Its the "one way reflective material" thats the cunning part, and what you pay all the money for. The surface treatment of the glass 'screen' is what is holographic in this instance, not the image that is generated, which is just a flat TV image. The hologram is such that from your viewing angle, light just passes straight through the glass plate, but from the projectors angle, the glass is opaque enough for an image to form on it like a conventional screen rather than passing straight through like it does the window on a projector booth at a cinema). I don't think you could generate the 40" hologram at home as a DIY solution!
Long post - the introductory stuff is neccessary to understand the relevant point (in bold) at the end.
The introduction of evolutionary theory should not have precipitated any direct conflict with Biblical literalism. Its advent served only to undermine the accommodation that had grown up between scriptural interpretation and certain philosophical theories that had been prevalent in the Western Church for two centuries. In particular, Christianity had adopted Plato's Idealist doctrine of specific forms, theologically interpreted as "ideas in the mind of God", and Aristotle's teleological doctrine of final causes, giving rise to a hierarchical scala naturae and the conception of biological forms as unchanging (consistent with a Divine creation). The theory of origins native to these ancient authorities was largely incompatible with Christian ideas of the time, but these specific philosophies taken out of their cultural context had combined well with a Biblically-inspired doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the state of the art of natural history and taxonomy in the 18th century (itself much influenced by Aristotle) to form an authoritative theory of origins, referred to by John Durant as the "special creation theory":
"By identifying the Platonic demiurge with the Christian, and giving this creator the task of fashioning out of unformed matter a formal array of exquisitely adapted species, it is possible to arrive at an idealistic synthesis according to which each species (or other chosen natural kind) of plant or animal is the embodiment of a transcendent idea in the mind of the creator, or, with a little more subtlety, perhaps, to arrive at a synthesis in which each species is seen as an individually tailored variation upon a far smaller set of transcendental themes."
As exploration vastly expanded the known number and variety of species, rendering problematical the concept of a personal creation and leading more researchers towards evolutionary ideas, no longer could God's 'Second Book' be viewed as a fixed and unchanging text. Durant controversially argues that the discovery of natural selection:
"represented the unexpected fulfilment of the promise of the theory of special creation [...] in the sense that it accounted for the observed pattern of organic form and function with the aid of but a single overarching theoretical principle.[...] but it also destroyed that tradition by undermining the particular alliance of philosophy, theology, and natural science upon which it rested."
As a secular activity, evolutionary biology should not have troubled the theological doctrine of creation. Darwinism contradicts only the philosophical baggage which the theology had accumulated, and it was only through advocates like Paley who in his 'Natural Theology' "attached the credibility of the Christian doctrine of creation to a particular set of philosophical and scientific beliefs about species with which it need never have been directly associated" that the conflict was fostered.
On the religious side, the objections to the new biology were four-fold (as discussed in Barbour, 1966, pp89-98):
Evolutionary theory contradicted such "self-evident truths" as the argument from design
It undermined the dignity of Man by placing him as integral to nature rather than being set apart.
Belief in a continuing progress of society towards perfection mediated by natural law rather than Divine providence created the possibility that moral and ethical norms might be taken from biological rather than Biblical example.
The questioning of the origins interpretation derived from 'higher criticism' of the Biblical sources was a direct challenge to Biblical (and hence secular Church) authority.
The Church wanted only a science which would underpin their "hierarchical moral cosmos with all eyes lifted towards a benevolent Sustainer" (Desmond, 1987, p102).
Consider the opposite - a constantly foggy environment. Here sight (unless you evolve a radio-sense) will be pretty useless, smell and hearing will take control. The real world is neither of the above extremes
Errm, I can't provide the "extreme" example of the constant fog, but how about the darkness in caves? The (occaisionally partial) eyelessness of cave fish species is a classic example of the removal of selective pressure for maintenance of a complex structure resulting in its degeneration...
People think that apes/chimpanzees/whatever are less evolved than humans, which is rubbish. People are more intelligent, but apes are just as evolved
Agreed, but not for the same reason. Every living creature alive now is exactly as evolved as every other: they all have a heritage stretching back from now to the first self-reproducing system. People misuse "evolved" as a synonym for "complicated" - whereas I'd be inclined to view the very simplest organisms that are still going as the most elegant solution to the self-replication puzzle.
there are those who insist that the Earth was created "with age" 6000 years ago, and that fossils, etc, are a diversionary trap for the unfaithful
This view has been referred to as "Last Tuesdayism". If God could have created the world with built in lies in the geological record (and everywhere else that refuting evidence for young earth creationism can be found), She could equally have created us with lies built in to our memories - the world was in fact created last Tuesday, and all our memories of, say, series one of Buffy, are lies told to us by our deity.
A completely irrefutable argument, but one that completely fails as a hypothesis in the scientific sense, because it is irrefutable: it could apply equally to every possible instant from now backwards... Oh, and it also requires that you beleive in a God who has perpetrated the biggest lie ever! I prefer to think that any possible deity would look favourably on me using the best mental tools I've got to form the most consistent picture from the information I'm given...
I disagree. If the guy had been fighting the vehicle for control, it would show forensic evidence of the attempts: condition of brakes being an obvious one, if they'd been applied hard while the car had an open throttle and was hitting 200kph. I'm not aware of any car in which every system that could bring it to a halt is run from software.
The story has been publicised again because there is still no monitoring on the faults involved. Might be worth funding the odd postgrad geologist?
The actual event can only be predicted to within geological timescales, so very little cause to start heading for high ground now.
The same tsunami would hit Africa first and harder, but in all the coverage I've heard on this the only mention made is of the east coast of the US. Just one more invisible catastrophe to hit the third world...
Re:Further reading...
on
Amorphous Steel
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Apparently amorphous metals are considered by some scientists to be a type of liquid rather than a solid. Kind of like glass, if you look at an old house you can see that the windows have slowly flowed downward.
Urban Legend, or at least most of the way to being one. The observed thickness variation is due to the Crown glass process of making glass sheets in that period: it involved spinning out a 5ft diameter disc of glass, thick in the centre and thin at the edges, and cutting the rectangles from that. There are apparently as many panes thicker at the top or the sides as at the bottom, although possibly some glaziers did have a preference for putting 'thick edge down'.
If glass did flow, extremely ancient (Myr) naturally occuring glasses like obsidian, fulgurites or tektites would have flowed into puddles! (they havent). Or if that doesnt convince you: the tolerances on the optical components of large telescopes are so fine that flow of the glass at the claimed rates would distort the image within days.
See, for example, "Do Cathedral Glasses Flow?", Am. J. Phys. v66, pp 392-396, May, 1998
NB. Glass can creep under loading, however - but thats for another thread.
Do you think the state and local governments should be able to tax my grandmother's house at its appraised value of $200,000 rather than the $12,000 she paid for it forty years ago? Jacking up people's taxes based on a something they have no control over (housing prices) is ridiculous.
Fine, as long as she is capped at not being able to sell the house for more than its taxable value...
Heinlein proposed a similar system in one of his books (possibly The Number of the Beast). Residents decided their own valuation for their properties for tax purposes, with the proviso that the house could be compulsorily purchased for the value they set. I never understood quite who he was satirising with that one until hearing about the Californian system.
So, from now on, book all tickets etc. over the phone and require that the company read out all their terms, conditions and policies in full in order to ensure that they are really bound by them and to prove that you have full expectation that they honour what they say they intend to do.
That should certainly slow those Indian call centres down to five or six bookings per staff member per day...
A better way to track down hit & run drivers would be to emboss a unique code pattern onto the bumpers of cars, then you could just read off the id of the vehicle from whatever it had hit (metal, wood, bone... etc). Just a thought.;)
This is yet another initiative that erodes the privacy of the law-abiding whilst doing nothing to inhibit the activities of the criminal element.
A criminal who needs to drive around isnt going to prevented by the RFID tags, she'll just drive a car that isnt tagged: the only way that can be caught is by police checking that every car that passes has a valid tag - how is that different from using the current 'dumb' numberplates against a database?
Meanwhile, the law-abiding have lost the right to lose themselves in a crowd, keep who they choose to associate with secret etc. (i.e. without taking heroic measures to ensure that privacy)
Of course, the real power brokers are either using taxicabs or chaffeur-driven cars from the car-pool, so their rights arent affected...
The Human Genome Project surprised us by finding far fewer genes than were theorised to be neccessary for life: perhaps if a significant amount of the regulatory function is carried out by DNA-previously-known-as-junk, a new genome annotation exercise might produce a figure closer to the estimate. It can't be long before ampaper along these lines is published...
Boy, I can't wait till they find out that genes are multi-dimensional, the same way a fugue is.
Sorry, but they already are!
A single gene can contain up to three overlapping reading frames, and some virii and bacteria can generate three completely different and functional proteins from the same gene sequence by this method. Add to that that certain gene products may be broken into subunits at different points along their sequence, and a highly-evolved (or carefully designed) gene could encode >10 proteins.
And yet there are people prepared to unleash modified genes on the world saying that they **know** there is no risk.
Genetic engineering consists of moving DNA for a reason - i.e. its done with the sequences that we know well how they work. No-one is creating commercial GMOs out of 'junk' DNA today - but now our understanding is growing, some of that junk isnt junk any more, and when it *is* understood, it probably will feature in future biotechnological innovation.
It's only in Nature that you see huge chunks of DNA crossing species barriers in the absence of intent or control
Not only depressing: Despite your shiny new WEP key, if 'god' is smart enough to use google to find a WEP crack script, and to not announce his presence in future, he's probably *still* logged into your system. There is no WiFi security at present - do it all elsewhere (firewall, encrypted protocols, VPN).
I understand that the codenames are supposed to be geographical and local to the site from which the project ran, but wouldn't it be good if "Jayhawk" broke this rule and actually referred to the online cyberpunk/Shadowrun fiction of the same name? ftp://ftp.cs.pdx.edu/pub/frp/stories/jayhawk/
You seem to be assuming that scientists can do better than nature at the genetic level. You have a lot more faith in modern science than I do.
Nature does it's genetics by rolling dice with its eyes shut. Of course modern science has a better chance than that! We havent had to wait a million years between uncovering the tools for genetic modification and producing stable, benefical biological novelties, for a start
Put another way, would you rather a software developer carefully choose relevant subroutines from her code library to incorporate into the product she was building for you, or would you prefer she just grabbed random chunks of code and hoped it all worked out somehow?
Your argument seems to be that time has proved 'natural' developments to be 'safe'. Presumably you will wait a few thousand years while more adventurous cohorts (or the poor without the luxury of choice) do your testing for you, and only then adopt the benefits of GM
There are those who would argue that however long such innovations are proved, they will always be a 'crime against nature' - a concept that tends to betray a certain ignorance of nature (Agrobacterium tunefaciens is doing 'natural' genetic engineering in your local park as we speak).
Actually, he ascended beside a tower, and landed on its roof, so presumably he didnt even have enough fuel to land again safely at the same level he took off from. He walked back down the staircase of the tower...
Not broadcasting SSID is pointless: A properly crafted packet can induce the AP to reveal its SSID, and scripts are available to do this. Filtering on MAC is useless: many WiFi drivers have MAC-spoofing capability in the Windows GUI!
The way to go is VPN, or 802.1x with a mutually-authenticating EAP protocol.
Remember you have to guard against a rogue AP that presents a fake version of your login interface to harvest credentials...
It strikes me that if someone created an application that generated random MP3 files (i.e. an MP3 structure populated with truly random data), it would be hard to prove that a given traded MP3 originated from a copy of a copyrighted work, rather than being coincidentally "discovered" in the dataspace that such an app would be (randomly) exploring... (it might be highly unlikely that an accidental duplicate would arise, but couldn't be *proved* impossible).
> However, in space you cannot suck in cool air, so you need to carry some other sort of reaction mass to jet out the back of the rocket. The laser provides energy to accelerate the reaction mass.
Not so. In space, you can set up a huge 'solar' sail and the impact of the photons from the laser provides the thrust without requiring the vehicle to lose mass. The problem is keeping a coherent enough beam back home to provide thrust at light-minute ranges.
Fictional applications of this include the "Crazy Eddie Drive" from The Mote in God's Eye, and the beam rider ships in Tron.
Slashdot Mirror
Its the "one way reflective material" thats the cunning part, and what you pay all the money for. The surface treatment of the glass 'screen' is what is holographic in this instance, not the image that is generated, which is just a flat TV image. The hologram is such that from your viewing angle, light just passes straight through the glass plate, but from the projectors angle, the glass is opaque enough for an image to form on it like a conventional screen rather than passing straight through like it does the window on a projector booth at a cinema). I don't think you could generate the 40" hologram at home as a DIY solution!
Long post - the introductory stuff is neccessary to understand the relevant point (in bold) at the end.
The introduction of evolutionary theory should not have precipitated any direct conflict with Biblical literalism. Its advent served only to undermine the accommodation that had grown up between scriptural interpretation and certain philosophical theories that had been prevalent in the Western Church for two centuries. In particular, Christianity had adopted Plato's Idealist doctrine of specific forms, theologically interpreted as "ideas in the mind of God", and Aristotle's teleological doctrine of final causes, giving rise to a hierarchical scala naturae and the conception of biological forms as unchanging (consistent with a Divine creation). The theory of origins native to these ancient authorities was largely incompatible with Christian ideas of the time, but these specific philosophies taken out of their cultural context had combined well with a Biblically-inspired doctrine of creation ex nihilo and the state of the art of natural history and taxonomy in the 18th century (itself much influenced by Aristotle) to form an authoritative theory of origins, referred to by John Durant as the "special creation theory":
As exploration vastly expanded the known number and variety of species, rendering problematical the concept of a personal creation and leading more researchers towards evolutionary ideas, no longer could God's 'Second Book' be viewed as a fixed and unchanging text. Durant controversially argues that the discovery of natural selection: As a secular activity, evolutionary biology should not have troubled the theological doctrine of creation. Darwinism contradicts only the philosophical baggage which the theology had accumulated, and it was only through advocates like Paley who in his 'Natural Theology' "attached the credibility of the Christian doctrine of creation to a particular set of philosophical and scientific beliefs about species with which it need never have been directly associated" that the conflict was fostered.On the religious side, the objections to the new biology were four-fold (as discussed in Barbour, 1966, pp89-98):
- Evolutionary theory contradicted such "self-evident truths" as the argument from design
- It undermined the dignity of Man by placing him as integral to nature rather than being set apart.
- Belief in a continuing progress of society towards perfection mediated by natural law rather than Divine providence created the possibility that moral and ethical norms might be taken from biological rather than Biblical example.
- The questioning of the origins interpretation derived from 'higher criticism' of the Biblical sources was a direct challenge to Biblical (and hence secular Church) authority.
The Church wanted only a science which would underpin their "hierarchical moral cosmos with all eyes lifted towards a benevolent Sustainer" (Desmond, 1987, p102).A completely irrefutable argument, but one that completely fails as a hypothesis in the scientific sense, because it is irrefutable: it could apply equally to every possible instant from now backwards... Oh, and it also requires that you beleive in a God who has perpetrated the biggest lie ever! I prefer to think that any possible deity would look favourably on me using the best mental tools I've got to form the most consistent picture from the information I'm given...
I disagree. If the guy had been fighting the vehicle for control, it would show forensic evidence of the attempts: condition of brakes being an obvious one, if they'd been applied hard while the car had an open throttle and was hitting 200kph. I'm not aware of any car in which every system that could bring it to a halt is run from software.
Urban Legend, or at least most of the way to being one. The observed thickness variation is due to the Crown glass process of making glass sheets in that period: it involved spinning out a 5ft diameter disc of glass, thick in the centre and thin at the edges, and cutting the rectangles from that. There are apparently as many panes thicker at the top or the sides as at the bottom, although possibly some glaziers did have a preference for putting 'thick edge down'.
If glass did flow, extremely ancient (Myr) naturally occuring glasses like obsidian, fulgurites or tektites would have flowed into puddles! (they havent). Or if that doesnt convince you: the tolerances on the optical components of large telescopes are so fine that flow of the glass at the claimed rates would distort the image within days.
See, for example, "Do Cathedral Glasses Flow?", Am. J. Phys. v66, pp 392-396, May, 1998
NB. Glass can creep under loading, however - but thats for another thread.
Fine, as long as she is capped at not being able to sell the house for more than its taxable value...
Heinlein proposed a similar system in one of his books (possibly The Number of the Beast). Residents decided their own valuation for their properties for tax purposes, with the proviso that the house could be compulsorily purchased for the value they set. I never understood quite who he was satirising with that one until hearing about the Californian system.
... presumably becuase they were under oath?
That should certainly slow those Indian call centres down to five or six bookings per staff member per day...
A better way to track down hit & run drivers would be to emboss a unique code pattern onto the bumpers of cars, then you could just read off the id of the vehicle from whatever it had hit (metal, wood, bone... etc). Just a thought. ;)
A criminal who needs to drive around isnt going to prevented by the RFID tags, she'll just drive a car that isnt tagged: the only way that can be caught is by police checking that every car that passes has a valid tag - how is that different from using the current 'dumb' numberplates against a database?
Meanwhile, the law-abiding have lost the right to lose themselves in a crowd, keep who they choose to associate with secret etc. (i.e. without taking heroic measures to ensure that privacy)
Of course, the real power brokers are either using taxicabs or chaffeur-driven cars from the car-pool, so their rights arent affected...
... the location of an allegorical tale to teach us the evils of materialism?
Google "overlapping reading frames", get something like this
The Human Genome Project surprised us by finding far fewer genes than were theorised to be neccessary for life: perhaps if a significant amount of the regulatory function is carried out by DNA-previously-known-as-junk, a new genome annotation exercise might produce a figure closer to the estimate. It can't be long before ampaper along these lines is published...
Sorry, but they already are!
A single gene can contain up to three overlapping reading frames, and some virii and bacteria can generate three completely different and functional proteins from the same gene sequence by this method. Add to that that certain gene products may be broken into subunits at different points along their sequence, and a highly-evolved (or carefully designed) gene could encode >10 proteins.
Genetic engineering consists of moving DNA for a reason - i.e. its done with the sequences that we know well how they work. No-one is creating commercial GMOs out of 'junk' DNA today - but now our understanding is growing, some of that junk isnt junk any more, and when it *is* understood, it probably will feature in future biotechnological innovation.
It's only in Nature that you see huge chunks of DNA crossing species barriers in the absence of intent or control
Not only depressing: Despite your shiny new WEP key, if 'god' is smart enough to use google to find a WEP crack script, and to not announce his presence in future, he's probably *still* logged into your system. There is no WiFi security at present - do it all elsewhere (firewall, encrypted protocols, VPN).
I understand that the codenames are supposed to be geographical and local to the site from which the project ran, but wouldn't it be good if "Jayhawk" broke this rule and actually referred to the online cyberpunk/Shadowrun fiction of the same name? ftp://ftp.cs.pdx.edu/pub/frp/stories/jayhawk/
Nature does it's genetics by rolling dice with its eyes shut. Of course modern science has a better chance than that! We havent had to wait a million years between uncovering the tools for genetic modification and producing stable, benefical biological novelties, for a start
Put another way, would you rather a software developer carefully choose relevant subroutines from her code library to incorporate into the product she was building for you, or would you prefer she just grabbed random chunks of code and hoped it all worked out somehow?
Your argument seems to be that time has proved 'natural' developments to be 'safe'. Presumably you will wait a few thousand years while more adventurous cohorts (or the poor without the luxury of choice) do your testing for you, and only then adopt the benefits of GM
There are those who would argue that however long such innovations are proved, they will always be a 'crime against nature' - a concept that tends to betray a certain ignorance of nature (Agrobacterium tunefaciens is doing 'natural' genetic engineering in your local park as we speak).
Not much higher: the climb rate of these belts is very low. I doubt he'd get enough altitude to deploy a chute from...
Actually, he ascended beside a tower, and landed on its roof, so presumably he didnt even have enough fuel to land again safely at the same level he took off from. He walked back down the staircase of the tower...
Filtering on MAC is useless: many WiFi drivers have MAC-spoofing capability in the Windows GUI!
The way to go is VPN, or 802.1x with a mutually-authenticating EAP protocol.
Remember you have to guard against a rogue AP that presents a fake version of your login interface to harvest credentials...
It strikes me that if someone created an application that generated random MP3 files (i.e. an MP3 structure populated with truly random data), it would be hard to prove that a given traded MP3 originated from a copy of a copyrighted work, rather than being coincidentally "discovered" in the dataspace that such an app would be (randomly) exploring... (it might be highly unlikely that an accidental duplicate would arise, but couldn't be *proved* impossible).
Not so. In space, you can set up a huge 'solar' sail and the impact of the photons from the laser provides the thrust without requiring the vehicle to lose mass. The problem is keeping a coherent enough beam back home to provide thrust at light-minute ranges.
Fictional applications of this include the "Crazy Eddie Drive" from The Mote in God's Eye, and the beam rider ships in Tron.