While I don't mind my freinds sharing my e-mails, I do mind the un-asked association of my provate thoughts with my non-google e-mail address by google.
That chaps my ass because you just can't escape the pan optic glare of the all seeing eye of google. Nothing escapes if you want to communicate with others by e-mail.
In contrast I don't really mind facebook quite as much, at least right now. Facebook is the nude beach. If you go there you are expected to have your trousers down and should know that by now. Google is the like having the TSA body scanners in every doorway on the planet. The google oogle is a prying peeping tom, not simply the owner of the nude beach.
Of course, facebook is trying hard to be as ubiquitous as google. Nearly every web page I go to, Ghostery warns me that facebook just tried to plant a tracking bug on me. Many places now are using facebook as the single-sign on credential, so soon, like google, it will just be obligatory.
But for now their own limitations make them more benign than the spreading eagle google oogle.
If i send a private message to someone on facebook, I feel I deserve the same level of privacy as if I was using gmail to send it.
I realize this is sarcasm. What bugs me about gmail is not the message I send or receive to my g-mail account. I know those are mined. What bugs me is when I send e-mail to other people and they happen to use g-mail. Often their use of G-mail isn't obvious since they use their g-mail to collect forwarded e-mail or hosted URLs. Othertimes it might be a list server in which the e-mails of the recipients are not exposed even though you know the people. They might even forward the e-mail to someone who has a G-mail account.
In any case all those e-mails that I did not intend to share with Google also get harvested along with my e-mail address. While I don't mind my freinds sharing my e-mails, I do mind the un-asked association of my provate thoughts with my non-google e-mail address by google.
That chaps my ass because you just can't escape the pan optic glare of the all seeing eye of google. Nothing escapes if you want to communicate with others by e-mail.
the article is rubbish. there's a 100 degree standard deviation in the measurements. the slightest residual bias in the field, say an interesting tree, would completely overwhelm the measured averages with such whopper deviations.
the standard deviations were ~100 degrees and the lower variation between magnetic fluctuations is simply due to fewer samples since those days are fewer. the article is crazy pants.
I suspect the dogs just don't like staring into the sun then they poo. I'd also speculate that since streets and walls tend to be aligned with the cardinal directions there's an overall alignment augmentation due to their surroundings. finally if they like to poo in a shadow of a tree then likely they may face back to the tree and thus have a bias to north or south alignments.
Quote: "Chrome Remote Desktop is fully cross-platform. Provide remote assistance to Windows, Mac and Linux users, or access your Windows (XP and above) and Mac (OS X 10.6 and above) desktops at any time, all from the Chrome browser on virtually any device, including Chromebooks."
So it sounds like it's supposed to work.
It works from Chromebooks to mount other OS desktops but not from other computers to mount the chromebook desktop. Since I'm trying to support the chromebook user I need the latter. I need to view the chromebook. can't do it with google remote desktop or team viewer.
Got my mom a chromebook which is almost perfect for her. There's 3 current problems for the chromebook I have to solve:
1) unlike her old mac, I have no way to remote desktop to her machine to fix her problems. Is there any Remote desktop that lets me view a chromebook's screen. Google's own chrome remote desktop runs on everything except chromebooks it seems. Oh the irony.
2) Chrome books can't print to any USB connected printer. They require a compliant mac or PC to be in the household that they can piggy back off of. Either that or you have to buy one of a very few and not cheap choices of Cloud ready printers google has specified.
3) I need to find an modest priced ~20" external display for this computer that has easy to adjust brightness and tilt. I have an acer screen sh is using but like most screens these days the controlls to ajust brightness are so asinine menu you have to toggle through. The problem I have is that since I don't live near a best buy or a target I have no way to go test drive screens for simple brighness controls. The manufaturer's haven't seen fit to add to their descritpive features the notation: "Does not have jackass menus that old people can't use to do obvious things like brightness controlls". The also should advertise "does not take two hand and two feet dexterity in a standing position to simply adjust the goddamn tilt of the crappy plastic screen stand". Seriously, apple products fit and finish for these little details is seriously underrated. it's so easy to tilt an apple screen with one hand and have no danger of it toppling.
4) the fourth problem I have with chromebooks is not really germain to my mom's needs--- just my own. It appears that despite being a so called cloud computer there's no easy way to mount a local network disk on these things.
I really do like the chrome book idea however so I'm tying to work through this. I tried to go the the Linux route to fix the network issues but Chrombooks are not meant for running linux due to the crippling limitations imposed by having to run in developer mode.
You're better off heating with a heat pump—it's about three times more efficient than resistive heat, which is what you get out of a light bulb. Of course, if all you have is resistive heat, you're right that it makes no difference, but people who live in cold climates typically don't use resistive heat because it's so bloody expensive. We use oil, or gas, or heat pump, or wood, or some combination of these.
Hey that's interesting. Could you run me through the physics of how a heat pump does that. Naively, I was thinking that to heat 50 degree air to 72 degrees requires the same amount of energy no matter how you slice it. Now I'm wondering what I'm missing. I could imagine that there's a loop hole but i'm not spotting it.
>Indeed. US-Americans are however famous for their combination of ignorance and stupidity. >And no, LED bulbs are not more expensive, but you need to be able to do basic math to see that.
You also need a gullible belief in the claim the LED light bulb will last 10 years. it' wont. I've been testing these things for quite a while and they do burn out. Usually it's sort of an infant mortality however. I think the main problem is when put in standard enclosed fixtures they can suffer a heat death. They also likely don't handle voltage spikes as well. Other's may not like dimmers. Those are my guesses, but they burn out prematurely.
I've been testing the phillips, the cree, the insignia, and a few other lesser known brands for their suitability as replacements. The bottom line is the phillips is by far the best in terms of color and noise and failure rate. But the cree, which costs far less is so good that id you never had a phillips you would not know what you were missing. the cree is a warm light, almost as good as the phillips and doesn't make noise. It dims pretty well too. So in terms of price the cree wins. The main problem I've had with the cree is that the cree is fragile. I've had ones with their glass unglued in the package. The phillips are a brick. you could drop them on concrete and they would likely survive. But the phillips are also longer so they often stick out of recessed fixtures. Personally, the cree price wins in my house.
After those two, there's no point at all to any other bulb I've tried. They are all harshly bluer than either of those. This is especially noticable when side by side. But the real problem is the noise. These things can make noise. Why would anyone want to live with that?
No buy a phillips if money is no object or buy a cree and hope you don't break it.
The things I invented were really almost impossible to do at the time, but 7 years later with newer technology they were easy to do.
Then your invention was worthless; it was unpracticable until it would have been obvious anyway. It's relatively easy to blue-sky a bunch of things you could do if some enabling technology were available, but in fact cannot do.
So I take it you only try to do things that are easy to do? Such a legacy you will leave this planet.
I dislike patent trolls. But I cringe everytime someone says someone is a troll just because they don't make the product associated with their patent. I've patented invention (in laser physics). I don't make lasers or detectors for commerical purposes. I make inventions and then sell the inventions. I don't think that makes me a patent troll. Furthermore if sell my invention I might well sell it to someone who plans to make their money by selling licenses to the invention rather than making it. I'm glad they exist. Because it makes it easier to sell the patent, it means there's less risk to the inventor and thus more reason to invent. Conversely that company is making their money by arbitraging. While I might have sold it for more had I the resources to connect with buyers, there's risk to me, because it might flop. To them, by buying lots of inventors patents, some flop, some are worth far more than they paid. On average, by holding lots of patents, they make money by arbitraging the risk I want to avoid.
SO it's better for everyone. more inventions, more of those inventions finding practical use because they are commericially available.
SO what's a patent troll versus a legitimate arbitrager? Perhaps its deliberately collecting dubious patents and then suing people who probably developed the technology on their own as an extension of their legitimate manufacturing? It's a fine line. Some things are truly obvious in hindsight but these are not always obvious is foresight. What makes this hard is that Many times patents are not collected on till a long time after their invention. This makes them seem more obvious in later times than they were at the time of their invention.
The things I invented were really almost impossible to do at the time, but 7 years later with newer technology they were easy to do. When they became easy to do, lots of people did it and sold products. When I informed them of my invention, they said, oh come on thats so obvious. And indeed it was, now, but defintitely not at the time. I know this because for example one of them allowed a laster to tune 1000 times faster than any other laser at the time was able to. It's quite apparent everyone would have invented that if they could have since it's so desirable. But 7 years later it seemed so easy to do.
Thus it would not have been unreasonable for me to have sold that patent to an arbitrager and get my money up front. they can wake 7 years for the industry to start using the idea, then assert their rights and make cash. this is a good thing.
Remember the pets.com puppet? I'm sure that must have brought in a lot of cash at the bankruptcy proceeding. See, there's lots of ways to monetize internet companies.
I honestly don't understand how snapChat is supposed to work. I can understand the concept of "We make it inconvenient" for someone to get a copy of your picture or text. But the idea that it's gone forever seems preposterous. If the device it is beamed to can display it, then presumably all the information necessary to decode and preserve it is present in the message or in the memory of the device and thus capturable. Not to mention one could just take a picture of the picture. So how are they actually doing it?
I neglected to mention the corollary. Since were just a simulation, what's your purpose. Well presumably you exist to be window dressing in a sophisticated version of Grand Theft Auto or the Sims. However, if our creators are at all like ourselves then they are vain and one of these sims is an avatar for them. Which ones? well duh... it's the famous people folks!
your simulated life is therefore meaningless unless you reduce your degrees of separation from famous people. Your highest purpose in life is to degrade yourself for Miley Cyrus's pleasure. If you do that you will find the number of computer cylces devoted to you will increase, your pixelation will get finer, and you will stop doing repetitive motions. Anything else but celebrity idolatry just makes you an Orc peasant in Warcraft
By the way, I'm the real game creator, just fucking with your mind, you uncomprehending digital slob.
Watch the "the 13th floor" it's actually a true story in my real world.
The future won't be Dad commuting to the Moon office in giant 1960s rockets while smoking a pipe, or the Human Species (every single one of us!) bravely heading to the stars in some sort of sci-fi vehicle (ignoring all the realities we know about space)... No, the future is far more radical than that: it's the complete understanding of how matter organizes itself into life. And how we can control it.
The anthropic principle says that if your prediction is possible then it's overwhelmingly more likely that some past civilization in the vastness of time and space got their first and you yourself are the product of their research. It also says that if a civilization persists forever it must achieve a ubiquitous computational power in devices that can simulate a greater number of neural firing events that it's creator. At that singularity, where simulated life and actual life can not be distinguished by the entity experiencing life, it becomes overwhelmingly more likely that you exist in a simulation than not. If you reject this hypothesis then the alternative is then it must be because every civilization snuffs itself before reaching the power to create unlimited versions of itself in a computer.
Since all our known physical laws from QM to the diffraction limit to the finite speed of light would be the exact expected behavior of any simulation with finite resources it seems reasonable to assume the former not the latter.
The fermi principle says that while that is the ambition of every evolving civilization in the universe, there is only a short window between when they discover the technology for radio transmission and they discover the orgasmatron, ending all progress. This is the future folks future, folks.
Duh... It's a subdvision of the Keyser Söze Group in the W.A.S.T.E operations department of Illuminatus holdings conglomerate. A few years ago they had a hostile take over bid from KAOS but the man UNCLE subverted it.
Look, were discussing semantics. I could have started off by saying that re-imaging the exit plane of a TEM 11 mode laser would produce a donut hole in the middle of a beam like magic. But no one would but you would have a clue what were talking about. And were not really disagreeing that you can form a whole in a beam at far field. What my objective was to explain this in a very intuitive way. If you always have to run to an orthogonal function handbook to think about something then you can only solve problems not think of new problems. Intuition is a good thing.
accidtnally Deleted my answer to your first quesiton: quote
axicons are continuous too, and there's nothing special about phase masks, zone plates or physcial lenses this. THere's nothing special about contiuitutiy to discontinuiuty in the lens. the fresnel lens is the missing link between all of these concepts. Just as the fresnel lens is a dicritized version of a continuous lens phase front, the mathematics can also be written as a series as well.
segments of optical phase space with delta-p*delta-x >> hbar is what a fresnel lens is acting on discretely and independently. But that is also the definition of the miniumum phase space bundle size you need to define something we call a "ray".
it's all the same. just different ways of factoring the same mathematical expression.
The fact that the cuobic phase maskes happen to factor most easily along different basis sets that "rays", bamboozles one into thinking they are operating on some different principle. they aren't.
On your argument that this is not a beam : you cannot use the notion of photon, nor rays, because this is pure diffraction optics...
Uh.... I think you need to define what you mean by "beam" if you are not going to let me use a photonic or ray optics. In a pure plane wave, which is a natural basis set for diffractive optics, there's no such thing as a "beam" at all. You have to create an ensemble and at some point when the ensemble is narrow enough you might like to call it a "beam". So now were back to "ray optics" in which each ray is a beam. I'm saying the focii are formed from different rays.
Also, if you block the beam it will change the beam structure after propagation, because you won't have a mode of the diffraction operator anymore. The effect introduced is dependent on the size of the mask and its geometrical properties with respect to the incoming beam.
Well that's the WHOLE point! if you block the first part of an axiconinc focus it does NOT change the diffractive properties at any other region along the "beam" line.
This conflict between the second and first paragraphs reveal the core logical problem of calling this a beam. If it was a beam, then blocking one part of it would disrupt the latter part. Because the different parts of the beam are acting independently, we can think of them as independent. that is think of them as "ray" optics.
"forming a pseudo non-diffrating "beam" --- which is a totally wrong way to describe this."
Hum... Why?
Imagine you took a lens, bored out the center and put another lens in the middle with a different focal length. now you shine a beam of light through this. what happens in the far field is you get two focal spots. You might have been thinking one would be a donut, but as Babinet will tell you, that donut part disappears in the focal region.
This is the crude, but easy to visualize, version of what these investigators did. One can do this more cleverly. Add more focal spots by adding concentric rings of different focii. in fact if you just make a really bad fresnel lens where you have constant curvature on each lenslet ( picture a triangle wave in glass) then you get an array of spots.
An axicon is just continuous limit of that discrete process.
it creats what looks like a beam that never difracts. but in reality is is just a bunch of separate focal spots that have merged in to a line giving that appearance.
why is this not a beam: None of the photon the form the first spot in the line actually pass through last spot. infact if you block the first spot in the "beam" it doens't stop the "beam" !
Here's some recent articles on the topic of shaping light beams so it curves or has extended focal range or dark spots
by the way the "lightning" redirection problem we originally of interest not as a weapon but to create virtual lightning rod arrays in the air to discharge destructive lightning harmlessly. Why? well back then there had been a few great arpanet outages and people realized how vulnerable we were ebcoming to lightning stikes as we depending on the ubiquitous internet to always be able to route around problems. turned out this was a weak point. I suspect it may have become less of one now in part because optical fiber now carries stuff. But I don't know. But it was the utility companies paying for the research at the time.
I think they must have skipped the chapter in their basic handbook of optics called Babinet's principle. Because they just re-invented Babinet focusing.
By the way, an insightful thing to ponder here is, what happens to the light rays that were aiming for the center? (yes you can use a ray-optic basis set and still have interferrence). Well they were not in the beam! In a plane wave basis set, you would say, well all the plane waves with that K-vector were missing. Thus it's really simple to figure out how to create a dark spot. Just take an axiconically focused beam. Delete all parts of the axicon which focus in the dark region and replace them with any part of the axicon that focuses outside the dark region. Bam. that's it.
Did this myself a decade ago when I wanted arrays of dark spots in focused light. Why would I want that? I was trying to get the same effect as self fillamentation. but without non-linear effects in the media. That way I could create long arrays of ionized spots in the air, and use this to direct lighting beams.
Recently the military created a lightning weapon based on this.
But axicons and babinets prininciple this has been known for centuries.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't mind my freinds sharing my e-mails, I do mind the un-asked association of my provate thoughts with my non-google e-mail address by google.
That chaps my ass because you just can't escape the pan optic glare of the all seeing eye of google. Nothing escapes if you want to communicate with others by e-mail.
In contrast I don't really mind facebook quite as much, at least right now. Facebook is the nude beach. If you go there you are expected to have your trousers down and should know that by now. Google is the like having the TSA body scanners in every doorway on the planet. The google oogle is a prying peeping tom, not simply the owner of the nude beach.
Of course, facebook is trying hard to be as ubiquitous as google. Nearly every web page I go to, Ghostery warns me that facebook just tried to plant a tracking bug on me. Many places now are using facebook as the single-sign on credential, so soon, like google, it will just be obligatory.
But for now their own limitations make them more benign than the spreading eagle google oogle.
If i send a private message to someone on facebook, I feel I deserve the same level of privacy as if I was using gmail to send it.
I realize this is sarcasm. What bugs me about gmail is not the message I send or receive to my g-mail account. I know those are mined. What bugs me is when I send e-mail to other people and they happen to use g-mail. Often their use of G-mail isn't obvious since they use their g-mail to collect forwarded e-mail or hosted URLs. Othertimes it might be a list server in which the e-mails of the recipients are not exposed even though you know the people. They might even forward the e-mail to someone who has a G-mail account.
In any case all those e-mails that I did not intend to share with Google also get harvested along with my e-mail address. While I don't mind my freinds sharing my e-mails, I do mind the un-asked association of my provate thoughts with my non-google e-mail address by google.
That chaps my ass because you just can't escape the pan optic glare of the all seeing eye of google. Nothing escapes if you want to communicate with others by e-mail.
the article is rubbish. there's a 100 degree standard deviation in the measurements. the slightest residual bias in the field, say an interesting tree, would completely overwhelm the measured averages with such whopper deviations.
I read the article too.
the standard deviations were ~100 degrees and the lower variation between magnetic fluctuations is simply due to fewer samples since those days are fewer. the article is crazy pants.
I wonder which way they poo in space and can anyone hear them scream?
I suspect the dogs just don't like staring into the sun then they poo. I'd also speculate that since streets and walls tend to be aligned with the cardinal directions there's an overall alignment augmentation due to their surroundings. finally if they like to poo in a shadow of a tree then likely they may face back to the tree and thus have a bias to north or south alignments.
Quote: "Chrome Remote Desktop is fully cross-platform. Provide remote assistance to Windows, Mac and Linux users, or access your Windows (XP and above) and Mac (OS X 10.6 and above) desktops at any time, all from the Chrome browser on virtually any device, including Chromebooks."
So it sounds like it's supposed to work.
It works from Chromebooks to mount other OS desktops but not from other computers to mount the chromebook desktop. Since I'm trying to support the chromebook user I need the latter. I need to view the chromebook. can't do it with google remote desktop or team viewer.
btw: I tried to use team viewer but team viewer needs java so it doesn't run on chromebooks.
Got my mom a chromebook which is almost perfect for her. There's 3 current problems for the chromebook I have to solve:
1) unlike her old mac, I have no way to remote desktop to her machine to fix her problems. Is there any Remote desktop that lets me view a chromebook's screen. Google's own chrome remote desktop runs on everything except chromebooks it seems. Oh the irony.
2) Chrome books can't print to any USB connected printer. They require a compliant mac or PC to be in the household that they can piggy back off of. Either that or you have to buy one of a very few and not cheap choices of Cloud ready printers google has specified.
3) I need to find an modest priced ~20" external display for this computer that has easy to adjust brightness and tilt. I have an acer screen sh is using but like most screens these days the controlls to ajust brightness are so asinine menu you have to toggle through. The problem I have is that since I don't live near a best buy or a target I have no way to go test drive screens for simple brighness controls. The manufaturer's haven't seen fit to add to their descritpive features the notation: "Does not have jackass menus that old people can't use to do obvious things like brightness controlls". The also should advertise "does not take two hand and two feet dexterity in a standing position to simply adjust the goddamn tilt of the crappy plastic screen stand". Seriously, apple products fit and finish for these little details is seriously underrated. it's so easy to tilt an apple screen with one hand and have no danger of it toppling.
4) the fourth problem I have with chromebooks is not really germain to my mom's needs--- just my own. It appears that despite being a so called cloud computer there's no easy way to mount a local network disk on these things.
I really do like the chrome book idea however so I'm tying to work through this. I tried to go the the Linux route to fix the network issues but Chrombooks are not meant for running linux due to the crippling limitations imposed by having to run in developer mode.
You're better off heating with a heat pump—it's about three times more efficient than resistive heat, which is what you get out of a light bulb. Of course, if all you have is resistive heat, you're right that it makes no difference, but people who live in cold climates typically don't use resistive heat because it's so bloody expensive. We use oil, or gas, or heat pump, or wood, or some combination of these.
Hey that's interesting. Could you run me through the physics of how a heat pump does that. Naively, I was thinking that to heat 50 degree air to 72 degrees requires the same amount of energy no matter how you slice it. Now I'm wondering what I'm missing. I could imagine that there's a loop hole but i'm not spotting it.
>Indeed. US-Americans are however famous for their combination of ignorance and stupidity.
>And no, LED bulbs are not more expensive, but you need to be able to do basic math to see that.
You also need a gullible belief in the claim the LED light bulb will last 10 years. it' wont. I've been testing these things for quite a while and they do burn out. Usually it's sort of an infant mortality however. I think the main problem is when put in standard enclosed fixtures they can suffer a heat death. They also likely don't handle voltage spikes as well. Other's may not like dimmers. Those are my guesses, but they burn out prematurely.
I've been testing the phillips, the cree, the insignia, and a few other lesser known brands for their suitability as replacements. The bottom line is the phillips is by far the best in terms of color and noise and failure rate. But the cree, which costs far less is so good that id you never had a phillips you would not know what you were missing. the cree is a warm light, almost as good as the phillips and doesn't make noise. It dims pretty well too. So in terms of price the cree wins. The main problem I've had with the cree is that the cree is fragile. I've had ones with their glass unglued in the package. The phillips are a brick. you could drop them on concrete and they would likely survive. But the phillips are also longer so they often stick out of recessed fixtures. Personally, the cree price wins in my house.
After those two, there's no point at all to any other bulb I've tried. They are all harshly bluer than either of those. This is especially noticable when side by side. But the real problem is the noise. These things can make noise. Why would anyone want to live with that?
No buy a phillips if money is no object or buy a cree and hope you don't break it.
Then your invention was worthless; it was unpracticable until it would have been obvious anyway. It's relatively easy to blue-sky a bunch of things you could do if some enabling technology were available, but in fact cannot do.
So I take it you only try to do things that are easy to do? Such a legacy you will leave this planet.
I dislike patent trolls. But I cringe everytime someone says someone is a troll just because they don't make the product associated with their patent. I've patented invention (in laser physics). I don't make lasers or detectors for commerical purposes. I make inventions and then sell the inventions. I don't think that makes me a patent troll. Furthermore if sell my invention I might well sell it to someone who plans to make their money by selling licenses to the invention rather than making it. I'm glad they exist. Because it makes it easier to sell the patent, it means there's less risk to the inventor and thus more reason to invent. Conversely that company is making their money by arbitraging. While I might have sold it for more had I the resources to connect with buyers, there's risk to me, because it might flop. To them, by buying lots of inventors patents, some flop, some are worth far more than they paid. On average, by holding lots of patents, they make money by arbitraging the risk I want to avoid.
SO it's better for everyone. more inventions, more of those inventions finding practical use because they are commericially available.
SO what's a patent troll versus a legitimate arbitrager? Perhaps its deliberately collecting dubious patents and then suing people who probably developed the technology on their own as an extension of their legitimate manufacturing? It's a fine line. Some things are truly obvious in hindsight but these are not always obvious is foresight. What makes this hard is that Many times patents are not collected on till a long time after their invention. This makes them seem more obvious in later times than they were at the time of their invention.
The things I invented were really almost impossible to do at the time, but 7 years later with newer technology they were easy to do. When they became easy to do, lots of people did it and sold products. When I informed them of my invention, they said, oh come on thats so obvious. And indeed it was, now, but defintitely not at the time. I know this because for example one of them allowed a laster to tune 1000 times faster than any other laser at the time was able to. It's quite apparent everyone would have invented that if they could have since it's so desirable. But 7 years later it seemed so easy to do.
Thus it would not have been unreasonable for me to have sold that patent to an arbitrager and get my money up front. they can wake 7 years for the industry to start using the idea, then assert their rights and make cash. this is a good thing.
I Once FB invests sufficient money into developing and marketing their own version, Snapshat will be worth peanuts.
I've heard the internal code name for it is CrotchBook.
Remember the pets.com puppet? I'm sure that must have brought in a lot of cash at the bankruptcy proceeding. See, there's lots of ways to monetize internet companies.
I honestly don't understand how snapChat is supposed to work. I can understand the concept of "We make it inconvenient" for someone to get a copy of your picture or text. But the idea that it's gone forever seems preposterous. If the device it is beamed to can display it, then presumably all the information necessary to decode and preserve it is present in the message or in the memory of the device and thus capturable. Not to mention one could just take a picture of the picture. So how are they actually doing it?
I neglected to mention the corollary. Since were just a simulation, what's your purpose. Well presumably you exist to be window dressing in a sophisticated version of Grand Theft Auto or the Sims. However, if our creators are at all like ourselves then they are vain and one of these sims is an avatar for them. Which ones? well duh... it's the famous people folks!
your simulated life is therefore meaningless unless you reduce your degrees of separation from famous people. Your highest purpose in life is to degrade yourself for Miley Cyrus's pleasure. If you do that you will find the number of computer cylces devoted to you will increase, your pixelation will get finer, and you will stop doing repetitive motions. Anything else but celebrity idolatry just makes you an Orc peasant in Warcraft
By the way, I'm the real game creator, just fucking with your mind, you uncomprehending digital slob.
Watch the "the 13th floor" it's actually a true story in my real world.
The future won't be Dad commuting to the Moon office in giant 1960s rockets while smoking a pipe, or the Human Species (every single one of us!) bravely heading to the stars in some sort of sci-fi vehicle (ignoring all the realities we know about space)... No, the future is far more radical than that: it's the complete understanding of how matter organizes itself into life. And how we can control it.
The anthropic principle says that if your prediction is possible then it's overwhelmingly more likely that some past civilization in the vastness of time and space got their first and you yourself are the product of their research. It also says that if a civilization persists forever it must achieve a ubiquitous computational power in devices that can simulate a greater number of neural firing events that it's creator. At that singularity, where simulated life and actual life can not be distinguished by the entity experiencing life, it becomes overwhelmingly more likely that you exist in a simulation than not. If you reject this hypothesis then the alternative is then it must be because every civilization snuffs itself before reaching the power to create unlimited versions of itself in a computer.
Since all our known physical laws from QM to the diffraction limit to the finite speed of light would be the exact expected behavior of any simulation with finite resources it seems reasonable to assume the former not the latter.
The fermi principle says that while that is the ambition of every evolving civilization in the universe, there is only a short window between when they discover the technology for radio transmission and they discover the orgasmatron, ending all progress. This is the future folks future, folks.
Duh... It's a subdvision of the Keyser Söze Group in the W.A.S.T.E operations department of Illuminatus holdings conglomerate. A few years ago they had a hostile take over bid from KAOS but the man UNCLE subverted it.
Look, were discussing semantics. I could have started off by saying that re-imaging the exit plane of a TEM 11 mode laser would produce a donut hole in the middle of a beam like magic. But no one would but you would have a clue what were talking about. And were not really disagreeing that you can form a whole in a beam at far field. What my objective was to explain this in a very intuitive way. If you always have to run to an orthogonal function handbook to think about something then you can only solve problems not think of new problems. Intuition is a good thing.
accidtnally Deleted my answer to your first quesiton:
quote
axicons are continuous too, and there's nothing special about phase masks, zone plates or physcial lenses this. THere's nothing special about contiuitutiy to discontinuiuty in the lens. the fresnel lens is the missing link between all of these concepts. Just as the fresnel lens is a dicritized version of a continuous lens phase front, the mathematics can also be written as a series as well.
segments of optical phase space with delta-p*delta-x >> hbar is what a fresnel lens is acting on discretely and independently. But that is also the definition of the miniumum phase space bundle size you need to define something we call a "ray".
it's all the same. just different ways of factoring the same mathematical expression.
The fact that the cuobic phase maskes happen to factor most easily along different basis sets that "rays", bamboozles one into thinking they are operating on some different principle. they aren't.
On your argument that this is not a beam : you cannot use the notion of photon, nor rays, because this is pure diffraction optics...
Uh.... I think you need to define what you mean by "beam" if you are not going to let me use a photonic or ray optics. In a pure plane wave, which is a natural basis set for diffractive optics, there's no such thing as a "beam" at all. You have to create an ensemble and at some point when the ensemble is narrow enough you might like to call it a "beam". So now were back to "ray optics" in which each ray is a beam. I'm saying the focii are formed from different rays.
Also, if you block the beam it will change the beam structure after propagation, because you won't have a mode of the diffraction operator anymore. The effect introduced is dependent on the size of the mask and its geometrical properties with respect to the incoming beam.
Well that's the WHOLE point! if you block the first part of an axiconinc focus it does NOT change the diffractive properties at any other region along the "beam" line.
This conflict between the second and first paragraphs reveal the core logical problem of calling this a beam. If it was a beam, then blocking one part of it would disrupt the latter part. Because the different parts of the beam are acting independently, we can think of them as independent. that is think of them as "ray" optics.
"forming a pseudo non-diffrating "beam" --- which is a totally wrong way to describe this."
Hum... Why?
Imagine you took a lens, bored out the center and put another lens in the middle with a different focal length. now you shine a beam of light through this. what happens in the far field is you get two focal spots. You might have been thinking one would be a donut, but as Babinet will tell you, that donut part disappears in the focal region.
This is the crude, but easy to visualize, version of what these investigators did. One can do this more cleverly. Add more focal spots by adding concentric rings of different focii. in fact if you just make a really bad fresnel lens where you have constant curvature on each lenslet ( picture a triangle wave in glass) then you get an array of spots.
An axicon is just continuous limit of that discrete process.
it creats what looks like a beam that never difracts. but in reality is is just a bunch of separate focal spots that have merged in to a line giving that appearance.
why is this not a beam: None of the photon the form the first spot in the line actually pass through last spot. infact if you block the first spot in the "beam" it doens't stop the "beam" !
Here's some recent articles on the topic of shaping light beams so it curves or has extended focal range or dark spots
by the way the "lightning" redirection problem we originally of interest not as a weapon but to create virtual lightning rod arrays in the air to discharge destructive lightning harmlessly. Why? well back then there had been a few great arpanet outages and people realized how vulnerable we were ebcoming to lightning stikes as we depending on the ubiquitous internet to always be able to route around problems. turned out this was a weak point. I suspect it may have become less of one now in part because optical fiber now carries stuff. But I don't know. But it was the utility companies paying for the research at the time.
lightning weapon using self filamentation:
http://www.army.mil/article/82262/Picatinny_engineers_set_phasers_to__fry_/
curving light "beams"
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16936-curved-laser-beams-could-help-tame-thunderclouds.html
forming a pseudo non-diffrating "beam" --- which is a totally wrong way to describe this.
http://www.mtu.de/en/technologies/engineering_news/others/Menges_Forming_non-diffracting_beams_en.pdf
that too was applied to the lighning problem
even a slashdot articlee referencing that:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/04/15/0147234/curved-laser-beams-could-help-tame-lightning
a patent:
http://www.google.nl/patents/US6937791
I think they must have skipped the chapter in their basic handbook of optics called Babinet's principle. Because they just re-invented Babinet focusing.
By the way, an insightful thing to ponder here is, what happens to the light rays that were aiming for the center? (yes you can use a ray-optic basis set and still have interferrence). Well they were not in the beam! In a plane wave basis set, you would say, well all the plane waves with that K-vector were missing. Thus it's really simple to figure out how to create a dark spot. Just take an axiconically focused beam. Delete all parts of the axicon which focus in the dark region and replace them with any part of the axicon that focuses outside the dark region. Bam. that's it.
Did this myself a decade ago when I wanted arrays of dark spots in focused light. Why would I want that? I was trying to get the same effect as self fillamentation. but without non-linear effects in the media. That way I could create long arrays of ionized spots in the air, and use this to direct lighting beams.
Recently the military created a lightning weapon based on this.
But axicons and babinets prininciple this has been known for centuries.