Degrees are used in mechanical drawings, and for good reason. The problem is rounding. If I put 60 degrees in a mechanical drawing, it will be exactly 1/6th of a circle. In radians, it would be 1.047197... if someone rounded off to 1.05, there could be serious misalignment issues. Radians are easier to calculate with, and degrees are better at expressing integral fractions of a circle.
Back in the day, when I worked for an IC maker, we got a bunch of TSOP parts (with very fine lead spacing) back from the packaging house. They were unusable because whoever did the drawing didn't carry enough precision when translating from inches to millimeters, so the pins were not spaced correctly. Rounding matters.
256 QAM means 256 symbols, or 8 bits per symbol. So you'd need about 5 GHz bandwidth.
You need the entire radio spectrum to transmit 10 channels at this speed.
There's a lot of spectrum. There's a recently been a new band opened up (71-76 and 81-86 GHz), which supports 10 Gbps full duplex (see, for example, http://www.gigabeam.com/productFamily.cfm).
40 Gbps is still a bit much at this point, but it's not out of the question.
If Microsoft did something like this there'd be a geek jihad.
Well, sure. The difference being that apple has a *NIX OS, and are using the software. Their intent seems to be to continue to use the software. Also, they haven't been actively trying to kill open source competition through FUD, lobbying (ODF!), and other means.
Microsoft, on the other hand, HAS been doing these things.
Now, I'm sure Apple won't release substantial improvements under the GPL - they'll probably close it up. This isn't a good thing for open source. But the deal seems straightforward. Whenever Microsoft gets involved in anything "open", you have to look very carefully for hidden agendas, because of a long history of shenanigans. That's what gets people upset.
Skin effect is effectively, in a nutshell, variation of conductor's resistance as function of signal's frequency. Strictly speaking, it ought to make harmonic distortions.
It distort the equalization - higher frequencies will be attenuated more than lower ones - but it's a linear phenomenum, so it won't introduce harmonic distortion or intermodulation.
You've got it backwards - harnessing tidal power will cause the moon to move further away, not closer. It will also slow down the earths rotation. It's an interesting freshman level physics problem to work through how much power is available, and what the final state will be.
The final state, it turns out, is the moon further away, and the length of the day being equal to the length of the new month - the same side of the earth will always face the moon. At this point, there will be no more tides.
If you worked out how long this would take, I would imagine it would be more than 50 years - but I haven't worked through it.
But your comment makes me wonder if the magnetic field of the natural magnets in Earth's crust may or may not form a kind of energy storage device for past rotational kinetic energy
The magnetic field of the earth is produced by the dynamo effect. The field comes because of convection currents in the liquid core of the earth. The convection currents are driven by heat from the core conducting up to the crust. So the energy source is geothermal, primarily. (The rotation of the earth is also involved in creating the field, but energy from the earth's rotation is not being lost into creating the field - as this would violate conservation of angular momentum.) The field is not due to magnetized ferromagnetic material, like a refridgerator magnet.
There's tons of usable energy out there - geothermal, solar, tidal, etc, etc. The trick is harnessing it cheaply, effectively, and safely on a large scale.
Mostly... but I notice there's no problem in shipping new CFLs. (You can get them on the internet, just check.) It's the paranoia over the trace amounts of mercury that's the issue. The fact that you can ship these things UPS suggests they are not as hazardous as all that. Or UPS is doing something really dumb.
Also, when you're a small shop, and have some merchandise which isn't selling, you can't reduce the price to get rid of it. This places a further burden on those who are too small to negotiate buy back provisions.
Suppose you hire one person to clean your home, and it takes five hours, or 300 minutes, for the person to perform each task, one after the other," Vishkin said. "That's analogous to the current serial processing method. Now imagine that you have 100 cleaning people who can work on your home at the same time! That's the parallel processing method.
100 people trying to clean my house at the same time would be slower than 1, because no one would be able to move or breathe. Which is exactly what makes parallel computing hard.
Perhaps I should clarify my point. A civil contractual obligation can in no way supercede federal law. So if restricted distribution is prohibited under the terms of the GPL (a point I am not making), and federal law restricts distribution, then legally no distribution can take place. It does not mean that the GPL overrides federal law, which it cannot do.
My original comment was an attempt to argue this point by taking it to an absurd extreme in imagining if I made an obviously restricted device - say a nuclear weapon - and incorporated GPL'd software on it (most nuclear weapon delivery systems, I imagine, are running some sort of embedded OS) - then clearly the fact that there was GPL'd software on the device would not supercede federal and international restrictions controlling the distribution of weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps the brevity of the remark led you to believe I had grossly misinterpreted the nature of the GPL and it's applicability, and led you to miss the larger point about the naivite of the original poster. I sincerely hope this more verbose explanation will sufficiently illuminate the matter.
It depend on the specificity of your target. If you're collecting credit card information and stealing bank accounts, then you're right. But suppose you want military secrets, or access to some CEOs emails, or to take down amazon.com. There's always a target of high enough value to be worth the extra effort.
I rarely do any work at home, and I never check my email. Because I'm and engineer, and a good deal of my time is spent of physical stuff, working at home is harder to do. Sure, there is design work, but most of the design programs are expensive enough that they're tied to a dongle, which puts up another barrier.
Also, I don't use the phone or do any work on Saturdays or religious holidays, which my non-jewish coworkers have all respected. People don't expect me to be available when I'm not at work. Add in a fairly sizable commute, and home and work stay pretty separate. With young kids, I really enjoy that.
I'm the number two guy at the company, after the founder, so it doesn't seem to have had an adverse impact on my career.
I agree that having the source code offers no assurances as to the legitimacy of the vote. It's too easy to hide stuff.
However, if there are general "quality" problems (lost votes, machines crashing, etc.) it will be that much easier to place the blame after the fact. Imagine your voting machine crashes, and an independent commission can look at the source code and find the problem without your cooperation. If they find serious bugs or code quality problems, the vendor is going to be in a nightmare position, PR wise. This puts a much higher amount of pressure on the voting machine vendors to do things properly, or be exposed.
So I see the code escrow not as a quality assurance, but as a deterrent to the voting machine vendors producing a sloppy product. They'll do it anyway, I'm sure, but this way they'll be very unhappy if something is screwed up.
I just finished Albrecht Folsing's biography of Albert Einstein. He lived through, in his life time, two major attempts to suppress academic freedoms. The first was in Germany in the decade leading up to World War II. The second was many years later, while he was at Princeton, during the McCarthy era. He also saw, pre WW I, how german intellectuals got swept up in patriotic fervor, which he refused to do. He spoke out each time.
Which gets me thinking about our own individual roles in safeguarding our rights. I recently turned down a job because the employement contract required would have signed over all rights to all works I produced during my employment there, regardless of when or where I worked on them, or about what they concerned. I wrote a later to HR and the hiring manager explaining my objections, and why I wasn't accepting the position.
I never got a response, and it's quite likely they just thought I was some sort of crank. My wife, although supportive, also thought I was some sort of crank. And perhaps I am.
But I feel very good about it because it was my chance to push back on the systematic encroachment on personal freedoms. At least two people with decision making authority have seen it come up as an issue. And I don't feel like I've sold myself short.
It was a small stand - I can't say I wouldn't have done it differently if I was desperate for a job. But the small ways matter too - it's letting things slip away a little at a time that is the biggest threat to our freedoms.
In fact, the error goes down as one over the square root of the number of data points. So if you want to find a 1% difference in two populations with a test with a 10% random error, you need a sample size of at least 100.
Of course, the kicker in all psychological testing is whether or not the error is actually random.
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Back in the day, when I worked for an IC maker, we got a bunch of TSOP parts (with very fine lead spacing) back from the packaging house. They were unusable because whoever did the drawing didn't carry enough precision when translating from inches to millimeters, so the pins were not spaced correctly. Rounding matters.
256 QAM means 256 symbols, or 8 bits per symbol. So you'd need about 5 GHz bandwidth.
You need the entire radio spectrum to transmit 10 channels at this speed.
There's a lot of spectrum. There's a recently been a new band opened up (71-76 and 81-86 GHz), which supports 10 Gbps full duplex (see, for example, http://www.gigabeam.com/productFamily.cfm).
40 Gbps is still a bit much at this point, but it's not out of the question.
Well, sure. The difference being that apple has a *NIX OS, and are using the software. Their intent seems to be to continue to use the software. Also, they haven't been actively trying to kill open source competition through FUD, lobbying (ODF!), and other means.
Microsoft, on the other hand, HAS been doing these things.
Now, I'm sure Apple won't release substantial improvements under the GPL - they'll probably close it up. This isn't a good thing for open source. But the deal seems straightforward. Whenever Microsoft gets involved in anything "open", you have to look very carefully for hidden agendas, because of a long history of shenanigans. That's what gets people upset.
I got stoned in the 80's, you insensitive clod!
It distort the equalization - higher frequencies will be attenuated more than lower ones - but it's a linear phenomenum, so it won't introduce harmonic distortion or intermodulation.
The final state, it turns out, is the moon further away, and the length of the day being equal to the length of the new month - the same side of the earth will always face the moon. At this point, there will be no more tides.
If you worked out how long this would take, I would imagine it would be more than 50 years - but I haven't worked through it.
The magnetic field of the earth is produced by the dynamo effect. The field comes because of convection currents in the liquid core of the earth. The convection currents are driven by heat from the core conducting up to the crust. So the energy source is geothermal, primarily. (The rotation of the earth is also involved in creating the field, but energy from the earth's rotation is not being lost into creating the field - as this would violate conservation of angular momentum.) The field is not due to magnetized ferromagnetic material, like a refridgerator magnet.
There's tons of usable energy out there - geothermal, solar, tidal, etc, etc. The trick is harnessing it cheaply, effectively, and safely on a large scale.
An EMP is a low frequency electromagnetic wave - it's not merely inductive coupling of a magnetic field. So a conducting sheet will block it.
It's true - as my wife says, "I thought we'd be doing a lot better when we lived in a half a million dollar house".
Damn - I knew we shouldn't have done natural childbirth with the midwives. Of course, the hot tub WAS nice...
"Perception of value"... that just about says it all, doesn't it?
Mostly... but I notice there's no problem in shipping new CFLs. (You can get them on the internet, just check.) It's the paranoia over the trace amounts of mercury that's the issue. The fact that you can ship these things UPS suggests they are not as hazardous as all that. Or UPS is doing something really dumb.
Also, when you're a small shop, and have some merchandise which isn't selling, you can't reduce the price to get rid of it. This places a further burden on those who are too small to negotiate buy back provisions.
Suppose you hire one person to clean your home, and it takes five hours, or 300 minutes, for the person to perform each task, one after the other," Vishkin said. "That's analogous to the current serial processing method. Now imagine that you have 100 cleaning people who can work on your home at the same time! That's the parallel processing method.
100 people trying to clean my house at the same time would be slower than 1, because no one would be able to move or breathe. Which is exactly what makes parallel computing hard.
My original comment was an attempt to argue this point by taking it to an absurd extreme in imagining if I made an obviously restricted device - say a nuclear weapon - and incorporated GPL'd software on it (most nuclear weapon delivery systems, I imagine, are running some sort of embedded OS) - then clearly the fact that there was GPL'd software on the device would not supercede federal and international restrictions controlling the distribution of weapons of mass destruction.
Perhaps the brevity of the remark led you to believe I had grossly misinterpreted the nature of the GPL and it's applicability, and led you to miss the larger point about the naivite of the original poster. I sincerely hope this more verbose explanation will sufficiently illuminate the matter.
By this reasoning, I could build a nuclear weapon with GPL'd code in it and send it to Syria.
Perhaps you could mail them your burnt out CFL when you get a few pounds worth. Saves on gas and your expense and time.
It depend on the specificity of your target. If you're collecting credit card information and stealing bank accounts, then you're right. But suppose you want military secrets, or access to some CEOs emails, or to take down amazon.com. There's always a target of high enough value to be worth the extra effort.
Also, I don't use the phone or do any work on Saturdays or religious holidays, which my non-jewish coworkers have all respected. People don't expect me to be available when I'm not at work. Add in a fairly sizable commute, and home and work stay pretty separate. With young kids, I really enjoy that.
I'm the number two guy at the company, after the founder, so it doesn't seem to have had an adverse impact on my career.
However, if there are general "quality" problems (lost votes, machines crashing, etc.) it will be that much easier to place the blame after the fact. Imagine your voting machine crashes, and an independent commission can look at the source code and find the problem without your cooperation. If they find serious bugs or code quality problems, the vendor is going to be in a nightmare position, PR wise. This puts a much higher amount of pressure on the voting machine vendors to do things properly, or be exposed.
So I see the code escrow not as a quality assurance, but as a deterrent to the voting machine vendors producing a sloppy product. They'll do it anyway, I'm sure, but this way they'll be very unhappy if something is screwed up.
If someone suggested RFID tags, I'd merely quit. If someone suggested a tattoo, I'd most likely take a swing at them.
Which gets me thinking about our own individual roles in safeguarding our rights. I recently turned down a job because the employement contract required would have signed over all rights to all works I produced during my employment there, regardless of when or where I worked on them, or about what they concerned. I wrote a later to HR and the hiring manager explaining my objections, and why I wasn't accepting the position.
I never got a response, and it's quite likely they just thought I was some sort of crank. My wife, although supportive, also thought I was some sort of crank. And perhaps I am.
But I feel very good about it because it was my chance to push back on the systematic encroachment on personal freedoms. At least two people with decision making authority have seen it come up as an issue. And I don't feel like I've sold myself short.
It was a small stand - I can't say I wouldn't have done it differently if I was desperate for a job. But the small ways matter too - it's letting things slip away a little at a time that is the biggest threat to our freedoms.
The liquid that comes out of a landfill is called leachate. Now that's a good word to know.
Of course, the kicker in all psychological testing is whether or not the error is actually random.