...surely combining the two formats (Atom and RSS) would be beneficial, lest we end up with another VHS/Beta or DVD+/-RW/RAM situation...
That's actually why Atom was first proposed. After Netscape lost control of the standard, RSS spintered into seven incompatible versions! Atom is an attempt to merge and stabilize the best of "Really Simple Syndication", "RDF Site Summary", and everything in between. The reason Google uses Atom, is because Blogger is a major sponser. Personally, I think Atom has an impressive design (although some is still a little clunky). Note that the final draft has yet to be published, as Atom isn't even 1.0 yet!
Of course if you insist on running Quake III in demo mode all night you would have a point.
I won't comment about the other points. But what if you leave your computer running Seti@home or another distributed computing application. Don't those tend to use a lot of power during idle times?
The article quoted Ballmer as saying that, "Most people still steal music." Now this is totally out-of-context in a noticeably biased column, so I take the quote with a grain of salt. However if correct, then doesn't that mean that something is wrong with the law?
Of course the majority is not always right - see the two wolf and lone lamb argument (a.k.a. the reason racist Jim Crow laws were enacted in the Deep South). However, society's will always wins in a democracy (or almost democracy, like most civilized nations). If Balmer's assertion is true, perhaps the society of the United States is not ready for fair (in Balmer's opinion) compensation for musical endeavors. Then when the musical crackdown begins, the politicians will capitulate to the populus or be voted out. See alcohol, tobacco, medical marijuana as other examples.
I should append this with a small correction. I didn't believe Saddam was close to getting operational WMD. One little omission, one large change....
I believed one of three things. He either had them but hid them well (not out of reach given the conditions in the region), he was going to get them eventually, or he wanted them but his scientists weren't competent (either on purpose or innocently). In either case, he couldn't use WMD for some time and didn't pose a threat for at least 5-10 years.
I didn't believe **all** of the evidence. Don't be so binary!:-) I believed in enough to conclude that Saddam Hussein wanted WMD for some time in the future. From what I believed, I forsaw three possibilities:
1) If I was him, I'd do my best to bury any illegal (by terms of the surrender) weapons or research into WMD in the most remote spot in the desert. Then, force weapon inspectons via harassment activities (i.e. not quite accurate accounting). After embarassing the inspectors, I'd unbury my weapons and sue for an out of the terms dictated by the previous surrender.
2) I'm not Saddam, since I don't believe in dictatorships. I think any dictator must be a little wacko. Saddam was trying to get WMD, but his scientists pulled a Heisenberg and delayed his program through lies hidden among technical jargon.
3) [I theorized this after the first week of the war.] Saddam had WMD but hid them well. Since opposing the US armed forces was suicide, he would not use them and instead focus on a gurella war. It will take 5-10 years before Iraq becomes peaceful (I still stand behind this sentence). Saddam has the option to deploy WMD via terrorist organizations or to save them if he emerges the chaos. I rejected the argument that Saddam wouldn't converse with religious fundamentalists, since as a dictator the only thing he was loyal to was himself and not any ideals (that's a fact for any sucessful dictator - like Kim Jong 2, unlike Hitler).
I supported the war mainly because the status quo was bad in the long term. A few times a year, Saddam's military would challenge the no-fly-zones, the inspections, or the other sanctions. I could never understand why the Iraqi government was not punished for these actions in violation of the surrender. Surely the first ten times that Iraq violated those terms would have indicated that they would try violating the others. Futhermore, the only way to bring posperity back to the Iraqi populus would be to lift sanctions; however, that would be impossible while Saddam was in control. The country was turing into another North Korea. If I was president, I would have tried for UN support back in the 1996-1999 time frame. By then, it was clear (to me) that Saddam was profiting off of the sanctions - at his people's expense - rather then being penalized by them. Eventually, he would get WMD (like every other country that tries to get them) and it would be too late to deal with the dictator until he dies of natural causes or by one of his children.
It were a crime then to question the legality of this war, it was unpatriotic to do so, it was simply wrong to doubt on the ability of our Commander in Chief...
Hold on there partner. I don't recall this every happening. In fact, I remember a some protests of the war quite vividly. There was a lot of debate about the legality of the war, and there still is. It was never a crime to be against the war. Some people thought it was unpatriotic, but others kept saying, 'the most patriotic thing is to protest government sanctioned injustice' (to the effect). I, for instance, supported the war and the right of the protestors to organize. I haven't seen any systematic arrests simply for opposition to the war.
BTW, am I the only person who thought that Saddam wasn't close to getting WMDs, and that these aluminum tubes probably weren't for enriching uranium? I mean, these debates aren't new. Is everyone's memory suddenly faulty?
Note to moderators: I'd rather have discussion than net moderation. This is a sensitive subject, so please don't mod up or down simply because you agree or disagree with my viewpoint.
However, you mention that there is no positive or negative polarity to a coil producing current through electromagnetic induction which greatly confuses me. In my understanding, there's two types of electricity: DC and AC. If you're saying this is AC, well, slap a diode on it, and now it's DC with a + and - side.
Don't think in terms of AC and DC. Think in terms of periodic, constant, and aperiodic voltages and currents as functions of time. You can have an entire DC signal that is still periodic (e.g. V(t)=A*sin(w*t)+B, when A
The problem with semiconductor devices at really small scales is that they don't act nearly ideal. Classically, diodes - when biased correctly - only allow current to travel one direction through them, and caps only allow periodic signals to travel through them. However, at small scales diodes can 'leak' and a "virtual cap" forms across the np junction. This can occur with high frequency fluctuations in the signal.
Another "gotcha" with diodes is that it takes four, with two forward biased and two reverse bieased at any one time, to rectify an AC signal into a DC signal (not a constant signal, just everything above a threshold). You have to use two diodes for each half of the signal, else you end up losing the other half! Classically, diodes generally drop the voltage by.7V each, so the instantious output voltage is at least 1.4V less than the input voltage.
Anyways, so now you have a DC circuit that flips on and off erraticly. Add a capacitor in there to store up the charge until it's a useful amount, then discharge the capacitor to charge your conventional battery. With several coils, they feed into their own capacitors, which then feed into another larger one, which then feed the battery.
That's how a conventional power supply works. The problem, is that most large-capacity caps don't discharge or charge quickly, and quickly responding caps don't hold a lot of charge. It takes a lot of engineering to make an efficient design.
I'm not saying that the proposed device wouldn't work. I'm just saying it probably isn't as efficient or scale as well as other methods.
Write your congressman or congresswoman! Here's my letter:
Dear Senator ---- ---- ----,
I urge you to vote against HR 4077, The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004 (formerly HR 2517). Although I do not share files on peer-to-peer networks without the copyright holder's permission, I feel that most legislation which explicitly criminalizes the activity is not appropriate.
It is already illegal for file traders to infringement on someone else's copyright - the copyright holder already has the right to sue for damages. Despite what the proponents of this bill say, there is no 'loophole' that allows this activity to occur within the law. Yet just as the complicated web of gun control laws don't decrease their illegal use, for instance, this bill and others like it won't deter file sharing. This bill is not needed.
HR 4077 does make the punishment unfair for these non-violent criminals. No person is physically or directly hurt by the activity. File traders don't participate in violent crime to continue their activity. Copyright infringement does not lead to more serious crimes. Why should a file trader - most of whom are middle class - have to pay potentially millions of dollars in infringement? It ruins their life for an activity that doesn't hurt society as much as illegal drug use, violent crime, or other illegal activities. This is not fair.
Furthermore, the Federal agencies that enforce these regulations tend to only help the large corporations that own copyrights. Small businesses, bands, and individuals are generally not helped by this legislation. Thus this bill only benefits a small subset of rich individuals and firms and not most Americans, in practice.
For these reasons, I submit that you should vote against HR 4077, The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004 (formerly HR 2517) when a vote is called in the Senate.
That would work; however, how easy would it be combining those signals together (compared with the already compicated analysis of erratic signals from any small-scale radioactive battery)?
Re:Random thought here...
on
Nuclear Batteries
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· Score: 4, Informative
In short, you take a small amount of the radioactive substance and wrap all but one face in a lead shield, only allowing alpha particles out one face.
One possible problem, to form a narrow alpha-particle beam for small devices, a small slit or hole has to be used. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle shows that the range of (normalized) highly probable momenta will be large since the range in location is small. This means that some particles will be fast and some will be slow; however, the actual event is hard to predict.
Since kinetic energy is proportional to the momentum (squared), your device will produce energy in hard-to-predict spirts. You can calculate an average energy; however, that applies only after a large number of particles go through your device. That's one reason why these kind of devices work well as trickle-chargers yet poorly as generators.
Another problem is that you lose 5/6th of the particles from the device, or more. This is because the probability of a radioactive atom emitting a particle in a specific direction is relatively uniform. However, only one face of the material is unshielded to the device. So particles most will hit the shielded face. One one face, 5/6th of the total area, will have a flux out.
Place a wire coil around that face, voila... moving charge (alpha particle) induces voltage and current in a conductor (coil). Insulate the coil, and draw power off it's ends.
When you extract energy from the particle's kinetic energy, it will slow down. When it does, it will emitt electromagnetic energy, breaking it furthermore. All this energy is not converted into electrical energy in your device.
In the article, two methods are getting energy were tried. In the first device, the scientiests use a material that emitts beta particles - electrons - and injected them directly into a pn-junction of a semiconductor device. Normal semiconductor devices (i.e. diodes) work by moving electrons to unfilled energy levels in one substance (p-material) from filled energy levels in another substance (n-material). Moving electrons means a current forms.
This is usually induced by thermal or EM energy. In this case, the radioactive element emitts electrons directly into the semiconductor. The imbalance causes a current to form through the junction. This can be miniaturized well. It also is not as sensitive to the direction that beta particles are emitted as your device.
The second device uses a (really small!) lever attached to a piezoelectric material. Piezoelectric crystals produce electric current when stressed or vibrating. (The reverse is also true; hense why the crystal in your digital watch creates the ticks for the clocks.) The lever gets hit by - and absorbs - beta particles emitted from the radioactive element. Since beta particles are charged, the lever aquires a negative charge and the element aquires a positive charge. This pulls the lever toward the radioactive element. When they get close, electron tunnel over the gap and return their charge to the radioactive element. Once uncharged, the lever spings back to its origional position. The movement of the lever causes the piezoelectric material to generate current.
This things scientists and engineers create are truely fascinating! (...to me at least!)
The other options just tell google which page you're on (of search results), what your browser pretends to be, what your language and character encoding are, and other usless triva.
In QM, you measure a property of an object by applying an "operator" (you put in a function, and it spits out another function) to its wavefunction. Heisenberg said[*] that certain pairs of operators don't commute (meaning order is important - AB != BA), and so some pairs of properties can't be measured together.
That's correct; here's an example (another more technically involved example was posted by Wass about Quantum Mechanics using Commutors). The position operator is the same as multiplying by the position of the system. The actual position could be denoted as, x and the operator called position could be denoted as, x. So (g(x) is just there so you can see what goes on the other side of the operator - i.e. nothing):
g(x) x f(x) = g(x) * x * f(x)
Another operator is called the (one-dimentional) momentum operator. Say the acutal momemtum is written as p and the operator as, p. Well, unlike the position operator, p is defined as k d/dx where k is a constant (k = h-bar * (-1)^.5 ) and d/dx is the gradient along the x-direction (AKA derivative of whatever's on the right hand side). So:
g(x) p f(x) = g(x) * k * f'(x)
What Heisenberg says is that these operators don't communte. This is easy to see by an example:
g(x) px f(x) = g(x) * p (x * f(x)) = g(x) * k * (x * f'(x) + f(x))
g(x) xp f(x) = g(x) * x (k * f'(x)) = g(x) * x * k * f'(x)
Since px and xp give two different equations, they don't commute.
In QM, you measure a property of an object by applying an "operator" (you put in a function, and it spits out another function) to its wavefunction. Heisenberg said[*] that certain pairs of operators don't commute (meaning order is important - AB != BA), and so some pairs of properties can't be measured together.
What happens when the founders and upper management eventually retire? You can't guarantee that philosophy will be effected forever. Google doesn't have a contract or a checks-and-balances system to prevent such behavior. Don't rely on their good philosophy now to prevent bad stuff later on.
Please excuse my typos. I gather you can understand my intent; however, I don't have much time to proof-read today.
their history is pro-standards, pro-open APIs: Blogger is XHTML+CSS, and largely (if not entirely) valid.
Note that Blogger is mostly a seperate entity, which just happens to be owned by Google. Gmail and their bread-and-butter - the search engine itself - have horrible code. They still use tabular layouts, CSS and javascript served in the head (rather than externally), font tags, unescaped ampersands, and other uncompliant code (and it's all easy to fix without breaking compatibility).
They also implemented the soon-to-be-standardized Atom as their primary syndication API, rather than the wilder-and-woolier RSS.
Well, that's pre-standards support and not standards support. MS did the same thing with HTML, CSS, XSLT, and other standards. As a result, they are stuck with those noncompliant behaviors. I hope the same doesn't happen with Blogger. (I think they are smart enough not to make those mistakes.)
Also, it is not a crime to implement RSS. It was standardized many times. The problem is that the only version written by a group - RSS 1.0 - was ignored by the biggest RSS supporter at the time: Userland. Furthermore, many RSS feeds don't validate, and the language itself has problems. Sound familier......like HTML. That's the reason Atom has so much broad support so early in its developement (to not make the same mistakes as with (X)HTML).
Fourth, I don't think the cost of development personnel would have anything to do with it. Google's hiring practices are almost as famous as Microsoft's: they go for the very brightest available (one thing you can't say about Microsoft is that they hire dumbasses--or even just smart foks; they hire scary-smart folks). I don't see any reason they'd change that practice for a browser.
it is true that Google hires more Ph.D.s than most companies. However, that means that 1) Google as a company will want to hire as few employees as possible for any one job. 2) They would be more interested in more scholarly projects - e.g. file systems, AI, protocols - than mudane projects like a browser: a shell over a pre-existing engine (where the interesting stuff happens). I think that the origional spartan interface to Google was more due to the scientists not being interested in it rather than a conscious effort at simplicity. After all, most people who get advanced degrees hate not using their specialized knowledge.
Finally, I don't know as the Google toolbar is evidence one way or another. The toolbar has been implemented (including PageRank) in a Mozilla extension already. I can see Google not much caring about other browsers previously as Moz's market share was teensy-to-non-existent when the Google Toolbar was released, Safari wasn't released yet, NN4 was a nightmare and IIRC neither it nor Opera were anywhere near as extensible as IE at the time. Gecko UAs are just now showing up in sufficient numbers to take seriously, but with a Google toolbar already available why bother?
Mozilla's google toolbar extension is based on many undocumented hacks (some pretty bad) - much like Linux's NTFS support. It works, but not necessarily forever. At best, it is an unoffical clone. At worst, it infringes on Google's "look and feel." And just as GPL developers tend to stay clear of working on proprietary code for fear of "unintentional contamination," I gather that proprietary developers tend to do the same. (Tho I think the "unintentional contamination" issue is based more on FUD than reality.)
So I don't see Google reimplementing the toolbar from scratch for Mozilla, Safari, or Opera. They likely won't modify the existing open source tools without hiring an entirely new team. The Free versions will probably never be offically reconized by Google, and a policy to keep them working may never be written. Depressing.
Really, what prevents Google from rebranding MSHTML? I gather that most browsers (produced, not consumed) are just inspired shells on top of Internet Explorer's backend. From a corporate POV, it seems much cheaper just to hire "Recent Vocational School Programming Graduates" and "High School VB Hackers" over C and competent XML/JavaScript developers. (Yes, there is a Mozilla ActiveX Control; however, it really isn't an offical part of Mozilla and hasn't been used in the wild nearly as much as Microsoft's version.) Furthermore, a simple shell would be a smaller download.
And there is precedence: Google Toolbar was never released for anything but MSIE on Windows. If it wasn't designed properly (likely), then integrating its functionality would be easier with a MSHTML shell rather than a Mozilla app.
Don't get me wrong: I really wish that Google was developing a Mozilla-based browser. However, I simply don't see that as likely as a MSIE derivative.:-(
Does anyone have a link to the patch and the tracker entry documenting its inclusion into the source? If only nine lines of code were changed, and they weren't changed since then the initial patch, then it should be trivial to re-implement it using only the requirements as a guide.
Heck, I'd do it just to learn about Mambo and its source. (I wasn't aware of it before this article). Why go through all this pain over nine lines of code?
Q I am looking for a dummy step by step setup of Linux router using freesco on old PC with windows98, for purposes of setting up a NAT gateway from broadband to two unconnected PCs at home. Also I am interested in a ZoneAlarm? (freeware version) like firewall that can close ports and restrict incoming/outgoing traffic. Please help with a good link, or list simple steps I must take. Thanks -- dl
A Starting with kernel version 2.0 (released 1996, before ZoneAlarm?), linux has filtering and firewalling built-in. From kernel 2.4 (released 2001) the default utility for setting up a firewall is IPFilter. Each distro has its own UI front-end to the ipfilter command.
There are also many antivirus programs for Linux. A Free application is Clam AV. You can google for some proprietary alternatives if you wish.
Also bear in mind that Linux was weak areas (eg, games, off-the-shelf software).
I'd actually say that Linux is weak in supporting off-the-shelf games; however, there are numerous fun, high-quality games available Free and/or for free. KDE provides many addictive games and edutainment applications that I can't live without (speaking as a GNOME lover, when using Linux). GNOME also has many high-quality games (my favorites are Mahjongg and Robots). Then there many other favorites like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble (like Snood), and GL Tron (you have to play this one) among others. Another really cool diversion is Celestia, which allows you to zoom around the galaxy and visit planets, moons, comets, astroids, spacecraft (like Hubble, the ISS, or even Friendship 1). And despite my premise, there are also quite a few commercial games for Linux. There are many fun games that run on Linux - some aren't even available for Windows or non-unix platforms! Check your favorite Linux Distribution for more examples.
Could the explosion have been caused by a meteor or comet? I admit that extraterrestrial sources of the event are improbable. However a smaller-scale version of the Tunguska event could explain the mushroom cloud, the forest fire, and a crater. If the meteoroid's trajectory remained mainly over the Pacific Ocean or even Siberia, it may not have been seen by many people.
Of course, the most likely explanation is that a Goa'uld Mothership crashed on Earth again.;-)
also work at MSFC in the ISS POIC... translation, marshall space flight center where they do space station payload ops..
Cool! Are they looking for interns?;-)
Hubble
I thought you were talking about Hubble-the-man or Hubble-the-astrological-constant and not Hubble-the-telescope. Now I understand, and it makes sense.
In other words all I said was since your starting from coarse information so you can only expect to derive similarly coarse results.
Well that's not a problem with this simulation! In fact, I think that getting a result, which coarsely correlates with the Universe on a very large scale, is interesting in itself. However, I hope that the results don't even correlate a little bit with our Universe - much more exciting trying to figure out what when wrong. 8-)
We only know so much about the origins of the universe. However in a model like this that informatin is fairly critical to creating a usefull model.
I suspect one purpose of this computer experiment is to determine if that is likely true or not.
Except for the problem of the n-body problem. Just doing the basic sumation of the affect of all 9,999,999,999 particles on each other individual paticle does not allow for the chaos that is inherrent in the n-body problem. IE those interactions go to hell in a hand basket pretty quick without some pretty niffty allowances based on observation.
I'm not sure if this is a precise enough description of the n-body problem. We talked a little about it in Differential Equations class. One major problem is that extimations have to be done using finite units of time instead as a continous variable. This means little errors tend to build up the longer that the approximation is done. However there are various different ways to model a system and minimize those errors. I don't see what a summation has to do with it.
Meaning they DON'T reflect realistic interactions over time which means you don't get realistic results when using it, coarse or otherwise.... You can guess seasonal trends for a few years but again as you attempt to model longer periods of time instability creeps in and disacociates the results with reality.
How good is realistic? Simular behavior (between the simulation and the "real world") is realistic enough for me even if the weather patterns predicted are entirely different. That suggest that our models are somewhat on the right track. Most weather simulations don't blow up, I think (and there are ways for figuring out is some estimation functions are going to diverge).
Slashdot Mirror
That's actually why Atom was first proposed. After Netscape lost control of the standard, RSS spintered into seven incompatible versions! Atom is an attempt to merge and stabilize the best of "Really Simple Syndication", "RDF Site Summary", and everything in between. The reason Google uses Atom, is because Blogger is a major sponser. Personally, I think Atom has an impressive design (although some is still a little clunky). Note that the final draft has yet to be published, as Atom isn't even 1.0 yet!
I won't comment about the other points. But what if you leave your computer running Seti@home or another distributed computing application. Don't those tend to use a lot of power during idle times?
The article quoted Ballmer as saying that, "Most people still steal music." Now this is totally out-of-context in a noticeably biased column, so I take the quote with a grain of salt. However if correct, then doesn't that mean that something is wrong with the law?
Of course the majority is not always right - see the two wolf and lone lamb argument (a.k.a. the reason racist Jim Crow laws were enacted in the Deep South). However, society's will always wins in a democracy (or almost democracy, like most civilized nations). If Balmer's assertion is true, perhaps the society of the United States is not ready for fair (in Balmer's opinion) compensation for musical endeavors. Then when the musical crackdown begins, the politicians will capitulate to the populus or be voted out. See alcohol, tobacco, medical marijuana as other examples.
I should append this with a small correction. I didn't believe Saddam was close to getting operational WMD. One little omission, one large change....
I believed one of three things. He either had them but hid them well (not out of reach given the conditions in the region), he was going to get them eventually, or he wanted them but his scientists weren't competent (either on purpose or innocently). In either case, he couldn't use WMD for some time and didn't pose a threat for at least 5-10 years.
Sorry.
I didn't believe **all** of the evidence. Don't be so binary! :-) I believed in enough to conclude that Saddam Hussein wanted WMD for some time in the future. From what I believed, I forsaw three possibilities:
1) If I was him, I'd do my best to bury any illegal (by terms of the surrender) weapons or research into WMD in the most remote spot in the desert. Then, force weapon inspectons via harassment activities (i.e. not quite accurate accounting). After embarassing the inspectors, I'd unbury my weapons and sue for an out of the terms dictated by the previous surrender.
2) I'm not Saddam, since I don't believe in dictatorships. I think any dictator must be a little wacko. Saddam was trying to get WMD, but his scientists pulled a Heisenberg and delayed his program through lies hidden among technical jargon.
3) [I theorized this after the first week of the war.] Saddam had WMD but hid them well. Since opposing the US armed forces was suicide, he would not use them and instead focus on a gurella war. It will take 5-10 years before Iraq becomes peaceful (I still stand behind this sentence). Saddam has the option to deploy WMD via terrorist organizations or to save them if he emerges the chaos. I rejected the argument that Saddam wouldn't converse with religious fundamentalists, since as a dictator the only thing he was loyal to was himself and not any ideals (that's a fact for any sucessful dictator - like Kim Jong 2, unlike Hitler).
I supported the war mainly because the status quo was bad in the long term. A few times a year, Saddam's military would challenge the no-fly-zones, the inspections, or the other sanctions. I could never understand why the Iraqi government was not punished for these actions in violation of the surrender. Surely the first ten times that Iraq violated those terms would have indicated that they would try violating the others. Futhermore, the only way to bring posperity back to the Iraqi populus would be to lift sanctions; however, that would be impossible while Saddam was in control. The country was turing into another North Korea. If I was president, I would have tried for UN support back in the 1996-1999 time frame. By then, it was clear (to me) that Saddam was profiting off of the sanctions - at his people's expense - rather then being penalized by them. Eventually, he would get WMD (like every other country that tries to get them) and it would be too late to deal with the dictator until he dies of natural causes or by one of his children.
Hold on there partner. I don't recall this every happening. In fact, I remember a some protests of the war quite vividly. There was a lot of debate about the legality of the war, and there still is. It was never a crime to be against the war. Some people thought it was unpatriotic, but others kept saying, 'the most patriotic thing is to protest government sanctioned injustice' (to the effect). I, for instance, supported the war and the right of the protestors to organize. I haven't seen any systematic arrests simply for opposition to the war.
BTW, am I the only person who thought that Saddam wasn't close to getting WMDs, and that these aluminum tubes probably weren't for enriching uranium? I mean, these debates aren't new. Is everyone's memory suddenly faulty?
Note to moderators: I'd rather have discussion than net moderation. This is a sensitive subject, so please don't mod up or down simply because you agree or disagree with my viewpoint.
See my profile. :-) What's your education?
Don't think in terms of AC and DC. Think in terms of periodic, constant, and aperiodic voltages and currents as functions of time. You can have an entire DC signal that is still periodic (e.g. V(t)=A*sin(w*t)+B, when A
The problem with semiconductor devices at really small scales is that they don't act nearly ideal. Classically, diodes - when biased correctly - only allow current to travel one direction through them, and caps only allow periodic signals to travel through them. However, at small scales diodes can 'leak' and a "virtual cap" forms across the np junction. This can occur with high frequency fluctuations in the signal.
Another "gotcha" with diodes is that it takes four, with two forward biased and two reverse bieased at any one time, to rectify an AC signal into a DC signal (not a constant signal, just everything above a threshold). You have to use two diodes for each half of the signal, else you end up losing the other half! Classically, diodes generally drop the voltage by .7V each, so the instantious output voltage is at least 1.4V less than the input voltage.
That's how a conventional power supply works. The problem, is that most large-capacity caps don't discharge or charge quickly, and quickly responding caps don't hold a lot of charge. It takes a lot of engineering to make an efficient design.
I'm not saying that the proposed device wouldn't work. I'm just saying it probably isn't as efficient or scale as well as other methods.
That was me - The computer temperory logged me out. :-(
Write your congressman or congresswoman! Here's my letter:
Dear Senator ---- ---- ----,
I urge you to vote against HR 4077, The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004 (formerly HR 2517). Although I do not share files on peer-to-peer networks without the copyright holder's permission, I feel that most legislation which explicitly criminalizes the activity is not appropriate.
It is already illegal for file traders to infringement on someone else's copyright - the copyright holder already has the right to sue for damages. Despite what the proponents of this bill say, there is no 'loophole' that allows this activity to occur within the law. Yet just as the complicated web of gun control laws don't decrease their illegal use, for instance, this bill and others like it won't deter file sharing. This bill is not needed.
HR 4077 does make the punishment unfair for these non-violent criminals. No person is physically or directly hurt by the activity. File traders don't participate in violent crime to continue their activity. Copyright infringement does not lead to more serious crimes. Why should a file trader - most of whom are middle class - have to pay potentially millions of dollars in infringement? It ruins their life for an activity that doesn't hurt society as much as illegal drug use, violent crime, or other illegal activities. This is not fair.
Furthermore, the Federal agencies that enforce these regulations tend to only help the large corporations that own copyrights. Small businesses, bands, and individuals are generally not helped by this legislation. Thus this bill only benefits a small subset of rich individuals and firms and not most Americans, in practice.
For these reasons, I submit that you should vote against HR 4077, The Piracy Deterrence and Education Act of 2004 (formerly HR 2517) when a vote is called in the Senate.
Sincerely,
---- ---- ----
That would work; however, how easy would it be combining those signals together (compared with the already compicated analysis of erratic signals from any small-scale radioactive battery)?
One possible problem, to form a narrow alpha-particle beam for small devices, a small slit or hole has to be used. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle shows that the range of (normalized) highly probable momenta will be large since the range in location is small. This means that some particles will be fast and some will be slow; however, the actual event is hard to predict.
Since kinetic energy is proportional to the momentum (squared), your device will produce energy in hard-to-predict spirts. You can calculate an average energy; however, that applies only after a large number of particles go through your device. That's one reason why these kind of devices work well as trickle-chargers yet poorly as generators.
Another problem is that you lose 5/6th of the particles from the device, or more. This is because the probability of a radioactive atom emitting a particle in a specific direction is relatively uniform. However, only one face of the material is unshielded to the device. So particles most will hit the shielded face. One one face, 5/6th of the total area, will have a flux out.
When you extract energy from the particle's kinetic energy, it will slow down. When it does, it will emitt electromagnetic energy, breaking it furthermore. All this energy is not converted into electrical energy in your device.
In the article, two methods are getting energy were tried. In the first device, the scientiests use a material that emitts beta particles - electrons - and injected them directly into a pn-junction of a semiconductor device. Normal semiconductor devices (i.e. diodes) work by moving electrons to unfilled energy levels in one substance (p-material) from filled energy levels in another substance (n-material). Moving electrons means a current forms.
This is usually induced by thermal or EM energy. In this case, the radioactive element emitts electrons directly into the semiconductor. The imbalance causes a current to form through the junction. This can be miniaturized well. It also is not as sensitive to the direction that beta particles are emitted as your device.
The second device uses a (really small!) lever attached to a piezoelectric material. Piezoelectric crystals produce electric current when stressed or vibrating. (The reverse is also true; hense why the crystal in your digital watch creates the ticks for the clocks.) The lever gets hit by - and absorbs - beta particles emitted from the radioactive element. Since beta particles are charged, the lever aquires a negative charge and the element aquires a positive charge. This pulls the lever toward the radioactive element. When they get close, electron tunnel over the gap and return their charge to the radioactive element. Once uncharged, the lever spings back to its origional position. The movement of the lever causes the piezoelectric material to generate current.
This things scientists and engineers create are truely fascinating! (...to me at least!)
You know, that URL is too long. Everything after the first ampersand is optional. e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?q=hotmail+slow
The other options just tell google which page you're on (of search results), what your browser pretends to be, what your language and character encoding are, and other usless triva.
That's correct; here's an example (another more technically involved example was posted by Wass about Quantum Mechanics using Commutors). The position operator is the same as multiplying by the position of the system. The actual position could be denoted as, x and the operator called position could be denoted as, x. So (g(x) is just there so you can see what goes on the other side of the operator - i.e. nothing):
g(x) x f(x) = g(x) * x * f(x)
Another operator is called the (one-dimentional) momentum operator. Say the acutal momemtum is written as p and the operator as, p. Well, unlike the position operator, p is defined as k d/dx where k is a constant (k = h-bar * (-1)^.5 ) and d/dx is the gradient along the x-direction (AKA derivative of whatever's on the right hand side). So:
g(x) p f(x) = g(x) * k * f'(x)
What Heisenberg says is that these operators don't communte. This is easy to see by an example:
g(x) p x f(x) = g(x) * p (x * f(x)) = g(x) * k * (x * f'(x) + f(x))
g(x) x p f(x) = g(x) * x (k * f'(x)) = g(x) * x * k * f'(x)
Since p x and x p give two different equations, they don't commute.
Disregard that. I accidently hit "Submit" instead of "No Karma Bonus." :-(
That's correct. Here's an example:
What happens when the founders and upper management eventually retire? You can't guarantee that philosophy will be effected forever. Google doesn't have a contract or a checks-and-balances system to prevent such behavior. Don't rely on their good philosophy now to prevent bad stuff later on.
Please excuse my typos. I gather you can understand my intent; however, I don't have much time to proof-read today.
Note that Blogger is mostly a seperate entity, which just happens to be owned by Google. Gmail and their bread-and-butter - the search engine itself - have horrible code. They still use tabular layouts, CSS and javascript served in the head (rather than externally), font tags, unescaped ampersands, and other uncompliant code (and it's all easy to fix without breaking compatibility).
Well, that's pre-standards support and not standards support. MS did the same thing with HTML, CSS, XSLT, and other standards. As a result, they are stuck with those noncompliant behaviors. I hope the same doesn't happen with Blogger. (I think they are smart enough not to make those mistakes.)
Also, it is not a crime to implement RSS. It was standardized many times. The problem is that the only version written by a group - RSS 1.0 - was ignored by the biggest RSS supporter at the time: Userland. Furthermore, many RSS feeds don't validate, and the language itself has problems. Sound familier......like HTML. That's the reason Atom has so much broad support so early in its developement (to not make the same mistakes as with (X)HTML).
it is true that Google hires more Ph.D.s than most companies. However, that means that 1) Google as a company will want to hire as few employees as possible for any one job. 2) They would be more interested in more scholarly projects - e.g. file systems, AI, protocols - than mudane projects like a browser: a shell over a pre-existing engine (where the interesting stuff happens). I think that the origional spartan interface to Google was more due to the scientists not being interested in it rather than a conscious effort at simplicity. After all, most people who get advanced degrees hate not using their specialized knowledge.
Mozilla's google toolbar extension is based on many undocumented hacks (some pretty bad) - much like Linux's NTFS support. It works, but not necessarily forever. At best, it is an unoffical clone. At worst, it infringes on Google's "look and feel." And just as GPL developers tend to stay clear of working on proprietary code for fear of "unintentional contamination," I gather that proprietary developers tend to do the same. (Tho I think the "unintentional contamination" issue is based more on FUD than reality.)
So I don't see Google reimplementing the toolbar from scratch for Mozilla, Safari, or Opera. They likely won't modify the existing open source tools without hiring an entirely new team. The Free versions will probably never be offically reconized by Google, and a policy to keep them working may never be written. Depressing.
Yes. Thanks for correcting my typo.
P.S. Sorry for the "really, what prevents...". I didn't realize I was mimicing your paragraph. No sarcasm or offence intended.
Really, what prevents Google from rebranding MSHTML? I gather that most browsers (produced, not consumed) are just inspired shells on top of Internet Explorer's backend. From a corporate POV, it seems much cheaper just to hire "Recent Vocational School Programming Graduates" and "High School VB Hackers" over C and competent XML/JavaScript developers. (Yes, there is a Mozilla ActiveX Control; however, it really isn't an offical part of Mozilla and hasn't been used in the wild nearly as much as Microsoft's version.) Furthermore, a simple shell would be a smaller download.
And there is precedence: Google Toolbar was never released for anything but MSIE on Windows. If it wasn't designed properly (likely), then integrating its functionality would be easier with a MSHTML shell rather than a Mozilla app.
Don't get me wrong: I really wish that Google was developing a Mozilla-based browser. However, I simply don't see that as likely as a MSIE derivative. :-(
Does anyone have a link to the patch and the tracker entry documenting its inclusion into the source? If only nine lines of code were changed, and they weren't changed since then the initial patch, then it should be trivial to re-implement it using only the requirements as a guide.
Heck, I'd do it just to learn about Mambo and its source. (I wasn't aware of it before this article). Why go through all this pain over nine lines of code?
From the origional How to Decide if Linux is for you:
There are also many antivirus programs for Linux. A Free application is Clam AV. You can google for some proprietary alternatives if you wish.
I'd actually say that Linux is weak in supporting off-the-shelf games; however, there are numerous fun, high-quality games available Free and/or for free. KDE provides many addictive games and edutainment applications that I can't live without (speaking as a GNOME lover, when using Linux). GNOME also has many high-quality games (my favorites are Mahjongg and Robots). Then there many other favorites like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble (like Snood), and GL Tron (you have to play this one) among others. Another really cool diversion is Celestia, which allows you to zoom around the galaxy and visit planets, moons, comets, astroids, spacecraft (like Hubble, the ISS, or even Friendship 1). And despite my premise, there are also quite a few commercial games for Linux. There are many fun games that run on Linux - some aren't even available for Windows or non-unix platforms! Check your favorite Linux Distribution for more examples.
Could the explosion have been caused by a meteor or comet? I admit that extraterrestrial sources of the event are improbable. However a smaller-scale version of the Tunguska event could explain the mushroom cloud, the forest fire, and a crater. If the meteoroid's trajectory remained mainly over the Pacific Ocean or even Siberia, it may not have been seen by many people.
Of course, the most likely explanation is that a Goa'uld Mothership crashed on Earth again. ;-)
Cool! Are they looking for interns? ;-)
I thought you were talking about Hubble-the-man or Hubble-the-astrological-constant and not Hubble-the-telescope. Now I understand, and it makes sense.
Well that's not a problem with this simulation! In fact, I think that getting a result, which coarsely correlates with the Universe on a very large scale, is interesting in itself. However, I hope that the results don't even correlate a little bit with our Universe - much more exciting trying to figure out what when wrong. 8-)
I suspect one purpose of this computer experiment is to determine if that is likely true or not.
I'm not sure if this is a precise enough description of the n-body problem. We talked a little about it in Differential Equations class. One major problem is that extimations have to be done using finite units of time instead as a continous variable. This means little errors tend to build up the longer that the approximation is done. However there are various different ways to model a system and minimize those errors. I don't see what a summation has to do with it.
How good is realistic? Simular behavior (between the simulation and the "real world") is realistic enough for me even if the weather patterns predicted are entirely different. That suggest that our models are somewhat on the right track. Most weather simulations don't blow up, I think (and there are ways for figuring out is some estimation functions are going to diverge).