Some writers once said that humans only use 5% of their brain because the scientists could only explain the 5% that directly created a recognizable effect when they poked it with a stick. This is like saying a computer uses only 1% of its ability because they can only understand what's on the phosphors in the video tube. Any language needs support functions like comma's and gerunds or the sentences would be nothing more than a jumble of concept words. For instance take the last sentence and remove everything but the "important" words and then mix them up and you get. Support gerunds functions nothing concept jumble language. Hardly understandable. The rest of the genetic language probably has to do with regulation of ontological development, phenotype expression, and such. Antibodies generally have an RNA segment attached how difficult would it be to use something similar on non-protean coding sequences to regulate transcription. Wouldn't you expect that as the number of genes increases and their interactions exponentially explode that the percentage of code necessary for regulation would come to dominate the portion coding for the proteins.
Do unto others as you would have done to yourself, don't let America become like Israel. It is un-American to support human rights violations, support justice in Palestine.
What we need to do is use all the extra cycles of the average computer waiting on its user to press a key to search for things that don't belong just like biological immune systems expend energy looking for invaders. Virus scanners are a start for recognizing intruders but only after they get recognized by antivirus writers and then distributed to the few that will pay and update. This gives the virus a long head start and "sheltered hosts".
The operating system should use the spare cycles to do a tripwire style scan of the rest of the system. The faster an intrusion is found the less time it has to create trouble. Areas like user storage will be problematic but such security measures should be integral to the system administration and operation at the operating system code level.
Further it should be (putting on fire suit) a function of the government to finance an independent system to publicize standardized virus recognition fingerprints. Then it should be integral to the operating system to run a scan as part of the executable load function. This would be justified as protecting commerce. This won't solve the problem of "script" viruses that play off the integration features of Microsoft products but that can be dealt will by requiring Microsoft to produce products that actually ask for permissions from the user before doing stupid stuff. Sometimes a parent just has to take control of their offspring. Either that or firewall off anyone using Microsoft products, most of them are so non standard they aren't hard to recognize. Many places don't let Microsoft attachments go through and it has saved them a lot of lost time. XML and other standard formats work just fine and are interoperable with other systems.
Do unto others as you would have done to yourself, don't let America become like Israel. It is un-American to support human rights violations, support justice in Palestine.
This is probably the best outcome the OSS movement could have gotten. When all a tyrant gets is a slap on the wrist you can be sure it will be business as usual, only more so. So M$ will practice even more predatory practices and try to get even more restrictive with its EULA's. Why is this to the OSS movements benefit? Because it cuts off other (reasonable) competition while simultaneously causing more people to want to switch to OSS software.
Nothing takes the fight out of a revolution like the tyrant becoming reasonable. IBM super computers, HP, SGI, Sun; as the big boys switch to Linux and cell phones, pda's and other things move to J2ME on a Linux kernel for all the right reasons the governments and other big users will have even more reason to switch away from the MS bullying.
Of course, bully's become spiteful in the end and drive the nails into their own coffins. My question is "can we sue the DOD to switch to OSS and Linux since it would seem necessary for both security and R&D and the MS EULA's don't allow their products to be loaded onto systems alongside OSS software". Seems to me it would save lots of money as well as making the DOD legal, secure and smarter. Given MS's either-or ELUA's they seem like the ones to be canned.
Or, for those readers who don't consider themselves to be "Westerners", how would you react if some World Government declared that an integral part of your culture (your language, your religion, your disrespect for Steamboat Willie, etc) were against their interests and sent troops to invade and set you right? Get the picture?
You mean like Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Algeria and Lebanon? I have always wondered to what extent those that call others "terrorists" would fight to defend their country against invasion by religious fanatics with a "master race" mentality. To the death? Remember, slavery, world wars, colonialism and the development of weapons of mass destruction are a distinctly Euro-American (western? Christian?) phenomena. You just don't call what you do terrorism.
During the 90's the UN dug a lot of wells in Pakistan and Northern India. It turns out that almost all of these wells are contaminated with arsenic. Drinking the well water is causing many people to develop cancer by the age of twenty but they have no alternative past trying to live off of small streams. Watering their crops and using the bathroom are introducing arsenic back into the surface soils. Economically it is devastating because their crops are becoming increasingly contaminated and even the people that don't develop cancer are too wasted to work hard. Biological remediation is the only alternative for an area of this scale.
You can either gather the plants and burn them to concentrate the heavy metals or compost them and replant in the compost to concentrate the metals even more. The great thing about the plants is that they filter a lot of contaminated water (which essentially ends up as distilled rain) over their lifetime with out burning oil for industrial processing or using industrial chemicals. And it is cheep too.
In developed areas there is a lot of lead contamination around old houses (lead paint) and cities (leaded gasoline), or mercury from florescent lights. Uranium from depleted bullets (which turn into a power aerosol upon impact) has just as strong a organiometallic effect as arsenic.
All of these things can turn you madder than a hatter (this is an old phrase resulting from the use of mercury in the hat making industry at one time. Or as dull as a printer (lead pigment used in news paper ink until the unions forced a change). But it depends on which part of the brain dies first.
These heavy metals have been used in a variety of things that people bring into their homes. In fact a large number of cosmetics are exceedingly poisonous because there are no regulations on what can be in them. Ever wonder what the active ingredient is in those hair dyes for men whose beards are turning white, its lead acetate. Remember, you are what you eat, drink and absorb through your skin. Moonshine isn't the only source of lead poisoning these days!
Re:I work in Broadcast Engineering....(tuna can)
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Engineer in a Box?
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· Score: 1
If you are the only engineer at a radio station run by jerks and you don't realize you are the one in control then you are nuts. Come in at 8:00 go home at 5:00. If they don't like it tell them to pay you double time and a half for all hours over 40. Either that or comp time. Then save up a weak or two of comp time and take a vacation. If they aren't on their knees within a week asking you what you want, get sick. Management jerks start to get happy with themselves unless you crack the whip over their heads every once in a while. Blown circuit breaker when you told them they needed to upgrade and they blamed it on you, you should have taken the abuse up the chain not sat there and taken it. You have been too good to them and they are taking advantage of you. 8 to 5 man that's the law because of people like them.
Young, white, Christian men weren't scrutinized in the same way that young Muslims and Arab men are for a very sensible reason. It's a simple fact that the Arab culture is in opposition to Western culture and values. It simply makes statistical sense to keep an eye on those who are most likely to come from the country we're at war with. If you tried preventing bombings by watching all young, white, Christian men - you'd be wasting a *lot* of time. We've got LOTS of them here in the U.S. -- much more than we've got of Muslims. People screaming about "racial profiling" seem to be neglecting the numerical facts. Why focus on a single group at all, unless it's statistically beneficial to you? In this case, focusing on Arabs is.
Well actually statistically there have been only two (count them two) terrorist attacks on American soil by Muslims since 1776. You can look that statistic up for yourself. What we have here is a country being controlled by the press (find me one politician that isn't) and a press that is not controlled by the American population. If the numerical formulas were based on historical evidence then Muslims in America would be given a free pass while born again white male Christians (like the president and much of congress) would all be strip searched. As a Muslim that works as a subcontractor for the military I can tell you about a lot of problems with "hate crimes" and the military being used by hate groups as a training ground.
My wife works with law enforcement (she has worked with the same PI firm that found the flight school in Florida, which happened to be run by a Lebanese that was called back into service by the Coast Guard ) and I have read their training books on profiling. It is a big negative. The extreme amount of false positives creates such a hassle for the officers that they are told not to do it. The false positive rate causes them to become lax and inattentive to the things they really ought to be looking for. And you can only imagine the social problems profiling creates. This is not what this country should stand for.
None the less racism is alive and well in DC. Profiling is just a way for "them" to be institutionally harassed (like in the 60's). And if they complain then they can be labeled as "anti-American". No this in not democracy this is tyranny in all its standard forms. I have to ask you, do you really think our present president would not have George Washington shipped off to Camp X-ray for suspicion of terrorism without right of redress or habious corpus. Read the deceleration of independence people and see how many of the grievances mentioned within it can not be leveled against the present US.
If you wish for these United States to represent the God given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness you need to be vigilant against all enemies to a government of the people, by the people and for the people both foreign and domestic. We have seen the enemy and he is us. When we start to think of the government as an entity in and of itself then we are thinking of a government that rules us not serves us.
Start looking at the foreign press, both our "allies" and our "enemies". It is a real eye opener. For instance Kol Yisrael radio reported on Oct. 3, 2001 that Ariel Sharon told Shimon Peres (and you should know what their government positions are) "Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear: don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
One day the saint, who loved God quite a bit did something really nice and God decided to reward him with three wishes. So God says to the saint, "I"LL GRANT YOU THREE WISHES. WHAT'S THE FIRST THING YOU WANT?" And the saint, loving God, wanted to know what it was like to be God. So the saint asks "God, what's a second like to you?" God answers "A SECOND TO ME IS LIKE A MILLION YEARS TO YOU." Now the devil always looking to screw things up whispered into the mind on the saint. ask what a penny is like" The saint thought this was an interesting question so he asked it. God answers "A PENNY TO ME IS LIKE A MILLION DOLLARS TO YOU." And the devil knew he had the saint so the devil whispers into the mind of the saint "ask for a penny". While the saint didn't care for money he thought it could be put to good use so the saint asks God for a penny. Now God sees this and thinks the saint's a pretty good chap and wouldn't mind to much getting the devils goat so God replies "WAIT A SECOND".
I always think people get a bit self centered when they talk about the translated version of Genesis in the Bible. Both the Hebrew of the original version and the Arabic of the Quran have the six "days" but you will find that the Quran also explicitly states in two places that you can't translate the times between our existence and God's existence. It gives a time translation like the joke above. I think as time passes and we get more accustomed with time not being "rigid" like the time contraction of the GPS satellites (yes they go fast enough that the atomic clocks have to be adjusted constantly) there be fewer and fewer "fundamentalists" that so horribly underestimate the supreme complexity God created in this reality as a pointer to God's power. After all the Catholic Church didn't admit that Galileo was correct about the earth being round and orbiting the sun like the rest of the planets until the 1970's. I only hope future generations will accept Galileo's assertion that "reality" is God's first revelation and all the rest of the revelations are essentially commentary to get people back on track when they start accepting their own screwed up ideas over God's.
Well one thing's for sure. The craft is too small to lose one or two extras on every away team. But one thing I can't figure out. How come the Klingons look like the Klingons from the next generation and not the first. Have they been doing a bit of the time warp. "Lets do the time warp tonight" opps wrong show.
Clipper chip redux - by your friendly fellon
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Analyzing Palladium
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· Score: 1
One has to wonder that if the U.S. Gov. doesn't seem to care about secure communications in the hands of private citizens that it has either misunderstood the concept, will not allow the chips to be sold over seas or does not think the security is sufficient to represent a threat. As the details are not given, it is difficult to determine whether the encryption is sufficient to make it a munitions under U.S. export law. But if it is not would you really want to trust your data to it.
Secondly, I do not believe a piece of hardware like this would be kept out of Linux. What are the hardware manufactures going to say "the interface details are only for Microsoft". Now there is an anti-trust suit waiting to happen.
Once it is into Linux then it is what everyone has been waiting for, ubiquitous secure communications. BUT with software emulation any data transformation can be emulated and therefore spoofed. Look at the numeric processor emulation. AND the more a system is trusted the more spoofers are protected by the "it can't be done" mindset.
You might have men in black at your door soon. If you remember the "nearsightedness" of the big hubble mistake and the fact that as sponsors of the hubble, the US airforce got exclusive rights to it for the first year and that the nearsightedness wasn't fixed till the AirForce lease was up one can draw interesting conclusions as to what the air force was looking at. And whether the "mistake" was intentional.
The question isn't how long till it gets slashdoted. The question is what should happen if it doesn't. Will all the big isp's go to ipac's for their server farm. So (wait for it) imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Information just wants to be free. And after it gets into your brain it makes you want to be free. Which is why tyrants always try to suppress it. The result is that after a period of brain drain the tyrant gets what he deserves. For instance the "solid water" article. Just go into any pet store and pick up a bottle of "gut load". It is used by reptile lovers to give crickets water without them drowning themselves. It can also be found in plant stores to mix into potting soil so potted plants don't need to be watered as often. But it's most common application is diapers.
Whenever a politician wants to prevent you from thinking, you know they are afraid you will realize just how little they believe in what they are saying.
Has anyone ever thought that we are moving toward the time when people will radically alter their appearance so that the face recognition and other surveillance techniques won't mistake them for someone in a database somewhere that the government happens to dislike (and therefore labels a terrorist) by say a whopping big OCR readable tattoo across the forehead or hand so that they will be able to do commerce. Hummmmm this sounds familiar.
Have the folks trying to force the second coming taken over the government?
One of the ideas of patents is that they are not valid if there is prior art. The open source community is all about creating art (reuse not recreate) so it is by definition prior art. Instead of just having various places like gnu, freshmeat, apache or others there needs to be a deliberate attempt to create a "prior art registry". This would be both a place the patent office can check to see that indeed the patent application is just an attempt to cash in on prior art and a place people looking for software for a specific purpose can bee found. The free software foundation and others that believe such should support this and might get funding from NGO's and the UN that need cheap software for the worlds use. Once such a corpus is created then it should be much easer to show that a patent is invalid and put the onus on the enforcer to show that it was patented before registration. There will still be cases where an algorithm was published in some journal or something but they would be less and less frequent. All releases and versions would need to be held in toto with dates and names of authors. But I'll leave it to the lawyers to come up with the details.
Nine inch nanotubes are nice but I really liked the article about the 100 gig DVD's. Get rid of that streaming tape and such. But back to the nanotubes. Is there any information about the tensile strength of these things? Could you make a very strong and light rope? Space elevator any one? Can they be woven into very thin cloth for use like fiberglass or a concrete amendment?
Coated with phosphors for extremely high resolution displays? High enough to create holographic display systems?
Take one nanometer thick sheet of electrically conductive cloth. Place near hard electrically conductive surface. Impress modulated voltage. Ultrasonic imagining might get a real boost.
Take a mm thick bundle of fibers and connect both ends to actuators. Impress high voltage.
And that's just mundane stuff.
Think of the electro-optical properties of spacing nanotubes fixed distances apart. Linear non-refractive optics. Interesting antenna, pulse shaping properties from microwave to ultraviolet. Might even be able to make ultraviolet lazers with these things.
1: given that the NSA is working with the Linux community then we might conclude that they have been checking it out.
2: if you can download it for free you haven't purchased it.
3: given the number of security flaws in Microsoft products, either the NSA is wholly incompetent or they haven't checked out the Microsoft products. And the government shouldn't be buying it.
If the bridges formed from the conductive material of the points they would also conduct electrical current, shorting out the device. With a low impedance power supply needed to create the high currents this might cause localized melting and depending on the materials the "fuse" could blow or vaporize. I suspect device characteristics would change a bit. Laughing a bit, I think the piezoelectric separation device could be used to pound them down, power being removed during this operation. I suspect malleable materials would need to be used but they would be more difficult to keep rigid. A thin layer of malleable material on a rigid substrate might work. It might act as a conformational coating if an ac current were put through the piezoelectric material to vibrate it against the other side. Rebuild the thing once a day or so. Actually I should patent that idea.
If you look at their patents they are trying to reduce the work function (energy needed to lose an electron) by creating shaped pits that create "interfering probability wave functions" or something to that effect. Spikes concentrate the electrical field and thereby increase the electron flow. Whether that will be the higher speed ones that would cut off the top of the speed distribution (leaving a lower average speed - temperature) I can't say. And yes there is an "electronic creep" in metals that would cause the gap to be bridged eventually. Another of their patents was about doping diamond to create conductivity so I suspect they are already well aware of the physical stress problem. I also saw a patent about using piezoelectric materials to regulate the gap size. I suspect that even with pits there will be a tendency for the electronic creep to limit the lifetime of the device, shame about that. I do have some ideas though. I'll have to see just how broad their patents are.
It is just that they have found a version of Maxwell's demon. The electrons in a metal are considered to be somewhat free and bounce around in what is called an "electron gas". Some will be going fast and some slow in a distribution called a Maxwell distribution. It is somewhat like a Chi square with a longer tail that gets longer the higher the temperature. Now those electrons on the fast side near the surface of the metal can pop out for a little distance but get pulled back by electronic attraction. Consider two metal surfaces very closely spaced. If their temperature is the same the Maxwell distribution of both is the same and as many electrons will go one way as the other. Now apply an electronic potential of just one vote over a gap of a nanometer. The electronic field potential is equivalent to a few billion votes per meter, which will highly bias the distribution of the tunneling toward the positive side. As the electrons that tunnel are the fast ones and the fast ones carry high kinetic energy there will be a net energy flow toward the positive pole. The negative side will have its distribution cut off the top, which will, in bulk, appear as a lower temperature and the positive side will have its distribution augmented at the top which will appear, in bulk, as a higher temperature. The electrons coming in at the electrical connections will be following the standard Maxwell for that temperature, so they will have an "average temperature". The real trick will be to create a device rigid enough to maintain a gap with an electrostatic attraction that could be in the tons per square inch range. I am not sure even diamond would be rigid enough.
At 600 to 1000 m^s/g of surface area it wouldn't take much H2 adhesion to make this a relatively good h2 storage medium. Coating the surface with a monoatomic layer of Ni would seem quite a feat, however. On the other hand if we looked around hard enough we might find a hemoglobin like analogue for hydrogen.
After seeing my mother-n-law attempting to compose and send an email with the standard user interface, I think the last thing the average consumer computer needs is emotions. All the cursing, keyboard pounding and blue screen of death before saving your work screaming would leave the thing in a permanently sulky mood. I could only consider this cruel beyond belief. The only saving grace would be that computers still don't have an intellect. If they did have an intellect the computer industry would come to a screeching halt as people found themselves begging their computers to not wipe their files. All we need are artificial intelligences with artificial emotions having control over our personal data.
Which brings me to the question of why we are so willing to spend disposable income on artificial pets (tamaguchi) with artificial intelligence at the level of a common ant and now with artificial emotions? Living in artificial environments with artificial lighting and artificial plants watching artificial lives (tv and movies) or artificially doing sports (espn). Decorating ourselves with artificial fur and artificial colors.
Good grief, time to turn this thing off and go snorkeling. Conch salad, sushi, and God's own sunset, now that's the ticket.
Actually I own a victrolla that has a little paper on the back that says that I do not own the victrolla until such time as the patents run out. Until that time I am only leasing it (for a one time payment) and can not reverse engineer, modify, have repaired or play records not by the Edison Talking Voice Corporation. She is a beautiful piece with red cherry finish and a sterling silver horn but I consider that little paper to be the main prize. (the patents ran out in 1917.)
Slashdot Mirror
Do unto others as you would have done to yourself, don't let America become like Israel. It is un-American to support human rights violations, support justice in Palestine.
Further it should be (putting on fire suit) a function of the government to finance an independent system to publicize standardized virus recognition fingerprints. Then it should be integral to the operating system to run a scan as part of the executable load function. This would be justified as protecting commerce. This won't solve the problem of "script" viruses that play off the integration features of Microsoft products but that can be dealt will by requiring Microsoft to produce products that actually ask for permissions from the user before doing stupid stuff. Sometimes a parent just has to take control of their offspring. Either that or firewall off anyone using Microsoft products, most of them are so non standard they aren't hard to recognize. Many places don't let Microsoft attachments go through and it has saved them a lot of lost time. XML and other standard formats work just fine and are interoperable with other systems.
Do unto others as you would have done to yourself, don't let America become like Israel. It is un-American to support human rights violations, support justice in Palestine.
Nothing takes the fight out of a revolution like the tyrant becoming reasonable. IBM super computers, HP, SGI, Sun; as the big boys switch to Linux and cell phones, pda's and other things move to J2ME on a Linux kernel for all the right reasons the governments and other big users will have even more reason to switch away from the MS bullying.
Of course, bully's become spiteful in the end and drive the nails into their own coffins. My question is "can we sue the DOD to switch to OSS and Linux since it would seem necessary for both security and R&D and the MS EULA's don't allow their products to be loaded onto systems alongside OSS software". Seems to me it would save lots of money as well as making the DOD legal, secure and smarter. Given MS's either-or ELUA's they seem like the ones to be canned.
You mean like Afghanistan, Palestine, Chechnya, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, Algeria and Lebanon? I have always wondered to what extent those that call others "terrorists" would fight to defend their country against invasion by religious fanatics with a "master race" mentality. To the death? Remember, slavery, world wars, colonialism and the development of weapons of mass destruction are a distinctly Euro-American (western? Christian?) phenomena. You just don't call what you do terrorism.
You can either gather the plants and burn them to concentrate the heavy metals or compost them and replant in the compost to concentrate the metals even more. The great thing about the plants is that they filter a lot of contaminated water (which essentially ends up as distilled rain) over their lifetime with out burning oil for industrial processing or using industrial chemicals. And it is cheep too.
In developed areas there is a lot of lead contamination around old houses (lead paint) and cities (leaded gasoline), or mercury from florescent lights. Uranium from depleted bullets (which turn into a power aerosol upon impact) has just as strong a organiometallic effect as arsenic.
All of these things can turn you madder than a hatter (this is an old phrase resulting from the use of mercury in the hat making industry at one time. Or as dull as a printer (lead pigment used in news paper ink until the unions forced a change). But it depends on which part of the brain dies first.
These heavy metals have been used in a variety of things that people bring into their homes. In fact a large number of cosmetics are exceedingly poisonous because there are no regulations on what can be in them. Ever wonder what the active ingredient is in those hair dyes for men whose beards are turning white, its lead acetate. Remember, you are what you eat, drink and absorb through your skin. Moonshine isn't the only source of lead poisoning these days!
If you are the only engineer at a radio station run by jerks and you don't realize you are the one in control then you are nuts. Come in at 8:00 go home at 5:00. If they don't like it tell them to pay you double time and a half for all hours over 40. Either that or comp time. Then save up a weak or two of comp time and take a vacation. If they aren't on their knees within a week asking you what you want, get sick. Management jerks start to get happy with themselves unless you crack the whip over their heads every once in a while. Blown circuit breaker when you told them they needed to upgrade and they blamed it on you, you should have taken the abuse up the chain not sat there and taken it. You have been too good to them and they are taking advantage of you. 8 to 5 man that's the law because of people like them.
Well actually statistically there have been only two (count them two) terrorist attacks on American soil by Muslims since 1776. You can look that statistic up for yourself. What we have here is a country being controlled by the press (find me one politician that isn't) and a press that is not controlled by the American population. If the numerical formulas were based on historical evidence then Muslims in America would be given a free pass while born again white male Christians (like the president and much of congress) would all be strip searched. As a Muslim that works as a subcontractor for the military I can tell you about a lot of problems with "hate crimes" and the military being used by hate groups as a training ground.
My wife works with law enforcement (she has worked with the same PI firm that found the flight school in Florida, which happened to be run by a Lebanese that was called back into service by the Coast Guard ) and I have read their training books on profiling. It is a big negative. The extreme amount of false positives creates such a hassle for the officers that they are told not to do it. The false positive rate causes them to become lax and inattentive to the things they really ought to be looking for. And you can only imagine the social problems profiling creates. This is not what this country should stand for.
None the less racism is alive and well in DC. Profiling is just a way for "them" to be institutionally harassed (like in the 60's). And if they complain then they can be labeled as "anti-American". No this in not democracy this is tyranny in all its standard forms. I have to ask you, do you really think our present president would not have George Washington shipped off to Camp X-ray for suspicion of terrorism without right of redress or habious corpus. Read the deceleration of independence people and see how many of the grievances mentioned within it can not be leveled against the present US.
If you wish for these United States to represent the God given rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness you need to be vigilant against all enemies to a government of the people, by the people and for the people both foreign and domestic. We have seen the enemy and he is us. When we start to think of the government as an entity in and of itself then we are thinking of a government that rules us not serves us.
Start looking at the foreign press, both our "allies" and our "enemies". It is a real eye opener. For instance Kol Yisrael radio reported on Oct. 3, 2001 that Ariel Sharon told Shimon Peres (and you should know what their government positions are) "Every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear: don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
I always think people get a bit self centered when they talk about the translated version of Genesis in the Bible. Both the Hebrew of the original version and the Arabic of the Quran have the six "days" but you will find that the Quran also explicitly states in two places that you can't translate the times between our existence and God's existence. It gives a time translation like the joke above. I think as time passes and we get more accustomed with time not being "rigid" like the time contraction of the GPS satellites (yes they go fast enough that the atomic clocks have to be adjusted constantly) there be fewer and fewer "fundamentalists" that so horribly underestimate the supreme complexity God created in this reality as a pointer to God's power. After all the Catholic Church didn't admit that Galileo was correct about the earth being round and orbiting the sun like the rest of the planets until the 1970's. I only hope future generations will accept Galileo's assertion that "reality" is God's first revelation and all the rest of the revelations are essentially commentary to get people back on track when they start accepting their own screwed up ideas over God's.
Well one thing's for sure. The craft is too small to lose one or two extras on every away team. But one thing I can't figure out. How come the Klingons look like the Klingons from the next generation and not the first. Have they been doing a bit of the time warp. "Lets do the time warp tonight" opps wrong show.
Secondly, I do not believe a piece of hardware like this would be kept out of Linux. What are the hardware manufactures going to say "the interface details are only for Microsoft". Now there is an anti-trust suit waiting to happen.
Once it is into Linux then it is what everyone has been waiting for, ubiquitous secure communications. BUT with software emulation any data transformation can be emulated and therefore spoofed. Look at the numeric processor emulation. AND the more a system is trusted the more spoofers are protected by the "it can't be done" mindset.
Just got to love those conspiracy theories.
The question isn't how long till it gets slashdoted. The question is what should happen if it doesn't. Will all the big isp's go to ipac's for their server farm. So (wait for it) imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
Whenever a politician wants to prevent you from thinking, you know they are afraid you will realize just how little they believe in what they are saying.
Have the folks trying to force the second coming taken over the government?
One of the ideas of patents is that they are not valid if there is prior art. The open source community is all about creating art (reuse not recreate) so it is by definition prior art. Instead of just having various places like gnu, freshmeat, apache or others there needs to be a deliberate attempt to create a "prior art registry". This would be both a place the patent office can check to see that indeed the patent application is just an attempt to cash in on prior art and a place people looking for software for a specific purpose can bee found. The free software foundation and others that believe such should support this and might get funding from NGO's and the UN that need cheap software for the worlds use. Once such a corpus is created then it should be much easer to show that a patent is invalid and put the onus on the enforcer to show that it was patented before registration. There will still be cases where an algorithm was published in some journal or something but they would be less and less frequent. All releases and versions would need to be held in toto with dates and names of authors. But I'll leave it to the lawyers to come up with the details.
I wonder what will happen when Microsoft comes out with it's own distro later this year. See http://www.mslinux.org LOL
Coated with phosphors for extremely high resolution displays? High enough to create holographic display systems?
Take one nanometer thick sheet of electrically conductive cloth. Place near hard electrically conductive surface. Impress modulated voltage. Ultrasonic imagining might get a real boost.
Take a mm thick bundle of fibers and connect both ends to actuators. Impress high voltage.
And that's just mundane stuff.
Think of the electro-optical properties of spacing nanotubes fixed distances apart. Linear non-refractive optics. Interesting antenna, pulse shaping properties from microwave to ultraviolet. Might even be able to make ultraviolet lazers with these things.
1: given that the NSA is working with the Linux community then we might conclude that they have been checking it out.
2: if you can download it for free you haven't purchased it.
3: given the number of security flaws in Microsoft products, either the NSA is wholly incompetent or they haven't checked out the Microsoft products. And the government shouldn't be buying it.
If the bridges formed from the conductive material of the points they would also conduct electrical current, shorting out the device. With a low impedance power supply needed to create the high currents this might cause localized melting and depending on the materials the "fuse" could blow or vaporize. I suspect device characteristics would change a bit. Laughing a bit, I think the piezoelectric separation device could be used to pound them down, power being removed during this operation. I suspect malleable materials would need to be used but they would be more difficult to keep rigid. A thin layer of malleable material on a rigid substrate might work. It might act as a conformational coating if an ac current were put through the piezoelectric material to vibrate it against the other side. Rebuild the thing once a day or so. Actually I should patent that idea.
If you look at their patents they are trying to reduce the work function (energy needed to lose an electron) by creating shaped pits that create "interfering probability wave functions" or something to that effect. Spikes concentrate the electrical field and thereby increase the electron flow. Whether that will be the higher speed ones that would cut off the top of the speed distribution (leaving a lower average speed - temperature) I can't say. And yes there is an "electronic creep" in metals that would cause the gap to be bridged eventually. Another of their patents was about doping diamond to create conductivity so I suspect they are already well aware of the physical stress problem. I also saw a patent about using piezoelectric materials to regulate the gap size. I suspect that even with pits there will be a tendency for the electronic creep to limit the lifetime of the device, shame about that. I do have some ideas though. I'll have to see just how broad their patents are.
It is just that they have found a version of Maxwell's demon. The electrons in a metal are considered to be somewhat free and bounce around in what is called an "electron gas". Some will be going fast and some slow in a distribution called a Maxwell distribution. It is somewhat like a Chi square with a longer tail that gets longer the higher the temperature. Now those electrons on the fast side near the surface of the metal can pop out for a little distance but get pulled back by electronic attraction. Consider two metal surfaces very closely spaced. If their temperature is the same the Maxwell distribution of both is the same and as many electrons will go one way as the other. Now apply an electronic potential of just one vote over a gap of a nanometer. The electronic field potential is equivalent to a few billion votes per meter, which will highly bias the distribution of the tunneling toward the positive side. As the electrons that tunnel are the fast ones and the fast ones carry high kinetic energy there will be a net energy flow toward the positive pole. The negative side will have its distribution cut off the top, which will, in bulk, appear as a lower temperature and the positive side will have its distribution augmented at the top which will appear, in bulk, as a higher temperature. The electrons coming in at the electrical connections will be following the standard Maxwell for that temperature, so they will have an "average temperature". The real trick will be to create a device rigid enough to maintain a gap with an electrostatic attraction that could be in the tons per square inch range. I am not sure even diamond would be rigid enough.
At 600 to 1000 m^s/g of surface area it wouldn't take much H2 adhesion to make this a relatively good h2 storage medium. Coating the surface with a monoatomic layer of Ni would seem quite a feat, however. On the other hand if we looked around hard enough we might find a hemoglobin like analogue for hydrogen.
Which brings me to the question of why we are so willing to spend disposable income on artificial pets (tamaguchi) with artificial intelligence at the level of a common ant and now with artificial emotions? Living in artificial environments with artificial lighting and artificial plants watching artificial lives (tv and movies) or artificially doing sports (espn). Decorating ourselves with artificial fur and artificial colors.
Good grief, time to turn this thing off and go snorkeling. Conch salad, sushi, and God's own sunset, now that's the ticket.
Great just what we need: Garbage in, Garbage out, with an attitude!!
Actually I own a victrolla that has a little paper on the back that says that I do not own the victrolla until such time as the patents run out. Until that time I am only leasing it (for a one time payment) and can not reverse engineer, modify, have repaired or play records not by the Edison Talking Voice Corporation. She is a beautiful piece with red cherry finish and a sterling silver horn but I consider that little paper to be the main prize. (the patents ran out in 1917.)