I'm not so sure that fixing the chips is a big breakthough, as it sounds like they're suggesting they'll get a lot more defects and not be able to mass produce chips. In fact, the comment that almost each chip will be different suggests a serious problem with their approach.
Remember all the stink over the Pentium II (or was it III?) that had some computing errors in numbers past the 6 or 7th digit? Now if no two chips are the same, how are you going to guarentee that chip A runs a protocol correctly when chip B, designed for the same application, has all its chip-innards set up differently, such that certain logic gates work differently and give different results for the same protocol? Perhaps each chip will indeed be customizable, but if you're producing 1000s of chips per day, do you really want 1000 different chips if you've got orders for 950 in one application and 50 in another? If no chips are the same due to this technology, what a QC nightmare this would be. No one would by it because they could never guarentee that your PC is going to act the same as everyone else's.
I don't know, the whole thing sounds quarter-baked, not even half-baked. My concern is that when these type of annoucements come out, it suggests that the company:
A) Is so far ahead of everyone else they can afford to brag and advertise thier technological edge.
B) Has developed something that's great for technological capablity PR, but is so impossible or impractical to put into practice that revealing its existance is designed to throw competitors off track. Companies tend to publish results when they can't patent it or if they think others are getting ready to patent it and they want to prevent others from getting exclusive rights to it.
I'll admit there is the possiblity HP is onto something, but I think category B above is probably more appropriate here.
Not so. As you get down to smaller scales, sometimes heat dissapation becomes easier as there are different methods of heat release than just fans and heat sink.
Basicailly it depends on the structure of the chip. If its inorganic semiconductors, which have to push heat through a rigid crystalline structure, then they tend to hold onto their heat longer due to poor heat conductivity. Therefore, they tend to heat up and stay heated up, and it takes more effort to cool them.
However, while no details were given, the tech probably won't be inorganic semiconductor based, and therefore could just release heat by the release of energy through the chemical bonds in the structure. You would get some heat, but some of that energy would get converted into moving electrons back and forth in each of the molecular bonds. In fact, its possible that they're relying up on the heat to get certain atoms to jump to higher energy state, thus turning a switch on or off, and when they rapidly cool back down, they activate or shut off the switch as appropriate.
Then again, its very likely they haven't considered this, and the first time they hook it up and starting running computations there is a puff of smoke and the chip is now CO2 and ash.
I agree. The experiment looks neat, but I need more details. If they put the light energy into the atoms and jump it up to an excited state, how do they keep it there and prevent it from coming back down to ground state and letting the light go? My guess is that the Neodynamium (Nd) atoms have something to do with it. Perhaps they can handle the light energy and stay in an excited state for longer. Or, perhaps the energy is converted electrons in the outer shells of the Nd atoms, thus changing their oxidation state in the crystal. Its not unheard of for light to change oxidation states in crystals so this could be the route/mechanism which allows this to occur.
I agree most of all with the speculation bit. I do not see how this will open up quantum computing. Unless they can show that the stored light energy causes energy states of the atoms to entangle and become coherent, thus doing calculations based on the coherence or lack of coherence of the energy states/orbitals, I fail to see how this sort of energy storage is the breakthrough on the way to quantum computing.
Actually, they don't say anything about the degradation in the article. Since the light is trapped/distributed among the atoms in the crystal, my guess is that degradation time will be increased, as the extra energy trapped in the atoms has to escape through a rigid matrix, vs. a gaseous flexible matrix as was previously mentioned.
What I can't figure out is what they're really doing. Without the 2nd laser, the effect doesn't occur. Therefore, are they doing some sort of destructive interference, rather than "storing" light? Or, are they using the 2nd laser to tune the yttrium silicate+Nd atoms to "accept" extra light energy without releasing it? Normally you put that much extra energy into an atom, and it will try to release that energy to get back to ground state. The energy can be released as heat, light, or kinetic energy. I wonder how hot the crystal gets while its holding the light? Also, they don't say what the quantum yield is of the light after release. I'm guessing it must be high, otherwise they wouldn't be promoting this.
That's his name! Thanks. That was who I was referring to. I knew he had been murdered - although I won't even speculate on who did it, there's plenty of speculation already out there.
I wish I could laugh at this...except that's the way it is now in the Physical Sciences, except you don't get royalties unless your advisor decides to include you in the patent.
More importantly, you never see anything from the patents because the Universities get too greedy when it comes to liscencing - and therefore, no one ever liscences it. So you waste your time pursuing a patent when you should have just published it.
As for the Ph.D. - students right now already are cheap labor - more like indentured servitude. You work you way to a Ph.D. and freedom. Students already are exploited as cheap labor and the Universities get away with it in the name of "education". Now all the work experience is indeed practical education, but the rights of the student to work he or she created are almost non-existant.
Funny you should mention that...
An American scientist during the 80s (I can't remember his name, but there have been shows about him and his work on Discovery and TLC) thought about creating a massive artillery piece for launching satellites into orbit. The artillery "barrel" would be almost half a mile long, and it would be a large facility. The US wasn't interested in it, and the scientist, very interested in promoting the tech, went to other countries to promote it. Eventually ended up in Iraq selling the tech to Saddam, where it actually started getting built. It was one of the "weapons of mass destruction" destroyed during the gulf war.
I don't think the idea was ever put into actual practice, but if you can lob a several ton shell across countries, you might be able to change the trajectory such that the satellite cuts through the ionisphere (sp?) and can obtain a stable orbit.
Emphasis on the word little. It has about as much flammable liquid, and heat output, as a full zippo lighter.
Unless you can make a molotov cocktail out of a zipplo lighter, you're not going to be able to do much with these fuel cells either.
Now 20+ fuel cells all taped together, that's a bit different. However, the units would be sealed, so you'd have to put fuses into each, which breaks the integretity of the system, and the methanol evaporates before it gets a chance to ignite.
The other thing here is that methanol burns much cooler than the kerosene/sterno/whatever you're putting into a molotov cocktail. Therefore, its destructive power and fire hazard level is much less than the before mentioned Zippo full of butane, which burns much hotter.
The nanotechnology they are referring to is commericial technology that isn't really nanotechnology, unless you count the structure of the solid phase metal oxide catalyst nanotechnology. I'm guessing they're referring to the size of the metal oxide which does all the chemical work of converting the methanol to hydrogen and CO2. If so, then they're using NMOs (Nanoscale Metal Oxides) as catalysts, and this technology has been around for quite awhile and is in use today. Technically, NMOs are "nanotechnology" in that the active structure is nanoscale sized. But its not the type of nanotechnology most people think of.
The fuel cells mentioned are probably based on technology that came out of Los Alamos about 4-5 years ago. It used a ceramic support for the NMOs (cerium oxide I think) to convert the methanol into hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen then gets "burned" to generate energy and water. Again, this isn't blue sky stuff, it exists now.
Interestingly, water-based fuel cells can work as well. Some prototypes exist, but they're solar powered and the catalysts which breaks the water down into hydrogen and oxygen don't have a lot of catalytic cycles before they die. Also, they're VERY expensive, which is the big reason why they're not being used, even if they have great potential use.
Or ECM.
Decommissioned ECM pods now sitting in Russian Aerodromes and/or US Military Surplus sites from the 60's had the power to fry radar electronics from a mile or so away.
FCC regs don't require shielding from this type of high power frequency.
Heck - a good electromagnet or a junkyard magnet could do a similar number on the place.
I can't agree with this. Banning a class of software does make sense, just as it makes sense banning something so dangerous it should not be open to those who don't know how to use it properly. Certain actions do not always classify as free speech, especially if they damage something.
Is a computer program that one created to do something damaging really free speech? Okay, lets say they add a political message to the virus, which flashes the political message over and over on the computer screen. This isn't quite free speech - its vandalism. If I used spray paint to put my political views on the side of one's car to make a point - I'd get tried for vandalism and no free speech argument would protect me. For the virus, you've taken over someone's computer and temporarily vandalized it. The spraypaint on the car and the virus can both be removed, returning the item to original condition, but damage was still done.
So lets take this further. Lets say I write a virus with a political message that "capitalism is evil" with a destructive payload that erases all the non-freeware programs. Now this virus makes its way to a water treatment plant, and screws up computer-operated water handling system. The erased program causes the pump to go to its defualt mode, which causes several hundred thousand gallons of sewage (read e-coli contaminated) to be forced into the clean water tank. Several people get sick and some elderly and children die. I've now used a tool, with no real benefit to others (except those who know how to use it to look for security holes) as my method of free speech. Should I be tried for terrorism or manslaughter? You bet! Whether or not this scenario could happen, it is possible, and therefore, it suggests that the tool should be banned, or at least restricted in access.
Some tools are meant to be restricted for a reason, because when used improperly they can cause huge amounts of damage. Therefore we ban their use except to those authorized (and trustworthy) enough to use them. Certain biological techniques have been voluntarily banned due to their danger they could cause to humanity in general. I'm not talking about cloning, but some very complicated retrovirus techniques which created a cold virus that creates cancer. The Austrialian lab that created this realized what it had done, destroyed all the work, and asked the few other researchers to drop this line of research until controls could be put in place. The ban was accepted, and it makes perfect sense.
Virus programs do nothing constructuve except find security holes. So it makes sense for computer security experts to use them in controlled settings, but to make them available to the public does not make sense.
All that being said, the technology and know-how is already out there, so one can't put the genie back in the bottle in regards to viruses. However, we can ban their use in the public when damage is caused by them, provided we actually enforce the law. If we don't enforce it, then we shouldn't even bother passing the law.
Re:Not just Windows XP... 98, ME as well!
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WinXP Security Flaw
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· Score: 2
According to the download site, it only affects Windows 98 and Windows 98 2nd edition if "XP ICS" is installed.
"I've always said that I'm cool with my Tivo tracking what I watch, provided it never tells anyone my name and address to anyone. If it meant I watched more targetted advertisements, I'd fast forward less."
The whole idea behind cookies and tracking what I watch or someone watches to personalize advertizing frankly doesn't work. Why?, because that information is used to develop stereotypes for the advertising industry to appeal to. Since its impossible, even with cookies and other collected internet information, to properly read our minds, Advertisers instead go with broad generalized stereotypes to appeal to. Think I'm kidding? Notice how they run certain ads only on certain channels during specific shows designed to appeal to a chief "demographic". The advertising world has no problem designing ads that appeal to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant on one hand, and Black Southern Baptist on the other, using all the stereotypes (both positive and negative) that go with those stereotypes.
So if Microsoft can know what I watch and target it, they'll just instead shove more lacklaster products my way that I'll have to fast forward through. Frankly, I'd rather have a random sampling of ads for me to choose, with no one's input but mine, to fast forward through or not.
I concur. During college (1990-1994) games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Dune II, Pirates Gold, and Civilization were renamed "the GPA destroyers". Why wrack your brains over Calc II when you could have fun conquoring imaginary worlds and have fun with your friends?
Computer games become a very immersive, brain-power/resource comsuming environment, so that when you get up to stretch, you find that way more time than you should have spent playing was spent doing something frivolous. Its similar to sports, where you have to completey concentrate on playing. Except with sports, your body tires out to let you know its time to rest. For computer games, your brain doesn't tire until your body says its time to sleep, which is far longer than the time to play a sport.
Was that time spent playing frivolous? No I didn't study for that Calc II test and my GPA suffered because of it, but, I did blow off steam, rather than doing the traditional college method of handling stress - going out and getting drunk.
Why do we play? - because its fun. Why do we play for long hours? - because its fun and it helps us unwind. Compared to how I've seen some people unwind, computer games, while they can result in us ignoring real people, are far better than getting drunk or taking drugs to relive life's pain and stress, and then doing something really stupid under the influence. The worst you'll do under a computer game is ignore someone. The worst you'll do under alcohol influence is put someone six feet under, if not yourself.
All that being said - I've had to pull myself away from games from time to time to rejoin the world of the living. But I still use it as a way to blow off steam and have fun.
Saudi Arabia is percieved as being a totalitarian regieme. Its not, its a monarchy, and their law is based upon Sharia law, not western democratic ideals. Under Sharia law, which is based upon the teaching of the Koran, THE religious book of Saudi Arabia, subversive and obscene material should be blocked and those who peddle it punished. If the persons peddling it are in another country, well then it falls upon the rulers to do the blocking, as they are responsible for upholding the Sharia law.
Since the majority of Saudi Arabia believes in Sharia Law as they believe in the Koran as the word of Allah/God, any government they have must follow these beliefs as well. Therefore, by blocking certain information, they are doing the will of the people, even if they didn't hold a referendum election to come to that conclusion.
You must remember that any government must adhere to the following phrase: "The Mob Rules". Piss off the mob and your rule comes to an end. If the Mob wants this subversive material blocked because it offends their religious beliefs, then the rulers WILL do it, because they're heavily outnumbered and in the case of Saudi Arabia, the population is almost as well armed as the police and army are.
I do think that a free democratic society is a better way to live. However, had I been born in a different country under a different belief system, I may feel differently. The point of my original post was not to say that censorship is justified, it was to state that you should look at the country in question through their belief system (as best as possible) before passing judgement on the rightness or wrongness of their actions.
"This is a radical assault on the spirit of the Net, of its open, point-to-point design, its great promise to democratize information."
I'll agree with some of what you write, but, I can't agree with all of it. We look at other governments and their policies through our own set of lenses, which paint things in terms of democracy, liberty, and all sorts of other American ideals. Now while I'm not saying the censorship certain nations apply should be aplogized for or encouraged, those nations have their own set of ideals and therefore, may not see things the way we do when it comes to certain civil rights. Take Saudi Arabia for example. You have a monarchy which has a strong fundamentalist religious belief system. So Saudi Arabia prevents its citizens from seeing porn and subversive material. We take offense. Did it occur to you that the majority of the Saudi Arabian citizenry may actually WANT those things blocked so their children or family cannot see the things which may offend them? Just as there are southern baptists who rant and rave over the local Rock and Roll concert and demand that it is banned, I suspect there are those in Saudi Arabia who do the same thing. The big difference is that for the most part, those rabid baptists get ignored. In Saudi Arabia, they are the majority and cannot be ignored. Certainly, there may be citizens in Saudi Arabia who don't like the censorship, but there is probably an equal or larger number who are glad that it is there. If the majority of the citizens don't want that information available, then they have the right to ask their government to block it.
Since different cultures have different belief systems, and put emphasis on different values, their version of the Net will be different than ours, and therefore, blocking certain information makes sense to them. So this isn't a radical assualt on the whole Net, just the American Centralized view of it. If the Internet is supposed to be the great democratizer, then no wonder it is viewed as a threat to a government or nation's culture. We already do a wonderful job destroying world cultures with our consumer-based culture, and now we have a method to send it out as fast as possible. Since a majority of the world's internet sites are US based, and designed by those with US values, the Net therefore looks like an American value-based highway of information. Perhaps the censorship, while not always good, may allow for the creation of local culture-based website, un-inspired (untainted perhaps?) by American-based web/net culture. Then they can send this information back out to the Net and we can learn about their unique point of view.
Let me say again that I don't support censorship, but I also don't agree that our value system should be shoved down other people's throats. For that matter, I don't think anyone's value system should be forced upon anyone else. Make the information available, but don't shove it. If they don't want to hear it, fine. Go pass it along to someone else then.
"It's the age-old debate; what follows the heart of the scientific method more? Peer review, or getting the information out as fast as possible?"
The scientific method is both peer review and the fast, free flow of information. Further, both are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate the two or say one is more important than the other. Without the free flow of information, one cannot cannot give a proper peer review of the work. Without good peer review, the information you get is garbage, thus clouding the review and making the knowledge suspect.
The work should be made open source after good review, not before. That way, you build upon that previous work such that the next scientific advancement is upon solid ground.
Good research is best accomplished by having all access to all information, so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel or relearn the experiments.
So why do some companies reproduce research that 10 other groups/companies are doing?
1. To see if the work can actually be reproduced. Patents are notoriously unreliable for their reproduciblity in the chemical sector.
2. To learn more about the technology, to either improve it or use it for another project. By doing the experiments yourself, you get a lot of knowledge that is never written down on paper.
3. Having a completely different group of scientists working on a research project can lead to a completely different way of interpreting the results. Therefore, the conclusions and applications of the research are different. (Diversity of thought!)
4. The idiots forgot to do a literature search before starting their project. This unfortunately happens more often than it should.
It does look like at first glance that reproducing other previously done work is a waste of time. However, given the advantages of the first 3 points, it will continue to occur this way, and for the benefit of science, it probably should.
"The problem being addressed by the petition isn't what is published in peer-reviewed journals, its what isn't being published."
There are several reasons for scientific research being published. Sometimes its because it is tied up in IP issues. Other times its because the work did not pass peer review and the original researchers decided not to press the issue. Or, the original researchers decided not to do additional research to answer the reviewer's comments. Finally, it may be because the experiments did not work. The sheer amount of information that is not made public because the experiment was a failure is staggering. To try and go through all that though, may or may not be of benefit.
All that being said, I do agree that making scientific techniques proprietary does slow the advance of science. However, there are cases where you don't want the technique to become common knowledge. The Manhattan Project is a perfect example of this.
Thanks for the info. If the metal gets trapped in the bacteria and it sinks to the bottom of the artificial wetland, then it should stay there and eventually get mineralized.
However, if the wetland causes the finely atomized metals to get into the water table, then you have the same problem all over again, perhaps even worse than before. Big chunks of toxic metal are a lot harder to dissolve in groundwater than the fine colloidal metals that the bacteria are going to make.
Then again - if you make an artifical wetland and put it over bedrock, you should be fine. However, if animals come to drink, they'll start to spread the surface contained heavy metal bacteria into the local food chain.
While this bioremediation technology looks real cool at first glance, and creates lots of beer jokes, I can see one potential flaw with it, unless I'm missing something. The flaw is that all that toxic lead and zinc have to go somewhere, even if the bacteria chew it up and remediate the soil. So where are the heavy metals going?
My guess is that they are taken up by the bacteria and somehow locked into a protein structure, putting the metal in the bacteria cell and not in the ground. Okay fine, you've gotten the toxic metal out of the ground and into the bacteria, but now what? If the bacteria are just left in the soil, they'll eventually decay and rather than having large chunks of zinc and lead laying around, you'll have atomisically dispersed metal all over the place.
I wish the popular science article had been more specific or verbose in how the whole thing would be engineered. My guess is that they'll have to somehow separate the soil from the bacterial colonies and burn the colony to collect the pure metal. The metal can then be recycled or stored safely. Separating the soil from the bacteria though is going to be very difficult.
I remember a similar technology that used plants to remove mercury from contaminated water streams rather than using bacteria. The scientists took a swamp plant that naturally had an affinity for mercury ions, and selectively bred/genetically engineered the plants to have even more affinity for the toxic mercury ions. The plants roots when then dangle in the waste streams, removing the ions and moving it to the leaves (natural defense mechanism as it turns out - animals and some bugs don't want to eat mercury-toxic leaves). After awhile the plants could be "harvested" and burned, where the mercury metal could then be collected, distilled, and recycled.
Given the sucess of the above approach (its now used by several companies that sometimes have mercury metal in their chemical waste streams) I'm surprised that a similar approach isn't used here.
If any of you out there know how this whole process works, or where these metals are going, please let me know via this forum, I'm very interested in finding out.
You are correct, there are certain types of bacteria that have the right enzymes to break down hydrocarbons into units the bacteria can actually use as food/cell-building chemicals.
The only problem with them is that like almost all bacteria, they are UV sensitive, so they were most effective at night and under the oil slick. In the morning, most of the colonies would get wiped out by the sunlight.
These bacteria are slightly different in that they seem to be breaking down not hydrocarbon (oil) waste, but heavy metal waste. What I couldn't glean from the article was what the bacteria are doing with the waste once they injest it. Yes, they've broken it down, but you have to atomistic/matter conservation here, so the toxic zinc and other heavy metals have to go somewhere. Since beer is needed to feed the bacteria, they're obviously not using the heavy metals to generate more of themselves or create some special zinc-containing enzyme. My guess is that the bacteria break down the toxic form of the zinc/heavy metals and turn it into something easier for the environment to handle. However, I have no idea here what those bacteria are doing with it. I wish the popular science article had been more verbose in scientific content.
I agree, it does sound a bit too fake. Perhaps it was sent by the same US commandos to help ensure winning the propaganda war.
Unless this guy is talking about an souped-up Commodore Amiga, I can't see him having any success doing any of the things he's claiming he's currently doing, unless he's got satellite access. I had thought just about all phone lines and servers that could connect with Afghanistan were under severe control so Al Qaeda could not send instructions out or get information in. For this guy to just wander around like nothing has changed seems a bit implausible.
I don't see the practicalities killing it in the marketplace at all. We can refill inkjet cartridges if one wants to - or just buy new ones.
Further, Methanol is VERY cheap. Almost cheaper than the rubbing alcohol (isopropanol) you buy from the drug store. Even if you need HPLC grade (that's very high purity material used for High Pressure Liquid Chromatography to purify pharmaceuticals. Small impurities can destroy the instrument and mess up the purification) methanol you can buy 4 liters of it for $50.00, and that would last you a very long time. If demand for the material increased, you can get it from oxidizing methane or fermenting certain types of wood chips.
Bottom line is this - if the American public can handle isopropanol, cleaning solutions, and refilling their inkjet cartridges, they can handle refilling the methanol fuel cells.
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I'm not so sure that fixing the chips is a big breakthough, as it sounds like they're suggesting they'll get a lot more defects and not be able to mass produce chips. In fact, the comment that almost each chip will be different suggests a serious problem with their approach.
Remember all the stink over the Pentium II (or was it III?) that had some computing errors in numbers past the 6 or 7th digit? Now if no two chips are the same, how are you going to guarentee that chip A runs a protocol correctly when chip B, designed for the same application, has all its chip-innards set up differently, such that certain logic gates work differently and give different results for the same protocol? Perhaps each chip will indeed be customizable, but if you're producing 1000s of chips per day, do you really want 1000 different chips if you've got orders for 950 in one application and 50 in another? If no chips are the same due to this technology, what a QC nightmare this would be. No one would by it because they could never guarentee that your PC is going to act the same as everyone else's.
I don't know, the whole thing sounds quarter-baked, not even half-baked. My concern is that when these type of annoucements come out, it suggests that the company:
A) Is so far ahead of everyone else they can afford to brag and advertise thier technological edge.
B) Has developed something that's great for technological capablity PR, but is so impossible or impractical to put into practice that revealing its existance is designed to throw competitors off track. Companies tend to publish results when they can't patent it or if they think others are getting ready to patent it and they want to prevent others from getting exclusive rights to it.
I'll admit there is the possiblity HP is onto something, but I think category B above is probably more appropriate here.
Not so. As you get down to smaller scales, sometimes heat dissapation becomes easier as there are different methods of heat release than just fans and heat sink.
Basicailly it depends on the structure of the chip. If its inorganic semiconductors, which have to push heat through a rigid crystalline structure, then they tend to hold onto their heat longer due to poor heat conductivity. Therefore, they tend to heat up and stay heated up, and it takes more effort to cool them.
However, while no details were given, the tech probably won't be inorganic semiconductor based, and therefore could just release heat by the release of energy through the chemical bonds in the structure. You would get some heat, but some of that energy would get converted into moving electrons back and forth in each of the molecular bonds. In fact, its possible that they're relying up on the heat to get certain atoms to jump to higher energy state, thus turning a switch on or off, and when they rapidly cool back down, they activate or shut off the switch as appropriate.
Then again, its very likely they haven't considered this, and the first time they hook it up and starting running computations there is a puff of smoke and the chip is now CO2 and ash.
I agree. The experiment looks neat, but I need more details. If they put the light energy into the atoms and jump it up to an excited state, how do they keep it there and prevent it from coming back down to ground state and letting the light go? My guess is that the Neodynamium (Nd) atoms have something to do with it. Perhaps they can handle the light energy and stay in an excited state for longer. Or, perhaps the energy is converted electrons in the outer shells of the Nd atoms, thus changing their oxidation state in the crystal. Its not unheard of for light to change oxidation states in crystals so this could be the route/mechanism which allows this to occur.
I agree most of all with the speculation bit. I do not see how this will open up quantum computing. Unless they can show that the stored light energy causes energy states of the atoms to entangle and become coherent, thus doing calculations based on the coherence or lack of coherence of the energy states/orbitals, I fail to see how this sort of energy storage is the breakthrough on the way to quantum computing.
Actually, they don't say anything about the degradation in the article. Since the light is trapped/distributed among the atoms in the crystal, my guess is that degradation time will be increased, as the extra energy trapped in the atoms has to escape through a rigid matrix, vs. a gaseous flexible matrix as was previously mentioned.
What I can't figure out is what they're really doing. Without the 2nd laser, the effect doesn't occur. Therefore, are they doing some sort of destructive interference, rather than "storing" light? Or, are they using the 2nd laser to tune the yttrium silicate+Nd atoms to "accept" extra light energy without releasing it? Normally you put that much extra energy into an atom, and it will try to release that energy to get back to ground state. The energy can be released as heat, light, or kinetic energy. I wonder how hot the crystal gets while its holding the light? Also, they don't say what the quantum yield is of the light after release. I'm guessing it must be high, otherwise they wouldn't be promoting this.
That's his name! Thanks. That was who I was referring to. I knew he had been murdered - although I won't even speculate on who did it, there's plenty of speculation already out there.
I wish I could laugh at this...except that's the way it is now in the Physical Sciences, except you don't get royalties unless your advisor decides to include you in the patent.
More importantly, you never see anything from the patents because the Universities get too greedy when it comes to liscencing - and therefore, no one ever liscences it. So you waste your time pursuing a patent when you should have just published it.
As for the Ph.D. - students right now already are cheap labor - more like indentured servitude. You work you way to a Ph.D. and freedom. Students already are exploited as cheap labor and the Universities get away with it in the name of "education". Now all the work experience is indeed practical education, but the rights of the student to work he or she created are almost non-existant.
Funny you should mention that...
An American scientist during the 80s (I can't remember his name, but there have been shows about him and his work on Discovery and TLC) thought about creating a massive artillery piece for launching satellites into orbit. The artillery "barrel" would be almost half a mile long, and it would be a large facility. The US wasn't interested in it, and the scientist, very interested in promoting the tech, went to other countries to promote it. Eventually ended up in Iraq selling the tech to Saddam, where it actually started getting built. It was one of the "weapons of mass destruction" destroyed during the gulf war.
I don't think the idea was ever put into actual practice, but if you can lob a several ton shell across countries, you might be able to change the trajectory such that the satellite cuts through the ionisphere (sp?) and can obtain a stable orbit.
Emphasis on the word little. It has about as much flammable liquid, and heat output, as a full zippo lighter.
Unless you can make a molotov cocktail out of a zipplo lighter, you're not going to be able to do much with these fuel cells either.
Now 20+ fuel cells all taped together, that's a bit different. However, the units would be sealed, so you'd have to put fuses into each, which breaks the integretity of the system, and the methanol evaporates before it gets a chance to ignite.
The other thing here is that methanol burns much cooler than the kerosene/sterno/whatever you're putting into a molotov cocktail. Therefore, its destructive power and fire hazard level is much less than the before mentioned Zippo full of butane, which burns much hotter.
The nanotechnology they are referring to is commericial technology that isn't really nanotechnology, unless you count the structure of the solid phase metal oxide catalyst nanotechnology. I'm guessing they're referring to the size of the metal oxide which does all the chemical work of converting the methanol to hydrogen and CO2. If so, then they're using NMOs (Nanoscale Metal Oxides) as catalysts, and this technology has been around for quite awhile and is in use today. Technically, NMOs are "nanotechnology" in that the active structure is nanoscale sized. But its not the type of nanotechnology most people think of.
The fuel cells mentioned are probably based on technology that came out of Los Alamos about 4-5 years ago. It used a ceramic support for the NMOs (cerium oxide I think) to convert the methanol into hydrogen and CO2. The hydrogen then gets "burned" to generate energy and water. Again, this isn't blue sky stuff, it exists now.
Interestingly, water-based fuel cells can work as well. Some prototypes exist, but they're solar powered and the catalysts which breaks the water down into hydrogen and oxygen don't have a lot of catalytic cycles before they die. Also, they're VERY expensive, which is the big reason why they're not being used, even if they have great potential use.
Or ECM.
Decommissioned ECM pods now sitting in Russian Aerodromes and/or US Military Surplus sites from the 60's had the power to fry radar electronics from a mile or so away.
FCC regs don't require shielding from this type of high power frequency.
Heck - a good electromagnet or a junkyard magnet could do a similar number on the place.
I can't agree with this. Banning a class of software does make sense, just as it makes sense banning something so dangerous it should not be open to those who don't know how to use it properly. Certain actions do not always classify as free speech, especially if they damage something.
Is a computer program that one created to do something damaging really free speech? Okay, lets say they add a political message to the virus, which flashes the political message over and over on the computer screen. This isn't quite free speech - its vandalism. If I used spray paint to put my political views on the side of one's car to make a point - I'd get tried for vandalism and no free speech argument would protect me. For the virus, you've taken over someone's computer and temporarily vandalized it. The spraypaint on the car and the virus can both be removed, returning the item to original condition, but damage was still done.
So lets take this further. Lets say I write a virus with a political message that "capitalism is evil" with a destructive payload that erases all the non-freeware programs. Now this virus makes its way to a water treatment plant, and screws up computer-operated water handling system. The erased program causes the pump to go to its defualt mode, which causes several hundred thousand gallons of sewage (read e-coli contaminated) to be forced into the clean water tank. Several people get sick and some elderly and children die. I've now used a tool, with no real benefit to others (except those who know how to use it to look for security holes) as my method of free speech. Should I be tried for terrorism or manslaughter? You bet! Whether or not this scenario could happen, it is possible, and therefore, it suggests that the tool should be banned, or at least restricted in access.
Some tools are meant to be restricted for a reason, because when used improperly they can cause huge amounts of damage. Therefore we ban their use except to those authorized (and trustworthy) enough to use them. Certain biological techniques have been voluntarily banned due to their danger they could cause to humanity in general. I'm not talking about cloning, but some very complicated retrovirus techniques which created a cold virus that creates cancer. The Austrialian lab that created this realized what it had done, destroyed all the work, and asked the few other researchers to drop this line of research until controls could be put in place. The ban was accepted, and it makes perfect sense.
Virus programs do nothing constructuve except find security holes. So it makes sense for computer security experts to use them in controlled settings, but to make them available to the public does not make sense.
All that being said, the technology and know-how is already out there, so one can't put the genie back in the bottle in regards to viruses. However, we can ban their use in the public when damage is caused by them, provided we actually enforce the law. If we don't enforce it, then we shouldn't even bother passing the law.
According to the download site, it only affects Windows 98 and Windows 98 2nd edition if "XP ICS" is installed.
"I've always said that I'm cool with my Tivo tracking what I watch, provided it never tells anyone my name and address to anyone. If it meant I watched more targetted advertisements, I'd fast forward less."
The whole idea behind cookies and tracking what I watch or someone watches to personalize advertizing frankly doesn't work. Why?, because that information is used to develop stereotypes for the advertising industry to appeal to. Since its impossible, even with cookies and other collected internet information, to properly read our minds, Advertisers instead go with broad generalized stereotypes to appeal to. Think I'm kidding? Notice how they run certain ads only on certain channels during specific shows designed to appeal to a chief "demographic". The advertising world has no problem designing ads that appeal to the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant on one hand, and Black Southern Baptist on the other, using all the stereotypes (both positive and negative) that go with those stereotypes.
So if Microsoft can know what I watch and target it, they'll just instead shove more lacklaster products my way that I'll have to fast forward through. Frankly, I'd rather have a random sampling of ads for me to choose, with no one's input but mine, to fast forward through or not.
I concur. During college (1990-1994) games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Dune II, Pirates Gold, and Civilization were renamed "the GPA destroyers". Why wrack your brains over Calc II when you could have fun conquoring imaginary worlds and have fun with your friends?
Computer games become a very immersive, brain-power/resource comsuming environment, so that when you get up to stretch, you find that way more time than you should have spent playing was spent doing something frivolous. Its similar to sports, where you have to completey concentrate on playing. Except with sports, your body tires out to let you know its time to rest. For computer games, your brain doesn't tire until your body says its time to sleep, which is far longer than the time to play a sport.
Was that time spent playing frivolous? No I didn't study for that Calc II test and my GPA suffered because of it, but, I did blow off steam, rather than doing the traditional college method of handling stress - going out and getting drunk.
Why do we play? - because its fun. Why do we play for long hours? - because its fun and it helps us unwind. Compared to how I've seen some people unwind, computer games, while they can result in us ignoring real people, are far better than getting drunk or taking drugs to relive life's pain and stress, and then doing something really stupid under the influence. The worst you'll do under a computer game is ignore someone. The worst you'll do under alcohol influence is put someone six feet under, if not yourself.
All that being said - I've had to pull myself away from games from time to time to rejoin the world of the living. But I still use it as a way to blow off steam and have fun.
These mutants are already out there - try watching ESPN2's "World's Strongest Man Competitions" and you'll see what I mean.
Absolute brutes - they probably were born that way and exercise/steroids did the rest.
Saudi Arabia is percieved as being a totalitarian regieme. Its not, its a monarchy, and their law is based upon Sharia law, not western democratic ideals. Under Sharia law, which is based upon the teaching of the Koran, THE religious book of Saudi Arabia, subversive and obscene material should be blocked and those who peddle it punished. If the persons peddling it are in another country, well then it falls upon the rulers to do the blocking, as they are responsible for upholding the Sharia law.
Since the majority of Saudi Arabia believes in Sharia Law as they believe in the Koran as the word of Allah/God, any government they have must follow these beliefs as well. Therefore, by blocking certain information, they are doing the will of the people, even if they didn't hold a referendum election to come to that conclusion.
You must remember that any government must adhere to the following phrase: "The Mob Rules". Piss off the mob and your rule comes to an end. If the Mob wants this subversive material blocked because it offends their religious beliefs, then the rulers WILL do it, because they're heavily outnumbered and in the case of Saudi Arabia, the population is almost as well armed as the police and army are.
I do think that a free democratic society is a better way to live. However, had I been born in a different country under a different belief system, I may feel differently. The point of my original post was not to say that censorship is justified, it was to state that you should look at the country in question through their belief system (as best as possible) before passing judgement on the rightness or wrongness of their actions.
"This is a radical assault on the spirit of the Net, of its open, point-to-point design, its great promise to democratize information."
I'll agree with some of what you write, but, I can't agree with all of it. We look at other governments and their policies through our own set of lenses, which paint things in terms of democracy, liberty, and all sorts of other American ideals. Now while I'm not saying the censorship certain nations apply should be aplogized for or encouraged, those nations have their own set of ideals and therefore, may not see things the way we do when it comes to certain civil rights. Take Saudi Arabia for example. You have a monarchy which has a strong fundamentalist religious belief system. So Saudi Arabia prevents its citizens from seeing porn and subversive material. We take offense. Did it occur to you that the majority of the Saudi Arabian citizenry may actually WANT those things blocked so their children or family cannot see the things which may offend them? Just as there are southern baptists who rant and rave over the local Rock and Roll concert and demand that it is banned, I suspect there are those in Saudi Arabia who do the same thing. The big difference is that for the most part, those rabid baptists get ignored. In Saudi Arabia, they are the majority and cannot be ignored. Certainly, there may be citizens in Saudi Arabia who don't like the censorship, but there is probably an equal or larger number who are glad that it is there. If the majority of the citizens don't want that information available, then they have the right to ask their government to block it.
Since different cultures have different belief systems, and put emphasis on different values, their version of the Net will be different than ours, and therefore, blocking certain information makes sense to them. So this isn't a radical assualt on the whole Net, just the American Centralized view of it. If the Internet is supposed to be the great democratizer, then no wonder it is viewed as a threat to a government or nation's culture. We already do a wonderful job destroying world cultures with our consumer-based culture, and now we have a method to send it out as fast as possible. Since a majority of the world's internet sites are US based, and designed by those with US values, the Net therefore looks like an American value-based highway of information. Perhaps the censorship, while not always good, may allow for the creation of local culture-based website, un-inspired (untainted perhaps?) by American-based web/net culture. Then they can send this information back out to the Net and we can learn about their unique point of view.
Let me say again that I don't support censorship, but I also don't agree that our value system should be shoved down other people's throats. For that matter, I don't think anyone's value system should be forced upon anyone else. Make the information available, but don't shove it. If they don't want to hear it, fine. Go pass it along to someone else then.
"It's the age-old debate; what follows the heart of the scientific method more? Peer review, or getting the information out as fast as possible?"
The scientific method is both peer review and the fast, free flow of information. Further, both are so intertwined that it is impossible to separate the two or say one is more important than the other. Without the free flow of information, one cannot cannot give a proper peer review of the work. Without good peer review, the information you get is garbage, thus clouding the review and making the knowledge suspect.
The work should be made open source after good review, not before. That way, you build upon that previous work such that the next scientific advancement is upon solid ground.
Good research is best accomplished by having all access to all information, so that you don't have to re-invent the wheel or relearn the experiments.
So why do some companies reproduce research that 10 other groups/companies are doing?
1. To see if the work can actually be reproduced. Patents are notoriously unreliable for their reproduciblity in the chemical sector.
2. To learn more about the technology, to either improve it or use it for another project. By doing the experiments yourself, you get a lot of knowledge that is never written down on paper.
3. Having a completely different group of scientists working on a research project can lead to a completely different way of interpreting the results. Therefore, the conclusions and applications of the research are different. (Diversity of thought!)
4. The idiots forgot to do a literature search before starting their project. This unfortunately happens more often than it should.
It does look like at first glance that reproducing other previously done work is a waste of time. However, given the advantages of the first 3 points, it will continue to occur this way, and for the benefit of science, it probably should.
"The problem being addressed by the petition isn't what is published in peer-reviewed journals, its what isn't being published."
There are several reasons for scientific research being published. Sometimes its because it is tied up in IP issues. Other times its because the work did not pass peer review and the original researchers decided not to press the issue. Or, the original researchers decided not to do additional research to answer the reviewer's comments. Finally, it may be because the experiments did not work. The sheer amount of information that is not made public because the experiment was a failure is staggering. To try and go through all that though, may or may not be of benefit.
All that being said, I do agree that making scientific techniques proprietary does slow the advance of science. However, there are cases where you don't want the technique to become common knowledge. The Manhattan Project is a perfect example of this.
Thanks for the info. If the metal gets trapped in the bacteria and it sinks to the bottom of the artificial wetland, then it should stay there and eventually get mineralized.
However, if the wetland causes the finely atomized metals to get into the water table, then you have the same problem all over again, perhaps even worse than before. Big chunks of toxic metal are a lot harder to dissolve in groundwater than the fine colloidal metals that the bacteria are going to make.
Then again - if you make an artifical wetland and put it over bedrock, you should be fine. However, if animals come to drink, they'll start to spread the surface contained heavy metal bacteria into the local food chain.
While this bioremediation technology looks real cool at first glance, and creates lots of beer jokes, I can see one potential flaw with it, unless I'm missing something. The flaw is that all that toxic lead and zinc have to go somewhere, even if the bacteria chew it up and remediate the soil. So where are the heavy metals going?
My guess is that they are taken up by the bacteria and somehow locked into a protein structure, putting the metal in the bacteria cell and not in the ground. Okay fine, you've gotten the toxic metal out of the ground and into the bacteria, but now what? If the bacteria are just left in the soil, they'll eventually decay and rather than having large chunks of zinc and lead laying around, you'll have atomisically dispersed metal all over the place.
I wish the popular science article had been more specific or verbose in how the whole thing would be engineered. My guess is that they'll have to somehow separate the soil from the bacterial colonies and burn the colony to collect the pure metal. The metal can then be recycled or stored safely. Separating the soil from the bacteria though is going to be very difficult.
I remember a similar technology that used plants to remove mercury from contaminated water streams rather than using bacteria. The scientists took a swamp plant that naturally had an affinity for mercury ions, and selectively bred/genetically engineered the plants to have even more affinity for the toxic mercury ions. The plants roots when then dangle in the waste streams, removing the ions and moving it to the leaves (natural defense mechanism as it turns out - animals and some bugs don't want to eat mercury-toxic leaves). After awhile the plants could be "harvested" and burned, where the mercury metal could then be collected, distilled, and recycled.
Given the sucess of the above approach (its now used by several companies that sometimes have mercury metal in their chemical waste streams) I'm surprised that a similar approach isn't used here.
If any of you out there know how this whole process works, or where these metals are going, please let me know via this forum, I'm very interested in finding out.
You are correct, there are certain types of bacteria that have the right enzymes to break down hydrocarbons into units the bacteria can actually use as food/cell-building chemicals.
The only problem with them is that like almost all bacteria, they are UV sensitive, so they were most effective at night and under the oil slick. In the morning, most of the colonies would get wiped out by the sunlight.
These bacteria are slightly different in that they seem to be breaking down not hydrocarbon (oil) waste, but heavy metal waste. What I couldn't glean from the article was what the bacteria are doing with the waste once they injest it. Yes, they've broken it down, but you have to atomistic/matter conservation here, so the toxic zinc and other heavy metals have to go somewhere. Since beer is needed to feed the bacteria, they're obviously not using the heavy metals to generate more of themselves or create some special zinc-containing enzyme. My guess is that the bacteria break down the toxic form of the zinc/heavy metals and turn it into something easier for the environment to handle. However, I have no idea here what those bacteria are doing with it. I wish the popular science article had been more verbose in scientific content.
I agree, it does sound a bit too fake. Perhaps it was sent by the same US commandos to help ensure winning the propaganda war.
Unless this guy is talking about an souped-up Commodore Amiga, I can't see him having any success doing any of the things he's claiming he's currently doing, unless he's got satellite access. I had thought just about all phone lines and servers that could connect with Afghanistan were under severe control so Al Qaeda could not send instructions out or get information in. For this guy to just wander around like nothing has changed seems a bit implausible.
I don't see the practicalities killing it in the marketplace at all. We can refill inkjet cartridges if one wants to - or just buy new ones.
Further, Methanol is VERY cheap. Almost cheaper than the rubbing alcohol (isopropanol) you buy from the drug store. Even if you need HPLC grade (that's very high purity material used for High Pressure Liquid Chromatography to purify pharmaceuticals. Small impurities can destroy the instrument and mess up the purification) methanol you can buy 4 liters of it for $50.00, and that would last you a very long time. If demand for the material increased, you can get it from oxidizing methane or fermenting certain types of wood chips.
Bottom line is this - if the American public can handle isopropanol, cleaning solutions, and refilling their inkjet cartridges, they can handle refilling the methanol fuel cells.