that this new LAP initiative is going to solve all authentication and privacy problems. But these problems are real and need to be addressed. It doesn't boil down just to marketdroid tracking us.
Back in the '80s, a young police officer (with whom I used to play D&D when we were teens, and no, he wasn't a lawful good ranger) once told me he was facing a ring of drug traffickers. He was bitter about not able to keep up with them. These mobsters knew that they were under constant phonetap surveillance. This didn't stop them from using the (tapped) phone lines for setting up appointments and deliveries. And the law enforcement agencies never knew about these dug deals until way too late.
Their trick? The mobsters had imported a few natives from a remote North-African village, speaking a dialect that nobody else on Earth spoke. One of these guys on each end of a phone, and even tapped phones become secure! Of course, they used code words for street name and subway stations.
The Navajo code speakers used by the US transmissions during WWII also used the same principle. Not high-tech at all, but very efficient.
So I strongly suggest that all these laws against cryptography include an article mandating the use of a State-approved language on a phone line. Just like in the former Eastern European countries. Why, anything less stringent would put freedom itself at risk, right?