I doubt CPUs will have much competition from this technology, but how about memory based on some kind of crossbar design? Make one sheet vertical one sheet horizontal bond together with some exotic ingredient and voilà -- a high density ROM material. HD movies on a postage stamp.
And neutrons will crash into other nuclei and there will be secondary fissions and fusions. Neither fission nor fusion is an entirely straight forward reaction with only one set of byproducts. Muon catalyzed fusion produces gamma rays directly.
Our own star the Sun produces gamma rays from the PP-I fusion chain
4 1H 1 4He + 2 positrons + 2 neutrinos + 2 gamma rays
The by-products provide the source of luminosity:
* Positrons: anti-electrons (e+) - collide with electrons (e-)
* Neutrinos: rapidly escape from the star
* Gamma rays (photons): travel outwards through star
interacting many times with atomic gas.
Energy is also provided by the PP-II and PP-III chains
"Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view."
Why can't multi-cast be pay-per-view? You download a key you pay for ahead of time and then decrypt what is streamed to everyone. Moreover you could download a broadcast and then pay later for a key to decrypt it. You could even have the cost for live events go down by how long the delay between the download and buying the key.
Granted there will be piracy, but for live sporting events this would probably work very well as the pirates wouldn't be able to get the pirated material decrypted quick enough to post, nor post the crack and software for intercepting the broadcast in real-time quickly enough (though some computer savvy users may manage some of the latter).
If memory serves correctly the very first few Shuttle flights lost ENTIRE tiles (plural) and came back safely. There was much concern and debate over the adhesives used to attach them -- that problem was corrected. A gouge in a tile is NOT the same thing as a WHOLE in the leading edge of a wing.
If so, only briefly if at all. The zone of habitable rock will get higher and higher in the strata as the above surface temperatures rise since the internally generated heat from radioactive decay cannot radiate to the surface and into space, thus raising temperates below ground in lock step with temperatures above ground.
I guess I should have specified FULL HD-DVD burners. These are only single layer. So with what you are posting it isn't 50 vs 30, but 50 vs 15. Why would anyone bother upgrading to go from 9G to 15G?
Are you sure HD-DVD Burners work? I challenge you to find even one for sale. Toshiba announced the first one back in Jan 2007, but it keeps getting delayed. Still no firm ship date. You can find several 2x Blu-Ray burners and 4x and 8x models on the way.
HD-DVD burners don't work because the layer widths were designed for red light lasers. The duplication process is more like stamping than burning which is why they can get away using the old DVD duplication equipment with some minor retrofitting. Blu-Ray was designed from the start as a burner. There have been Blu-Ray burners since 2005 for over the air transmission recording.
HD-DVD's whole premise was to be quick and cheap for duplication houses. Since Blu-Ray disc prices are on average cheaper than HD-DVD, these seems not to have mattered.
"This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
I'm curious just where this speculation was forwarded. Is there some UFO magazine with articles like "Egg Shape Saucers -- How Easy to Fly" or "Egg shaped versus conventional Plate shaped, which Flying Saucer is right for your intergalactic traveling needs?" or better yet is Consumer Reports planning a Fly Saucer Safety issue? "Flying Saucer Roll Over Crash Test Results -- Egg Shaped Models perform poorly"
A majority of American's are against illegal immigration. A majority of American's are against profiling. So what alternative do you propose to identify legitimate citizens from illegal aliens? Your papers analogies is actually rather weak as a national ID only identifies you are a legal US Citizen. Whereas the point of "papers" in the past was to show where citizens had permission to move to and from and were checked frequently at checkpoints. The police would only be able to ask for it when there is clear evidence of crime. It wouldn't be required to be on your person, you just would for convenience like your driver's license to confirm your identity when needed.
My wife is from China, and while they don't have papers they have to carry around with them, they are not free to just pick up an live wherever they wish. I really doubt this will come to pass even with a National ID.
People always trot out these objections based on knee jerk emotional reactions to abuses in the past. The proposed boarder along our Mexican border gets similar jeers although the reason for its need is exactly the opposite of the reason for the Berlin Wall.
I for one would concentrate on protecting our Freedom of Speech rights (for which you are entitled to your opinion in this) and challenge to you suggest a feasible alternative that safeguards our borders, cuts down on illegal immigration, and possible terrorist activity. I don't live my life in fear of terrorism, but as the husband of Chinese national who has played by the rules and lived apart from my wife for TWO YEARS, I really do chafe at proposals to give illegals a faster easier way in than for those of us playing by the rules.
Maybe without a National ID we will never have another major successful terrorist attack, but I guarantee we will have such an ID in the wake of one.
I use to have a machine that BSOD on upgrade to service pack 2. Office 2007 won't install on pre SP2. From another machine I used Word 2007 to send out resumes to several prospective employers only to have them request 1997-2003 format because they couldn't read my Word documents. I do government work now and where I work they have standardized on Windows 2000 with the Office 2003. I doubt Office 2007 would work on their machines and for reasons of security and stability and having gotten so many machines all working together smoothly they won't be upgrading to XP anytime soon. Maybe Windows 2000 is inferior to XP in most aspects, but big organizations HATE reworking everything to get it to work again when they have work to get done TODAY.
You can save 1997-2003 format from 2007, but it doesn't do it by default.
When I upgraded my Wife's machine to IE7 it broke all her access to bank accounts, which ironically would inform her she needed to "upgrade" to IE6.
This is just the kind of crap that will cause OS to win eventually (even if it is still years off). BTW, we use a mix of Windows and Linux and we UPGRADE the Linux all the time -- no big deal.
So 9-11 conspiracy theorists say the towers couldn't come down because "steel doesn't melt" this is a direct quote from Rosie O'Donnell -- so I provide two facts, steel doesn't have to melt to become weakened, and a steel and concrete overpass where fire was enough to bring it down. But does not counter Rosie's argument? Not in the mind of 9-11 theorists, who now have to make linear extrapolations from the amount of fuel to conclude the example has no bearing. Actual building engineers have gone over this and concluded the fire and forces involved were enough to bring the buildings down, I merely provide another example that shows the concept that fire can melt steel is sound. The folks at PBS and NPR are hardly shills for a Bush cover-up and they conclude in investigative reports that there were two factors leading to the buildings' collapsing. One the initial explosion blasted insulation away from the supporting columns and two that once the support members began to sage they pulled away from the outer shell of the building thus losing all support and initiated the pancaking already mentioned. Conditions never anticipated by the original architects.
But what does it matter what I say, you are bound and determined to conclude what you want. In your world there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of government agents frantically working to suppress the truth. All on board and approving the slaughter of thousands of American citizens for some vague and ill-defined purpose, because people with money and power can never have enough, and like step 2 for the underpants gnomes this gives it to them somehow. And amazing not one of them ever come forward to denounce the huge fraud, when in general politicians can't even cover up a the most innocuous in house memos.
This was a big news story a few weeks back. At the time they mentioned the gallons of fuel and I immediately googled to compare it to the fuel capacity of a 747 and was shocked how much fuel a 747 needs. Ferrying 500 people upto 12,000 miles if fuel-efficient compared to the same distance by car, but it is still A LOT of fuel.
As to why WTC7 collapsed, why would our Government feel the need to collapse an un-hit building? It would surely just lead people like you to say "what about WTC7?!?!" WTC7 was smaller than the other two towers, really big to be sure, but smaller. While the two towers collapsed straight downward their debris shot out at their bases, with not just tons of material, but with hundreds of thousands of tons of material (together the two main towers weighed approximately a MILLON tons!), much of which slammed into the base of WTC7. The fact that it didn't collapse immediately is similar to why the other towers didn't collapse immediately. Once huge structures like these are compromised it can take minutes or hours for the sagging support columns to finally deform so much that they reach a point where those above them snap and give way completely. Add to this there were fires in WTC7 that where not being attended to due to all the attention on the other buildings and the difficulty of getting past the afore mentioned debris. While the two main towers may have been designed on paper to withstand an airplane hit -- WTC7 was never designed to withstand being bulldozed at its base with what amounts to hundreds of bulldozers simultaneously at huge velocity.
Again, I am sure your unconvinced, because no mater how many logical explanations I can provide your camp will hang on anything that seems anomalous to support a conspiracy theory that validates a certain view of our government. No matter that you or Sean Penn or Rosie O'Donnell or thousands of other bloggers have no training or expertise to decide what is anomalous or not.
Designed to be struck by a fully fueled 747 you say. And how many Megastructures did they fly fully fueled 747s into to test this? Buildings and bridges are designed to withstand lots of damage in theory, and yet several large bridges have come down in the past few decade under circumstances they were "designed" to withstand.
There was an overpass that recently collapsed after a tanker truck accident. The steel and concrete melted and that was with 1/6 the amount of fuel that a 747 carries. Keep in mind the steel doesn't have to "melt" just soften. You ever see ye-old smithy making horseshoes? He doesn't melt them into a mold, he heats them up so the can be bent easily with a hammer.
The two towers quite clearly started their collapse at the point of impact where the planes went in. The fact that they went straight down is because they are FUCKING HUMONGOUSLY HEAVY AND BIG. Once they start to collapse it is called pancaking. It is a well know phenomenon caused by trillions of ergs of pent up potential energy in the form of gravity -- the energy to lift all the stuff in the first stuff to enormous heights.
I'm quite sure my explanations will be inadequate for you. Logical explanation is impervious to someone that chooses to believe something for ideological reasons -- political or religious.
Some of these stories have merit, some are exaggerated, and some are spun to make America look bad because private industries have commercial interests in turbulent regions of the world. I see no evidence that the 9-11 conspiracy theory has been "censored." US celebrities like Rosie O'Donnel and Sean Penn bring this one up all the time. Just like you can find the strange stray biologist that supports creationism, this camp has found one stray physicist to support this conspiracy crap. By including it in the list just shows the list on whole to be an agenda disguised as journalism by pandering to a left leaning fan base.
Now before I'm attacked as a right wing kook, let me say I tend to be a liberal on social issues, and think there are plenty of stories that need more attention when it comes to social fairness. But just because people yawn or don't believe you, doesn't mean you are being censored. I'd say about half of this list is the proponents just being crybabies that the public (rightly or wrongly) doesn't care more. Maybe the authors should find irrefutable evidence for their assertions or write in more challenging ways that defies being ignored.
From the article, "Surprisingly, it is very hard to pin down the age of a star." Well, duh, I could have told you that. Who ever heard of a star revealing their age. It may just be a coincidence, but I believe 13.2 billion years is the age of Joan Collins.
Lets take a very trivial example of a two-antenna setup doubling bandwidth. If you have one transmission tower to your south and one to your north and you have directional antennas pointed at both you have multiplexed your signal spatially and nearly doubled your transmission rate in the same bandwidth. Multipath makes this harder too tease out, but that's what signal processing is for. Are you really telling me someone with two directional antennas can't tease out two different stations in two different directions? And that is with NO signal processing.
I'm pretty sure the people that made the BLAST demo system back in 2002 know more about this than you do. Yes there is a higher noise to signal ratio, but as long as our multiplexing multiples rise faster than this ratio then we are getting more information. Shannon's laws only apply to single channels, spatial multiplexing adds more channels as would polarization.
Two is actually pretty small. There was a system proposed back in 2002 by the acronym BLAST (Bell Lab Layered Space Time) that used up to 8 transmitters. As was noted in another reply if we go with a new transmission method we might as well go for a different encoding scheme like MPEG4 as well and double the available bandwidth again. We might as well go with more than 2 transmitters as well to more than double the bandwidth. This stuff does require A LOT of horse power in signal processing to tease the signals apart especially when you factor in multpath reflection (which is considered somewhat of a plus by BLAST as it make the signals easier to discriminate).
Broadcast antennas have to be in far-flung locations, but receiving antennas need only be directional and can be put virtually on top of one another. To speculate on increasing the bandwidth more we could polarize the signal as well. Throw in a little time-shifted redundancy to the error checking and you could have a very robust system even with electrical noise and lightning, though this would take some SERIOUS horsepower to decode the signals. But Moore has shown bandwidth is precious and processing power will increase. I suspect we could easily pack full 1080P 60fps in 1 MHz channels now, it would just be expensive initially. Remember bandwidth and signal to noise ratios are just competing tradeoffs. With a strong enough signal now you could do HDTV in 1 MHz with no changes to transmission method. Multi Antenna Multi Receiver adds a new dimension to multiplexing the signal in. AM multiplexes one dimensionally in amplitude, FM one dimensionally in frequency, digital uses both for two dimensions. Now we can add spatial multiplexing and to go even more over the top with polarization (though multipath makes polarization crazy hard to decode).
"Remember DivX (the Circuit City format abortion, not the codec)? Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures released their content exclusively for it at first (if Wikipedia is to be believed). That worked out really well for that format, didn't it?"
A reasonable point, but if memory serves me at no point was DivX ever ahead of DVD in sales, let alone by multiples. People immediately rejected the implied DivX DRM control by the Studios. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are essentially functionally identical with respect to DRM and most importantly functionally equivalent do standard DVD adding no new restriction as DivX did.
So let me get this straight -- a deal that Walmart hasn't admitted to, with a format that may or not be HD-DVD (because it could be Blu-Ray given translation problems), with players that won't come out till 2008, will absolutely win the format war for HD-DVD, because no there is no reason for anyone to not buy HD-DVD now (at the currently higher prices) because they promise to win the war because these (without a doubt according to HD-DVD fanboys) are on the way. The same way they promised to win because HD-DVD's early to market strategy would give them an "Unbeatable" lead. And how "All" the studios would support HD-DVD because of the lower replication costs.
Unless the studios change alignments and go neutral by Christmas it is all over for HD-DVD. Period. I am dubious anyone can make an HD player for 50 dollars (say, how well does "Children of Men" play for you on your XBox 360?). Maybe the mechanism, but it takes a lot of horsepower to do all the modern codecs at full HD and with the DRM overhead.
I suspect this will all turn out to be a huge misunderstanding that is blown all out of proportion by the HD-DVD camp looking for any good news to hang their hats on after having gotten beaten badly 4 months in a row. Children of Men is out and Matrix preorder has also come and gone. HD-DVD doesn't have any more ammo in the content pipeline to compete with the big titles coming Blu-Ray's way in the next few months.
If you include PS3 players Blu-Ray sells more players every month than HD-DVD has sold in a full Year.
Having been to China, they call DVD9 HD-DVD on the street and on the packaging. I suspect we are talking a conventional DVD player that scales conventional DVD to HD resolution. This could definitely be produced for $50 dollars or less. I do not believe they can make $50 HD-DVD players that actually work. Remember this stuff has to have HDMI for God's sake. If it were possible to do the processing, they'd still probably still have to skimp by piping out component only and hope the Down Rez flag never gets set on future HD-DVD discs.
Blu-Ray also has two additional layers of DRM (and yes I know how much slashdotters all hate DRM) and these will be used for the first time soon. Since the AACS is now completely compromised, the studios will really be watching to see how well Blu-Ray's additional layers hold up. If they last even a few months, the studios will offer up HD-DVD on the altar as a sacrifice to the DRM gods.
It's not all about how cheap the players are. People that can afford a decent big HDTV (and it really does need to be big to see the BIG difference) can afford a $500 Blu-Ray players (and yes they exist now, pay no attention to the "$1000" player FUD, hell buy a PS3 for $600) and will care more about how many movies are available. Sure HD-DVD will be 100-200 dollars cheaper this Christmas, but Blu-Ray will have the movies and will eventually be considered a must buy item for good HDTVs. People that don't have HDTV or are satisfied with DVD don't need either.
My wife is a Chinese National and an Economist. I don't know where to start on how naïve most of today's comments are on this topic. I myself have been to China four times. It is a vibrant growing area. Disparaging their accomplishments is far from productive.
What amazes my wife most is how much America cares about what are internal Chinese matters, while we, Americans, meddle in every affair across the globe. I can attest that the average Chinese is non too concerned about internet censorship nor political activism. They all assume (rightly or wrongly) they will all have more rights and freedoms as their wealth increases. Modern Chinese care about wealth and security. Obtaining an education is almost a mantra for them.
While the majority of rural Chinese live in property, it will not take too many more decades of double-digit GDP growth to correct this.
While I prefer living in America and believe in Capitalism and Democracy the current Chinese brand of socialism is working well. It is a hybrid system of Capitalism and Central Control that for now is working. It may breakdown in the future, but not necessarily. Communist dogma is not allowed to get in the way of economic planning. That they can plan for the long run should be envied. Chinese patience is an amazing thing.
I am not prepared to say China will eclipse America and the West soon, but am also disinclined to say they could not be the major Super Power in the world 30-50 years from now.
Of course I've hedged my bets by having a Chinese wife;-)
I wouldn't call myself a fanboy as I don't own Blu-Ray or HD-DVD yet. I'm waiting for things to sort out. You just can't argue with the fact Blu-Ray now has (or will have soon) 3 million players in the field and HD-DVD hasn't even hit.5 yet.
Real HD-DVD fanboys (see the discussions over at Eproductwars (DVD)) keep blather on about higher attachment rates.
If you are loosing sales disc sales 4 to 1 and player sales 7 or 8 to one and new releases 2 to 1, well it doesn't matter what the "attachment rate" is. It has been 3 months now since Blu-Ray took the lead and it when from 2:1 to 3:1 to now 4:1.
The best HD-DVD can hope to accomplish is stay in the running through the 2007 Christmas season. Maybe, Maybe Universal will stay HD-DVD only, in which case you either buy both machines or a combo. But there is no way Blu-Ray will lose.
Whine about how it isn't a fair comparison because of title releases, but it's not about it being a fair fight. If HD-DVD can't match Blu-Ray title releases, it loses. It doesn't matter if SONY has to spend more to win the war. HD-DVD only has lower initial player cost going for it, and that will matter less and less as Blu-Ray prices come down.
When you're already staggering things like Microsoft's on the cheap HD-DVD screw up don't help. And yes I repeat -- HD-DVD was rushed and skimped on and the first players were a loading nightmare (2 minutes plus). HD-DVD was intended to be the cheap good enough format, and now they want to be perceived of has having the same quality.
By Christmas I expect to be watching Blu-Ray.
BTW, it doesn't bother me you came off a bit "rantish" It is always nice to get a response and have a little bit of a heated debate.
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I doubt CPUs will have much competition from this technology, but how about memory based on some kind of crossbar design? Make one sheet vertical one sheet horizontal bond together with some exotic ingredient and voilà -- a high density ROM material. HD movies on a postage stamp.
And neutrons will crash into other nuclei and there will be secondary fissions and fusions. Neither fission nor fusion is an entirely straight forward reaction with only one set of byproducts. Muon catalyzed fusion produces gamma rays directly.
Our own star the Sun produces gamma rays from the PP-I fusion chain 4 1H 1 4He + 2 positrons + 2 neutrinos + 2 gamma rays The by-products provide the source of luminosity: * Positrons: anti-electrons (e+) - collide with electrons (e-) * Neutrinos: rapidly escape from the star * Gamma rays (photons): travel outwards through star interacting many times with atomic gas. Energy is also provided by the PP-II and PP-III chains
Or possibly the fusion of deuterium/hydrogen in rain water by lightning?
I actually posted an article about this back in 2005. Lightning Fusion And Other Hot News
Actually you have to over-core it by adding cores.
"Using multicast you can send the same channel to multiple customers (IPTV) but that is broadcast, not pay-per-view."
Why can't multi-cast be pay-per-view? You download a key you pay for ahead of time and then decrypt what is streamed to everyone. Moreover you could download a broadcast and then pay later for a key to decrypt it. You could even have the cost for live events go down by how long the delay between the download and buying the key.
Granted there will be piracy, but for live sporting events this would probably work very well as the pirates wouldn't be able to get the pirated material decrypted quick enough to post, nor post the crack and software for intercepting the broadcast in real-time quickly enough (though some computer savvy users may manage some of the latter).
If memory serves correctly the very first few Shuttle flights lost ENTIRE tiles (plural) and came back safely. There was much concern and debate over the adhesives used to attach them -- that problem was corrected. A gouge in a tile is NOT the same thing as a WHOLE in the leading edge of a wing.
If so, only briefly if at all. The zone of habitable rock will get higher and higher in the strata as the above surface temperatures rise since the internally generated heat from radioactive decay cannot radiate to the surface and into space, thus raising temperates below ground in lock step with temperatures above ground.
I guess I should have specified FULL HD-DVD burners. These are only single layer. So with what you are posting it isn't 50 vs 30, but 50 vs 15. Why would anyone bother upgrading to go from 9G to 15G?
Are you sure HD-DVD Burners work? I challenge you to find even one for sale. Toshiba announced the first one back in Jan 2007, but it keeps getting delayed. Still no firm ship date. You can find several 2x Blu-Ray burners and 4x and 8x models on the way.
HD-DVD burners don't work because the layer widths were designed for red light lasers. The duplication process is more like stamping than burning which is why they can get away using the old DVD duplication equipment with some minor retrofitting. Blu-Ray was designed from the start as a burner. There have been Blu-Ray burners since 2005 for over the air transmission recording.
HD-DVD's whole premise was to be quick and cheap for duplication houses. Since Blu-Ray disc prices are on average cheaper than HD-DVD, these seems not to have mattered.
"This recent evidence would seem to confirm speculation that egg-shaped saucers are notoriously difficult to fly safely at low altitude."
I'm curious just where this speculation was forwarded. Is there some UFO magazine with articles like "Egg Shape Saucers -- How Easy to Fly" or "Egg shaped versus conventional Plate shaped, which Flying Saucer is right for your intergalactic traveling needs?" or better yet is Consumer Reports planning a Fly Saucer Safety issue? "Flying Saucer Roll Over Crash Test Results -- Egg Shaped Models perform poorly"
A majority of American's are against illegal immigration. A majority of American's are against profiling. So what alternative do you propose to identify legitimate citizens from illegal aliens? Your papers analogies is actually rather weak as a national ID only identifies you are a legal US Citizen. Whereas the point of "papers" in the past was to show where citizens had permission to move to and from and were checked frequently at checkpoints. The police would only be able to ask for it when there is clear evidence of crime. It wouldn't be required to be on your person, you just would for convenience like your driver's license to confirm your identity when needed.
My wife is from China, and while they don't have papers they have to carry around with them, they are not free to just pick up an live wherever they wish. I really doubt this will come to pass even with a National ID.
People always trot out these objections based on knee jerk emotional reactions to abuses in the past. The proposed boarder along our Mexican border gets similar jeers although the reason for its need is exactly the opposite of the reason for the Berlin Wall.
I for one would concentrate on protecting our Freedom of Speech rights (for which you are entitled to your opinion in this) and challenge to you suggest a feasible alternative that safeguards our borders, cuts down on illegal immigration, and possible terrorist activity. I don't live my life in fear of terrorism, but as the husband of Chinese national who has played by the rules and lived apart from my wife for TWO YEARS, I really do chafe at proposals to give illegals a faster easier way in than for those of us playing by the rules.
Maybe without a National ID we will never have another major successful terrorist attack, but I guarantee we will have such an ID in the wake of one.
I use to have a machine that BSOD on upgrade to service pack 2. Office 2007 won't install on pre SP2. From another machine I used Word 2007 to send out resumes to several prospective employers only to have them request 1997-2003 format because they couldn't read my Word documents. I do government work now and where I work they have standardized on Windows 2000 with the Office 2003. I doubt Office 2007 would work on their machines and for reasons of security and stability and having gotten so many machines all working together smoothly they won't be upgrading to XP anytime soon. Maybe Windows 2000 is inferior to XP in most aspects, but big organizations HATE reworking everything to get it to work again when they have work to get done TODAY.
You can save 1997-2003 format from 2007, but it doesn't do it by default.
When I upgraded my Wife's machine to IE7 it broke all her access to bank accounts, which ironically would inform her she needed to "upgrade" to IE6.
This is just the kind of crap that will cause OS to win eventually (even if it is still years off). BTW, we use a mix of Windows and Linux and we UPGRADE the Linux all the time -- no big deal.
So 9-11 conspiracy theorists say the towers couldn't come down because "steel doesn't melt" this is a direct quote from Rosie O'Donnell -- so I provide two facts, steel doesn't have to melt to become weakened, and a steel and concrete overpass where fire was enough to bring it down. But does not counter Rosie's argument? Not in the mind of 9-11 theorists, who now have to make linear extrapolations from the amount of fuel to conclude the example has no bearing. Actual building engineers have gone over this and concluded the fire and forces involved were enough to bring the buildings down, I merely provide another example that shows the concept that fire can melt steel is sound. The folks at PBS and NPR are hardly shills for a Bush cover-up and they conclude in investigative reports that there were two factors leading to the buildings' collapsing. One the initial explosion blasted insulation away from the supporting columns and two that once the support members began to sage they pulled away from the outer shell of the building thus losing all support and initiated the pancaking already mentioned. Conditions never anticipated by the original architects.
But what does it matter what I say, you are bound and determined to conclude what you want. In your world there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands of government agents frantically working to suppress the truth. All on board and approving the slaughter of thousands of American citizens for some vague and ill-defined purpose, because people with money and power can never have enough, and like step 2 for the underpants gnomes this gives it to them somehow. And amazing not one of them ever come forward to denounce the huge fraud, when in general politicians can't even cover up a the most innocuous in house memos.
I drink so much soda I've turned into one of the X-Men
This was a big news story a few weeks back. At the time they mentioned the gallons of fuel and I immediately googled to compare it to the fuel capacity of a 747 and was shocked how much fuel a 747 needs. Ferrying 500 people upto 12,000 miles if fuel-efficient compared to the same distance by car, but it is still A LOT of fuel.
Here is a CBS story and here is a googling of 396 other mentions.
As to why WTC7 collapsed, why would our Government feel the need to collapse an un-hit building? It would surely just lead people like you to say "what about WTC7?!?!" WTC7 was smaller than the other two towers, really big to be sure, but smaller. While the two towers collapsed straight downward their debris shot out at their bases, with not just tons of material, but with hundreds of thousands of tons of material (together the two main towers weighed approximately a MILLON tons!), much of which slammed into the base of WTC7. The fact that it didn't collapse immediately is similar to why the other towers didn't collapse immediately. Once huge structures like these are compromised it can take minutes or hours for the sagging support columns to finally deform so much that they reach a point where those above them snap and give way completely. Add to this there were fires in WTC7 that where not being attended to due to all the attention on the other buildings and the difficulty of getting past the afore mentioned debris. While the two main towers may have been designed on paper to withstand an airplane hit -- WTC7 was never designed to withstand being bulldozed at its base with what amounts to hundreds of bulldozers simultaneously at huge velocity.
Again, I am sure your unconvinced, because no mater how many logical explanations I can provide your camp will hang on anything that seems anomalous to support a conspiracy theory that validates a certain view of our government. No matter that you or Sean Penn or Rosie O'Donnell or thousands of other bloggers have no training or expertise to decide what is anomalous or not.
Designed to be struck by a fully fueled 747 you say. And how many Megastructures did they fly fully fueled 747s into to test this? Buildings and bridges are designed to withstand lots of damage in theory, and yet several large bridges have come down in the past few decade under circumstances they were "designed" to withstand.
There was an overpass that recently collapsed after a tanker truck accident. The steel and concrete melted and that was with 1/6 the amount of fuel that a 747 carries. Keep in mind the steel doesn't have to "melt" just soften. You ever see ye-old smithy making horseshoes? He doesn't melt them into a mold, he heats them up so the can be bent easily with a hammer.
The two towers quite clearly started their collapse at the point of impact where the planes went in. The fact that they went straight down is because they are FUCKING HUMONGOUSLY HEAVY AND BIG. Once they start to collapse it is called pancaking. It is a well know phenomenon caused by trillions of ergs of pent up potential energy in the form of gravity -- the energy to lift all the stuff in the first stuff to enormous heights.
I'm quite sure my explanations will be inadequate for you. Logical explanation is impervious to someone that chooses to believe something for ideological reasons -- political or religious.
Some of these stories have merit, some are exaggerated, and some are spun to make America look bad because private industries have commercial interests in turbulent regions of the world. I see no evidence that the 9-11 conspiracy theory has been "censored." US celebrities like Rosie O'Donnel and Sean Penn bring this one up all the time. Just like you can find the strange stray biologist that supports creationism, this camp has found one stray physicist to support this conspiracy crap. By including it in the list just shows the list on whole to be an agenda disguised as journalism by pandering to a left leaning fan base.
Now before I'm attacked as a right wing kook, let me say I tend to be a liberal on social issues, and think there are plenty of stories that need more attention when it comes to social fairness. But just because people yawn or don't believe you, doesn't mean you are being censored. I'd say about half of this list is the proponents just being crybabies that the public (rightly or wrongly) doesn't care more. Maybe the authors should find irrefutable evidence for their assertions or write in more challenging ways that defies being ignored.
From the article, "Surprisingly, it is very hard to pin down the age of a star." Well, duh, I could have told you that. Who ever heard of a star revealing their age. It may just be a coincidence, but I believe 13.2 billion years is the age of Joan Collins.
In the game of life we are ALL wearing red shirts
Lets take a very trivial example of a two-antenna setup doubling bandwidth. If you have one transmission tower to your south and one to your north and you have directional antennas pointed at both you have multiplexed your signal spatially and nearly doubled your transmission rate in the same bandwidth. Multipath makes this harder too tease out, but that's what signal processing is for. Are you really telling me someone with two directional antennas can't tease out two different stations in two different directions? And that is with NO signal processing.
I'm pretty sure the people that made the BLAST demo system back in 2002 know more about this than you do. Yes there is a higher noise to signal ratio, but as long as our multiplexing multiples rise faster than this ratio then we are getting more information. Shannon's laws only apply to single channels, spatial multiplexing adds more channels as would polarization.
Two is actually pretty small. There was a system proposed back in 2002 by the acronym BLAST (Bell Lab Layered Space Time) that used up to 8 transmitters. As was noted in another reply if we go with a new transmission method we might as well go for a different encoding scheme like MPEG4 as well and double the available bandwidth again. We might as well go with more than 2 transmitters as well to more than double the bandwidth. This stuff does require A LOT of horse power in signal processing to tease the signals apart especially when you factor in multpath reflection (which is considered somewhat of a plus by BLAST as it make the signals easier to discriminate).
Broadcast antennas have to be in far-flung locations, but receiving antennas need only be directional and can be put virtually on top of one another. To speculate on increasing the bandwidth more we could polarize the signal as well. Throw in a little time-shifted redundancy to the error checking and you could have a very robust system even with electrical noise and lightning, though this would take some SERIOUS horsepower to decode the signals. But Moore has shown bandwidth is precious and processing power will increase. I suspect we could easily pack full 1080P 60fps in 1 MHz channels now, it would just be expensive initially. Remember bandwidth and signal to noise ratios are just competing tradeoffs. With a strong enough signal now you could do HDTV in 1 MHz with no changes to transmission method. Multi Antenna Multi Receiver adds a new dimension to multiplexing the signal in. AM multiplexes one dimensionally in amplitude, FM one dimensionally in frequency, digital uses both for two dimensions. Now we can add spatial multiplexing and to go even more over the top with polarization (though multipath makes polarization crazy hard to decode).
"Remember DivX (the Circuit City format abortion, not the codec)? Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount Pictures released their content exclusively for it at first (if Wikipedia is to be believed). That worked out really well for that format, didn't it?"
A reasonable point, but if memory serves me at no point was DivX ever ahead of DVD in sales, let alone by multiples. People immediately rejected the implied DivX DRM control by the Studios. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are essentially functionally identical with respect to DRM and most importantly functionally equivalent do standard DVD adding no new restriction as DivX did.
So let me get this straight -- a deal that Walmart hasn't admitted to, with a format that may or not be HD-DVD (because it could be Blu-Ray given translation problems), with players that won't come out till 2008, will absolutely win the format war for HD-DVD, because no there is no reason for anyone to not buy HD-DVD now (at the currently higher prices) because they promise to win the war because these (without a doubt according to HD-DVD fanboys) are on the way. The same way they promised to win because HD-DVD's early to market strategy would give them an "Unbeatable" lead. And how "All" the studios would support HD-DVD because of the lower replication costs.
Unless the studios change alignments and go neutral by Christmas it is all over for HD-DVD. Period. I am dubious anyone can make an HD player for 50 dollars (say, how well does "Children of Men" play for you on your XBox 360?). Maybe the mechanism, but it takes a lot of horsepower to do all the modern codecs at full HD and with the DRM overhead.
I suspect this will all turn out to be a huge misunderstanding that is blown all out of proportion by the HD-DVD camp looking for any good news to hang their hats on after having gotten beaten badly 4 months in a row. Children of Men is out and Matrix preorder has also come and gone. HD-DVD doesn't have any more ammo in the content pipeline to compete with the big titles coming Blu-Ray's way in the next few months.
If you include PS3 players Blu-Ray sells more players every month than HD-DVD has sold in a full Year.
Having been to China, they call DVD9 HD-DVD on the street and on the packaging. I suspect we are talking a conventional DVD player that scales conventional DVD to HD resolution. This could definitely be produced for $50 dollars or less. I do not believe they can make $50 HD-DVD players that actually work. Remember this stuff has to have HDMI for God's sake. If it were possible to do the processing, they'd still probably still have to skimp by piping out component only and hope the Down Rez flag never gets set on future HD-DVD discs.
Blu-Ray also has two additional layers of DRM (and yes I know how much slashdotters all hate DRM) and these will be used for the first time soon. Since the AACS is now completely compromised, the studios will really be watching to see how well Blu-Ray's additional layers hold up. If they last even a few months, the studios will offer up HD-DVD on the altar as a sacrifice to the DRM gods.
It's not all about how cheap the players are. People that can afford a decent big HDTV (and it really does need to be big to see the BIG difference) can afford a $500 Blu-Ray players (and yes they exist now, pay no attention to the "$1000" player FUD, hell buy a PS3 for $600) and will care more about how many movies are available. Sure HD-DVD will be 100-200 dollars cheaper this Christmas, but Blu-Ray will have the movies and will eventually be considered a must buy item for good HDTVs. People that don't have HDTV or are satisfied with DVD don't need either.
My wife is a Chinese National and an Economist. I don't know where to start on how naïve most of today's comments are on this topic. I myself have been to China four times. It is a vibrant growing area. Disparaging their accomplishments is far from productive.
;-)
What amazes my wife most is how much America cares about what are internal Chinese matters, while we, Americans, meddle in every affair across the globe. I can attest that the average Chinese is non too concerned about internet censorship nor political activism. They all assume (rightly or wrongly) they will all have more rights and freedoms as their wealth increases. Modern Chinese care about wealth and security. Obtaining an education is almost a mantra for them.
While the majority of rural Chinese live in property, it will not take too many more decades of double-digit GDP growth to correct this.
While I prefer living in America and believe in Capitalism and Democracy the current Chinese brand of socialism is working well. It is a hybrid system of Capitalism and Central Control that for now is working. It may breakdown in the future, but not necessarily. Communist dogma is not allowed to get in the way of economic planning. That they can plan for the long run should be envied. Chinese patience is an amazing thing.
I am not prepared to say China will eclipse America and the West soon, but am also disinclined to say they could not be the major Super Power in the world 30-50 years from now.
Of course I've hedged my bets by having a Chinese wife
I wouldn't call myself a fanboy as I don't own Blu-Ray or HD-DVD yet. I'm waiting for things to sort out. You just can't argue with the fact Blu-Ray now has (or will have soon) 3 million players in the field and HD-DVD hasn't even hit .5 yet.
Real HD-DVD fanboys (see the discussions over at Eproductwars (DVD)) keep blather on about higher attachment rates.
If you are loosing sales disc sales 4 to 1 and player sales 7 or 8 to one and new releases 2 to 1, well it doesn't matter what the "attachment rate" is. It has been 3 months now since Blu-Ray took the lead and it when from 2:1 to 3:1 to now 4:1.
The best HD-DVD can hope to accomplish is stay in the running through the 2007 Christmas season. Maybe, Maybe Universal will stay HD-DVD only, in which case you either buy both machines or a combo. But there is no way Blu-Ray will lose.
Whine about how it isn't a fair comparison because of title releases, but it's not about it being a fair fight. If HD-DVD can't match Blu-Ray title releases, it loses. It doesn't matter if SONY has to spend more to win the war. HD-DVD only has lower initial player cost going for it, and that will matter less and less as Blu-Ray prices come down.
When you're already staggering things like Microsoft's on the cheap HD-DVD screw up don't help. And yes I repeat -- HD-DVD was rushed and skimped on and the first players were a loading nightmare (2 minutes plus). HD-DVD was intended to be the cheap good enough format, and now they want to be perceived of has having the same quality.
By Christmas I expect to be watching Blu-Ray.
BTW, it doesn't bother me you came off a bit "rantish" It is always nice to get a response and have a little bit of a heated debate.