The ability of lasers to do interesting things is based on the concentration of the beam. Spread a watt or two over a six foot radius and it is not very strong. It is something less than a shop light with twin four foot T8's shining on a white door. Not enough to blind.
Unless you happen to be flying at night and have let your eyes adjust for night vision. Then it could be quite dazzling, despite the low power.
Flying an aircraft is no joke, and flying a helicopter is even worse from what I've heard. Colorful stories, possibly, but you don't want to make a hard job even worse.
How on earth do you come to that conclusion? I compare cash to useful platinum, and compare commerce to manufacturing, both necessary parts of a modern economy.
Or were you referring to my "useless, ugly..." statement? In that case, you completely misread my comment: I was challenging GP to find me something that was of no use to people, had no redeeming esthetic qualities, and was just not something someone would actually want for any reason, but which nonetheless you could say had "intrinsic value". I'm saying that something like this doesn't exist. At no point did I say cash or commerce is useless, ugly or undesirable, and was in fact implying the opposite: that money and platinum have value *because*, and also *only* because, they are currently desirable.
So the intrinsic value of something is the value of what it can be used for.
So, what happens when we no longer have any use for platinum? It loses its intrinsic value? That means that its value wasn't *intrinsic* but extrinsic, dependent on our need for it in manufacturing, in the same way that cash has extrinsic value dependent on our need for it to engage in commerce.
Can you name one useless, ugly and undesirable material with intrinsic value?
It only makes sense to talk about ownership rights within society as it's a grated right, not an implicit one. Outside of society, the only property that society "owns" is the property that it can and will defend. Society may own all land on paper, but I'm sure there are plenty of places a dedicated loner could squat undisturbed.
That it treats you as a member is an upside, because the alternative is that it relocates, jails or shoots you as being a dangerous wild animal infringing on its territory, same as a bear or a tiger.
But isn't that to be expected? If you're truly outside of society, then you don't have any cooperative agreements (the social contract, treaties between countries, etc...) with it and are therefore in direct competition with society for resources. Seeing as you're not part of society, it owes you nothing, and can run roughshod over you to take the resources for itself. Isn't that what one pack of animals would do to a loner, or to another, smaller pack?
If you really were to live outside of society, why should it care about respecting your independence if you have something it wants? That's why it's a miserable existence: only by being homeless and destitute can you escape the hungry eye of society.
And if you're not part of society, why would you care if you break its laws? That only matters if you expect it to treat you as a member.
Post the facts here. Which "top" British swimmers made gains of a few seconds during their teenage years?
Check podcasts from the last few days from the BBC, specifically Newshour I believe. They did a piece on her, and interviewed an Australian swim coach. He said he was not at all surprised by this, that he'd seen it happen with his own students, and that a female swimmer's capabilities are very flexible, much more so than a man. He claimed it's why the age range of top female swimmers is much broader than that of male swimmers.
What does Bolt have to do with a 16 year old beating the best of the best by seconds? Bolt can't do that - and never did.
Nor did she. She beat her own time by seconds. Haven't found how much she beat the best by.
And Bolt did precisely what gp suspected the male swimmer did: slowed down in a race he was sure of winning, specifically in the 2008 Olympics. It happens.
Because launching solar panels into space and beaming the power down to a receiving station near population centers is better than putting solar panels in the desert and running power to city centers via cables?
Yep! No clouds in space, nor any sunsets. Plenty of room, as well.
Like with video games, right, and software in general? Where they release on the deadline, tested or not, saying any bugs will be fixed with the next patch?
"New in PopularMassMarketPaperback v3.4: No more speling errors!"
A feedback mechanism is a good idea, but I see them taking what you describe a bit further than you would like.
The setting's the very distant future, where among other things this kind of building robot has been put into use. Unfortunately, humans have long forgotten how to control them, and as a result the single structure the Earth has become now extends past the orbit of the moon, which was itself consumed as building resources...
Of course they probably respect the FCC requirements,...
The point is, they're not by any reasonable standard. The spectrum LS bought is zoned for satellite use and only allows a limited deployment of backup ground-based stations. LS is trying to pull a fast one by building a huge network of "backup" stations and then using these as the primary system, never actually putting a single satellite into orbit.
It's possible that they're not violating the letter of the regulation, but they're definitely misusing the spectrum by trying to repurpose it.
Remember those thousand monkeys at their typewriters? Them writing Shakespeare is an example of patterns appearing in randomness.
The music composed here is perfectly predictable (no random numbers were used), but completely pattern-free in that any relationship between groups of notes only appeared once.
Belgium is a country that operates based on compromise between political parties - not the same as what you're describing, but similar and at a smaller scale. Thanks to this we get appeasement politics - I'll give you this vote if you support another bridge for my constituency - and, when things fail, as they have now with reforming the state, we get deadlock. We haven't had a valid federal government in over a year and a half (beats Iraq's record), merely a caretaker government that may not make new decisions.
There are things that people will never agree on. Can you imagine a consensus on abortion, for instance? And in the meantime, is it banned or is it permitted? You'd get people screaming bloody murder if you said everything was permitted by default.
This makes the government put their attention on the cases that matter.
To play devil's advocate, the side effect of this is that they won't investigate anything they think *doesn't* matter. People often complain here and elsewhere that police seem uninterested in mundane crime (i.e., stolen laptops), and making investigations more expensive won't help.
First of all, use all the spectrum all the time instead of carving it up like we do today.
Not all spectrum is created equally. Look at FM vs AM radio, for instance: FM passes through the ionosphere while AM reflects, meaning that a single AM station can be heard - and will therefore interfere - over a much greater distance. Extend something as ubiquitous as WiFi down into that range and you'll drown out the world with noise.
High frequencies have problems too. As GP said, when you start hitting the hundreds of GHz even air starts to absorb your signal, much less effects such as rain. Take point-to-point microwave links between cell towers: if you replaced them by THz communication devices (ie, lasers), the next rainstorm would cause massive outages.
I'm sure there are more problems along these lines.
Requires a cheap way for small devices to send and receive at any frequency, which I suspect we haven't got yet, but I don't know of a reason that it shouldn't be possible eventually.
Invent that and you'll be filthy rich. If it happens in my lifetime I'll eat my hat.
Second, add access points everywhere to get a better signal at lower strength and shared with only the people in your immediate vicinity.
Each one is then a source of interference for the others. Your neighbor's file transfers will knock out your streaming video. Detecting whether or not a channel is in use is a hard problem, and unsolved despite active research.
After that, you could try directed channels where the wireless device knows where the access points are and sends a focused beam only in the direction of the access point.
Cell towers sometimes do this from tower to handheld, and it does help with congestion, but that's quite complex hardware.
If it's really necessary, you could set up several directed wireless channels from the same device, though that would require some precision aiming.
There's also a minimum spacing between the channels, and it's larger than the thickness of equivalent cables. It's also frequency and antenna dependent.
If ALL the spectrum multiplied by however many channels can be kept separate is not enough for your application...
The SKA, a planned radio telescope, will be generating a petabyte of data per second. You'd need ten thousand 100 GHz transmission links to carry that, or instead you could put it onto a few hundred fiberoptic cables instead. And if you did use radio links, good luck finding a free frequency for your cell phone.
In any case, the bandwidth of such a system would be tremendous - far beyond anything you can do on wires today.
Such a system is also impossible today. By the time it is possible, the same will be possible for wires, and seeing as it's so much easier to make independent wired channels versus independent radio channels, wire will always have a factor N more capacity than wireless, N being the number of wires in your house.
...but it's possible that at some point we'll have so much bandwidth and so low latency that it doesn't matter.
There are fundamental limits on both. We can't use the really high frequencies without removing Earth's atmosphere. We can't keep reducing latency without at some point violating relativity. The same applies to wires, of course, but the difference is that each wire is almost a little world of its own. You can approach that with RF tech, but you can never exceed it.
There was a presentation a few weeks ago by G. Ganguli from Naval Research Laboratory where he suggested placing a layer of very fine dust in an LEO band. The dust should be too fine to cause any impact damage but thick enough that it increases drag, decaying the orbit of debris. A satellite would be unharmed, although its orbit would also decay slightly. You can even tune the dust's own decay rate to match that of the debris size you're targeting.
The root certificate is also included on the chip, so as long as you have a known good one (i.e., your own that you picked up from the local govt. office) you can verify any other card.
Good IT guys are ones who understand that security cannot come at the price of productivity.
Bugger that. I want the IT guys handling my medical or financial information to put security above productivity, because if that stuff is mishandled I'm gonna be delayed much longer getting my life back in order.
Like everything else in life, there's a balance.
That I agree with. My university gives professors and grad students admin on their machines. I wouldn't go to a hospital that did the same, however. There is a balance, and it varies with the sensitivity of the data.
Motion creates interlace artifacts. 1080i looks great until something moves. That is why the more sports-oriented broadcasters use 720p60.
Are you talking about the comb effect? You can get rid of that by playing the video back at twice the frame rate with each field a frame. Vertical resolution's lousy, but there shouldn't be any artifacts.
Unless of course the stream was first interlaced and then compressed with a lossy codec, as I expect most are. Then 720p60 should win, as the codec probably doesn't understand the concept of interlacing and will treat an interlaced frame in the same way as a progressive.
DVDs are a good example of a source that can be compressed first and then interlaced. Movies are often pressed as progressive 24fps with a telecine flag set to allow the player to produce interlaced output.
If your source is 30fps, then there's no practical difference between 1080p30 and 1080i60 once it reaches your set. In fact, if you delay your signal by a frame or two, you can display it as 1080p30.
True. Thing is, It may be changing now, but in the past the two interlaced fields were not taken at the same moment, and so it was not possible to bring it back to progressive 30. If you watch old interlaced tv programs on an LCD, you'll see a comb effect that no deinterlacer can fully get rid of short of changing it to 1080x540 @ 60fps.
In any case, 1080p60 is still better than 1080i60.
First, the best quality is arguably 1080i (1920x1080 at 30fps), which is same resolution as 1080p once it is de-interlaced. 720p (1280x720 at 60fps) is better for motion, since it is not interlaced.
I'd disagree - it's more complex than that.
60fps material is obviously better than 30fps for motion. When you say 720p and 1080p you do not specify the framerate, however, and 720p could be 30fps or 60fps. You typically have a choice between 1080p30 or 720p60 because the bandwidth saved by reducing the resolution can be used to up the framerate.
1080i30 is typically one of two things: progressive 24fps movie reel telecined up to 30fps , or native interlaced material at 30fps. The native stuff is actually 1920x540 at 60fps, so you actually have less vertical resolution than 720p, but in exchange you get a higher framerate - just as good as 720p with regards to motion. A telecined movie, on the other hand, can be transformed back into 1080p24 perfectly, assuming no lossy operations were applied to the pulled up signal (such as compression, unfortunately). Neither is equal to true 1080p30 and they're both far below 1080p60.
So: TV interlacing halves the vertical resolution but doubles the framerate - better motion at the cost of sharpness - and 2:3 telecine is a useless waste of space for anyone with a progressive TV. Both of these techniques can be applied to any resolution, be it 1080, 720 or 480.
Unfortunately, no one actually transmits 1080p60...
Seriously.... for the gamers out there... is there really that much of difference between 1680x1050 at 60fps and 1900X1200 at 60fps? Do you really have to purchase a new computer every 12-18 months to get the maximum resolution and fps out of the current hot game on the market? Are you sure you could not enjoy a game at a slightly less than bleeding edge resolution and fps? The most enjoyment I think I got out of game was back in the Apple IIe and Nintendo games. That was when plot and substance was more important than graphics.
Yes, I need it. Maybe not every 12 months, but definitely sooner than every 7 years.
Mario, in all its pixellated glory, was a great game mainly because it had a great mechanic that didn't rely on visuals at all. Most old games are like this, as are some new ones despite their graphics. Flash Portal and similar versions, for instance - Portal without graphics, but still fun.
Thing is, there are some wonderful game mechanics that don't work without good visuals, mainly games that rely on immersion. Mirror's edge comes to mind - the game would have been much less interesting at NES resolutions. It's the feeling that you're actually leaping from building to building, pulling off all these stunts, that makes it great.
How about cinematic games, like Mass Effect or Grim Fandango? They benefit from a better screen in the same way that high def movies do.
It also greatly benefits shooters if you prefer sniping to close combat. I know my eyes can resolve finer details than my monitor can display for the distance at which I sit. I *might* be satisfied when monitors have twice or three times the dpi they have now. I'd also appreciate this at work - text would be sharper and easier to read. Photo editing would be easier as well if I could see the entire photo at 100% resolution, rather than at the ~25% I have to use now.
So yes, plot and mechanics are important, but graphics are not always just eye candy as you seem to imply.
It hurts people who hoard dollars. Anyone who spends them quickly gets almost full value, and having a short turnaround time for cash helps the economy.
I think you could view it as a progressive tax on capital...
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you happen to be flying at night and have let your eyes adjust for night vision. Then it could be quite dazzling, despite the low power.
Flying an aircraft is no joke, and flying a helicopter is even worse from what I've heard. Colorful stories, possibly, but you don't want to make a hard job even worse.
How on earth do you come to that conclusion? I compare cash to useful platinum, and compare commerce to manufacturing, both necessary parts of a modern economy.
Or were you referring to my "useless, ugly..." statement? In that case, you completely misread my comment: I was challenging GP to find me something that was of no use to people, had no redeeming esthetic qualities, and was just not something someone would actually want for any reason, but which nonetheless you could say had "intrinsic value". I'm saying that something like this doesn't exist. At no point did I say cash or commerce is useless, ugly or undesirable, and was in fact implying the opposite: that money and platinum have value *because*, and also *only* because, they are currently desirable.
So, what happens when we no longer have any use for platinum? It loses its intrinsic value? That means that its value wasn't *intrinsic* but extrinsic, dependent on our need for it in manufacturing, in the same way that cash has extrinsic value dependent on our need for it to engage in commerce.
Can you name one useless, ugly and undesirable material with intrinsic value?
It only makes sense to talk about ownership rights within society as it's a grated right, not an implicit one. Outside of society, the only property that society "owns" is the property that it can and will defend. Society may own all land on paper, but I'm sure there are plenty of places a dedicated loner could squat undisturbed.
That it treats you as a member is an upside, because the alternative is that it relocates, jails or shoots you as being a dangerous wild animal infringing on its territory, same as a bear or a tiger.
But isn't that to be expected? If you're truly outside of society, then you don't have any cooperative agreements (the social contract, treaties between countries, etc...) with it and are therefore in direct competition with society for resources. Seeing as you're not part of society, it owes you nothing, and can run roughshod over you to take the resources for itself. Isn't that what one pack of animals would do to a loner, or to another, smaller pack?
If you really were to live outside of society, why should it care about respecting your independence if you have something it wants? That's why it's a miserable existence: only by being homeless and destitute can you escape the hungry eye of society.
And if you're not part of society, why would you care if you break its laws? That only matters if you expect it to treat you as a member.
Check podcasts from the last few days from the BBC, specifically Newshour I believe. They did a piece on her, and interviewed an Australian swim coach. He said he was not at all surprised by this, that he'd seen it happen with his own students, and that a female swimmer's capabilities are very flexible, much more so than a man. He claimed it's why the age range of top female swimmers is much broader than that of male swimmers.
Nor did she. She beat her own time by seconds. Haven't found how much she beat the best by.
And Bolt did precisely what gp suspected the male swimmer did: slowed down in a race he was sure of winning, specifically in the 2008 Olympics. It happens.
Yep! No clouds in space, nor any sunsets. Plenty of room, as well.
Like with video games, right, and software in general? Where they release on the deadline, tested or not, saying any bugs will be fixed with the next patch?
"New in PopularMassMarketPaperback v3.4: No more speling errors!"
A feedback mechanism is a good idea, but I see them taking what you describe a bit further than you would like.
Anyone else think of Blame! when they read this?
The setting's the very distant future, where among other things this kind of building robot has been put into use. Unfortunately, humans have long forgotten how to control them, and as a result the single structure the Earth has become now extends past the orbit of the moon, which was itself consumed as building resources...
Always makes my hair stand on end.
The point is, they're not by any reasonable standard. The spectrum LS bought is zoned for satellite use and only allows a limited deployment of backup ground-based stations. LS is trying to pull a fast one by building a huge network of "backup" stations and then using these as the primary system, never actually putting a single satellite into orbit.
It's possible that they're not violating the letter of the regulation, but they're definitely misusing the spectrum by trying to repurpose it.
Remember those thousand monkeys at their typewriters? Them writing Shakespeare is an example of patterns appearing in randomness.
The music composed here is perfectly predictable (no random numbers were used), but completely pattern-free in that any relationship between groups of notes only appeared once.
Belgium is a country that operates based on compromise between political parties - not the same as what you're describing, but similar and at a smaller scale. Thanks to this we get appeasement politics - I'll give you this vote if you support another bridge for my constituency - and, when things fail, as they have now with reforming the state, we get deadlock. We haven't had a valid federal government in over a year and a half (beats Iraq's record), merely a caretaker government that may not make new decisions.
There are things that people will never agree on. Can you imagine a consensus on abortion, for instance? And in the meantime, is it banned or is it permitted? You'd get people screaming bloody murder if you said everything was permitted by default.
To play devil's advocate, the side effect of this is that they won't investigate anything they think *doesn't* matter. People often complain here and elsewhere that police seem uninterested in mundane crime (i.e., stolen laptops), and making investigations more expensive won't help.
Seems that the Nobel Prize winning scientist whose work on radiation exposure is the basis for our standards today may have lied about there being no threshold: http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/education/radiations-big-lie
Not all spectrum is created equally. Look at FM vs AM radio, for instance: FM passes through the ionosphere while AM reflects, meaning that a single AM station can be heard - and will therefore interfere - over a much greater distance. Extend something as ubiquitous as WiFi down into that range and you'll drown out the world with noise.
High frequencies have problems too. As GP said, when you start hitting the hundreds of GHz even air starts to absorb your signal, much less effects such as rain. Take point-to-point microwave links between cell towers: if you replaced them by THz communication devices (ie, lasers), the next rainstorm would cause massive outages.
I'm sure there are more problems along these lines.
Invent that and you'll be filthy rich. If it happens in my lifetime I'll eat my hat.
Each one is then a source of interference for the others. Your neighbor's file transfers will knock out your streaming video. Detecting whether or not a channel is in use is a hard problem, and unsolved despite active research.
Cell towers sometimes do this from tower to handheld, and it does help with congestion, but that's quite complex hardware.
There's also a minimum spacing between the channels, and it's larger than the thickness of equivalent cables. It's also frequency and antenna dependent.
The SKA, a planned radio telescope, will be generating a petabyte of data per second. You'd need ten thousand 100 GHz transmission links to carry that, or instead you could put it onto a few hundred fiberoptic cables instead. And if you did use radio links, good luck finding a free frequency for your cell phone.
Such a system is also impossible today. By the time it is possible, the same will be possible for wires, and seeing as it's so much easier to make independent wired channels versus independent radio channels, wire will always have a factor N more capacity than wireless, N being the number of wires in your house.
There are fundamental limits on both. We can't use the really high frequencies without removing Earth's atmosphere. We can't keep reducing latency without at some point violating relativity. The same applies to wires, of course, but the difference is that each wire is almost a little world of its own. You can approach that with RF tech, but you can never exceed it.
There was a presentation a few weeks ago by G. Ganguli from Naval Research Laboratory where he suggested placing a layer of very fine dust in an LEO band. The dust should be too fine to cause any impact damage but thick enough that it increases drag, decaying the orbit of debris. A satellite would be unharmed, although its orbit would also decay slightly. You can even tune the dust's own decay rate to match that of the debris size you're targeting.
Couldn't find that original paper online, but here's another: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.1401
The root certificate is also included on the chip, so as long as you have a known good one (i.e., your own that you picked up from the local govt. office) you can verify any other card.
Bugger that. I want the IT guys handling my medical or financial information to put security above productivity, because if that stuff is mishandled I'm gonna be delayed much longer getting my life back in order.
That I agree with. My university gives professors and grad students admin on their machines. I wouldn't go to a hospital that did the same, however. There is a balance, and it varies with the sensitivity of the data.
Are you talking about the comb effect? You can get rid of that by playing the video back at twice the frame rate with each field a frame. Vertical resolution's lousy, but there shouldn't be any artifacts.
Unless of course the stream was first interlaced and then compressed with a lossy codec, as I expect most are. Then 720p60 should win, as the codec probably doesn't understand the concept of interlacing and will treat an interlaced frame in the same way as a progressive.
DVDs are a good example of a source that can be compressed first and then interlaced. Movies are often pressed as progressive 24fps with a telecine flag set to allow the player to produce interlaced output.
True. Thing is, It may be changing now, but in the past the two interlaced fields were not taken at the same moment, and so it was not possible to bring it back to progressive 30. If you watch old interlaced tv programs on an LCD, you'll see a comb effect that no deinterlacer can fully get rid of short of changing it to 1080x540 @ 60fps.
In any case, 1080p60 is still better than 1080i60.
I'd disagree - it's more complex than that.
60fps material is obviously better than 30fps for motion. When you say 720p and 1080p you do not specify the framerate, however, and 720p could be 30fps or 60fps. You typically have a choice between 1080p30 or 720p60 because the bandwidth saved by reducing the resolution can be used to up the framerate.
1080i30 is typically one of two things: progressive 24fps movie reel telecined up to 30fps , or native interlaced material at 30fps. The native stuff is actually 1920x540 at 60fps, so you actually have less vertical resolution than 720p, but in exchange you get a higher framerate - just as good as 720p with regards to motion. A telecined movie, on the other hand, can be transformed back into 1080p24 perfectly, assuming no lossy operations were applied to the pulled up signal (such as compression, unfortunately). Neither is equal to true 1080p30 and they're both far below 1080p60.
So: TV interlacing halves the vertical resolution but doubles the framerate - better motion at the cost of sharpness - and 2:3 telecine is a useless waste of space for anyone with a progressive TV. Both of these techniques can be applied to any resolution, be it 1080, 720 or 480.
Unfortunately, no one actually transmits 1080p60...
Yes, I need it. Maybe not every 12 months, but definitely sooner than every 7 years.
Mario, in all its pixellated glory, was a great game mainly because it had a great mechanic that didn't rely on visuals at all. Most old games are like this, as are some new ones despite their graphics. Flash Portal and similar versions, for instance - Portal without graphics, but still fun.
Thing is, there are some wonderful game mechanics that don't work without good visuals, mainly games that rely on immersion. Mirror's edge comes to mind - the game would have been much less interesting at NES resolutions. It's the feeling that you're actually leaping from building to building, pulling off all these stunts, that makes it great.
How about cinematic games, like Mass Effect or Grim Fandango? They benefit from a better screen in the same way that high def movies do.
It also greatly benefits shooters if you prefer sniping to close combat. I know my eyes can resolve finer details than my monitor can display for the distance at which I sit. I *might* be satisfied when monitors have twice or three times the dpi they have now. I'd also appreciate this at work - text would be sharper and easier to read. Photo editing would be easier as well if I could see the entire photo at 100% resolution, rather than at the ~25% I have to use now.
So yes, plot and mechanics are important, but graphics are not always just eye candy as you seem to imply.
It hurts people who hoard dollars. Anyone who spends them quickly gets almost full value, and having a short turnaround time for cash helps the economy.
I think you could view it as a progressive tax on capital...
Just because you want to edit the dictionary for political reasons, doesn't mean we have to go along with it.
Oy, what happened to "yesterday's news"? I can't filter by date any more?