Off the top of my head, here are some items that he had, which probably were stripped from him:
Augmented vision (camera & hud glasses)
Handheld chording keyboard
Any mic/headphone setup
Wireless/cellular hookup
Without his input/output devices, he would have lost access to his memory enhancement programs (smart conversation tags to lookup keywords, replay stored audio, etc.), vision enhancement programs (recording, environment reconstruction, text overlay), and probably all of his sending/receiving capability.
I pray that he backed up his rig before he flew. All the data he accumulated/uploaded while in Newfoundland is probably toast. (Why the hell was he in Newfoundland anyways? Was he speaking or just visiting?)
In one fell swoop they cut him off from his augmented memory and processing, and then threw his visual system for a loop, hence the need for a wheelchair. Oh, and of course, they trashed some very expensive, hard to replace, custom equipment. Not nice. I'd hate to think what might have happened if Mann had needed vital implants (heartrate regulator, insulin, etc.) that would have summarily been stripped along with the rest of his hardware.
Unfortunately, people are so freaked out about anything with the word "nuclear" or "reaction" attached to it the only way they would ever put a dime in it is if it was called "The Wonder Drive" or "Warp Drive".
Absolutely right. That's why they use MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to describe what used to be known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI.) The nuclear in this case refers to the nucleus of the atoms/molecules being imaged by the scanner. NMRI is a more descriptive name for the technique, but it's bad form to mention "Nuclear" to patients when you need to do a scan.
Of course, since we haven't managed to send any manned ships outside of Earth orbit for decades, this is all moot...
Beside, you think those liberals are going to let you lift off with anything mildly radioactive, without drowning the launch authority with paper and lawsuits?
Privatize spaceflight. Grant treaty provisions for private enterprise to occupy and OWN portions of the solar system (homesteader clause, like the US government did with the old west.) Oh, and junk the shuttle fleet so we no longer have an excuse to avoid funding and using cheap lift capability. Only then will any of this stuff matter.
With current tech, we could create a 486 based word processing machine, thinner, cheaper, lighter, and with a week's worth of power, rather than just a few hours.
Why they insist on forcing desktop replacements on the market is beyond me. (Actually, it isn't beyond me, it's all about keeping those profit margins high.)
As a writer, dealing with these noisy, overheating, overpriced, heavy machines is distasteful. As a programmer, I'm gonna use my laptop as a terminal, not a server, so all those extra CPU cycles are wasted.
Someone with knowledge of US constitutional law, please feel free to chip in. If a treaty has to be ratified by congress, does that not imply that the treaty can be treated as a piece of legislation that has been approved by our legislative body? And if so, does that not mean that a treaty would then be equivalent of federal law?
Not that this makes a whit of difference here in the US, since we originated the DMCA and other evil corp-oriented "laws", which I'm assuming are at least as nasty as the WIPO music control treaty provisions.
Since DLP projectors use a micromirror array, they reflect the light at various angles from a standard projector bulb to produce different shades. Consequently, they ought to be able to have just as black a black and just a white a white as film.
Contrast this to LCDs which must have light pass through them (without melting), and, as was mentioned by other posters, can suffer from the dreaded dead-pixel syndrome.
I can't comment on how well either reproduces color range - I doubt that they're using more than the standard 8bits per pixel, so probably much less than the 10-12 bits per pixel that are used when scanning film for post.
Filmakers' have traditionally lamented that the film that they finish cutting is NEVER the film that the audience gets to see. The reason? Multiple layers of copies that need to be struck before you get to the release prints.
The quality of one wet-gate interpositve to internegative is quite good, but you do that a couple of times at high speed, and there is significant quality loss (no lenses used when copying folks.) By the time you get to the release print, which is struck from the final internegative, you're lucky to get 2k of the original 4-8k worth of information. Think of it as photocopying a photocopy - several times.
Add that grainy, blurry, off-color print, to the crap that it will go through during the first couple of days of release (burn, splice, scratch, dust), and by the time that you and I go to watch it, it's nowhere near what the editor handed off to the director. Of course, if you go to a crappy theatre, with a crappy projector, with a dirty projector window and a crappy screen... jeez, you might as well wait for the DVD.
As a rule I prefer 70mm prints to 35mm, just cause there's less degradation, I prefer better theatres to crappy multiplexes, because they usually get the better prints.
Now, you ask, what's so hot about digital? I mean, even with a bad print you get better resolution than the current tech, right? Not quite. Even though the max resolution of the current projectors can't match the theoretical resolution of 35mm film, the digital stuff is either cine-scanned or telecined from an early inter-positive, and cleaned up (dust removal, etc.) As a result, even if the final resolution is less, you get pretty much what you'd see what the director sees, and that's what Lucas and a whole lot of other filmmakers are so hot about.
And yes, the projections they use are LCD or DLP, so the projections are digital.
However, I must warn you. It's weird going to a theatre looking at a bright picture that seems like it's playing straight off a HD DVD. No scratches or blotches. No jitter. Very little grain (for daylight shots). It's like sitting in your living room watching a super-big TV. Eerie.
Actually, the artifical womb story reminded me of the Azi in CJ Cherry's books, like Cyteen and 40,000 in Ghenna.
Scary shit if you really stop to think about it. You could give birth entire species once you develop the technology far enough. Instead of having colony ships filled with people, animals, etc., you could have one filled with frozen genetic material (sperm and ova), ready to be thawed out and grown at the other end...
Or you could make a few hundred clones of Hitler in some underground lab in South America...
Wasn't Gordon Moore promoting a several million dollar foundation that he founded for preserving biodiversity?
Might be worth it to hook these institutions up with the money. Does anyone have a definitive list of all the biodiversity conservation efforts that need funding?
In the meantime, concerned geeks/citizens can resort to the Paypal/Amazon tip jar while all the bureaucratic garbage gets sorted out to get these institutions hooked up with major foundations in the long term.
Problems with electromag acceleration launchers (essentially massive railguns):
Payload is subject to very high acceleration (since all of your V is acquired during launch), some sort of rocket boosters will probably be used for escaping the Terran gravity well in conjunction with the launchers. You won't be launching any live cargo, unless you want it not so live when it gets into orbit.
Power reqirements are very high, we'd probably have to dedicate a nuke plant to supply a steady stream of reliable power for launch.
Noise problems - launch will probably exceed speed of sound, which means your launcher and the payload flight path will have to be away from populated areas.
Space (physical space). You'll need miles of secure track, miles of superconducting wire, space for the loading facility, and several miles downrange of the launcher (for saftey).
It has been suggested that a mountain would make a good launcher, some where in one of the newly industrialized nations (like India, or China) where the governmencould dedicate the space by fiat.
All the more reason to get our asses into space, so we can set up automated plants to manufacture anti-matter far away from inhabited areas...
Besides, free power (solar), free reaction mass (with sufficient heat, we can liberate volitiles from moon rock, asteroids, etc), and we're already outside of the gravity well... lots of advantages to doing space-related research, while actually in space. We just have to make like we want to stay there, instead of making very expensive vists all the time.
If the damage that random e-beams do to products sent via the mail (think everything shipped for eBay auctions for a start) hampers commerce, that will go a long ways to fulfilling Bin Laden's goal of disrupting the US economy.
Higher shipping charges, disruptions to just-in-time deliveries, the collapse of the USPS as all the business shippers switch to other carriers.
And the disturbing thing I'm getting from these posts is, the USPS isn't even notifying you when this is done. I'd hate for some critical part to fail prematurely because it was cooked at random.
Time to put some couriers on the payroll. Hand-carrying stuff is back in style.
Nuclear winters are caused by the dust kicked up by multiple warheads impacting and exploding on the earth's crust. A single rocket with waste blowing up in the atmosphere, critical mass or not, will not cause a nuclear winter.
What you will get is a nasty case of Chernobyl-style fallout, combined with a Mir-like dispersal of radioactive junk across a given hemisphere. Time to stock up on fallout shelters and iodine tablets...
After they load this sucker up, will you be able to detect the emissions from space, gamma, visual, or otherwise?
Look for laws mandating that routes for waste transport be published for the public saftey and need to know, then subsequently rovoked under homeland defense concerns...
That great big sucking sound you hear tommorrow will be Apple and all of its units pulling every last bit of advertising from AOL/TimeWarner publications as punishment.
Nevermind the consequences of losing exposure, this is the guy who pretty much axed ATI as a vendor for leaking the details about the Cube in advance. You can be assured he's not going to rest until the Time Canada unit no longer EXISTS.
I predict many heads rolling in an attempt to appease the angry gods...
Where in the world did they dig this data up from? Were these tapes that Deja had somehow acquired, but never read in, or did Google actually root around and restore backups from way back when, and if so, from who did they get the tapes from???
I figure that Google has to be getting these posts from trusted sources, or else you could inject false data into the historical archives. Anyone know for sure?
I gotta say, it's weird seeing how much I used to post. Of course, it was back when USENET was actually useful, and not clogged with spam and idiots... The funny thing is, that AOL used to be the same way (back when that was one of the few ways outside of academia to get something like an e-mail address, remember bitnet?) but that was even farther in the past...
The risk can be minimized by using valve-regulated absorbant-mat or gelled-cell batteries. They're still lead-acid, but they contain the electrolyte in either a mat or gel matrix which eliminates the spill hazard of sulfuric acid. The valve regulated feature allows the gases produced during charging to recombine instead of escaping if properly charged, via a valve-relief system.
Keep in mind, any unit with a battery in it (including the Airgen), will vent hydrogen if overcharged - that's why you spend the money to get a good charger/regulator. A car alternator or el-cheapo car-battery charger are NOT good chargers (no intelligence), and either depend on a known load, or a timed charge. You want something that monitors amperage, temprature, and voltage, and knows the profile of the batteries you're trying to charge. Good chargers are not cheap, but well worth the cost in maintaining battery life, without having to resort to "boiling" your batteries from time to time to get full charge.
Also, you might either want ventilation, or an outside installation for the units, if you really fear hydrogen that much...
Regarding the environmental hazard, lead is the most recycled material (90-99%?), and batteries are not dumped, but chopped up and recycled into new lead-acid batteries. Any place that sells lead-acid batteries here in the US is required to accept them for recycling. Compare this to all the NiCad batteries (Cadmium is quite toxic) produced for consumer devices that people end up tossing directly into the garbage.
The only other, low-cost high-capacity mass-market batteries, other than lead-acid, would NiFe, and good luck finding a supplier for those in small amounts.
Slashdot Mirror
Augmented vision (camera & hud glasses)
Handheld chording keyboard
Any mic/headphone setup
Wireless/cellular hookup
Without his input/output devices, he would have lost access to his memory enhancement programs (smart conversation tags to lookup keywords, replay stored audio, etc.), vision enhancement programs (recording, environment reconstruction, text overlay), and probably all of his sending/receiving capability.
I pray that he backed up his rig before he flew. All the data he accumulated/uploaded while in Newfoundland is probably toast. (Why the hell was he in Newfoundland anyways? Was he speaking or just visiting?)
In one fell swoop they cut him off from his augmented memory and processing, and then threw his visual system for a loop, hence the need for a wheelchair. Oh, and of course, they trashed some very expensive, hard to replace, custom equipment. Not nice. I'd hate to think what might have happened if Mann had needed vital implants (heartrate regulator, insulin, etc.) that would have summarily been stripped along with the rest of his hardware.
Absolutely right. That's why they use MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to describe what used to be known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI.) The nuclear in this case refers to the nucleus of the atoms/molecules being imaged by the scanner. NMRI is a more descriptive name for the technique, but it's bad form to mention "Nuclear" to patients when you need to do a scan.
Of course, since we haven't managed to send any manned ships outside of Earth orbit for decades, this is all moot...
Beside, you think those liberals are going to let you lift off with anything mildly radioactive, without drowning the launch authority with paper and lawsuits?
Privatize spaceflight. Grant treaty provisions for private enterprise to occupy and OWN portions of the solar system (homesteader clause, like the US government did with the old west.) Oh, and junk the shuttle fleet so we no longer have an excuse to avoid funding and using cheap lift capability. Only then will any of this stuff matter.
On his page, he mentions that he took out the inner metal chassis and replaced it with plexiglas.
He no longer has any RF shielding...
With current tech, we could create a 486 based word processing machine, thinner, cheaper, lighter, and with a week's worth of power, rather than just a few hours.
Why they insist on forcing desktop replacements on the market is beyond me. (Actually, it isn't beyond me, it's all about keeping those profit margins high.)
As a writer, dealing with these noisy, overheating, overpriced, heavy machines is distasteful. As a programmer, I'm gonna use my laptop as a terminal, not a server, so all those extra CPU cycles are wasted.
Now, who wants to volunteer to put up repeater stations so people outside of Alberta can leech off of the public infrastructure? :)
Someone with knowledge of US constitutional law, please feel free to chip in. If a treaty has to be ratified by congress, does that not imply that the treaty can be treated as a piece of legislation that has been approved by our legislative body? And if so, does that not mean that a treaty would then be equivalent of federal law?
Not that this makes a whit of difference here in the US, since we originated the DMCA and other evil corp-oriented "laws", which I'm assuming are at least as nasty as the WIPO music control treaty provisions.
Yes, have private bnetd servers decrease the load on Blizzard servers... and deprive Blizzard of ad revenue (those annoying banner ads on bnet.)
I think this is the real reason here - ad dollars and eyeballs. No doubt some catbert-like MBA marketdroid put their lawyers up to this...
Since DLP projectors use a micromirror array, they reflect the light at various angles from a standard projector bulb to produce different shades. Consequently, they ought to be able to have just as black a black and just a white a white as film.
Contrast this to LCDs which must have light pass through them (without melting), and, as was mentioned by other posters, can suffer from the dreaded dead-pixel syndrome.
I can't comment on how well either reproduces color range - I doubt that they're using more than the standard 8bits per pixel, so probably much less than the 10-12 bits per pixel that are used when scanning film for post.
Filmakers' have traditionally lamented that the film that they finish cutting is NEVER the film that the audience gets to see. The reason? Multiple layers of copies that need to be struck before you get to the release prints.
The quality of one wet-gate interpositve to internegative is quite good, but you do that a couple of times at high speed, and there is significant quality loss (no lenses used when copying folks.) By the time you get to the release print, which is struck from the final internegative, you're lucky to get 2k of the original 4-8k worth of information. Think of it as photocopying a photocopy - several times.
Add that grainy, blurry, off-color print, to the crap that it will go through during the first couple of days of release (burn, splice, scratch, dust), and by the time that you and I go to watch it, it's nowhere near what the editor handed off to the director. Of course, if you go to a crappy theatre, with a crappy projector, with a dirty projector window and a crappy screen... jeez, you might as well wait for the DVD.
As a rule I prefer 70mm prints to 35mm, just cause there's less degradation, I prefer better theatres to crappy multiplexes, because they usually get the better prints.
Now, you ask, what's so hot about digital? I mean, even with a bad print you get better resolution than the current tech, right? Not quite. Even though the max resolution of the current projectors can't match the theoretical resolution of 35mm film, the digital stuff is either cine-scanned or telecined from an early inter-positive, and cleaned up (dust removal, etc.) As a result, even if the final resolution is less, you get pretty much what you'd see what the director sees, and that's what Lucas and a whole lot of other filmmakers are so hot about.
And yes, the projections they use are LCD or DLP, so the projections are digital.
However, I must warn you. It's weird going to a theatre looking at a bright picture that seems like it's playing straight off a HD DVD. No scratches or blotches. No jitter. Very little grain (for daylight shots). It's like sitting in your living room watching a super-big TV. Eerie.
Actually, the artifical womb story reminded me of the Azi in CJ Cherry's books, like Cyteen and 40,000 in Ghenna.
Scary shit if you really stop to think about it. You could give birth entire species once you develop the technology far enough. Instead of having colony ships filled with people, animals, etc., you could have one filled with frozen genetic material (sperm and ova), ready to be thawed out and grown at the other end...
Or you could make a few hundred clones of Hitler in some underground lab in South America...
Wasn't Gordon Moore promoting a several million dollar foundation that he founded for preserving biodiversity?
Might be worth it to hook these institutions up with the money. Does anyone have a definitive list of all the biodiversity conservation efforts that need funding?
In the meantime, concerned geeks/citizens can resort to the Paypal/Amazon tip jar while all the bureaucratic garbage gets sorted out to get these institutions hooked up with major foundations in the long term.
Problems with electromag acceleration launchers (essentially massive railguns):
Payload is subject to very high acceleration (since all of your V is acquired during launch), some sort of rocket boosters will probably be used for escaping the Terran gravity well in conjunction with the launchers. You won't be launching any live cargo, unless you want it not so live when it gets into orbit.
Power reqirements are very high, we'd probably have to dedicate a nuke plant to supply a steady stream of reliable power for launch.
Noise problems - launch will probably exceed speed of sound, which means your launcher and the payload flight path will have to be away from populated areas.
Space (physical space). You'll need miles of secure track, miles of superconducting wire, space for the loading facility, and several miles downrange of the launcher (for saftey).
It has been suggested that a mountain would make a good launcher, some where in one of the newly industrialized nations (like India, or China) where the governmencould dedicate the space by fiat.
As long as Maizan stays the hell out of the Sol system, I could care less...
All the more reason to get our asses into space, so we can set up automated plants to manufacture anti-matter far away from inhabited areas...
Besides, free power (solar), free reaction mass (with sufficient heat, we can liberate volitiles from moon rock, asteroids, etc), and we're already outside of the gravity well... lots of advantages to doing space-related research, while actually in space. We just have to make like we want to stay there, instead of making very expensive vists all the time.
If the damage that random e-beams do to products sent via the mail (think everything shipped for eBay auctions for a start) hampers commerce, that will go a long ways to fulfilling Bin Laden's goal of disrupting the US economy.
Higher shipping charges, disruptions to just-in-time deliveries, the collapse of the USPS as all the business shippers switch to other carriers.
And the disturbing thing I'm getting from these posts is, the USPS isn't even notifying you when this is done. I'd hate for some critical part to fail prematurely because it was cooked at random.
Time to put some couriers on the payroll. Hand-carrying stuff is back in style.
Nuclear winters are caused by the dust kicked up by multiple warheads impacting and exploding on the earth's crust. A single rocket with waste blowing up in the atmosphere, critical mass or not, will not cause a nuclear winter.
What you will get is a nasty case of Chernobyl-style fallout, combined with a Mir-like dispersal of radioactive junk across a given hemisphere. Time to stock up on fallout shelters and iodine tablets...
After they load this sucker up, will you be able to detect the emissions from space, gamma, visual, or otherwise?
Look for laws mandating that routes for waste transport be published for the public saftey and need to know, then subsequently rovoked under homeland defense concerns...
> Speech communication is the only safe alternative.
Unless the other guy has the flu.
*cough* *hack* *sneeze*
That great big sucking sound you hear tommorrow will be Apple and all of its units pulling every last bit of advertising from AOL/TimeWarner publications as punishment.
Nevermind the consequences of losing exposure, this is the guy who pretty much axed ATI as a vendor for leaking the details about the Cube in advance. You can be assured he's not going to rest until the Time Canada unit no longer EXISTS.
I predict many heads rolling in an attempt to appease the angry gods...
Both of Handspring's Treo phone/palm gizmos look like they have chiclet keyboards instead of the standard graffiti area as an option.
Palm seems to have been clueless - could Handspring have known that Xerox was gonna win? Seems like more than coincidence to me...
Where in the world did they dig this data up from? Were these tapes that Deja had somehow acquired, but never read in, or did Google actually root around and restore backups from way back when, and if so, from who did they get the tapes from???
I figure that Google has to be getting these posts from trusted sources, or else you could inject false data into the historical archives. Anyone know for sure?
I gotta say, it's weird seeing how much I used to post. Of course, it was back when USENET was actually useful, and not clogged with spam and idiots... The funny thing is, that AOL used to be the same way (back when that was one of the few ways outside of academia to get something like an e-mail address, remember bitnet?) but that was even farther in the past...
The risk can be minimized by using valve-regulated absorbant-mat or gelled-cell batteries. They're still lead-acid, but they contain the electrolyte in either a mat or gel matrix which eliminates the spill hazard of sulfuric acid. The valve regulated feature allows the gases produced during charging to recombine instead of escaping if properly charged, via a valve-relief system.
Keep in mind, any unit with a battery in it (including the Airgen), will vent hydrogen if overcharged - that's why you spend the money to get a good charger/regulator. A car alternator or el-cheapo car-battery charger are NOT good chargers (no intelligence), and either depend on a known load, or a timed charge. You want something that monitors amperage, temprature, and voltage, and knows the profile of the batteries you're trying to charge. Good chargers are not cheap, but well worth the cost in maintaining battery life, without having to resort to "boiling" your batteries from time to time to get full charge.
Also, you might either want ventilation, or an outside installation for the units, if you really fear hydrogen that much...
Regarding the environmental hazard, lead is the most recycled material (90-99%?), and batteries are not dumped, but chopped up and recycled into new lead-acid batteries. Any place that sells lead-acid batteries here in the US is required to accept them for recycling. Compare this to all the NiCad batteries (Cadmium is quite toxic) produced for consumer devices that people end up tossing directly into the garbage.
The only other, low-cost high-capacity mass-market batteries, other than lead-acid, would NiFe, and good luck finding a supplier for those in small amounts.