My question is, doesn't the charge that defines the ionosphere help protect us from solar radiation and who-knows-what-else?
I don't think so. It's more a byproduct of the processes that DO protect us (mainly the magnetic field deflecting and/or trapping the charged particles of the solar wind.)
Even if this did work, I shudder to think what would happen if we started removing gigawatts from the ionosphere to power our doo-dads.
Why not if we put the gigawatts up there first?
We're not talking about removing and eating the charge (DC) of the ionospheric layers. We're talking about using their conduction (or pressure waves within their sea of charged particles) to carry AC around without radiating it away into space - or having to string wires when there's already a planet-sized "wire" hanging up there in the sky.
A thing to remember is that Tesla was working when the concept of an electromagnetic wave was just being developed. He did a lot of stuff with resonance phenomenon, transformers, and low-pressure gas plasmas and so was probably thinking in terms of circuit components even when he invented radio - ahead of Helmholtz/Hertz/Maxwell/etc. who had the theory of transverse electromagnetic waves in free space.
Then again he was a math whiz and he might have been quite aware of this work and trying to use longitudinal waves in a cavity or the ionospheric plasma rather than the transverse electromagnetic waves of free space. (These CAN exist in these places, though not in free space.)
Or he might have just been hacking, back when the theories were still being developed.
How would these towers effectively transmit electricity? I'm having trouble seeing how this would work effectively given the inverse square law.
I'm not Tesla but I can take a guess.
I think the idea was to couple to the ionosphere - treating the conductive ground and one of the layers of the conductive ionosphere as the two walls of a resonant cavity and pumping one of its resonances. The energy would not propagate away into space but would stay in the cavity until removed by a load or resistive losses due to the imperfect conduction of the cavity walls and its contents (dirt, buildings, birds, people,...). It would be an extremely high impedance - enormous voltage (because of a nontrivial voltage gradient - in the ballpark of the atmospheric DC bias - multiplied by an enormous height) combined with minuscule currents through the tiny (though physically large) apacitances.
At the relatively low (compared to radio) frequencies involved you wouldn't have appreciable currents in anything that wasn't also a resonator and strongly coupled to the cavity (by being tall and broad at the top), i.e. a "raised capacitance" (Tesla's term for that big sphere-ish conductive shape on the top of the structure) and a big coil between it and ground, forming a tank circuit tuned to the carrier frequency and cavity resonance.
Buildings and metal towers might have nontrivial unintentional currents. But they'd be reactive currents because of the low resistance of the buildings' structural members. So they wouldn't suck out much power - just shift the phase of the power carrier signal in the area near them.
But a resonant circuit between a big raised conductor and ground would be able to efficiently power out of the cavity and couple it to a secondary coil around the main coil - shifting the voltage/current ratio from the extraordinarily high impedance of the transmission system to a lower impedance more convenient for use (though still at the carrier frequency so probably in need of rectification or other frequency conversion).
At least I think that may be what he intended. Whether it would work or not is still "up in the air", pun intended.
One nice thing: At the frequency involved you shouldn't be interfering with any existing information services. If the losses are low enough for it to be practical for power transmission it would be constantly "ringing" from lighting excitation. (Or maybe that's the ELF band where the US is talking to submerged submarines...)
(Heh. Thinking about this I just recognized the details of the broadcast power that was a throwaway background item in Eric Frank Russel's novel _Wasp_. Cars were "dinos" with the car body for "raised capacitance" and a dynamotor for frequency conversion. Disconnecting the "intake lead" and striking it against an "earth terminal" would produce a thin thread of arc if the distant power transmitter was on. And the energy density necessary to operate an automobile on this was completely ignored, of course. B-) )
We don't need wires for privacy. We have WEP, which provides equivalent security, wirelessly. Stop living in the past.
Absolutely!
"Wired Equivalent of Privacy" is about as secure as running Ethernet lines from your switch out to all the nearby parking places and mounting an RJ jack at each one.
its power consumption per unit of computation goes UP when it gets hotter
If I understand this correctly:
With currently deployed technologies the structures are so small (compared to the wavelength of an electron) that a major component of power consumption is leakage. In a process I've been using lately (copper interconnect, 65-nm features), leakage amounts to HALF the power consumption.
Higher temperatures means more thermal excitation of the electrons, which means more leakage, which means more power consumption from leakage. This ramps rapidly, so it's the dominant mechanism for changing power consumption.
(Now that copper interconnects and lower voltages have gotten things to a size where leakage is dominant, vendors are working on tricks to improve this fraction in later generations - including at least one already deploying.)
(Leakage dominance is also why you don't currently see as much work on slowing clocks to save power as you might expect, though we could finally afford the logic and software to do it. If you STOPPED them you'd only save HALF of it. You have to power down a core to get the rest of the savings, which means you can't bring it back up quickly later because the dynamic state is lost. Again this might change in a generation or two.)
Higher temepratures also increase the resistance of the conductors, though the same number of electrons need to be conducted to raise or lower the voltage. So again you burn more power when temperature goes up.
With these two mechanisms being so large you don't even need to look at what's going on with things like transistor switching speed variations with temperature.
WWII destroyed the British Empire, ruined all of Eastern Europe, and devastated Japan. You want to fight another one like that?
You seem to have misunderstood my posting.
I don't WANT to fight another war. Period.
But I don't want the slashdot readership to have any illusions about what war IS, either.
It is an understanding of how horrible war is that leads people to try to avoid it - and makes things like the MAD doctrine work to hold off future wars. And a lack of understanding cuts both ways: Unfortunately, sometimes war IS the less horrible alternative and avoiding it is the poorer choice.
But all generations are born ignorant. And it often suits their rulers to keep them that way - or misinform them to make them more controllable and usable for their own purposes. They especially want to keep them in the dark and/or confused about the effective use and consequences of violence, which ruling classes want to keep as their own monopoly.
Discussions about what are the "proper" ways (if any) to use internet-based sabotage of infrastructure are discussions about the "use of force" and the "rules of war". The participants need to be informed on how the people who make these decisions think, what threats they expect, and what preexisting rules and tacit agreements they work with.
Yes it might be nice if wars, or "cold wars", were fought with rules and among only a small warrior class on each side. (Then again it might be a really bad idea. Sanitizing the conflict leads to more war, by reducing the constituency for peace.)
It also invites the division of the population into a powerful ruling class and a powerless ruled class.
Let's stop kidding ourselves that the militaries of our, and all other, nations, along with all the other power groups, will simultaneously adhere to medieval European ideas of the separation of the serfs and the armies, as codified in the alleged "laws of war".
World War II and the Cold War's MAD doctrine treated the civilian population and its infrastructure as a military resource. (They DO produce the materiel of war, after all. This makes them, like the war-materiel manufacturing plants and the infrastructure that supports them - including water, electricity, and communications, military targets.)
In republics the electorate are the basic decision makers and the bulk of the civilian population is the electorate. Pressuring "the country" to change its foreign policy involves pressuring these decision-makers. So many power groups - governmental and especially "terrorist" - consider them fair game.
Bans on political assassination are convenient for officials - deflecting the attacks from them to those below them. So of course these find their ways into the "law of war" as promulgated by these officials. But some power groups consider it more cost-effective to hurt or kill a handful of leaders than a large number of soldiers or a larger number of civilians. (The colinization-era American Indians, the American Revolutionaries, and the Viet Cong come to mind just for three quick examples. "Knock off the guy with the shiny geegaws on his clothes and the rest of 'em run around in confusion." That's why Marines don't salute or wear officer insignia in the field.)
So don't expect political organizations of any level of recognition to actually refrain from attacking their "opponent"s' infrastructure, even if it's civilian.
Yes it might be nice if wars, or "cold wars", were fought with rules and among only a small warrior class on each side. (Then again it might be a really bad idea. Sanitizing the conflict leads to more war, by reducing the constituency for peace.)
Having said that: Such attacks are ACTS OF WAR. (That's why the US reined in its cold warriors by banning the assassination of foreign leaders during "peacetime".) Using them invites retaliation and escalation, including the escalation from covert to overt.
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to the Internet.
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to the telephone network?
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to radio receivers?
And so on.
You gotta communicate with 'em SOMEHOW. Are you proposing the banking system, the hospitals, and the military all SEPARATELY (and each individual organization within each group SEPARATELY as well) dig up the country and run their own private network? (And harden it against manhole-divers with bolt cutters while they're at it?)
"The Internet" and other networks sharing infrastructure (and potential vulnerabilities) is the current communication utility. It's time to stop wringing hands about how foolish it is to actually use it and join those working on how to do so safely and reliably.
RCA was the last of the GE units to push any kind of consumer electronic standards onto American consumers but their final true successes were the NTSC color TV and 45 RPM polystyrene disc systems 50 years ago....
My point is that GE is itself a rights holder, not that it has recent success in pushing OTHER rights holders into its formats.
Like Sony, if it comes up with a productized medium of enormous capacity it has enough "content" of its own to launch it. Then the competition needs an alternative of similar capacity to even attempt a Betamax/VHS style war. If there isn't one, they can pile onto the bandwagon or watch their lunch get eaten.
I thought this was obvious after learning about photodiodes in electronics class.
It's not about the quantum nature of the absorption of the photon and its conversion to an excited electron state.
It's about the efficient propagation of that excited electron state, once created, from one molecule to another until it gets to a place where it can be used. "Picking the path" in a non-random way, without losing energy in the process, seems to be using quantum weirdness as well.
Any bets on which way the research comes out on any politically charged subject?
Like, say, "global warming"? (Or is that "climate change" this week?) Or how sonar affects sea lions? Or the risks for the endangered North American Wombat? Or how many birds are chopped up by windmills - especially when they're visible from the Kennedy compound?
And I thought zombie computers were bad. Now we have computer-assisted zombie people.
Hmmm... Might be a B-movie in that. Zombies animated by BORG-style computers rather than supernatural spells, bioweapons, badly programmed nanobot body-repair systems,...
... creating compatibility with... jittery rights holders. GE doesn't come to mind as a company with experience getting that done,...
Huh?
GE is one of the six conglomerates that, together, own 90% of the media in the US. It's big on movies, broadcasting, cable, news,... For starters it owns NBC and Universal. See Wikipedia for a more complete list.
I know Pacific Bell (merged into SBC, merged into AT&T) used rings in the Bay Area because I saw the map of them a decade or so back, when the loops were new and the company talked about them occasionally.
They had two rings that, though they occasionally crossed, almost never ran down the same street. About the only exception was a common run up Loma Verde in Palo Alto. (I lived near that run at the time.) There was an under-street equipment vault near the intersection with Waverley and for about a year there was a phone guy working in it.
This is safe if you have good ventilation. If your room is stuffy you could pass out - and die or take massive brain damage (even if rescued) before all the liquid boils away and the air exchange brings the oxygen level back up.
And then there's that Intel cache overrun SMM code promotion bug we talked about yesterday. Unless AMD has an equivalent problem Intel might be in trouble once the crackers get to exploiting it against Windows boxen.
... how long till we're able to capture the heat from processors and use them to cut power requirements for computers exponentially?
Look up the second law of thermodynamics.
Power goes in on the "work" side of the Carnot Cycle and comes out on the "heat" side. You can salvage a small percentage by running the heat through a heat engine on the way to the heat sink - more if you let the chip get hotter. But not a lot.
Further, the current technology can't stand being allowed to heat up - and its power consumption per unit of computation goes UP when it gets hotter. So even if you COULD put a bottleneck in the cooling (where you're normally spending more power to pump the heat away faster) to try to salvage some of the energy, you'll be running at a net loss.
Now if somebody wants to use ceramic, high temperature metal alloys, and low work-function oxides to build integrated circuits based on vacuum-tube technology they might be able to get away with it. But electrons tend to be even larger and fuzzier in vacuum than in condensed matter so you might not be able to get your scale down to that of even current integrated circuits, limiting your speed due to signal propagation time.
... - for cooling or anything else - be sure to install an oxygen level alarm.
A nitrogen leak will dilute the oxygen content of the air to the point that you'll pass out - then die - without noticing what is happening.
Nitrogen is the bulk of normal air so it has no smell. Your breathing is controlled by the CO2 level, not the oxygen content, so you don't notice it when both are being diluted (and the dilution of the CO2 slows your breathing, exacerbating the problem with the oxygen level.)
This made evolutionary sense because the O2 and CO2 level are normally related - CO2 goes up as oxygen is consumed - and the CO2 level starts from a low baseline and affects pH, making it FAR easier to detect. But it doesn't work very well when people start taking the atmosphere apart into its components and remixing them differently.
... and that two cable cut sites had been found, I speculated that there were two more sites. Turns out that was the case.
The SONET network is normally configured in a ring, or a set of interconnected rings and ring segments - a net with MOST nodes being points on a line and a few being points at a Y junction. (It's the cheapest way to insure two geographically diverse paths to every site when you have to dig things up to string your connections.) The rings are configured so that a cut link is automatically bypassed. (The traffic may already be propagating around the ring both ways and the sites just switch to the side that still has good info. Or it may have reserved bandwidth and when a link goes down the sites beside the cut "fold the traffic back" onto the reserved bandwidth.
Packet networks can have similar redundancy characteristics:
- They may be carried on existing SONET infrastructure.
- They may be connected as "Redundant Packet Ring" - essentially the IP equivalent of SONET rings using arbitrary transport methods with the same physical layout.
- Or they may have any of a number of other net-style redundant connections. (But they usually reduce to the same geographic layouts.
- (Or they may be non-redundant or "2x-redundant" with both cables taking the same path. Oops!)
Given this, when I heard that there were two dead patches and that phone service (along with everything else) was out, I figured the dead patches were on rings and that there had to be cuts on two points of each ring to defeat the redundancy.
Now we hear that there were indeed four manholes entered and cables cut in each.
So it sounds to me like the system ALREADY had the redundancy built in - but the attackers knew about it and deliberately made the multiple-location cuts needed to defeat the backups.
All other science to this point has solely been done as groundwork for better tasting beer.
Which brings us full circle, since the development of agriculture (which led to the sedentary lifestyle, food surplus, and a leisure class with the time and resources to "do science") is believed (by some anthropologists) to have been primarily motivated by a desire to raise more grain for feeding to yeast in order to make beer (and, incidentally, bread).
The new technique works by recognizing, from brainwaves, when a letter on a screen is blinked. I doubt that will work for the blind.
What if you can't move your eyes?
It's not clear to me whether the EEG device is recognizing the brain signal alterations from the letter being concentrated on blinking or the letter being looked at blinking. If the former it may work for someone whose eyes are paralyzed. If the latter, it certainly won't. (I suspect it may be the latter, since the visual processing fires a LOT of nerves.)
Also: If the eyes are truly paralyzed the person is effectively blind. At a minimum the nictations (microscopic eye movements) are needed to keep the image from fading out.
Slashdot Mirror
My question is, doesn't the charge that defines the ionosphere help protect us from solar radiation and who-knows-what-else?
I don't think so. It's more a byproduct of the processes that DO protect us (mainly the magnetic field deflecting and/or trapping the charged particles of the solar wind.)
Even if this did work, I shudder to think what would happen if we started removing gigawatts from the ionosphere to power our doo-dads.
Why not if we put the gigawatts up there first?
We're not talking about removing and eating the charge (DC) of the ionospheric layers. We're talking about using their conduction (or pressure waves within their sea of charged particles) to carry AC around without radiating it away into space - or having to string wires when there's already a planet-sized "wire" hanging up there in the sky.
A thing to remember is that Tesla was working when the concept of an electromagnetic wave was just being developed. He did a lot of stuff with resonance phenomenon, transformers, and low-pressure gas plasmas and so was probably thinking in terms of circuit components even when he invented radio - ahead of Helmholtz/Hertz/Maxwell/etc. who had the theory of transverse electromagnetic waves in free space.
Then again he was a math whiz and he might have been quite aware of this work and trying to use longitudinal waves in a cavity or the ionospheric plasma rather than the transverse electromagnetic waves of free space. (These CAN exist in these places, though not in free space.)
Or he might have just been hacking, back when the theories were still being developed.
How would these towers effectively transmit electricity? I'm having trouble seeing how this would work effectively given the inverse square law.
I'm not Tesla but I can take a guess.
I think the idea was to couple to the ionosphere - treating the conductive ground and one of the layers of the conductive ionosphere as the two walls of a resonant cavity and pumping one of its resonances. The energy would not propagate away into space but would stay in the cavity until removed by a load or resistive losses due to the imperfect conduction of the cavity walls and its contents (dirt, buildings, birds, people, ...). It would be an extremely high impedance - enormous voltage (because of a nontrivial voltage gradient - in the ballpark of the atmospheric DC bias - multiplied by an enormous height) combined with minuscule currents through the tiny (though physically large) apacitances.
At the relatively low (compared to radio) frequencies involved you wouldn't have appreciable currents in anything that wasn't also a resonator and strongly coupled to the cavity (by being tall and broad at the top), i.e. a "raised capacitance" (Tesla's term for that big sphere-ish conductive shape on the top of the structure) and a big coil between it and ground, forming a tank circuit tuned to the carrier frequency and cavity resonance.
Buildings and metal towers might have nontrivial unintentional currents. But they'd be reactive currents because of the low resistance of the buildings' structural members. So they wouldn't suck out much power - just shift the phase of the power carrier signal in the area near them.
But a resonant circuit between a big raised conductor and ground would be able to efficiently power out of the cavity and couple it to a secondary coil around the main coil - shifting the voltage/current ratio from the extraordinarily high impedance of the transmission system to a lower impedance more convenient for use (though still at the carrier frequency so probably in need of rectification or other frequency conversion).
At least I think that may be what he intended. Whether it would work or not is still "up in the air", pun intended.
One nice thing: At the frequency involved you shouldn't be interfering with any existing information services. If the losses are low enough for it to be practical for power transmission it would be constantly "ringing" from lighting excitation. (Or maybe that's the ELF band where the US is talking to submerged submarines...)
(Heh. Thinking about this I just recognized the details of the broadcast power that was a throwaway background item in Eric Frank Russel's novel _Wasp_. Cars were "dinos" with the car body for "raised capacitance" and a dynamotor for frequency conversion. Disconnecting the "intake lead" and striking it against an "earth terminal" would produce a thin thread of arc if the distant power transmitter was on. And the energy density necessary to operate an automobile on this was completely ignored, of course. B-) )
Surely you jest.
Yep. The poster jests.
We don't need wires for privacy. We have WEP, which provides equivalent security, wirelessly. Stop living in the past.
Absolutely!
"Wired Equivalent of Privacy" is about as secure as running Ethernet lines from your switch out to all the nearby parking places and mounting an RJ jack at each one.
its power consumption per unit of computation goes UP when it gets hotter
If I understand this correctly:
With currently deployed technologies the structures are so small (compared to the wavelength of an electron) that a major component of power consumption is leakage. In a process I've been using lately (copper interconnect, 65-nm features), leakage amounts to HALF the power consumption.
Higher temperatures means more thermal excitation of the electrons, which means more leakage, which means more power consumption from leakage. This ramps rapidly, so it's the dominant mechanism for changing power consumption.
(Now that copper interconnects and lower voltages have gotten things to a size where leakage is dominant, vendors are working on tricks to improve this fraction in later generations - including at least one already deploying.)
(Leakage dominance is also why you don't currently see as much work on slowing clocks to save power as you might expect, though we could finally afford the logic and software to do it. If you STOPPED them you'd only save HALF of it. You have to power down a core to get the rest of the savings, which means you can't bring it back up quickly later because the dynamic state is lost. Again this might change in a generation or two.)
Higher temepratures also increase the resistance of the conductors, though the same number of electrons need to be conducted to raise or lower the voltage. So again you burn more power when temperature goes up.
With these two mechanisms being so large you don't even need to look at what's going on with things like transistor switching speed variations with temperature.
WWII destroyed the British Empire, ruined all of Eastern Europe, and devastated Japan. You want to fight another one like that?
You seem to have misunderstood my posting.
I don't WANT to fight another war. Period.
But I don't want the slashdot readership to have any illusions about what war IS, either.
It is an understanding of how horrible war is that leads people to try to avoid it - and makes things like the MAD doctrine work to hold off future wars. And a lack of understanding cuts both ways: Unfortunately, sometimes war IS the less horrible alternative and avoiding it is the poorer choice.
But all generations are born ignorant. And it often suits their rulers to keep them that way - or misinform them to make them more controllable and usable for their own purposes. They especially want to keep them in the dark and/or confused about the effective use and consequences of violence, which ruling classes want to keep as their own monopoly.
Discussions about what are the "proper" ways (if any) to use internet-based sabotage of infrastructure are discussions about the "use of force" and the "rules of war". The participants need to be informed on how the people who make these decisions think, what threats they expect, and what preexisting rules and tacit agreements they work with.
Yes it might be nice if wars, or "cold wars", were fought with rules and among only a small warrior class on each side. (Then again it might be a really bad idea. Sanitizing the conflict leads to more war, by reducing the constituency for peace.)
It also invites the division of the population into a powerful ruling class and a powerless ruled class.
While we're at it:
Let's stop kidding ourselves that the militaries of our, and all other, nations, along with all the other power groups, will simultaneously adhere to medieval European ideas of the separation of the serfs and the armies, as codified in the alleged "laws of war".
World War II and the Cold War's MAD doctrine treated the civilian population and its infrastructure as a military resource. (They DO produce the materiel of war, after all. This makes them, like the war-materiel manufacturing plants and the infrastructure that supports them - including water, electricity, and communications, military targets.)
In republics the electorate are the basic decision makers and the bulk of the civilian population is the electorate. Pressuring "the country" to change its foreign policy involves pressuring these decision-makers. So many power groups - governmental and especially "terrorist" - consider them fair game.
Bans on political assassination are convenient for officials - deflecting the attacks from them to those below them. So of course these find their ways into the "law of war" as promulgated by these officials. But some power groups consider it more cost-effective to hurt or kill a handful of leaders than a large number of soldiers or a larger number of civilians. (The colinization-era American Indians, the American Revolutionaries, and the Viet Cong come to mind just for three quick examples. "Knock off the guy with the shiny geegaws on his clothes and the rest of 'em run around in confusion." That's why Marines don't salute or wear officer insignia in the field.)
So don't expect political organizations of any level of recognition to actually refrain from attacking their "opponent"s' infrastructure, even if it's civilian.
Yes it might be nice if wars, or "cold wars", were fought with rules and among only a small warrior class on each side. (Then again it might be a really bad idea. Sanitizing the conflict leads to more war, by reducing the constituency for peace.)
Having said that: Such attacks are ACTS OF WAR. (That's why the US reined in its cold warriors by banning the assassination of foreign leaders during "peacetime".) Using them invites retaliation and escalation, including the escalation from covert to overt.
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to the Internet.
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to the telephone network?
What country would be foolish enough to connect its power grid, hospital systems, air traffic control and it's banking system to radio receivers?
And so on.
You gotta communicate with 'em SOMEHOW. Are you proposing the banking system, the hospitals, and the military all SEPARATELY (and each individual organization within each group SEPARATELY as well) dig up the country and run their own private network? (And harden it against manhole-divers with bolt cutters while they're at it?)
"The Internet" and other networks sharing infrastructure (and potential vulnerabilities) is the current communication utility. It's time to stop wringing hands about how foolish it is to actually use it and join those working on how to do so safely and reliably.
RCA was the last of the GE units to push any kind of consumer electronic standards onto American consumers but their final true successes were the NTSC color TV and 45 RPM polystyrene disc systems 50 years ago. ...
My point is that GE is itself a rights holder, not that it has recent success in pushing OTHER rights holders into its formats.
Like Sony, if it comes up with a productized medium of enormous capacity it has enough "content" of its own to launch it. Then the competition needs an alternative of similar capacity to even attempt a Betamax/VHS style war. If there isn't one, they can pile onto the bandwagon or watch their lunch get eaten.
I thought this was obvious after learning about photodiodes in electronics class.
It's not about the quantum nature of the absorption of the photon and its conversion to an excited electron state.
It's about the efficient propagation of that excited electron state, once created, from one molecule to another until it gets to a place where it can be used. "Picking the path" in a non-random way, without losing energy in the process, seems to be using quantum weirdness as well.
Any bets on which way the research comes out on any politically charged subject?
Like, say, "global warming"? (Or is that "climate change" this week?) Or how sonar affects sea lions? Or the risks for the endangered North American Wombat? Or how many birds are chopped up by windmills - especially when they're visible from the Kennedy compound?
And I thought zombie computers were bad. Now we have computer-assisted zombie people.
Hmmm... Might be a B-movie in that. Zombies animated by BORG-style computers rather than supernatural spells, bioweapons, badly programmed nanobot body-repair systems, ...
... creating compatibility with ... jittery rights holders. GE doesn't come to mind as a company with experience getting that done, ...
Huh?
GE is one of the six conglomerates that, together, own 90% of the media in the US. It's big on movies, broadcasting, cable, news, ... For starters it owns NBC and Universal. See Wikipedia for a more complete list.
I know Pacific Bell (merged into SBC, merged into AT&T) used rings in the Bay Area because I saw the map of them a decade or so back, when the loops were new and the company talked about them occasionally.
They had two rings that, though they occasionally crossed, almost never ran down the same street. About the only exception was a common run up Loma Verde in Palo Alto. (I lived near that run at the time.) There was an under-street equipment vault near the intersection with Waverley and for about a year there was a phone guy working in it.
Oops!
Unfortunately, when it boils it expands.
This is safe if you have good ventilation. If your room is stuffy you could pass out - and die or take massive brain damage (even if rescued) before all the liquid boils away and the air exchange brings the oxygen level back up.
I like the Gubernator better.
Ditto.
It's the logical construction from "gubernatorial" & "terminator".
Rolls off the tongue with the same number of syllables, the same stresses, and last two syllables identical to those of "terminator".
And then there's that Intel cache overrun SMM code promotion bug we talked about yesterday. Unless AMD has an equivalent problem Intel might be in trouble once the crackers get to exploiting it against Windows boxen.
... how long till we're able to capture the heat from processors and use them to cut power requirements for computers exponentially?
Look up the second law of thermodynamics.
Power goes in on the "work" side of the Carnot Cycle and comes out on the "heat" side. You can salvage a small percentage by running the heat through a heat engine on the way to the heat sink - more if you let the chip get hotter. But not a lot.
Further, the current technology can't stand being allowed to heat up - and its power consumption per unit of computation goes UP when it gets hotter. So even if you COULD put a bottleneck in the cooling (where you're normally spending more power to pump the heat away faster) to try to salvage some of the energy, you'll be running at a net loss.
Now if somebody wants to use ceramic, high temperature metal alloys, and low work-function oxides to build integrated circuits based on vacuum-tube technology they might be able to get away with it. But electrons tend to be even larger and fuzzier in vacuum than in condensed matter so you might not be able to get your scale down to that of even current integrated circuits, limiting your speed due to signal propagation time.
... - for cooling or anything else - be sure to install an oxygen level alarm.
A nitrogen leak will dilute the oxygen content of the air to the point that you'll pass out - then die - without noticing what is happening.
Nitrogen is the bulk of normal air so it has no smell. Your breathing is controlled by the CO2 level, not the oxygen content, so you don't notice it when both are being diluted (and the dilution of the CO2 slows your breathing, exacerbating the problem with the oxygen level.)
This made evolutionary sense because the O2 and CO2 level are normally related - CO2 goes up as oxygen is consumed - and the CO2 level starts from a low baseline and affects pH, making it FAR easier to detect. But it doesn't work very well when people start taking the atmosphere apart into its components and remixing them differently.
... and that two cable cut sites had been found, I speculated that there were two more sites. Turns out that was the case.
The SONET network is normally configured in a ring, or a set of interconnected rings and ring segments - a net with MOST nodes being points on a line and a few being points at a Y junction. (It's the cheapest way to insure two geographically diverse paths to every site when you have to dig things up to string your connections.) The rings are configured so that a cut link is automatically bypassed. (The traffic may already be propagating around the ring both ways and the sites just switch to the side that still has good info. Or it may have reserved bandwidth and when a link goes down the sites beside the cut "fold the traffic back" onto the reserved bandwidth.
Packet networks can have similar redundancy characteristics:
- They may be carried on existing SONET infrastructure.
- They may be connected as "Redundant Packet Ring" - essentially the IP equivalent of SONET rings using arbitrary transport methods with the same physical layout.
- Or they may have any of a number of other net-style redundant connections. (But they usually reduce to the same geographic layouts.
- (Or they may be non-redundant or "2x-redundant" with both cables taking the same path. Oops!)
Given this, when I heard that there were two dead patches and that phone service (along with everything else) was out, I figured the dead patches were on rings and that there had to be cuts on two points of each ring to defeat the redundancy.
Now we hear that there were indeed four manholes entered and cables cut in each.
So it sounds to me like the system ALREADY had the redundancy built in - but the attackers knew about it and deliberately made the multiple-location cuts needed to defeat the backups.
All other science to this point has solely been done as groundwork for better tasting beer.
Which brings us full circle, since the development of agriculture (which led to the sedentary lifestyle, food surplus, and a leisure class with the time and resources to "do science") is believed (by some anthropologists) to have been primarily motivated by a desire to raise more grain for feeding to yeast in order to make beer (and, incidentally, bread).
How is this better than eye tracking?
What if you're blind?
The new technique works by recognizing, from brainwaves, when a letter on a screen is blinked. I doubt that will work for the blind.
What if you can't move your eyes?
It's not clear to me whether the EEG device is recognizing the brain signal alterations from the letter being concentrated on blinking or the letter being looked at blinking. If the former it may work for someone whose eyes are paralyzed. If the latter, it certainly won't. (I suspect it may be the latter, since the visual processing fires a LOT of nerves.)
Also: If the eyes are truly paralyzed the person is effectively blind. At a minimum the nictations (microscopic eye movements) are needed to keep the image from fading out.