Problem is that solar cells are _really_ inefficient. Well, as I recall they had an efficiency rating of 10-30% or so. Lasers are also pretty inefficient (I think they're about the 10% mark too, but I'm sure someone with the appropriate knowlege can correct me), so you'd be wasting an awful lot of power, not to mention probably melting the solar cell. (10% efficient means that almost 90% of that energy turns into heat on the cell)
Using it to boil water for a steam engine might work. Or just powertrip and kill everyone else using the energy of the world and then you don't have to worry about conservation anymore:)
Not quite correct on using less power to produce hydrogen than you gain consuming it - fundamentally that's against thermodynamics, and a source of infinite energy
Burn hydrogen, use energy produced to make more, sell surplus, repeat.
It is quite an old concept, that of an orbiting solar power plant. The medium for energy transferrence is slightly different, but the idea is the same (I seem to recall the early forms of the idea used microwaves beamed down from orbit. Shudder).
Nothing new and revolutionary, but if they can get it working we have tapped another energy source (yes, I know we already have solar power, but an orbital power station doesn't have the limits on size that a ground based one does.)
Wasn't this more or less what CSS was supposed to do? Just like macrovision is _supposed_ to protect videos.
Oh well, we can run a sweep stake on how long it takes after release to get reverse-engineered.
(I reckon 6-7 days)
Well as to applying to P2P, I know that one of the clients I used allowed you to give priority to people who _were_ sharing files.
Open source software is harder. It's really easy to get bitter when you see thousands downloading your product, and not even seeing one 'thanks, it was really handy'. This also applies to an awful lot of free services (the ones that spring to mind are running a website or a mud).
Protecting against enthusiastic vigilantes is always a problem in a 'peer punishment' system. And saying that, the/. moderation system is about the best I have seen at coping with such a thing. Each moderator can make a difference, but if you moderate badly a further consensus will alter your decision, and if you consistently make bad decisions, your Karma drops low and so you get less potential to make them.
I could conceive of something similar in the legal system, a 'citizen police card' or somesuch. Good decisions 'improve' your score, bad decisions decrease it, and when it dropped below a certain point, then you lost it.
My problem with spam is simpler.
When some monkey sends me a comparatively big html-ised email with graphics and even (once shudder) some flash, it's _me_ paying for the bandwidth.
OK, if you're on cable or DSL the b/w is flat rate, but even so, if you consider that it's otherwise wasting a resource for which you've paid, then spam costs you money.
Getting junk through a letter box, you can just ignore, and it cost _them_ to send it. Ditto faxes. Spam doesn't.
Don't bother compressing it, just delete it, and then get an infinite number on monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters to re-produce the original.
Wouldn't it be entertaining if this press release _was_ the result of that BYTE article.
Scenario: Overworked programmer tells manager to back off, because he's developing a _really_ new and fantastic compression algorithm.
Shows said manager copy of article and points out that no-one has patented it yet.
Manager know not a lot, but does know that with compression, more is better, and rushes press release.
Actually, I think there are tests that allow you to determin how random a set of data are. My final year project at university required (amongst other things) porting a gaussian (normal distribution) function from FORTRAN to C - and it's possible to analyse how random the results are. In my case the C (using a mix of rand() and some scaling factors) was a lot worse than the FORTRAN random function.
The C code _did_ run about 100 times faster though:)
At a guess, technically theres a chance that if you just dump 20Gb of truly random numbers, you end up with all of them being 0's.
Course, if they managed pull random numbers that many times and got 0 every time, they don't need to invent compression standards - they're on to a winner on the lottery:)
100 to 1? Bah, that's only 99%.
The _real_ trick is getting 100% compression. It's actually really easy, there's a module built in to do it on your average unix.
Simply run all your backups to the New Universal Logical Loader and perfect compression is achieved. The device driver, is of course, loaded as/dev/null.
Very true, as the man once said: "Golf, the perfect way to spoil a decent walk".
The 500 marbles is a good analogy, since we do have this 'cushion' of an atmosphere. Unfortunately from what I recall, a nuclear explosion would at best split it into a few large - ish pieces. Possibly less damage each, but assuming that they all still hit you could lose several cites.
I always understood that nuking an asteroid was a little pointless. I mean, instead of one big chunk of rock coming towards you really fast, you instead have several.
I seem to recall a book on the subject at some point (Arthur C. Clarke probably), which suggested a great big rocket engine. 'Land' on asteroid and start firing, and eventually you'll alter it's course enough so it doesn't impact.
Or somesuch.
Easy. E=mv^2 IIRC. So take the mass of something that size, multiply by the square of the impact velocity, and that's the 'energy' released by the impact.
It's not _quite_ the same as a nuclear explosion, but if you get the energy level high enough, then the effects are similar enough that it doesnt matter.
A kiloton is define as 10^12 calories which is about 4 x 10 ^ 12 joules.
A 1000 tons of rock would have to hit the earth at about 1 kilometer per second to have a similar effect - which is quite a small speed if you are talking about relative speeds in space... (escape velocity is 7km/sec IIRC)
Don't know what the mass of that rock would have been, but a 300 metre sphere of rock is going to be _fairly_ heavy. Take some averages, and count a few fingers, and you start realising that several megatonnes of energy are comparatively easy to come by if you're hit by a big chunk of rock travelling at significant speeds.
(This is, assuming I can count of course.)
The RIAA has been stomping royally on anyone and everyone about protecting their copyright.
Of course, the artists themselves don't actually see much of it but the publishers do.
Last I heard the royalty paid to the artist was somewhere in the region of 5%. Once you deduct production and advertising costs, it's not hard to see why the industry is trying to protect it's margin...
No, no no.
The Internet is (IMHO) a global community. Identifying and restricting people by ip address is, to my mind, contrary to the whole ethos.
I dislike the thought that people will be allowed to track who and where I am. I also dislike the thought that it'll be possible to prevent/deny access to your site based on where in the world the person who's trying to access it is located.1
Then again, I suppose there's always enough anonymous proxy servers out their to circumvent this.
Well, you don't _have_ to double the mass.
I suspect that if you were to use raw atoms and fired them much faster then momentum would also be conserved.
Would this work with a single electron at relativistic speeds? Less mass needed, but I suspect more overall energy - although perhaps with solar power and really big capacitors you might be able to.
Not to mention making the most deadly weapon ever.
Orbital bombardment at 'significant' velocities? Oh yeah, let's not even bother with the nukes, kinetic energy will be more than enough.
Slashdot Mirror
1 word.
Inflation.
Problem is that solar cells are _really_ inefficient. Well, as I recall they had an efficiency rating of 10-30% or so. Lasers are also pretty inefficient (I think they're about the 10% mark too, but I'm sure someone with the appropriate knowlege can correct me), so you'd be wasting an awful lot of power, not to mention probably melting the solar cell. (10% efficient means that almost 90% of that energy turns into heat on the cell) :)
Using it to boil water for a steam engine might work. Or just powertrip and kill everyone else using the energy of the world and then you don't have to worry about conservation anymore
The article mentions 10 megawatts. :)
Of light energy.
That's going to give you one hell of a sunburn
Not quite correct on using less power to produce hydrogen than you gain consuming it - fundamentally that's against thermodynamics, and a source of infinite energy
Burn hydrogen, use energy produced to make more, sell surplus, repeat.
It is quite an old concept, that of an orbiting solar power plant. The medium for energy transferrence is slightly different, but the idea is the same (I seem to recall the early forms of the idea used microwaves beamed down from orbit. Shudder).
Nothing new and revolutionary, but if they can get it working we have tapped another energy source (yes, I know we already have solar power, but an orbital power station doesn't have the limits on size that a ground based one does.)
Wasn't this more or less what CSS was supposed to do? Just like macrovision is _supposed_ to protect videos.
Oh well, we can run a sweep stake on how long it takes after release to get reverse-engineered. (I reckon 6-7 days)
Well as to applying to P2P, I know that one of the clients I used allowed you to give priority to people who _were_ sharing files. /. moderation system is about the best I have seen at coping with such a thing. Each moderator can make a difference, but if you moderate badly a further consensus will alter your decision, and if you consistently make bad decisions, your Karma drops low and so you get less potential to make them.
Open source software is harder. It's really easy to get bitter when you see thousands downloading your product, and not even seeing one 'thanks, it was really handy'. This also applies to an awful lot of free services (the ones that spring to mind are running a website or a mud).
Protecting against enthusiastic vigilantes is always a problem in a 'peer punishment' system. And saying that, the
I could conceive of something similar in the legal system, a 'citizen police card' or somesuch. Good decisions 'improve' your score, bad decisions decrease it, and when it dropped below a certain point, then you lost it.
My problem with spam is simpler.
When some monkey sends me a comparatively big html-ised email with graphics and even (once shudder) some flash, it's _me_ paying for the bandwidth.
OK, if you're on cable or DSL the b/w is flat rate, but even so, if you consider that it's otherwise wasting a resource for which you've paid, then spam costs you money.
Getting junk through a letter box, you can just ignore, and it cost _them_ to send it. Ditto faxes. Spam doesn't.
Don't bother compressing it, just delete it, and then get an infinite number on monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters to re-produce the original.
Wouldn't it be entertaining if this press release _was_ the result of that BYTE article.
Scenario: Overworked programmer tells manager to back off, because he's developing a _really_ new and fantastic compression algorithm.
Shows said manager copy of article and points out that no-one has patented it yet.
Manager know not a lot, but does know that with compression, more is better, and rushes press release.
Scary thing is, I can see it happening...
Actually, I think there are tests that allow you to determin how random a set of data are. My final year project at university required (amongst other things) porting a gaussian (normal distribution) function from FORTRAN to C - and it's possible to analyse how random the results are. In my case the C (using a mix of rand() and some scaling factors) was a lot worse than the FORTRAN random function. The C code _did_ run about 100 times faster though :)
At a guess, technically theres a chance that if you just dump 20Gb of truly random numbers, you end up with all of them being 0's. :)
Course, if they managed pull random numbers that many times and got 0 every time, they don't need to invent compression standards - they're on to a winner on the lottery
Erm, cos the output wouldn't be random?
Always assuming you're interested in reconstructing the initial values of course.
It's easy. /dev/random to replace it.
If it's true random, it's meaningless, so you can just cat an equivalent number of bytes out of
Full house!
I just won buzzword Bingo!
Of course, given that cpu speed increases faster than bandwidth, even if it is an issue now, it won't be in a year.
100 to 1? Bah, that's only 99%. /dev/null.
The _real_ trick is getting 100% compression. It's actually really easy, there's a module built in to do it on your average unix.
Simply run all your backups to the New Universal Logical Loader and perfect compression is achieved. The device driver, is of course, loaded as
So you can plan a really rocking end of the world party of course. :)
Very true, as the man once said: "Golf, the perfect way to spoil a decent walk".
The 500 marbles is a good analogy, since we do have this 'cushion' of an atmosphere. Unfortunately from what I recall, a nuclear explosion would at best split it into a few large - ish pieces. Possibly less damage each, but assuming that they all still hit you could lose several cites.
The emergency procedure when being faced with being hit by an awfully large rock is to lower your pants bend down and kiss your arse goodbye.
I always understood that nuking an asteroid was a little pointless. I mean, instead of one big chunk of rock coming towards you really fast, you instead have several.
I seem to recall a book on the subject at some point (Arthur C. Clarke probably), which suggested a great big rocket engine. 'Land' on asteroid and start firing, and eventually you'll alter it's course enough so it doesn't impact.
Or somesuch.
Easy. E=mv^2 IIRC. So take the mass of something that size, multiply by the square of the impact velocity, and that's the 'energy' released by the impact.
It's not _quite_ the same as a nuclear explosion, but if you get the energy level high enough, then the effects are similar enough that it doesnt matter.
A kiloton is define as 10^12 calories which is about 4 x 10 ^ 12 joules.
A 1000 tons of rock would have to hit the earth at about 1 kilometer per second to have a similar effect - which is quite a small speed if you are talking about relative speeds in space... (escape velocity is 7km/sec IIRC)
Don't know what the mass of that rock would have been, but a 300 metre sphere of rock is going to be _fairly_ heavy. Take some averages, and count a few fingers, and you start realising that several megatonnes of energy are comparatively easy to come by if you're hit by a big chunk of rock travelling at significant speeds.
(This is, assuming I can count of course.)
The RIAA has been stomping royally on anyone and everyone about protecting their copyright.
Of course, the artists themselves don't actually see much of it but the publishers do.
Last I heard the royalty paid to the artist was somewhere in the region of 5%. Once you deduct production and advertising costs, it's not hard to see why the industry is trying to protect it's margin...
No, no no.
The Internet is (IMHO) a global community. Identifying and restricting people by ip address is, to my mind, contrary to the whole ethos.
I dislike the thought that people will be allowed to track who and where I am. I also dislike the thought that it'll be possible to prevent/deny access to your site based on where in the world the person who's trying to access it is located.1
Then again, I suppose there's always enough anonymous proxy servers out their to circumvent this.
Well, you don't _have_ to double the mass.
I suspect that if you were to use raw atoms and fired them much faster then momentum would also be conserved.
Would this work with a single electron at relativistic speeds? Less mass needed, but I suspect more overall energy - although perhaps with solar power and really big capacitors you might be able to.
Not to mention making the most deadly weapon ever.
Orbital bombardment at 'significant' velocities? Oh yeah, let's not even bother with the nukes, kinetic energy will be more than enough.