I would reckon these things would be easier for a Star Wars system to defend against than true ICBMs. They have to come through the upper atmosphere, which gives you a releatively thin slice of directions it must be coming from (say 50,000 ft vertically) compared to the wide angle (bauically, anywher up) an ICBM is coming from. And an ICBM will come in faster: plummetting from 100 miles up should beat even Mach 7.6, and the heat sahileds have to last for only the last minute or two of the flight rather than the whole flight.
Actually, defence wise, I seee these as increasing the techno-advantage of the high-tech states. High tech states could build very fast bombers, cabable of responding from (say) the US to (taking a radom example) Iraq in 45 minites or so. Which means that a surprise attack has to be launced in an even narrower window than before if it is to get away before vengeance arrives.
The scramjet works only at supersonic speeds. So the test vehicle had an ordinary booster which took it up to, and through, Mach 1. When they had a supersonic airflow, they turned on the scramjet - but for only 10 seconds (I can't think why so short, but that is what it said). Sop, from the ground, there would have been little differnce in what they saw - a change of a few miles in the 350 mile trajectory, but that might be experimental error. So they had to wait for the telemetry - e.g. a surge in acceleration as the scramjet fired.
This is very interesting, but don't get too excited. This was basically a firework, and it is a loooong way from here to a flyable payload-carrying plane. The first objective, as they say, is probably cheap satellite launches - essentailly another firework. probably a good vehicle for Amsat-type launches.
The interesting question in about your proposal is the goal setting. In the swedish research, they set the system a very simple goal - generate lift using the hardware provided. And they showed that an evolutionary algorithm actaully achieved that, including exploring unexpected pathways (the cheats). But it is long, long way from such a simple, one-dimensional, goal seeking to a the multi-dimesional goal seeking required to make a working community/society. Particularly important, in my opinion, and unexplored in this scenario, is finding good compromises between conflicting goals, and particularly between long term and short term goals.
Actually, I think research of this sort has gone a lot further in the simulated environment than these swedes have done. The different thing about this research is that they have done it with an object in the physical world. This should please those who distrust simulation, but for the average/.er it probably only confirms what we have known for a while - genetic algorithms are a nifty solution to a certain class of problem.
Exactly. What is interesting is that they have seen it at work, which is much less common. One of the common accusations of creationists is that you can't see evolution working, so it is only a plausible hypothesis to explain the facts we see - and that they have an equally plausible hypothesis to explain the same facts, with divine imprimatur.
In fact, you can see it working - see for example The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time - but not very easily. So more examples tracing what has happened, and particularly examples relating to the most important animal in the universe(ourselves, in our own unbiased opinion) are devinoitely of interest.
Capitalisation, like punctuation, is simply an aide to reading. Shakespeare wrote all his play using only one punctuation element: the full stop. We find it useful to add extra forms of punctiation to give cues to the reader as to how the sentence should be read. Capitalisation does the same thing. Maybe you could regard it as an amplifier for they (small and easily overlooked) full stop.
Because capitalisation is only really a hinting system, we could do without it. But we could do without a lot of things that make life easier. Why use elevators when you have to have stairs? Why total you checks with a calculator when you can use pen-and-paper? Because it makes life easier - for humans.
But capitalisation, like punctuation, does nothing for computers. Therefore I think elements, like filenames, entended to be understood by computers rather than just carried around, shoudl be case independent.
Amen to this. Or, not so much obsolete as a bit of enginering infrastructure, like drivers and assembler, the then user doesn't want to, and shouldn't have to, see.
Name is probably the last sort field that people want. I have difficulty remembering the names I gave to ad-hoc files such as WP documents. This contrasts with my use as a Java programmer, where I have to use precise and definite file names. The two uses are completely different - even for a geek. And as for Auntie, she wants to see her documents by date, by addressee, by sender, by free-format constext search... By anything other than the arbitrary name she (or the sender) gave it and forgot.
Yes, the tools we have for indexing by all those fields are not as good as they could be. But that is no excuse for not trying to improve them.
As already said, the stealth bomber is untrackable because of extensive use of stealth technology to make it radar invisible.
I once saw a copper-coated table tennis ball which, it was claimed, was used to test the anti-intruder radar. The placard claimed it was throw out of a high-altitude aircraft and tracked by radar as it fell to earth, beint blown this way and that by the wind. When it landed, they sent a man out to pick it up - which he usually did.
Sealth technology has a big impact on flyability. I would expect that this plane, unstealthed, would have a radar crossection bigger than my table tennis ball, and stealthing it would ruin the range.
And if you read the article, most of the travel is due to wind. They only need lift - meteorology will do the rest.
And I would suggest that they have checked out the duration of the power source by flying it over their back yard for that amount of time - hardly a major proposition.
You can get the rated performance off modern disks - I do it for a living, building video servers. But it doesn't come easy - there are a lot of traps which you have to be sure not to fall into.
First thing is you have to have double-buffered commands - and I don't think ATA/IDE can do that. Scsican - you issue command 1, and while the disk is getting its at together, you issue command 2 before the data for command 1 arrives - and command 3, and command 4... To my surprise, pewrformance increased beyond just double buffering.
Some people will tell you that his is not necessary - the disk reads ahead iin case you want the next block. Yes, but only usually for transfers = 64Kb.
Fragmentation is a real killer. Avg access time, say, 5 millisec. At 50 Mbyte/sec, that it time enough to transfer 250Kb for each and every discontinuity.
You basically need to adopt a double-bufferd, streaming apprough thoughout the process - and I bet that somewhere in the OS, something doesn't. And that one bottleneck can kill you.
Which, according to Terry Pratchet, makes you a Troll. His trolls, being a silicaceous life-form, have brains that get slow when hot. Detritus the Guardsman has cooling fins and a clockwork fan on his guardsmans helmet.
Or maybe you just need a Beanie-cap whose propeller is motorised. Become a real propellor-head - and inflict significant damage when you head-butt your pointy-haired manager.
Here is a link to New Scientist's coverage of the crater. They suggest that, in order to form this kind of multi-ringed crater, you need a brittle layer over a watery layer before it hits the bedrock, and that seabed sludge might have provided this structure.
There is an interesting experimental keyboard-less input program called Dasher. The current program is oriented towards ordinary text, for written language input (e.g. to allow the disabled to send emails). What would be interesting would be to customise this for program editing, possibly inside an IDE. E.g. to build in the main language constructs, and to replace the English language dictionary by the table of symbols valid at the point you are editing. Another approach to predictive editing.
One problem that nobody has mentioned is gyroscopic effects on the disk drive. Small boats do some fairly crazy twisting in heavy weather (big boats, such as the navy, do less and do it slower when they do).
Waaay back when, I worked for a company which supplied computers to the Royal Navy. They couldn't use the disk technology of the time because as soon as the ship rolled, the platters twisted on their spindle and the heads dug into the surface.
Now, disks have come a long way since then, and the smaller the disk the smaller the effect. But disks are spinning faster and flying heights are lower, which may cancel some of that out.
Laptop drives have great specs for non-spinning shock etc, but they are much lower for spinning use, because the manufacturers assume that, whatever you may do while lugging the thing around, you'll be sitting reasonably quietly before you start work. But afloat, you don't want to wait for the storm to subside before booting up the nav system.
I accept that point made by others for workstation rather than laptop class computers - every laptop I have encountered has died within two years without event being taken to sea. But I would be tempted to fit laptop-style 2.5 in drives not workstation-style 3.5 in drives (none of my laptop failures was drive-based). But then, make sure you spin down - laptop drives are not designed to spin 24/7.
Teleporters would have a lot more side effects than just that - read Larry Niven's stories about them (e.g. Mass Crowd).
In this lab, we believe we can build one of anything. Unfortunately, teleporters come in pairs (transmitter and receiver) and we could never build two that would be compatible with each other.
OTOH, if I did invent a teleporter, I wouldn't bother patenting it. Just give the designs away then invest in real estate in beautiful places a long way from big cities. These will become incredibly valuable while city real estate will plummet in ptice.
One thing that makes me very suspicious of this is the necessity for something to be spinning very, very fast. As anybody who has played with gyroscopes knows, spinning objects behave in very counter-intuitive ways.
Thirty years ago, Professor Eric Laithwaite, quoted as the inventor of the linear motor, claimed that an assembly of gyroscopes could produce anti-gravity. He was scorned at the time, and his career was wrecked. As I undertand it, after much follow-on research, he admitted that he hadn't got anti-gravity or a reactionless drive, but an interesting side effect of the complex behaviour of spinning gyroscopes.
I would bet heavily that this is another occurrence of the same. Some novel (or perhaps not novel, but forgotten) effect is producing a force on the object being weighed - e.g. second or third order effects from the currents in the rotating disk - a bit like the Hall Effect.
This does not mean that it is foolish of Boeing to follow up the claims with a bit of their "blue sky" research budget. The strange effect may have useful consequences elsewhere in research - it is worth looking. Remember that the transistor came about from investigating an unexpected effect when a wire just touched a lump of silicon instead of being properly fixed to it - and look where that got us.
According to this weeks New Scientist, the two Voyagers are about 24 million miles apart. If, as their graphic shows, they went in opposite direction, they are about 12 billion miles out from the earth, which is well outside any planetary orbits.
The article (cover article, but unfortunately subscriber-only) is about the fact that they are just a tad behind where they "ought" to be (400,000 km, IIRC), and some claim that this shows they are being decelerated by dark matter. Others talk about fuel leaks, radiation pressure....
They are still working, but but the radioactive-element based power unit is running down - from 4kw to 750w from memory - but better read the article. Enough to heep talking, and possibly send the odd picture if there were anything to picture.
As an interface, the difference between SCSI and IDE is small. Yes, Scsi has a few more controllability and asynchronous features, but these are not a big deal. The difference is that the manufacturesers use Scsi is a marker for a generally higher level of build quality and testing. Just as PCs marketed as servers are built better than desktop workstations, SCSI drives are simply better built than IDE ones. The price difference is not the trivial/zero cost of the different interface, it is better bearings, stronger actuators, more rigid cases, bigger buffer rams, cleverer firmware, extra levels of ECC, more vibration testing and so on. Check the MTBF figures - when I last looked, SCSI drives had 5 times the MTBF of comparable IDE drives from the same manufacturer. Basically, IDE is designed down to minimum cost for the cutthroat desktop/home market, while Scsi is designed up to beat the competition in the less price sensitive server market. [Most of this derived from talking to the tech support of a major disk manufacturer]
Which means that if you really, really, want your data to stay there, the delta of SCSI is probably worth it. OTOH, I would go for Raid-ed IDE before non-Raide-ed SCSI - drives fail, even the best.
There is no technical reason why IDE cannot be made host-swap - but not in an ordinary PC case. You need a mounting enclosure designed to make/break contacts in the right order, and a controller designed for hot swap. These cost money, and people tend to put that money alongside the premium features already in Scsi rather that the minimum-cost IDE.
I got the figure of $6000 from a guy who worked for Technicolor, who make the prints. This is for "major release" films, which get a premium service, for which Technicolor charge more.
And a DLP, being a sealed box, should have nothing for a foolish projectionist to screw up. The box is very sealed using military grade anti-tamper technology so that no-one can reach inside with a couple of probes and runs a feed out to a VTR/DVD recorder to make pirate coies. It is encrypted outside the box and only decrypted inside the sealed DLP unit.
Agreed 100% to this. A brand new print on well set up projection equipment gives far better quality that digital projectors. Simply, there are more bits there, both spatially and in depth. IIRC, Star Wars was shot at 1920 wide, but film is still giving more data when digitised over 3K wide. Likewise, film has the depth to allow really good gamma correction before processing - probably the equivalent to 14 or 15 bits, while cameras are at most 10 bits and often 8.
However, the other point you make, that film degrades over time is very relevant. A film print nowadays costs about $6000, and will be showing noticable wear after 2 weeks (as said to me by a film person). And film needs to be physically transported etc.
The problem is that the costs of digital projection fall upon the theatre owner, who sees very little benifit, whereas the benifits go to the producer. In order to make digital really take off, the producers are going to have to find some way of kicking back a percentage of their gain to the theatre owners. One way that has been suggested is for the producers, or a producer-oriented organisation, to buy the projectors and put them into the cinemas, then charge on a pay-per-view. If the digifilms don't come out, the theatre owner doesn't lose, if they do, he has the revenue to pay the rent. Which requires help from the money men - who are a bit suspicious of new-tech propositions at the moment.
MySQL now has transactions and foreign key support using the InnoDB table type. Beta-ed about a year ago, production about six months ago, and I heve heard few complaints, though I don't usi it myself.
It wasn't the paint job on the Hindenburg which burnt so well - it was the outer skin which, as someone found out recently, was basically celluloid - cellulose nitrate, quite closely related to cordite and notorious for blazine up when used for early film stock.
If you read the article, they aren't even proposing pressurised bottles, they are proposing metal hydrides. This is good, because there is never any runny liquid around. Also, I think, the rate at which the metal can relewase the hydrogen is much lower than leakage from a tank, because the hydrogen has to migrate through the metal. So it should be no more dangerous than gasoline.
Re:stamping process is not useful for mass product
on
Printing Chips
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· Score: 3, Informative
You have a number of implicit assumptions in your comment which I would like to query. As well as the/. article, I have read the The Economists take on the same research.
Point 1 - they are not talking about a single-die stamper. Actually they were talking about a whole-wafer stamper, created by e-beam lithography, If, as you suggest, a single stamper is good for only 500 stamps, this gives a 500:1 power boost to e-beam - good going.
Point 2, the stamping is not purely mechanical. A laser beam at a frequency at which the quartz stamper is transparent but the silicon isn't is shone through the stamper. This softens the silicon, so the stamper presses into it. No photoresist, and far less mechanical wear on the stamper. Quartz is pretty damned hard stuff, whereas softened silicon is (I guess) not - so I would guess a lifetime in the thousands or tens of thousands for the stamper, not hundreds.
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I would reckon these things would be easier for a Star Wars system to defend against than true ICBMs. They have to come through the upper atmosphere, which gives you a releatively thin slice of directions it must be coming from (say 50,000 ft vertically) compared to the wide angle (bauically, anywher up) an ICBM is coming from. And an ICBM will come in faster: plummetting from 100 miles up should beat even Mach 7.6, and the heat sahileds have to last for only the last minute or two of the flight rather than the whole flight.
Actually, defence wise, I seee these as increasing the techno-advantage of the high-tech states. High tech states could build very fast bombers, cabable of responding from (say) the US to (taking a radom example) Iraq in 45 minites or so. Which means that a surprise attack has to be launced in an even narrower window than before if it is to get away before vengeance arrives.
This is very interesting, but don't get too excited. This was basically a firework, and it is a loooong way from here to a flyable payload-carrying plane. The first objective, as they say, is probably cheap satellite launches - essentailly another firework. probably a good vehicle for Amsat-type launches.
The interesting question in about your proposal is the goal setting. In the swedish research, they set the system a very simple goal - generate lift using the hardware provided. And they showed that an evolutionary algorithm actaully achieved that, including exploring unexpected pathways (the cheats). But it is long, long way from such a simple, one-dimensional, goal seeking to a the multi-dimesional goal seeking required to make a working community/society. Particularly important, in my opinion, and unexplored in this scenario, is finding good compromises between conflicting goals, and particularly between long term and short term goals.
/.er it probably only confirms what we have known for a while - genetic algorithms are a nifty solution to a certain class of problem.
Actually, I think research of this sort has gone a lot further in the simulated environment than these swedes have done. The different thing about this research is that they have done it with an object in the physical world. This should please those who distrust simulation, but for the average
Exactly. What is interesting is that they have seen it at work, which is much less common. One of the common accusations of creationists is that you can't see evolution working, so it is only a plausible hypothesis to explain the facts we see - and that they have an equally plausible hypothesis to explain the same facts, with divine imprimatur. In fact, you can see it working - see for example The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time - but not very easily. So more examples tracing what has happened, and particularly examples relating to the most important animal in the universe(ourselves, in our own unbiased opinion) are devinoitely of interest.
Capitalisation, like punctuation, is simply an aide to reading. Shakespeare wrote all his play using only one punctuation element: the full stop. We find it useful to add extra forms of punctiation to give cues to the reader as to how the sentence should be read. Capitalisation does the same thing. Maybe you could regard it as an amplifier for they (small and easily overlooked) full stop.
Because capitalisation is only really a hinting system, we could do without it. But we could do without a lot of things that make life easier. Why use elevators when you have to have stairs? Why total you checks with a calculator when you can use pen-and-paper? Because it makes life easier - for humans.
But capitalisation, like punctuation, does nothing for computers. Therefore I think elements, like filenames, entended to be understood by computers rather than just carried around, shoudl be case independent.
Amen to this. Or, not so much obsolete as a bit of enginering infrastructure, like drivers and assembler, the then user doesn't want to, and shouldn't have to, see.
Name is probably the last sort field that people want. I have difficulty remembering the names I gave to ad-hoc files such as WP documents. This contrasts with my use as a Java programmer, where I have to use precise and definite file names. The two uses are completely different - even for a geek. And as for Auntie, she wants to see her documents by date, by addressee, by sender, by free-format constext search... By anything other than the arbitrary name she (or the sender) gave it and forgot.
Yes, the tools we have for indexing by all those fields are not as good as they could be. But that is no excuse for not trying to improve them.
As already said, the stealth bomber is untrackable because of extensive use of stealth technology to make it radar invisible.
I once saw a copper-coated table tennis ball which, it was claimed, was used to test the anti-intruder radar. The placard claimed it was throw out of a high-altitude aircraft and tracked by radar as it fell to earth, beint blown this way and that by the wind. When it landed, they sent a man out to pick it up - which he usually did.
Sealth technology has a big impact on flyability. I would expect that this plane, unstealthed, would have a radar crossection bigger than my table tennis ball, and stealthing it would ruin the range.
And if you read the article, most of the travel is due to wind. They only need lift - meteorology will do the rest.
And I would suggest that they have checked out the duration of the power source by flying it over their back yard for that amount of time - hardly a major proposition.
You can get the rated performance off modern disks - I do it for a living, building video servers. But it doesn't come easy - there are a lot of traps which you have to be sure not to fall into.
First thing is you have to have double-buffered commands - and I don't think ATA/IDE can do that. Scsican - you issue command 1, and while the disk is getting its at together, you issue command 2 before the data for command 1 arrives - and command 3, and command 4... To my surprise, pewrformance increased beyond just double buffering.
Some people will tell you that his is not necessary - the disk reads ahead iin case you want the next block. Yes, but only usually for transfers = 64Kb.
Fragmentation is a real killer. Avg access time, say, 5 millisec. At 50 Mbyte/sec, that it time enough to transfer 250Kb for each and every discontinuity.
You basically need to adopt a double-bufferd, streaming apprough thoughout the process - and I bet that somewhere in the OS, something doesn't. And that one bottleneck can kill you.
Which, according to Terry Pratchet, makes you a Troll. His trolls, being a silicaceous life-form, have brains that get slow when hot. Detritus the Guardsman has cooling fins and a clockwork fan on his guardsmans helmet.
Or maybe you just need a Beanie-cap whose propeller is motorised. Become a real propellor-head - and inflict significant damage when you head-butt your pointy-haired manager.
Here is a link to New Scientist's coverage of the crater. They suggest that, in order to form this kind of multi-ringed crater, you need a brittle layer over a watery layer before it hits the bedrock, and that seabed sludge might have provided this structure.
There is an interesting experimental keyboard-less input program called Dasher. The current program is oriented towards ordinary text, for written language input (e.g. to allow the disabled to send emails). What would be interesting would be to customise this for program editing, possibly inside an IDE. E.g. to build in the main language constructs, and to replace the English language dictionary by the table of symbols valid at the point you are editing. Another approach to predictive editing.
One problem that nobody has mentioned is gyroscopic effects on the disk drive. Small boats do some fairly crazy twisting in heavy weather (big boats, such as the navy, do less and do it slower when they do).
Waaay back when, I worked for a company which supplied computers to the Royal Navy. They couldn't use the disk technology of the time because as soon as the ship rolled, the platters twisted on their spindle and the heads dug into the surface.
Now, disks have come a long way since then, and the smaller the disk the smaller the effect. But disks are spinning faster and flying heights are lower, which may cancel some of that out.
Laptop drives have great specs for non-spinning shock etc, but they are much lower for spinning use, because the manufacturers assume that, whatever you may do while lugging the thing around, you'll be sitting reasonably quietly before you start work. But afloat, you don't want to wait for the storm to subside before booting up the nav system.
I accept that point made by others for workstation rather than laptop class computers - every laptop I have encountered has died within two years without event being taken to sea. But I would be tempted to fit laptop-style 2.5 in drives not workstation-style 3.5 in drives (none of my laptop failures was drive-based). But then, make sure you spin down - laptop drives are not designed to spin 24/7.
Well, the Cray 2 worked immersed in fluorocarbons. Full speed ahead and damn the ozone layer!
Opera also allows you to kill pop-ups, or to force them into background. Another of its many excellent features.
Teleporters would have a lot more side effects than just that - read Larry Niven's stories about them (e.g. Mass Crowd).
In this lab, we believe we can build one of anything. Unfortunately, teleporters come in pairs (transmitter and receiver) and we could never build two that would be compatible with each other.
OTOH, if I did invent a teleporter, I wouldn't bother patenting it. Just give the designs away then invest in real estate in beautiful places a long way from big cities. These will become incredibly valuable while city real estate will plummet in ptice.
One thing that makes me very suspicious of this is the necessity for something to be spinning very, very fast. As anybody who has played with gyroscopes knows, spinning objects behave in very counter-intuitive ways.
Thirty years ago, Professor Eric Laithwaite, quoted as the inventor of the linear motor, claimed that an assembly of gyroscopes could produce anti-gravity. He was scorned at the time, and his career was wrecked. As I undertand it, after much follow-on research, he admitted that he hadn't got anti-gravity or a reactionless drive, but an interesting side effect of the complex behaviour of spinning gyroscopes.
I would bet heavily that this is another occurrence of the same. Some novel (or perhaps not novel, but forgotten) effect is producing a force on the object being weighed - e.g. second or third order effects from the currents in the rotating disk - a bit like the Hall Effect.
This does not mean that it is foolish of Boeing to follow up the claims with a bit of their "blue sky" research budget. The strange effect may have useful consequences elsewhere in research - it is worth looking. Remember that the transistor came about from investigating an unexpected effect when a wire just touched a lump of silicon instead of being properly fixed to it - and look where that got us.
According to this weeks New Scientist, the two Voyagers are about 24 million miles apart. If, as their graphic shows, they went in opposite direction, they are about 12 billion miles out from the earth, which is well outside any planetary orbits.
The article (cover article, but unfortunately subscriber-only) is about the fact that they are just a tad behind where they "ought" to be (400,000 km, IIRC), and some claim that this shows they are being decelerated by dark matter. Others talk about fuel leaks, radiation pressure....
They are still working, but but the radioactive-element based power unit is running down - from 4kw to 750w from memory - but better read the article. Enough to heep talking, and possibly send the odd picture if there were anything to picture.
As an interface, the difference between SCSI and IDE is small. Yes, Scsi has a few more controllability and asynchronous features, but these are not a big deal. The difference is that the manufacturesers use Scsi is a marker for a generally higher level of build quality and testing. Just as PCs marketed as servers are built better than desktop workstations, SCSI drives are simply better built than IDE ones. The price difference is not the trivial/zero cost of the different interface, it is better bearings, stronger actuators, more rigid cases, bigger buffer rams, cleverer firmware, extra levels of ECC, more vibration testing and so on. Check the MTBF figures - when I last looked, SCSI drives had 5 times the MTBF of comparable IDE drives from the same manufacturer. Basically, IDE is designed down to minimum cost for the cutthroat desktop/home market, while Scsi is designed up to beat the competition in the less price sensitive server market. [Most of this derived from talking to the tech support of a major disk manufacturer]
Which means that if you really, really, want your data to stay there, the delta of SCSI is probably worth it. OTOH, I would go for Raid-ed IDE before non-Raide-ed SCSI - drives fail, even the best.
There is no technical reason why IDE cannot be made host-swap - but not in an ordinary PC case. You need a mounting enclosure designed to make/break contacts in the right order, and a controller designed for hot swap. These cost money, and people tend to put that money alongside the premium features already in Scsi rather that the minimum-cost IDE.
I got the figure of $6000 from a guy who worked for Technicolor, who make the prints. This is for "major release" films, which get a premium service, for which Technicolor charge more.
And a DLP, being a sealed box, should have nothing for a foolish projectionist to screw up. The box is very sealed using military grade anti-tamper technology so that no-one can reach inside with a couple of probes and runs a feed out to a VTR/DVD recorder to make pirate coies. It is encrypted outside the box and only decrypted inside the sealed DLP unit.
Agreed 100% to this. A brand new print on well set up projection equipment gives far better quality that digital projectors. Simply, there are more bits there, both spatially and in depth. IIRC, Star Wars was shot at 1920 wide, but film is still giving more data when digitised over 3K wide. Likewise, film has the depth to allow really good gamma correction before processing - probably the equivalent to 14 or 15 bits, while cameras are at most 10 bits and often 8.
However, the other point you make, that film degrades over time is very relevant. A film print nowadays costs about $6000, and will be showing noticable wear after 2 weeks (as said to me by a film person). And film needs to be physically transported etc.
The problem is that the costs of digital projection fall upon the theatre owner, who sees very little benifit, whereas the benifits go to the producer. In order to make digital really take off, the producers are going to have to find some way of kicking back a percentage of their gain to the theatre owners. One way that has been suggested is for the producers, or a producer-oriented organisation, to buy the projectors and put them into the cinemas, then charge on a pay-per-view. If the digifilms don't come out, the theatre owner doesn't lose, if they do, he has the revenue to pay the rent. Which requires help from the money men - who are a bit suspicious of new-tech propositions at the moment.
MySQL now has transactions and foreign key support using the InnoDB table type. Beta-ed about a year ago, production about six months ago, and I heve heard few complaints, though I don't usi it myself.
It wasn't the paint job on the Hindenburg which burnt so well - it was the outer skin which, as someone found out recently, was basically celluloid - cellulose nitrate, quite closely related to cordite and notorious for blazine up when used for early film stock.
If you read the article, they aren't even proposing pressurised bottles, they are proposing metal hydrides. This is good, because there is never any runny liquid around. Also, I think, the rate at which the metal can relewase the hydrogen is much lower than leakage from a tank, because the hydrogen has to migrate through the metal. So it should be no more dangerous than gasoline.
You have a number of implicit assumptions in your comment which I would like to query. As well as the /. article, I have read the The Economists take on the same research.
Point 1 - they are not talking about a single-die stamper. Actually they were talking about a whole-wafer stamper, created by e-beam lithography, If, as you suggest, a single stamper is good for only 500 stamps, this gives a 500:1 power boost to e-beam - good going.
Point 2, the stamping is not purely mechanical. A laser beam at a frequency at which the quartz stamper is transparent but the silicon isn't is shone through the stamper. This softens the silicon, so the stamper presses into it. No photoresist, and far less mechanical wear on the stamper. Quartz is pretty damned hard stuff, whereas softened silicon is (I guess) not - so I would guess a lifetime in the thousands or tens of thousands for the stamper, not hundreds.