The basic limit of resolution you can get is set by the Rayleigh criterion:
There's nothing 'basic' about this completely empirical law. What we see with a camera is, roughly, a convolution of a 'perfect' image with the Airy disc. If you convolve an image that consists solely of two points then when the angular separation of the points is less than roughly the angle set by Rayleigh's criterion you end up with a function with a single central peak rather than two distinct peaks. So naively you end up with a single peak not two. Nonetheless, the intensity you get is still a function of the distance between the points and even when the points are much closer, the resulting intensity pattern is distinct from the pattern from a single point. All this means is that in order to clearly see two distinct points you need to do a bit of image processing to deconvolve the Airy disk. Digital cameras already apply image sharpening kernels so that's nothing fundamentally new.
So what I'm saying is that nothing special whatsoever happens at the Rayleigh angle. It just gets increasingly more difficult to produce good images at higher and higher resolution. These difficulties come from signal-to-noise ratio issues, not from 'diffraction limiting'.
The world Orwell described was a metaphor. It was a metaphor for the world we live in now.
And yes, there is the equivalent, many equivalents, of Room 101.
You concede the doublethink. You concede the existence of 'equivalents' to Room 101. I'm wondering, when Winston Smyth is being tortured in room 101, will you be protesting that it's nothing like Orwell's book because 'Smith' is spelled with an 'i'?
But we don't have telescreens in every room that can listen and watch us
Who needs to listen and watch when the screens can do better - they controlyou.
...no one, even Coulter, is saying you should be tortured for doing it.
If one side of the cavity is bigger than the other then one side is receiving more momentum than the other.. so the cavity should move.
Between the ends of the cavity must be walls joining them. If the ends are circular we're talking about conical walls. The photons are slamming into these too. (If this is a proper waveguide then they're actually bouncing rather than being absorbed.) If you think about it, the conical walls aren't orthogonal to the ends, their inside surface points more towards the wide end. So photons bouncing off these walls will also provide thrust. This thrust is in the same direction as the thrust from the narrow end and exactly makes up for the shortfall from its being narrow.
The trick would be to join a narrow and wide end using walls that don't point more towards the wide end. But alas, that's an impossibility of geometry.
Of course the key is the generation of the cavity and its material, and the magentron design.
Eh? What are you on about? The material and magnetron design have nothing to do with anything. The force on the conical walls joining the two ends exactly balances the difference in forces between the ends and unless there's a leak of microwaves this device doesn't do anything.
I'm starting to dispair over the state of science in this so called modern world when I see articles like this
It could be a lot worse. People could start claiming completely insane things like that we should replace scientific research in fields like biology and cosmology with the contents of ancient Middle Eastern scrolls. Then we'd really be in trouble.
You might think the forces on the end walls will cancel each other out, but Shawyer worked out that with a suitably shaped resonant cavity, wider at one end than the other, the radiation pressure exerted by the microwaves at the wide end would be higher than at the narrow one...Shawyer calculates the microwaves striking the end wall at the narrow end of his cavity will transfer less momentum to the cavity than those striking the wider end (see Diagram). The result is a net force that pushes the cavity in one direction.
So we have a closed cavity containing photons and somehow these photons provide more force in one direction than in another. That's a clear violation of conservation of momentum.
odds are he picked up a textbook and...made a "discovery" that no one else has noticed until now.... HUGE HUGE Kudos if it's true.
It's not just unlikely, it's impossible. It's impossible to derive something that doesn't conserve energy and momentum from things like Maxwell's equations because the theory is an energy-conserving one. It may be that one day someone makes a drive like this using electromagnetism - but if they do, its principles won't be derived from Maxwell's equations, it'll have to utilize some completely new physics.
What BS! Everyone seems to view products in such a narrow way these days. The question isn't "will they succeed or fail?" but "what is the niche for which this product has a use?". I've no doubt that thousands of people have already bought these batteries because they have a good use for them and they'll be using them happily for a couple of years. Pointing out that there are some people for whom these batteries are useless really is dumb. How the hell do you know what everyone else wants to do with batteries? If the com pany that sells this product can make a profit from them, for some time, then its a success, regardless of whether or not they sweep the world.
If you live in Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is instinctively wrong. If you live in San Francisco it's not intuitively wrong. There's really only one sensible response to the argument "Theft is intuitively wrong". It's "Whatever!".
Ownership of property is a 'natural right' because it can exist in the absence of any government or law
And homosexuality is naturally wrong. Except to those people who think that it's naturals because some animals engage in homosexual activity. Arguments about what is 'natural' are positively medieval and really have no validity.
The important thing is to keep in mind that rights really do exist
And so do fairies. Are you sure you didn't just step out of a time machine?
Liberty is a right to be free of an oppression. It is not a dipole to property, per se.
This is just word play. It is only true because of the way libertarians define liberty. A more conventional description might discuss how in order to have a civilised society we have to sacrifice liberties and among those liberties are the liberties you sacrifice in order to have property. It's standard practice for libertarians, not only to use an unconventional definition of liberty, but to deliberately confuse people by cashing in on the value placed on the conventional meaning of the word, even though it's not what they mean.
Note that I'm not criticising libertarianism here, I'm criticising libertarian propaganda.
Libertarianism is the political position of advocating liberty.
Stop with the slogans already, and say what you actually mean. Your definition of 'liberty' does not include a starving man taking food from a billionaire. Your definition of 'liberty' considers a starving man prevented from eating the food he needs as 'liberty'.
rather it is limitations on our liberty that must be justified
But in your twisted perversion of 'liberty', when the starving man takes food from the billionaire it's the billionaire's liberty that's being encroached on. You see no need even to justify the billionaire keeping his food from the starving man.
Liberty works very well indeed, as the history of western civilization demonstrates.
Yes it does. But pretending that libertarianism is about liberty is as disingenuous as a socialist claiming that the US is proof of the success of socialism because Americans mostly pay income tax.
I'm no socialist. I think there's sometimes good reason for allowing billionaire's to prevent poor people taking their food. But I'm not so brainwashed as to think that it's axiomatic and in absolutely no need of justification. Only a libertarian could have such a twisted view of 'liberty'.
I bet geeks just love saying this. Anything to make something as boring as a security issue in an application seem exciting. Let's use the language of big game. Oooohhhh. "In the Wild!". Makes exploits seem as exciting as going on safari or hunting crocodiles.
Anybody who has used Linux or any other OS would be aware of the very powerful and feature rich text editor Vi.
What does Linux have to do with anything? If your proposition is true of "Linux or any other OS" then it's true of "any OS". So why mention Linux at all. And why are you telling us that people who have used any OS would be aware of vi? If what you say is true, then I'm aware of vi, and there's no point you telling me. The only purpose I can imagine this sentence having is to give people who haven't heard of vi a feeling of inferiority. In fact, I'm pretty sure this sentence is false as I doubt that that most Windows users have heard of vi.
...for buying those songs that are too embarassing to buy from a record store, or even have physically delivered to my house. For example, there's a Madonna song I downloaded...
We know that iPods already have multiple entire songs loaded up into RAM before they are played. So clearly the problem is not one that can be fixed by pre-buffering alone.
Here's a guess: a PC can decode multiple streams of mp3 data at the same time and so is free to interpolate between data from different files for a smooth transition. On an iPod it's not the CPU doing the decoding but external hardware. And the output from that hardware goes straight to the DAC. So there's no way the iPod can mix two different mp3 streams. But that's just a guess.
I did worry about this. But the reviews also point out that features important to the game, like the pit you're about to fall into, are very hard to see.
Slashdot Mirror
So what I'm saying is that nothing special whatsoever happens at the Rayleigh angle. It just gets increasingly more difficult to produce good images at higher and higher resolution. These difficulties come from signal-to-noise ratio issues, not from 'diffraction limiting'.
Keep taking the pills and I'm sure you'll be fine!
The trick would be to join a narrow and wide end using walls that don't point more towards the wide end. But alas, that's an impossibility of geometry.
The complete and utter bogosity of this story has prompted Greg Egan to try to start a movement to save New Scientist. Anyway, check out this story.
Exactly
What BS! Everyone seems to view products in such a narrow way these days. The question isn't "will they succeed or fail?" but "what is the niche for which this product has a use?". I've no doubt that thousands of people have already bought these batteries because they have a good use for them and they'll be using them happily for a couple of years. Pointing out that there are some people for whom these batteries are useless really is dumb. How the hell do you know what everyone else wants to do with batteries? If the com pany that sells this product can make a profit from them, for some time, then its a success, regardless of whether or not they sweep the world.
Unicaceous?
Note that I'm not criticising libertarianism here, I'm criticising libertarian propaganda.
I'm no socialist. I think there's sometimes good reason for allowing billionaire's to prevent poor people taking their food. But I'm not so brainwashed as to think that it's axiomatic and in absolutely no need of justification. Only a libertarian could have such a twisted view of 'liberty'.
You say that as if there's something wrong with rattling people's cages.
Just FYI: That's "tête à tête".
...for buying those songs that are too embarassing to buy from a record store, or even have physically delivered to my house. For example, there's a Madonna song I downloaded...
We know that iPods already have multiple entire songs loaded up into RAM before they are played. So clearly the problem is not one that can be fixed by pre-buffering alone.
Here's a guess: a PC can decode multiple streams of mp3 data at the same time and so is free to interpolate between data from different files for a smooth transition. On an iPod it's not the CPU doing the decoding but external hardware. And the output from that hardware goes straight to the DAC. So there's no way the iPod can mix two different mp3 streams. But that's just a guess.
I did worry about this. But the reviews also point out that features important to the game, like the pit you're about to fall into, are very hard to see.