Just to speculate on a possible "what use" question that might arise, I can't help but notice the line This is one of the central themes of modern research in number theory and is devoted to the study of the relation between the symmetries of number theory and geometry. . If I may be so bold, anything that ties the study of pure math to geometry probably has implications for quantum mechanics. These objects may lie embedded in higher dimensions, and probably settle into stable configurations from near infinite possibilities. But they still have to satisfy some allowable mathematical model. This is just the type of thing that may allow us to better predict what those allowable states could be.
An interesting read. I'd like to add another environmental heresy to the list (OK more a concern than a heresy). So much concern is being expended on the "Global Warming" issue, that other more pressing environmental problems are being ignored. I wrote up a journal entry about this a couple of weeks ago "Global Warming - Does it Matter?", but I would like to add to the observations in it and the article above. Supporters of "Global Warming" controls by proffering a simple solution that is economically hard can wash their hands of other environmental actions which may actually be of more pressing concern. When it comes to the actions of governments, this may not be self-deluded piety, but self-serving economic ploy (see my other essay "Piety by Proxy").
I use to work at Wolfram Research and when they moved into their new building the building was protected after hours by a voice activated entry device. This was about 14 years ago. Anyway the device worked reasonably well except when it was raining. There was no awning or other overhang, so in driving rain when you would really like to get in - well you just couldn't. The idea was to be a cost saver by not having to issue individual cards. Oh yeah they ripped the thing out after about a two months. One of the employees (I don't remember who) took it as a challenge to slowly modify his voice entry phrase to something else slowly day by day, by slowing morphing one phoneme at a time into something else. I wish I had a list of phrases he changed from and to, but I don't.
This was good technology applied in a bad way. As one of more than one way of activating a card this would be a good thing. Thieves are a skittish lot, even if they could sign for card use or use a stolen PIN, the fact they would be expected to voice activate the card first would deter them, not wishing to draw undue attention to themselves.
Even 14 years ago this technology had a extremely low false positive rate misidentifying someone as someone else. Even 25 years ago I seem to remember this technology being not being prone to misidentification, though more finicky and with a much smaller vocabulary (like 10 words).
I understand the one-step-at-time approach NASA is pursuing with regard to the search for life on Mars, but it strikes me a little odd that the methane concentrations on Mars are being measured by telescopes based here on Earth. Why haven't current orbiters been equipped to sense this in a more direct fashion. I would think exact precise chemical composition of the air would be a high priority. In fact, how sensitive would the Viking data have been on showing possible methane concentrations in the atmosphere? My recommendation to NASA: more emphasis on chemical analysis in future missions. Yeah, I know the Rocket Scientists are probably already thinking this. Hopefully this new data will get the proper equipment funded for the next Mars shots. And yes I know everything is a trade off and we do chemical analysis as part of every mission to some degree. But damn, we have to use scopes here on Earth to get this data?!?
Instead of in anticipation of future regulation, why not just tack on a "regulation fee" line that is currently $0.00. Tack on a $0.00 tax line while you're at it.
Then and if regulation or taxation occurs, these lines get filled in with an actual amount that is the correct amount. Not only that, but users would know right away that the government has added fees as they shows up in the bill.
I'm betting all hell would bust loose when a $0.00 line suddenly clicks upward.
Yeah it's cheaper, but that doesn't mean they can't write an honest bill.
Whether we get hit or not, what is it about me that wants this to be really-really-really close and require an intercept mission? It isn't just the anticipation of a revived space program, though that would be nice. Big, big disasters, tragic as they are still offer some fascination, some distraction from the drivel that usually is news.
Perhaps it is just boredom and curiosity about how we would live in a post-apocalyptic world. You don't really want to see anyone hurt, but the uniqueness of it all, the change of pace.
Since P2P can also distribute legitimate files (I am looking into one such project even now) this can only be seen as something that will lead to unintended collateral damage(assuming it works of course).
Here is a tool specifically designed to cripple the flow of data, how can it be thought of as anything but a virus? Should it work I could see TV and Movie studios using it surreptitiously to cripple net-based fledgling media companies.
This should be outlawed just like another intentionally malevolent software. Why shouldn't everyone write viruses and malware when the big guys do it and the government sanctions it. This is just the kind of thing that keeps web commerce from taking off to its full potential.
One of the main things Langa complains about in his article is that some websites do not render properly under Firefox. Of course these sites are probably using IE proprietary extensions and not W3C suggested standards. So Firefox is broken in his eyes, because it fails to follow Micosoft's high-jacking of HTML standards.
I have found Firefox to be more logical looking in its layout using CSS elements and have had to rework pages more often for IE than the other way around. The problem is that many websites don't bother to check the look of a page in anything other than IE. So how is this FireFox's fault? Langa just assumes IE is getting it right and that there is no ambiguity in the way some HTML elements are specified.
In theory there may be more bugs and possible security threats lying in wait in FireFox, but here it the thing, since switching to FireFox I have had FAR fewer virus problems. Now it could just be the smaller market thing, but so what - what I care about is how many real viruses I am exposed to. You could argue that should FireFox continue to grow in popularity, so will the attacks on it by virus writers, bring it back to parity with IE. That may be, but hasn't happened yet. BUT it could just be that the open software model means more work on the code and better more secure code when it gains an even wider audience. In fact this is the horse I would bet on.
I had actually read this article yesterday or the day before off of Google News (guess I should have submitted it). I was surprised that it didn't clarify in more detail how this "Near Super Conductivity" works, but I believe I had seen this mentioned years ago and is called "Balistic Conduction". There is resistance entering and leaving the Bucky Nano Tube, but near zero resistance as the electron travels down the tube. One might imagine the electrons zipping through the hollow center, though I suspect that would be a gross over simplification, but probably is related to some wave guide principle.
So this is probably not some new huge breakthrough in anything like superconductivity, but a refinement of a well-known phenomenon.
Well that was a crappy implementation of 3D, crude compared to 2D graphics of its day. I am not suggesting Sony force 3D Stereo on everyone, the processing power for the graphics sub processing would be just about doubled. I am suggesting a high-end machine variant that plays 3D titles in true Stereovision with little or no modification to an existing game title. Instead of generating one camera angle, it would be generating two slightly offset camera views either side of the point called for in the game. As for the display technology it would probably have to support two or three ways to overlap the images. 2 VGA outs for overlapping projector solutions. Or use 1 VGA out with some kind of infrared timing signal to support LCD shuttered solutions on double frame rate monitors. Or vertical interleaved striping as is used in some lensed LCD solutions.
Unfortunately for Cell Phones they are only a bridge gap technology before everything goes pure digital wireless. In an analog world every analog device was hard wired for its one function, there really was no other way. Now that all data is digital: sound, text, images, moving images, data, it will increasingly just flow wirelessly from device to devise, hopping down into the net to ride fiber optical backbones when needing to be sent to distant locations. The tangle of wires connecting your computer to printers, cameras, keyboards, perhaps even the monitor, will eventually disappear. Only the electrical cord remaining and fuel cell powered portables won't even have that. Data will just flow to where it is wanted and needed.
As for indoor reliability of cell phones, my Sprint works quite well at home, but only after they built a new cell-phone tower quite close to where I live. I probably have the Chicago Bears to thank for that, as they played their home games here in Champaign a year or two ago while their stadium was modernized, and the cell phone capacity probably had to be upgraded for the temporary flood of Chicagoans.
Cell phones could easily be upgrade to work indoors by either of two ways. A repeater station with a larger antenna, possibly pointed in some general direction of the nearest cell if the signal is really week. Secondly, smart or dynamic bandwidth use. The electronics probably aren't cheap enough yet, but no doubt soon will be to dynamically use only as much bandwidth as is needed for reliable data transmission. A benefit of this would be the ability to pay a little more for a higher quality voice signal, say using a full 32K or 64K of bandwidth instead of the over-compressed 16k one-size-fits-all chunk used today. In the digital realm a weak signal can be compensated for by using more bandwidth. You can also go the other direction, more reliability by keeping the bandwidth constant but slowing the data rate.
In any event the cell phone is a specialized device, the early ones where analog, the latter ones hard wired to handle a very specific chunk of 16K voice data. Adding on cameras and the like are really just kludges and I suspect true 3G services will never truly arrive being side stepped by the advent of an internet everywhere sea of data always flowing, flowing, flowing. When out of range to reach the internet backbone some devices will probably be courteous enough to hand data along in bucket brigade fashion until it gets to where it needs to go.
Practical 3D-display technology has been just around the corner for years. Trouble is it always falls short with tradeoffs in brightness, resolution, or head placement. When going to a 3D movie shown with polarized glasses or LCD shutter glasses you still have to keep your head perfectly level or the image will split diagonally in two.
This will probably be much the same, another attempt that falls just short. I predict 3D will take off big time when very small, very light weight, very high resolution headsets arrive, whether LCD or scanning micro-laser or whatever.
Despite my pessimism I think we should plan for a 3D future now. I doubt the HD-DVD people or Blu-Ray camp will see this post, but they should build in 3D compliance now. Since digital compression is about encoding similarities between frames, it should work well to compress two nearly identical images to one probably only adding a 10 percent overhead for a film shot in 3D. All players should be able to read a 3D title, ignoring the 3D enhancement data on standard players. Blu-Ray especially would have both the capacity and bandwidth to pull this off, in fact imagine the Marketing coo a Playstation 3D would be. I'll bet you wouldn't have to change most off the shelf 3D games to be true 3D in true stereovision if the hardware is done right. Existing titles transformed to a more immersive experience overnight.
Most types of Fusion are not completely benign, but the gases to which you refer are almost completely non-radioactive, or are of type that can be recycled directly into more fusion. The neutron flux from most fusion reactions make the containment vessel walls radioactive over time, but unlike the byproducts of fusion, this material is stable, not generating excess heat, and cannot easily be weaponized. Even dirty bombs would be hard to make from the stuff. Fusion would generate at least a 100 times less dangerous waste than fission.
There is virtually no scenario where a commercial plant could pose a threat to a surrounding population. BUT because there is still some waste, so there are some environmentalists that would oppose its pursuit.
Again getting back to the gasses issue. Because the percentage weight difference is so huge between isotopes of helium and hydrogen, you can much more easily separate out the radioactive byproducts. What's left can be used industrially, or more likely just released back into the environment. Remember that burning coal releases all sorts of more dangerous radioactive isotopes into the air, ones more readily absorbed into the body. Conventional fission reactors (accidents aside) put far less radiation into the environment than coal, and with fusion we're talking generating thousands of times less waste again. I don't believe there are any remaining radioactive direct fusion byproducts that cannot be recycled. As for being dangerous because they are gasses, should they need to be contained they can just be made part of a chemical that is not a gas. Should there be unusable Helium isotopes (helium won't bind chemically to other elements easily), which I don't believe there are any unusable ones, but should you want to permanently get rid of Helium isotopes, they could be released at any suitable altitude to drift into the far upper atmosphere where solar wind will eventually strip them away from Earth completely. This is why we have to mine Helium from deep underground; it doesn't stay in the atmosphere.
Fusion can be used to generate Tritium or convert abundant Thorium to Uranium and Plutonium, thus could escalate proliferation of atomic weapons, but that would be an abuse of the technology not an inherent byproduct of normal operation. But this is no doubt this is where radical environmentalists will hang their hats in opposition. Of course this kind of Ludite thinking only works if you can get every nation in the world to avoid Fusion.
I predict the next 5 to 10 years will see breakthroughs in fusion. My reasoning is that Oil prices will probably fluctuate wildly over the next 5-10 years seldom getting below $40 and often above $60. While I don't think there has been a conspiracy to keep fusion down, nothing focuses the mind quite so clearly as a crisis. $60 dollar a barrel oil will motivate research into all sorts of energy research. Unlike the '70s I don't believe truly cheap oil is returning, oh and there is that Global Warming thing to think about.
Conventional incandescent bulbs are cheap and incandescent bulb factories churn out billions per year. They won't disappear overnight, but disappear they will eventually when we reach some tipping point in price. Trouble is all those old factories will continue to churn out bulbs until the profit margin is some fraction of a cent above raw material price. You can get 4 conventional bulbs for 99 cents today when they are on sale, so I think $5-$10 Dollar will be the magic tipping point for LED bulbs given the energy savings and lifetime for home use and $20-$40 for commercial use. When this happens incandescent will probably drop to 10 or 15 cents a pop for a while, basically burning off inventory at cost. Once LEDs are 60-80 percent of indoor illumination, conventional bulbs will slowly start to climb in price as old bulb factories close their doors leaving fewer suppliers.
It will be some years before we reach this tipping point in price however as current costs are about $100-$200 a bulb for 65watt equivalent LED bulbs
10 years after most bulbs are LED conventional bulbs will seem anachronistic and stone age. One of the few things in the last 100 years to just be out and out replaced by a new technology. Granted we have lots of bright shining new things in our modern world, but they general have been added to what we already have or evolved slowly from what came before. The switch to transistors from tubes is about the only other thing that comes to mind where this has happened, and perhaps this should just be seen as one of the last hold outs of filaments in tube to be displaced by solid state. All that is left to go are CRTs and this too will happen relatively soon.
In need of a similar revolution: Cars that run without gas - this is a hard one, but we are finally starting to make some progress; Energy production from other than Oil, Gas, Coal, and Uranium. Fusion is about the only way to go here, but it isn't doable at any price today. None of the other energy alternatives have a chance of displacing the big 3 fossil fuels or remaining conventional nuclear plants; Getting to Space without conventional rocket technology. Do all these things and we will have finally arrived in the 21 Century.
Wow I really should leave this alone, but since I mentioned raising the center of gravity 3 feet as the explanation for why you can't just do a straight multiplication, I was clearly talking about a vertical jump. As are most other commentators when they incorrectly just multiple 6 by 6 for the Moon or 6 by 3 for Mars. The fact that I contrasted 6 foot on earth is another clue that I was talking about the high jump or a vertical jump, since 6 Feet is close to, but under the current record of 2.28 meters
For long jumping the record is 24 feet and a straight multiplication of the inverse of the fractional gravity probably works, so a 144 foot long jump in distance might be possible on the Moon. I have never heard a commentator talk about so huge a number for a lunar jump, so I assume they like I would be referring to a vertical jump measured in the only way vertical jumps are measured (clearing a bar), but they, unlike myself, usually get it wrong.
A high jumper on Earth is only lifting his center of gravity 3 Feet. It (the center of gravity) is also starting at 3 Feet.
3 + 3 == 6 Foot jump on Earth
On the Moon 3*6 + 3 = 21. This fits your equations. Another poster countered the jumper on Earth should equal 9 feet, 6 foot man plus 3 foot start. But this is not how a jump is measured, it is measured by how far your entire body can clear a bar, the body being horizontal at the top of it trajectory.
Clearly this also assumes no space suit and doesn't take into the mechanics of how the jump would differ given the radically different timing, but should be close.
It may be possible to get your head to 9 foot, but to clear a 6 foot bar you have to get your body horizontal. This is actually a simplification as it also involves kicking while in flight to move your body over the bar in a a coordianted fashion.
This is more performance art than a real privacy issue. Mann should have expected, or more likely actually gleefully hoped, such random illogical responses from underpaid mall security staff.
Of course some would say the real purpose of art is to provoke, and this certainly passes the test on that front. In a Post 9/11 era world it's amazing the surveillance-surveillance wasn't halted on possible terrorism suspicions.
I have a nice cell phone I can no longer bring to work because it contains a digital camera. The Gym where I work out prohibits camera cell phones as well and not just in the locker rooms, but the Gym area, which ironically is on complete view from the street with floor to ceiling windows.
I have friends who like to snap pictures of random individuals and then deride these strangers later for their looks, clothing, or activity -- "Look at this Bozo." There are people who don't like to have their pictures taken for just this reason, with digital photography costing next to nothing these days it is happening more and more. In the past such people were just being paranoid, today they are being realistic -- not that it really should mater if someone you don't know is making fun of your clothes behind your back.
I guess I'm a bit conflicted about all this. I would like to be able to take my pictures anytime anywhere I would like, but I understand why some people would have a problem with it. Storeowners don't typically like people behaving in ways that discourage patronage. Someone clicking away uninvitedly at you while you shop kind of has this feel.
I would support stores having to clearly mark possible surveillance equipment, whether real or not. I would also support public access to government surveillance equipment that monitors public areas.
As for what I can do with my camera on private property, perhaps the privacy issue lies with the storeowners and not the camera wielding performance artists.
OK these figure seem to be getting misquoted a lot lately on Slashdot.
The Moon has about 1/6 Earth Gravity
Mars has about 1/3 Earth Gravity.
Assuming a 6-foot man can jump 6 feet on Earth, he could jump about 1/(1/6)*3 + 3 feet for a total of 21 feet on The Moon, 1/(1/3)*3 +3 for a total of 12 feet on Mars. Keep in mind when a 6-foot man jumps 6 feet here on Earth he is only lifting his CENTER of gravity 3 feet with a starting height of 3 feet for it.
I like the idea of free access to media. I'm not sure about the idea of Cuisinarting this stuff into derivative materials. Don't get me wrong I'm not opposed to creativity, early sound sampling in music was used to great advantage, but it seems like we've entered an age of endless recycling when it comes to media. Even when not reusing the original material directly (as is so common in music) we are re-shooting it. I just watched Dennis Quaid in "Flight of the Phoenix" last night. Wow, here is a remake that didn't need to be. The original was much better. There was nothing even approaching the famous maniacal laughing scene when it is discovered the engineer designs model airplanes. But I digress.
Perhaps the idea is to encourage independent documentary style work, but I still shudder at the idea of hundreds of avant-garde like film stuttering remixes of old stuff. Call me old fashioned but I just want to see good stories told in film and video. I hate "Reality TV" and now I may have to suffer through the advent of "Rip It Mix It TV"
Hopefully people will limit them selves to intermittent flashes of things like train-wrecks and other visual punctuation marks with this stuff, but it is unclear to me where this is all going.
One thing does seem certain -- production costs for creating quality content should continue to drop for independents. At some point big budget TV and Hollywood will have a problem keeping up, and this I am for.
OK, BSEs are neat and all. Good science and good physics, but just because one can be used to trap the phase and amplitude of a wave front of light for some time is a HUGE stretch to call it a computer.
The title of this post clearly reads:
Science: Optical Computer Made From Frozen Light
We don't even have a diagram for a logic gate (or at least none are presented in the article) just some supposition in the article that such a thing could be used as a component. As for the 10x faster, where the hell did this number come from? Even if Moore's Law is slowing down (don't nit pick about it be about the number of components on a chip) it will make this "smashing" 10x advantage moot. Perhaps they refer to the speed of light in free space as opposed to signal speed copper. But even this doesn't make sense because signal speed in copper is about c/3.
What really maters is how fast a gate can be made to switch, how easy it is to fabricate enough of them to do something useful, and how close you can pack them together. Until someone can put down on paper the diagram of how this thing would work it is pointless to posit that it would be 10x faster.
Usually for these Pie-in-the-Sky type hype offerings it is common to claim 100x or 1000x or 1,000,000x times.
That BSEs might be used someday as parts in a Quantum computer would be a completely different thing, and those calculations that could be done quantumly would be trillions of times faster, but only for very specific algorithms. This article is not talking about that possibility, but classical computing and I think they have a lot of work to do just to demonstrate a single working component. Let alone claim BSE computers are here or just around the corner.
Technology will continue to improve, but Moore's law may indeed be slowing down. Now I realize that the official Moore's Law is about the number of components on a chip, but the popular revision to "Doubling in Speed every 18 months" is more useful. No one buys a chip because it has twice as many transistors. The speed increases in clock rate largely came from scaling, and scaling is slowing down. We are starting to hit a wall at 4-5ghz, and I suspect we won't have 10ghz commercial CPUs until sometime after 2010.
Quantum computing is neat in theory, but has made not significant progress in the number of qbits manipulatable in years. Granted there are new ways to make qbits, but nothing can seem to get 7 to 10 to date. Hopefully there will be a breakthrough, but you can't just command one. There is no scaling technology for Quantum Computers yet.
I predict biological approaches will similarly run into intractably hard roadblocks on the way to usefulness, with the possible exception of practical biological to electronic interfaces to aid the disabled and in the more distant future meld with the machine so to speak.
All is not lost however, multicore is of course where the industry is going for now, but expect more specialization in silicon for well-defined tasks. Graphics processors will get more powerful as algorithms improve and are more efficiently implemented with the transistors available. Any application that becomes mainstream will get its own processing unit of some sort. Granted this make for less flexibility in expanding the capabilities of existing machines, but software has been getting a free ride off the speed scaling in chips for years. In the future the line between programming and chip designing will blur as the two must work in concert to achieve the desired performance in whatever domain is desired.
Imagine a compiler that doesn't just compile code but tapes out the coprocessor need to run it.
Just today I saw a new method in a ebay.com phishing scheme.
The ebay.com link showed up at the bottom of the browser, but was replaced with some kind of javascript mouseon event. This is probably not new.
Instead of random text to fool Bayesian filters, it had hidden recent news article summaries (bracketed by html comment tags) that would be similar to what you might post to a friend.
Spam filters will probably be upgraded to catch this soon, but it was the first time I had seen it. And of course as mentioned in the article, the ebay specifics where obfuscated by html tags between letters.
I should clarify, yes they switch at the clock rate of the CPU, but they have to be capable of transitioning much faster, else they would be out of step with one another if too close to their maximum frequency.
So what is the Max Frequency the smallest transistor could be clocked at on a modern CPU?
This is much much higher than what the CPU could possibly be overclocked to, as that requires all the transistors to work in concert.
I am aware of the specifics of the original Moore's Law, but performance is what matters in the market for new hardware. Nobody buys a computer because it has more transitors. Moore's Law has come to have a new meaning, and a more useful one.
Also many APU's clock at double the CPU rate of the chip they are on, so you are wrong by at least 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to speculate on a possible "what use" question that might arise, I can't help but notice the line This is one of the central themes of modern research in number theory and is devoted to the study of the relation between the symmetries of number theory and geometry. . If I may be so bold, anything that ties the study of pure math to geometry probably has implications for quantum mechanics. These objects may lie embedded in higher dimensions, and probably settle into stable configurations from near infinite possibilities. But they still have to satisfy some allowable mathematical model. This is just the type of thing that may allow us to better predict what those allowable states could be.
This was good technology applied in a bad way. As one of more than one way of activating a card this would be a good thing. Thieves are a skittish lot, even if they could sign for card use or use a stolen PIN, the fact they would be expected to voice activate the card first would deter them, not wishing to draw undue attention to themselves.
Even 14 years ago this technology had a extremely low false positive rate misidentifying someone as someone else. Even 25 years ago I seem to remember this technology being not being prone to misidentification, though more finicky and with a much smaller vocabulary (like 10 words).
I understand the one-step-at-time approach NASA is pursuing with regard to the search for life on Mars, but it strikes me a little odd that the methane concentrations on Mars are being measured by telescopes based here on Earth. Why haven't current orbiters been equipped to sense this in a more direct fashion. I would think exact precise chemical composition of the air would be a high priority. In fact, how sensitive would the Viking data have been on showing possible methane concentrations in the atmosphere? My recommendation to NASA: more emphasis on chemical analysis in future missions. Yeah, I know the Rocket Scientists are probably already thinking this. Hopefully this new data will get the proper equipment funded for the next Mars shots. And yes I know everything is a trade off and we do chemical analysis as part of every mission to some degree. But damn, we have to use scopes here on Earth to get this data?!?
Then and if regulation or taxation occurs, these lines get filled in with an actual amount that is the correct amount. Not only that, but users would know right away that the government has added fees as they shows up in the bill.
I'm betting all hell would bust loose when a $0.00 line suddenly clicks upward.
Yeah it's cheaper, but that doesn't mean they can't write an honest bill.
Perhaps it is just boredom and curiosity about how we would live in a post-apocalyptic world. You don't really want to see anyone hurt, but the uniqueness of it all, the change of pace.
I say: Bring It On 2004-MN4!
Here is a tool specifically designed to cripple the flow of data, how can it be thought of as anything but a virus? Should it work I could see TV and Movie studios using it surreptitiously to cripple net-based fledgling media companies.
This should be outlawed just like another intentionally malevolent software. Why shouldn't everyone write viruses and malware when the big guys do it and the government sanctions it. This is just the kind of thing that keeps web commerce from taking off to its full potential.
I have found Firefox to be more logical looking in its layout using CSS elements and have had to rework pages more often for IE than the other way around. The problem is that many websites don't bother to check the look of a page in anything other than IE. So how is this FireFox's fault? Langa just assumes IE is getting it right and that there is no ambiguity in the way some HTML elements are specified.
In theory there may be more bugs and possible security threats lying in wait in FireFox, but here it the thing, since switching to FireFox I have had FAR fewer virus problems. Now it could just be the smaller market thing, but so what - what I care about is how many real viruses I am exposed to. You could argue that should FireFox continue to grow in popularity, so will the attacks on it by virus writers, bring it back to parity with IE. That may be, but hasn't happened yet. BUT it could just be that the open software model means more work on the code and better more secure code when it gains an even wider audience. In fact this is the horse I would bet on.
So this is probably not some new huge breakthrough in anything like superconductivity, but a refinement of a well-known phenomenon.
As for indoor reliability of cell phones, my Sprint works quite well at home, but only after they built a new cell-phone tower quite close to where I live. I probably have the Chicago Bears to thank for that, as they played their home games here in Champaign a year or two ago while their stadium was modernized, and the cell phone capacity probably had to be upgraded for the temporary flood of Chicagoans.
Cell phones could easily be upgrade to work indoors by either of two ways. A repeater station with a larger antenna, possibly pointed in some general direction of the nearest cell if the signal is really week. Secondly, smart or dynamic bandwidth use. The electronics probably aren't cheap enough yet, but no doubt soon will be to dynamically use only as much bandwidth as is needed for reliable data transmission. A benefit of this would be the ability to pay a little more for a higher quality voice signal, say using a full 32K or 64K of bandwidth instead of the over-compressed 16k one-size-fits-all chunk used today. In the digital realm a weak signal can be compensated for by using more bandwidth. You can also go the other direction, more reliability by keeping the bandwidth constant but slowing the data rate.
In any event the cell phone is a specialized device, the early ones where analog, the latter ones hard wired to handle a very specific chunk of 16K voice data. Adding on cameras and the like are really just kludges and I suspect true 3G services will never truly arrive being side stepped by the advent of an internet everywhere sea of data always flowing, flowing, flowing. When out of range to reach the internet backbone some devices will probably be courteous enough to hand data along in bucket brigade fashion until it gets to where it needs to go.
This will probably be much the same, another attempt that falls just short. I predict 3D will take off big time when very small, very light weight, very high resolution headsets arrive, whether LCD or scanning micro-laser or whatever.
Despite my pessimism I think we should plan for a 3D future now. I doubt the HD-DVD people or Blu-Ray camp will see this post, but they should build in 3D compliance now. Since digital compression is about encoding similarities between frames, it should work well to compress two nearly identical images to one probably only adding a 10 percent overhead for a film shot in 3D. All players should be able to read a 3D title, ignoring the 3D enhancement data on standard players. Blu-Ray especially would have both the capacity and bandwidth to pull this off, in fact imagine the Marketing coo a Playstation 3D would be. I'll bet you wouldn't have to change most off the shelf 3D games to be true 3D in true stereovision if the hardware is done right. Existing titles transformed to a more immersive experience overnight.
There is virtually no scenario where a commercial plant could pose a threat to a surrounding population. BUT because there is still some waste, so there are some environmentalists that would oppose its pursuit.
Again getting back to the gasses issue. Because the percentage weight difference is so huge between isotopes of helium and hydrogen, you can much more easily separate out the radioactive byproducts. What's left can be used industrially, or more likely just released back into the environment. Remember that burning coal releases all sorts of more dangerous radioactive isotopes into the air, ones more readily absorbed into the body. Conventional fission reactors (accidents aside) put far less radiation into the environment than coal, and with fusion we're talking generating thousands of times less waste again. I don't believe there are any remaining radioactive direct fusion byproducts that cannot be recycled. As for being dangerous because they are gasses, should they need to be contained they can just be made part of a chemical that is not a gas. Should there be unusable Helium isotopes (helium won't bind chemically to other elements easily), which I don't believe there are any unusable ones, but should you want to permanently get rid of Helium isotopes, they could be released at any suitable altitude to drift into the far upper atmosphere where solar wind will eventually strip them away from Earth completely. This is why we have to mine Helium from deep underground; it doesn't stay in the atmosphere.
Fusion can be used to generate Tritium or convert abundant Thorium to Uranium and Plutonium, thus could escalate proliferation of atomic weapons, but that would be an abuse of the technology not an inherent byproduct of normal operation. But this is no doubt this is where radical environmentalists will hang their hats in opposition. Of course this kind of Ludite thinking only works if you can get every nation in the world to avoid Fusion.
I predict the next 5 to 10 years will see breakthroughs in fusion. My reasoning is that Oil prices will probably fluctuate wildly over the next 5-10 years seldom getting below $40 and often above $60. While I don't think there has been a conspiracy to keep fusion down, nothing focuses the mind quite so clearly as a crisis. $60 dollar a barrel oil will motivate research into all sorts of energy research. Unlike the '70s I don't believe truly cheap oil is returning, oh and there is that Global Warming thing to think about.
It will be some years before we reach this tipping point in price however as current costs are about $100-$200 a bulb for 65watt equivalent LED bulbs
10 years after most bulbs are LED conventional bulbs will seem anachronistic and stone age. One of the few things in the last 100 years to just be out and out replaced by a new technology. Granted we have lots of bright shining new things in our modern world, but they general have been added to what we already have or evolved slowly from what came before. The switch to transistors from tubes is about the only other thing that comes to mind where this has happened, and perhaps this should just be seen as one of the last hold outs of filaments in tube to be displaced by solid state. All that is left to go are CRTs and this too will happen relatively soon.
In need of a similar revolution: Cars that run without gas - this is a hard one, but we are finally starting to make some progress; Energy production from other than Oil, Gas, Coal, and Uranium. Fusion is about the only way to go here, but it isn't doable at any price today. None of the other energy alternatives have a chance of displacing the big 3 fossil fuels or remaining conventional nuclear plants; Getting to Space without conventional rocket technology. Do all these things and we will have finally arrived in the 21 Century.
For long jumping the record is 24 feet and a straight multiplication of the inverse of the fractional gravity probably works, so a 144 foot long jump in distance might be possible on the Moon. I have never heard a commentator talk about so huge a number for a lunar jump, so I assume they like I would be referring to a vertical jump measured in the only way vertical jumps are measured (clearing a bar), but they, unlike myself, usually get it wrong.
A high jumper on Earth is only lifting his center of gravity 3 Feet. It (the center of gravity) is also starting at 3 Feet.
3 + 3 == 6 Foot jump on Earth
On the Moon 3*6 + 3 = 21. This fits your equations. Another poster countered the jumper on Earth should equal 9 feet, 6 foot man plus 3 foot start. But this is not how a jump is measured, it is measured by how far your entire body can clear a bar, the body being horizontal at the top of it trajectory.
Clearly this also assumes no space suit and doesn't take into the mechanics of how the jump would differ given the radically different timing, but should be close.
It may be possible to get your head to 9 foot, but to clear a 6 foot bar you have to get your body horizontal. This is actually a simplification as it also involves kicking while in flight to move your body over the bar in a a coordianted fashion.
Thanks for playing
Of course some would say the real purpose of art is to provoke, and this certainly passes the test on that front. In a Post 9/11 era world it's amazing the surveillance-surveillance wasn't halted on possible terrorism suspicions.
I have a nice cell phone I can no longer bring to work because it contains a digital camera. The Gym where I work out prohibits camera cell phones as well and not just in the locker rooms, but the Gym area, which ironically is on complete view from the street with floor to ceiling windows.
I have friends who like to snap pictures of random individuals and then deride these strangers later for their looks, clothing, or activity -- "Look at this Bozo." There are people who don't like to have their pictures taken for just this reason, with digital photography costing next to nothing these days it is happening more and more. In the past such people were just being paranoid, today they are being realistic -- not that it really should mater if someone you don't know is making fun of your clothes behind your back.
I guess I'm a bit conflicted about all this. I would like to be able to take my pictures anytime anywhere I would like, but I understand why some people would have a problem with it. Storeowners don't typically like people behaving in ways that discourage patronage. Someone clicking away uninvitedly at you while you shop kind of has this feel.
I would support stores having to clearly mark possible surveillance equipment, whether real or not. I would also support public access to government surveillance equipment that monitors public areas.
As for what I can do with my camera on private property, perhaps the privacy issue lies with the storeowners and not the camera wielding performance artists.
The Moon has about 1/6 Earth Gravity
Mars has about 1/3 Earth Gravity.
Assuming a 6-foot man can jump 6 feet on Earth, he could jump about 1/(1/6)*3 + 3 feet for a total of 21 feet on The Moon, 1/(1/3)*3 +3 for a total of 12 feet on Mars. Keep in mind when a 6-foot man jumps 6 feet here on Earth he is only lifting his CENTER of gravity 3 feet with a starting height of 3 feet for it.
Perhaps the idea is to encourage independent documentary style work, but I still shudder at the idea of hundreds of avant-garde like film stuttering remixes of old stuff. Call me old fashioned but I just want to see good stories told in film and video. I hate "Reality TV" and now I may have to suffer through the advent of "Rip It Mix It TV"
Hopefully people will limit them selves to intermittent flashes of things like train-wrecks and other visual punctuation marks with this stuff, but it is unclear to me where this is all going.
One thing does seem certain -- production costs for creating quality content should continue to drop for independents. At some point big budget TV and Hollywood will have a problem keeping up, and this I am for.
The title of this post clearly reads:
Science: Optical Computer Made From Frozen Light
We don't even have a diagram for a logic gate (or at least none are presented in the article) just some supposition in the article that such a thing could be used as a component. As for the 10x faster, where the hell did this number come from? Even if Moore's Law is slowing down (don't nit pick about it be about the number of components on a chip) it will make this "smashing" 10x advantage moot. Perhaps they refer to the speed of light in free space as opposed to signal speed copper. But even this doesn't make sense because signal speed in copper is about c/3.
What really maters is how fast a gate can be made to switch, how easy it is to fabricate enough of them to do something useful, and how close you can pack them together. Until someone can put down on paper the diagram of how this thing would work it is pointless to posit that it would be 10x faster.
Usually for these Pie-in-the-Sky type hype offerings it is common to claim 100x or 1000x or 1,000,000x times.
That BSEs might be used someday as parts in a Quantum computer would be a completely different thing, and those calculations that could be done quantumly would be trillions of times faster, but only for very specific algorithms. This article is not talking about that possibility, but classical computing and I think they have a lot of work to do just to demonstrate a single working component. Let alone claim BSE computers are here or just around the corner.
Quantum computing is neat in theory, but has made not significant progress in the number of qbits manipulatable in years. Granted there are new ways to make qbits, but nothing can seem to get 7 to 10 to date. Hopefully there will be a breakthrough, but you can't just command one. There is no scaling technology for Quantum Computers yet.
I predict biological approaches will similarly run into intractably hard roadblocks on the way to usefulness, with the possible exception of practical biological to electronic interfaces to aid the disabled and in the more distant future meld with the machine so to speak.
All is not lost however, multicore is of course where the industry is going for now, but expect more specialization in silicon for well-defined tasks. Graphics processors will get more powerful as algorithms improve and are more efficiently implemented with the transistors available. Any application that becomes mainstream will get its own processing unit of some sort. Granted this make for less flexibility in expanding the capabilities of existing machines, but software has been getting a free ride off the speed scaling in chips for years. In the future the line between programming and chip designing will blur as the two must work in concert to achieve the desired performance in whatever domain is desired.
Imagine a compiler that doesn't just compile code but tapes out the coprocessor need to run it.
The ebay.com link showed up at the bottom of the browser, but was replaced with some kind of javascript mouseon event. This is probably not new.
Instead of random text to fool Bayesian filters, it had hidden recent news article summaries (bracketed by html comment tags) that would be similar to what you might post to a friend.
Spam filters will probably be upgraded to catch this soon, but it was the first time I had seen it. And of course as mentioned in the article, the ebay specifics where obfuscated by html tags between letters.
Yes, because we would rather have Sony shooting Laser Beams through our heads instead of sound waves...
So what is the Max Frequency the smallest transistor could be clocked at on a modern CPU? This is much much higher than what the CPU could possibly be overclocked to, as that requires all the transistors to work in concert.
I am aware of the specifics of the original Moore's Law, but performance is what matters in the market for new hardware. Nobody buys a computer because it has more transitors. Moore's Law has come to have a new meaning, and a more useful one.
Also many APU's clock at double the CPU rate of the chip they are on, so you are wrong by at least 2.