Physical layer is level 1. This covers the hardware--the cables and interface cards that would need to be modified to operate at the Terabit rates, and which is the primary concern in this case.
Layer 2 will be involved, of course, but the primary difficulties in this endeavor is going to be layer 1.
There are still a few token rings and other such mesozoic cruft wandering around in the wild out there, but they still work--because some clever folks invented a way to get from one kind of network to another.
Keep in mind, also, that it's really only the early adopters--those who are willing to buy 1st-generation equipment--who would get 'screwed over', and they have, by definition (as the first generation of a given kind of thing is always several times more expensive than the 'production' generations), the money to waste on this sort of thing.
I see it as an opportunity for a new standard to evolve in a more natural fashion. Consider HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray--you have two competing formats come out, neither of which is compatible with the other's standard, but after a while it becomes apparent which one is going to be used.
Besides, it's not like this is going to affect TCP or IP or whatnot--this is way down at the bottom of the OSI model at level 1.
Stick a department store mannequin in a junker car loaded with explosives.
Wire said junker up to be a robot--add in a processor, some collision detection software, maybe a GPS or some other heuristic to determine when to blow up--and send it off.
The now robotic junker car looks legit enough at a first glance--there's a human-looking figure in the driver's seat, it's a car, it passes--but it's still a robot that's heading towards its target.
Not all robots need to look even vaguely humanoid.
There's a significant difference between gasoline and water: converting gasoline to its end products is an exothermic reaction; converting water to hydrogen and oxygen is an endothermic reaction.
In other words, while you can get more energy out of gasoline than you put into it when you break it down, it takes more energy to break apart water than you get from doing so.
And yes, you'll get some of it back when you turn the hydrogen and oxygen back into water, but not nearly enough to run the process continuously--and you would need to either plug the car in at night every night, or would need to have some other means of producing hydrogen, in order to make this practical.
Furthermore, you're still left with the problem of how to store the hydrogen that's produced--because it's far less practical to produce it 'on demand' (you could, after all, just run the car off electricity if you're going to be doing that, and avoid the efficiency hit of going through the intermediate steps) than to produce it in bulk.
So while you may end up with a car that can produce -and store- its own hydrogen overnight, you will -never- have a car you can just 'fill up on water'.
I can see, though, if they do manage to demonstrate platinumless electrodes, the possibility that the electrodes could be swappable for a fairly minimal price hit.
Seriously, though, a distillery isn't that expensive. They're, what, a couple hundred to a couple thousand bucks for a home model? And that's assuming you don't just shell out the $.25/gallon down at the laundromat, anyway.
Hell, with some folks, you could hook up the dehumidifier in the basement to the electrolyser and make fuel while you're dehumidifying your basement. Or just wear a stillsuit, and instead of drinking it, use it for your sandcrawler.
Ah, see, that makes a -lot- more sense. The way the damn thing's worded makes it look like some kind of magic fairydust driven water->hydrogen->water cycle, which is, of course, ridiculous.
That's the way it's supposed to work, but in the press release they say that they want to use water to convert to hydrogen for on-board fuel cell, and have said electrolysis being also installed on the car so that fuel stations wouldn't need to reformat, but would be able to dispense water.
The problem is that it just doesn't work that way. Yes, radically increased electrolysis efficiency -is- a good thing, but it's just not going to work in a car.
Distilleries aren't that expensive, though, and you don't -actually- need pure distilled water.
You'll just have to clean out the electrolysis chamber periodically if you don't, because all the stuff that isn't water will end up caked all over the insides. Those of you with particularly hard water will have issues.
OK, so, what energy are you using to run the process? The water's not going to spontaneously fall apart into hydrogen and oxygen, after all, even if you have a super duper catalyst--what's the -real- fuel for this process?
Which is a good thing, considering that I like to obey the laws of thermodynamics in my house.
But at any rate, the one thing that I keep wondering about is how this in-car conversion of water to hydrogen will work--as yet, it keeps looking like this is just going to be another electric car implementation or something. Where's the power to crack the water coming from? Onboard batteries? Some other power source?
True enough that there are people who study all manner of things, and I'm not trying to imply that there would be -no- interest in dark matter life--but I'm questioning how wide this interest would be. After all, mediocre 500-year-old poets are only interesting as either a means of studying linguistics, the history of literature, or trivia--so too would dark matter life be really only interesting to biologists, physicists, and the perennially curious, I should think--unless there was some reason why the Great Unwashed would be interested that I've not thought of?
Keep in mind, no matter how fascinating you find a given subject, it's kinda hard to make a living doing it unless you can get enough other people interested to support your studies monetarily.
It may be possible that dark matter interacts normally with itself, but its weak interaction with what we can see makes the problem of resolution difficult.
If I were feeling particularly sci-fi, I'd probably call it something like 'gravitational bleed-over from close neighboring dimensions'.
What would we trade, exactly? Information's all I can think of (provided we had a way to communicate, anyway)--after all, it's not as though we can interact in such a way as to trade any sort of material goods, is there?
Though I suppose we could outsource telemarketing....
However, galaxies also form 'sheets and filaments' at extremely large scales, as well; presumably, should these folks figure out how to find smaller structures, they should look somewhat more familiar.
It's really probably just a point of view issue. After all, should there be 'dark matter organisms' of some kind, they'd be most likely supremely uninterested in the likes of us for anything other than curiosity value. However, we're rather interesting to us, being as we -are- us and we tend to be somewhat self-interested.
So now that they've spotted the large ones, perhaps they can get the queens and twins as well. Dark Matter would probably be a great seller amongst the goth/emo crowd--after all, once you've painted your walls black and gotten black carpets, it wouldn't do to have "My Little Pony" sheets, would it?
Seems to me that if it's your job to go to a meeting that you should sit your own rear end in line.
Besides, the more you have these lobbyists tied up waiting, the less you have them actually lobbying--so perhaps the congresscritters might have to listen to their constituents for once, if only out of sheer boredom.
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Physical layer is level 1. This covers the hardware--the cables and interface cards that would need to be modified to operate at the Terabit rates, and which is the primary concern in this case.
Layer 2 will be involved, of course, but the primary difficulties in this endeavor is going to be layer 1.
Not entirely.
There are still a few token rings and other such mesozoic cruft wandering around in the wild out there, but they still work--because some clever folks invented a way to get from one kind of network to another.
Keep in mind, also, that it's really only the early adopters--those who are willing to buy 1st-generation equipment--who would get 'screwed over', and they have, by definition (as the first generation of a given kind of thing is always several times more expensive than the 'production' generations), the money to waste on this sort of thing.
Do you have any idea the volume of pr0n you could serve on that pipe?
I see it as an opportunity for a new standard to evolve in a more natural fashion. Consider HD-DVD v. Blu-Ray--you have two competing formats come out, neither of which is compatible with the other's standard, but after a while it becomes apparent which one is going to be used.
Besides, it's not like this is going to affect TCP or IP or whatnot--this is way down at the bottom of the OSI model at level 1.
A whole new marketing campaign suggests itself: "Give her the gift of the stars"
Or something like that, anyway.
The only way to fight said robots will be to wear red sweaters and white fishing hats; this will cause the robots to malfunction automatically.
Or we could develop some kind of bamboo-and-coconut method of fighting 'em, but why enter the arms race on the same terms?
Stick a department store mannequin in a junker car loaded with explosives.
Wire said junker up to be a robot--add in a processor, some collision detection software, maybe a GPS or some other heuristic to determine when to blow up--and send it off.
The now robotic junker car looks legit enough at a first glance--there's a human-looking figure in the driver's seat, it's a car, it passes--but it's still a robot that's heading towards its target.
Not all robots need to look even vaguely humanoid.
There's a significant difference between gasoline and water: converting gasoline to its end products is an exothermic reaction; converting water to hydrogen and oxygen is an endothermic reaction.
In other words, while you can get more energy out of gasoline than you put into it when you break it down, it takes more energy to break apart water than you get from doing so.
And yes, you'll get some of it back when you turn the hydrogen and oxygen back into water, but not nearly enough to run the process continuously--and you would need to either plug the car in at night every night, or would need to have some other means of producing hydrogen, in order to make this practical.
Furthermore, you're still left with the problem of how to store the hydrogen that's produced--because it's far less practical to produce it 'on demand' (you could, after all, just run the car off electricity if you're going to be doing that, and avoid the efficiency hit of going through the intermediate steps) than to produce it in bulk.
So while you may end up with a car that can produce -and store- its own hydrogen overnight, you will -never- have a car you can just 'fill up on water'.
True, true.
I can see, though, if they do manage to demonstrate platinumless electrodes, the possibility that the electrodes could be swappable for a fairly minimal price hit.
Seriously, though, a distillery isn't that expensive. They're, what, a couple hundred to a couple thousand bucks for a home model? And that's assuming you don't just shell out the $.25/gallon down at the laundromat, anyway.
Hell, with some folks, you could hook up the dehumidifier in the basement to the electrolyser and make fuel while you're dehumidifying your basement. Or just wear a stillsuit, and instead of drinking it, use it for your sandcrawler.
The spice must flow!
Ah, see, that makes a -lot- more sense. The way the damn thing's worded makes it look like some kind of magic fairydust driven water->hydrogen->water cycle, which is, of course, ridiculous.
That's the way it's supposed to work, but in the press release they say that they want to use water to convert to hydrogen for on-board fuel cell, and have said electrolysis being also installed on the car so that fuel stations wouldn't need to reformat, but would be able to dispense water.
The problem is that it just doesn't work that way. Yes, radically increased electrolysis efficiency -is- a good thing, but it's just not going to work in a car.
Distilleries aren't that expensive, though, and you don't -actually- need pure distilled water.
You'll just have to clean out the electrolysis chamber periodically if you don't, because all the stuff that isn't water will end up caked all over the insides. Those of you with particularly hard water will have issues.
OK, so, what energy are you using to run the process? The water's not going to spontaneously fall apart into hydrogen and oxygen, after all, even if you have a super duper catalyst--what's the -real- fuel for this process?
Which is a good thing, considering that I like to obey the laws of thermodynamics in my house.
But at any rate, the one thing that I keep wondering about is how this in-car conversion of water to hydrogen will work--as yet, it keeps looking like this is just going to be another electric car implementation or something. Where's the power to crack the water coming from? Onboard batteries? Some other power source?
True enough that there are people who study all manner of things, and I'm not trying to imply that there would be -no- interest in dark matter life--but I'm questioning how wide this interest would be. After all, mediocre 500-year-old poets are only interesting as either a means of studying linguistics, the history of literature, or trivia--so too would dark matter life be really only interesting to biologists, physicists, and the perennially curious, I should think--unless there was some reason why the Great Unwashed would be interested that I've not thought of?
Keep in mind, no matter how fascinating you find a given subject, it's kinda hard to make a living doing it unless you can get enough other people interested to support your studies monetarily.
True, but bear in mind that lawsuits like this seem mostly intended not as an actual reparation of damages but to make a large public statement.
Attention whoring, in a way.
So they've already won what they wanted: to get attention for the difficulties that they and their neighbors have been having.
IANAL myself, so take this comment cum grano salis.
What'm I going to do with something at that scale, though?
It may be possible that dark matter interacts normally with itself, but its weak interaction with what we can see makes the problem of resolution difficult.
If I were feeling particularly sci-fi, I'd probably call it something like 'gravitational bleed-over from close neighboring dimensions'.
What would we trade, exactly? Information's all I can think of (provided we had a way to communicate, anyway)--after all, it's not as though we can interact in such a way as to trade any sort of material goods, is there?
Though I suppose we could outsource telemarketing....
Kind of an odd thing to do, isn't it?
However, galaxies also form 'sheets and filaments' at extremely large scales, as well; presumably, should these folks figure out how to find smaller structures, they should look somewhat more familiar.
Interesting or noninteresting to -whom- exactly?
It's really probably just a point of view issue. After all, should there be 'dark matter organisms' of some kind, they'd be most likely supremely uninterested in the likes of us for anything other than curiosity value. However, we're rather interesting to us, being as we -are- us and we tend to be somewhat self-interested.
So now that they've spotted the large ones, perhaps they can get the queens and twins as well. Dark Matter would probably be a great seller amongst the goth/emo crowd--after all, once you've painted your walls black and gotten black carpets, it wouldn't do to have "My Little Pony" sheets, would it?
Last I checked, said 'nutcases' approved somewhat of nuclear power as being cleaner than coal?
I'm kinda curious as to why they shut down five reactors, though.
Seems to me that if it's your job to go to a meeting that you should sit your own rear end in line.
Besides, the more you have these lobbyists tied up waiting, the less you have them actually lobbying--so perhaps the congresscritters might have to listen to their constituents for once, if only out of sheer boredom.
Bring a suit against 'em for 'subverting the democratic process' I suppose. Or something else that sounds suitably treasonous.