Please, wait until the rest of all Brazilian routers are confiscated before making the rest of your jokes. I mean are those jokes that good that they can't wait a day or two?
As I understand a recent theory:
- Sunspots are associated with increased solar wind and coronal mass ejections,
- This improves the magnetic/plasma shielding of the earth from cosmic rays,
- Which reduces the nucleation of water droplets,
- Which reduces cloud cover,
- Which reduces reflection of sunlight, and this reflection of sunlight totally swamps the minor change in the solar radiant output.
When the sun goes through a prolonged period of no sunspots the result is enough of an increase in reflection of sunlight to significantly drop the Earth's temperature.
If you compare the graph of sunspot numbers linked from the great-great-great-grandparent post to the wikipedia article on the "Little Ice Age" you'll see that the sunspots-went-away period from about 1650 to 1700 corresponds to the first - and drastically deepest - temperature drop. MAJOR global cooling - the temperature crash at the end of the medieval warm period which we've just recovered from.
Seems to me an "All Quiet Alert" is appropriate. This could be the start of some significant global cooling.
And that could be a problem. According to the orbit-based climate forcing models the peak of the last interglacial corresponded to the start of agriculture, and temperature should have begun a gradual but accelerating descent into the next ice age, which should have been moderately steep by now. Instead it pretty much leveled out (ignoring "minor" bumps like the two I just named and the recent upslope). If fossil-fuel greenhouse gasses are indeed holding back a downhill slide we could be in pretty sad shape in about four more centuries, when the fossil carbon runs out. And once that snow persists into summer it does a darned good job of reflecting sunlight, too.
Meanwhile, if we're going into a cold period and at the same time are cutting our carbon emissions in order to "stave off global warming" - with a resulting drastic hit on the economy - we could generate the scenario Niven and Pournelle described in _Angels Down_.
... if you want to beat google in the search engine market, give good "erotic" results.
Google gives just FINE erotic search results if you turn off "safe search".
Go to image search and search for anything. You'll find a link to the safe search configuration at the bottom of the results page. Set it to show you everything and rerun your search. (If you've got cookies on it will also remember you turned it off when it does future searches.)
The other thing that caught my attention was Bussard's comment that they should go straight to full scale.... Most people... would be sceptical... When you are trying something new, there is almost always a gotcha or two.
In this case he believed he had the scaling laws down. With power proportional to the seventh power of the radius and energy gain proportional to the fifth power, you were only talking about building a device maybe 10 times the radius of the lab device. That's TINY as fusion experiments go, and also compared to fission plants. And the thing is basically a slightly gassy vacuum tube with some magnets in it, i.e. mostly empty space, very little material.
If there are any gotchas you'd have to scale it up about that much to find them. So why go halfway and then build a full-size one when, if it turns out there AREN'T any gotchas you've got an operating power plant on the next step?
His plan was to do two more small prototypes, to get some more solid data than his three-neutron final run and compare two geometries for the final deaign, then go for the gotchas-or-gold. If it works, it gets you to production right away and you didn't spend a dime on yet another intermediate prototype. If it doesn't, you're not out all that much more than if you built some intermediate size that was maybe big enough to find the gotchas.
Suppose there AREN'T any gotchas. Then we get to working fusion power years sooner. Ditto if there are gotchas that only show up at the scale between the intermediate prototype and the full-size design. In either case the time spent on the middle-size below-break-even prototype was wasted.
Baby steps are for people who get their money from researching and will be looking for a new job once things are actually working. Big steps are for people who want to get to the finish line.
How is it better to lift your solar panels into orbit, generate your electricity, then beam it to the surface at (optimistically) 50% efficiency, and then receive the beamed power at (optimistically) 50% efficiency,...
First: It isn't necessarily panels. Steam plants work just fine, and are much cheaper to build and lift.
Second: There's 7 times the power per square foot available up there due to lack of atmospheric attenuation and the 24/7 nature of sunlight in space, compared to the atmosphere-and-weather-compromised equivalent of 5 or so noontime-hours-worth you get on the ground.
Third: As of the '60s they could already do > 90% DC in at orbit to DC out on the ground, using masers and TWT amplifiers in orbit and schottky diode based rectennas on the ground, not the 25% you consider optimistic. (Vacuum tubes are EASY when you don't need to pump air out of them and can heat the cathodes with focussed sunlight...)... meanwhile creating the navigational hazards of the power beams and still requiring distribution from receiving stations rather than simply generating it via panels at the point of use?
The power beams are not a navigational hazard. You can fly right through them - as can birds. You can also sit on the ground where they're strongest - grazing cattle under the rather lacy rectennas (assuming you put 'em up on grazing land rather than, say, some sterile hunk of rocks and sand.) This is accomplished by picking the right band for the beam - in the millimeter range - where it passes right through water (clouds, birds, people,...) rather than being strongly absorbed (like the K-band microwaves used in ovens, which are tuned to one of water's absorption bands.)
The distribution grid is already there and very efficient. It's eminently suitable for taking power from a few rectennas located in remote regions and distributing it to cities, towns, and rural consumers across the country. What's your gripe with it?
The L5 society investigated and was pushing this a half century ago, and this is what they came up with back then. Some things have improved since. But they didn't really NEED to improve in order to make it practical.
Thinking of "submitters" as a homogeneous mass of nearly-identical units is the kind of category/magical thinking characteristic of the old-line media. That's one of the reasons they're dying off as the internet rises.
Here on the internet the population really is diverse.
Heck: The same individual is often "diverse" from hour to hour. B-)
But you repeatedly said that I could send signals simultaneously and independantly to multiple [remote stations]. If I cannot choose those signals to be identical or different on my whim, then they aren't really independant, are they?
I just showed you a case where the two stations get independent signals.
I happened to pick two examples where I ran the whole math:
- Send a sine wave to station SE but not NE and the same sine wave to station NE but not SW.
- Send a sine wave to station SE but not NE and the negation of that sine wave to station NE but not SW. You can generalize that to sending any signal you want, separately to each remote station.
The general form (for these particular angles) is:
Antenna N signal = real(carrier * ((mod(NE) * coef(N,NE)) + (Mod(SE) * coef(N,SE)))
Antenna S signal = real(carrier * ((mod(NE) * coef(S,NE)) + (mod(SE) * coef(S,SE)))
Arithmetic is complex numbers. Carrier is e^(i*omega*t), i.e. a cosine wave and an imaginary sine wave (i.e. the cosine wave delayed by a quarter cycle is the imaginary part of the complex number).
For this two-antenna, two-station case: one of the coef(ficients) is 1 and the other just a phase rotation: (cos(d) + i*sin(d)), where d-pi radians is the delay you would need to make the signals from the two antennas match exactly at the station you're trying NOT to send this modulation to. Adding pi inverts the signal from that antenna and causes it to cancel exactly at the "don't hear me" station. This second coefficient is a complex number which also has magnitude one. (For more than two antennas and two remote stations the coefficients will have varying magnitudes as well as phase angles.)
... [$]222,000 is in no way reasonable (~9k per song).
Penalties for copyright violations are deliberately draconian and have been since the beginning of the law.
The idea is apparently that:
- It's very hard to identify the violators (or even that a violation took place).
- So only a small fraction will be caught.
- If the penalties are comparable to the actual damage of the offense (a pittance), potential offenders may simply make take the chance - and be rewarded on the average by nearly-free copies.
- So the penalties are set high in proportion to this fraction.
- With high penalties the offenders' bet becomes a losing proposition, a low probability of a big hit. Paying for the content in the first place becomes cheap insurance.
- And with high penalties the copyright holders can make enough from the small fraction they do catch and convict to be "made whole" on their losses from the great mass they miss.
Of course there are problems with this. And the biggest one is with the standard of proof.
Civil law is about making things right. Two roughly equal parties with a dispute go to a court. The court decides which is more likely to be right ("preponderance of evidence" rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt"). The one found to be in the wrong pays the amount needed to make things right. If the one found in the wrong was found to have known what was right and been wrong deliberately, that typically means he pays the wronged party three times the amount of correcting the harm, rather than just the amount.
- Draconian penalties to shift the expected outcome of a rule-breaker's bet is the stuff of criminal law, with its higher standard of proof.
- A person paying, not only for his own misdeeds, but for that of thousands of others, is hardly "setting right" the result of their own misbehavior.
- If the punishment is to be, not three times, but nine thousand times the cost of the alleged offense, how fair is it to use a "more likely than not" standard? If an innocent person is to be put at risk of paying nine thousand times the price of the stuff he allegedly obtained, shouldn't this require a "nine-thousand-to-one" standard to prove the case?
On re-reading I see what you were getting at. Let's try that again:
Two sine waves of the same frequency added together will always add to one single sine wave (which is how you get 208V from two 120V power phases), and if the two components are 105 degrees apart (360-255=105), that single sine wave will have 159% of the strength of one of the components (whereas if the signal power was not split between the antennas this would be 200%). Since it leaves both antennas at the same time, and they are one wavelength apart, the radiation pattern will have a 3db gain (not relative to the 159%) at the north, south, east, and west points with nulls in between each point. What am I missing?
You're missing that the two sine waves are equal strength and phase (in your simplified, symmetric, case) only when both stations are supposed to hear an equal amount of signal and hear it with the same phase (as measured at the transmitting location). If the modulation later calls for the NE station to hear the signal 180 degrees out of phase (compared to the previous case) its component at the antennas will be phase shifted. The signals at the two antennas will no longer be in-phase and equal.
In your first case the N antenna gets one sine wave at 0 degrees and another at -0.207 * 360 = -74.52. In the second case it gets one sine wave at 0 degrees and another at -0.707 * 360 = -105.48. Meanwhile the S antenna had 0 & -74.5 in the first case and -180 & -74.52 in the second.
case 1:
- N antenna: Phase -37.26 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 74.52 degrees.
- S antenna: Phase -37.26 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 74.52 degrees.
case 2:
- N antenna: Phase -52.74 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 105.48 degrees.
- S antenna: Phase -127.26 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 105.48 degrees.
Let me describe the simplest example I can think of so you can point out to me where I'm not getting it.
Sure.
Say you want to transmit the same simple carrier wave to two points at the same time. You are using two dipoles oriented vertically to transmit, one is directly north of the other, one wavelength away (just using one wavelength to make the math simple - if a different number is needed, let me know). One of the receivers is at 45 degrees (northeast) and the other is at 135 degrees (southeast).
So far so good. Here comes the oopsie:
For the northeast station to receive a coherent signal, the signal needs to leave the southern antenna.707 wavelengths (or sqrt(2)/2*360 = 255 degrees) ahead of the northern antenna. For the southeast station to receive a coherent signal, the opposite is true.
Here's where you're starting to go wrong. You don't need the northeast station to hear the strongest possible signal (be in the middle of the antenna pattern's major "loop".) What you need is for it to NOT hear the signal intended for the SOUTHEAST station (be bang in the middle of one of the "null"s in the pattern intended for that station.) Loops are broad. Nulls are sharp. You want the best ratio of "my signal vs. other guy's signal", which is achieved by minimizing the other guy's signal rather than maximizing your own.
So if you just add the signals together, you're sending out two sine waves simultaneously out of both antennas. Two sine waves of the same frequency added together will always add to one single sine wave (which is how you get 208V from two 120V power phases),
Yes.
But that will also be true if they're NOT in phase. Adding two sine waves of divergent amplitude and phase still gives you a sine wave of the same frequency. But to get the strength and phase you need to take the vector sum. If the vector sum from all the antennas cancels out you STILL get a sine wave of the correct frequency - but one with zero amplitude.
In your two antenna case they have to be the same strength and the phase difference plus the propagation time difference total to 180 degrees to cancel completely.
and if the two components are 105 degrees apart (360-255=105), that single sine wave will have 159% of the strength of one of the components (whereas if the signal power was not split between the antennas this would be 200%). Since it leaves both antennas at the same time, and they are one wavelength apart, the radiation pattern will have a 3db gain (not relative to the 159%) at the north, south, east, and west points with nulls in between each point. What am I missing?
That's fine as far as it goes. Your in-phase signal goes N, S, E, and W and has four nulls in between. But this has nothing to do with the remote stations in the NE and SE directions.
You're not analyzing what happens when you shift the phase of the signals going to the two antennas.
The South antenna's signal gets to the SE receiver 0.707 of a cycle earlier than that from the north antenna. To put a null on the SE receiver you need that to be 0.5. So you delay the signal to the S antenna by 0.207 cycle.
As viewed by the NE receiver the signal from the South antenna is delayed by 0.707 cycle by the propagation delay plus 0.207 cycle by the deliberate phase difference at the South antenna, for a total delay of 0.914 cycle. They're almost in phase, and add up really well. So the SE station is at a null, while the NE station is ALMOST at the middle of a loop. The NE station hears this signal just fine, while the SE station doesn't hear it at all.
Similarly if you delay the NE antenna by 0.207 cycle the NE station will not hear THIS signal at all and the SE station will hear it just fine.
Now modulate the two signals separately, one with the stuff you want to send to the NE station, one with stuff for the SE. Add 'em up and put 'em into the antennas. It's a linear process so the sum of the comp
The SIP protocol offers many novel ways to communicate. The least of which is a simple phone call. In one way, it is vonage's fault for choosing to stick to dumb phone call only because there were many neat possibilities awaiting consumers in SIP.
The SIP protocol also lets anybody play without paying for anything (except for generic network service).
With SIP the ONLY thing Vonage has to sell that can't be had for free is bridging to the public switched telephone network. Which is what those patents are about.
"Invention" is coming up with the idea, by definition.
Once someone comes up with the idea, there's a lot of development to do before it becomes a working prototype and then a marketable product. (Edison: "... one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.") That 99% stage requires a lot of money.
If somebody isn't already independently wealthy, he'll need to find backers. One of the primary purposes of the patent system is to protect the inventor during this stage. A prospective backer would get a LOT more money from a good invention if he just went ahead and developed it himself than if he paid the inventor a healthy chunk of the profits. When the inventor has a patent in hand this sort of cheating is precluded.
Without a patent system (or something like it) the little guys with expensive-but-profitable ideas have NO chance of benefitting from their own work. With it they have a shot.
= = = =
Software is a very different case from most inventions: There the capital cost is small enough that a single person working in "spare time" or a small team under non-disclosure agreement can bring a product to market without a large infustion of venture capital. Copyright is adequate to prevent verbatim cloning and with very low manufacturing costs a large profit can be made and a brand established before competition can re-implement most products. The patent system, designed around high capital costs and long implementation and payback times, isn't necessary for software-product incentive creation - but does produce a massive retardation by creating a "MINE! field" for future innovators.
I'll change my registration just before the primary to Republican so I can vote for Ron Paul. Then afterwards I'll change it right back to "No Party Preference".
Since your affiliation affects only which primary you can vote in, it doesn't hurt to have it set any way that's convenient.
I understand that for some states the cutoff for party change is coming up in a week or so. Even if it isn't, changing now means you won't risk forgetting it until it's too late. It also means you'll have a chance to correct any errors before the deadline.
(Errors are very common. I've registered once and changed my party affiliation about three times since moving to California, and twice they screwed up and gave me a second registration instead - once with my name misspelled. They also "lost" my initial registration, which had to be repeated.)
This is stupid, with an open primary I could vote for the best candidate for each party.
The party system consists of competing factions, who each chose their own candidate. As independent, non-governmental, organizations, they get to set their own rules for that process. Primaries are just a convenience for the parties, letting them poll their supporters. They are strictly advisory, regardless of what laws the states chose to pass.
California tried an open primary. They couldn't make it stick: The Republicans chose only to pay attention to the votes of those whose registered preference was Republican. If they'd wanted, they could have held caucuses where the actual party members selected the deligates (which is what they would have done if California hadn't broken out the vote totals by party preference).
So if you want to help get Ron Paul onto the election ballot, you need to change your affiliation in time to have it take effect.
(Which reminds me: *I* need to check whether I'm registered as R this time around... B-) )
A store somehow registering you so you can walk in, pick up an item and put it in your pocket to purchase, and walk out.
Not quite right.
How about: "A store recording your billing and shipping information, so you can walk in, point to an item, and tell the salesman to 'deliver it to my place and put it on my account'"
No patents without implementation! That's one essential reform.
So you'd deny Keith Henson his satellite launching whip patent - just because he can't afford to buy a 747, modify it to attach the tow cable, and do aerobatics with it until he gets a payload out of the atmosphere?
Ditto if I put a cellphone-net modem in my laptop and programmed the laptop to advertise its new IP address to the routing daemon of my home machine whenever the laptop came up on the net - or did the equivalent on, say, a linux-based cellphone.
In this case would a mail transfer agent on the home machine, programmed in the normal way to forward mail to the laptop's or cellphone's MTA, also be infringing "push technology"?
Now substitute "the ISP's routing daemon" for "my home machine's routing daemon". Isn't that just a normal internet-connected computer that happens to connect to its ISP by a wireless link (and maybe happens to be portable)? Isn't everything else absolutely normal?
Technically NTP's patents are not for sending wireless email... rather, the patents are more about the "push" technology that is used.
How is their patented "push technology" different from, say, someone with a linux based phone running a stock mail transfer agent (such as sendmail or its successors) on the phone, with his ISP's MTA programmed to forward his mail to his own MTA in the normal fashion, and BIFF (or one of its successors) set up to beep at him when new mail arrives? This is a straightforward configuration of standard components. If you want to be able to read your email when out of range of the cell network it's the obvious way to configure it. No "invention" required.
I have a site, for instance, that receives mail by periodic polling of the ISP using UUCP-over-IP with dialup UUCP backup. If I were to move it to a linux phone - or clone the configuration - and switch the initiation of scheduled UUCP polling from my side to the ISP's side, I'd have one form of what I described in the paragraph above. It would be a typical mail configuration from the earliest days of UUCP-internet mail bridging. The sole change would be that the user's terminal happens to be a cellphone and the dialup polling happens to be by "radio phone" rather than landline.
Similarly if the cloned configuration accepted mail forwarded via SMTP, with the ISP's mail servers as some of the MX record entries (or the only ones), so inbound mail has somewhere to go when the phone itself isn't present on the net.
The only threat is if someone where to enable this, not reboot, and then have the machine stolen.
I see what is possibly another. I may enable a hole of this form:
If someone gets access to the disk or its contents before the reboot, they can clone the state of the encryption software - which will do one "unlocked" reboot. Later (up to a point where the encryption key is changed) they can shut down the machine, reapply this state, and bring it up without the password, gaining access to data that has been added or updated since the state was cloned.
I see ways to prevent this sort of attack. But they'd have to be built in with blocking such an attack in mind - which means the feature and defense against its corruption would have to be taken into account in the architecture of the rest of the product. (They'd also greatly increase the risk of corrupting the encryption software in a way that prevents even the authorized user from referencing the disk in case of, for instance, power problems on startup or an ungraceful shutdown.)
Slashdot Mirror
Please, wait until the rest of all Brazilian routers are confiscated before making the rest of your jokes. I mean are those jokes that good that they can't wait a day or two?
But then the people in Brazil won't see them.
As I understand a recent theory:
- Sunspots are associated with increased solar wind and coronal mass ejections,
- This improves the magnetic/plasma shielding of the earth from cosmic rays,
- Which reduces the nucleation of water droplets,
- Which reduces cloud cover,
- Which reduces reflection of sunlight,
and this reflection of sunlight totally swamps the minor change in the solar radiant output.
When the sun goes through a prolonged period of no sunspots the result is enough of an increase in reflection of sunlight to significantly drop the Earth's temperature.
If you compare the graph of sunspot numbers linked from the great-great-great-grandparent post to the wikipedia article on the "Little Ice Age" you'll see that the sunspots-went-away period from about 1650 to 1700 corresponds to the first - and drastically deepest - temperature drop. MAJOR global cooling - the temperature crash at the end of the medieval warm period which we've just recovered from.
Seems to me an "All Quiet Alert" is appropriate. This could be the start of some significant global cooling.
And that could be a problem. According to the orbit-based climate forcing models the peak of the last interglacial corresponded to the start of agriculture, and temperature should have begun a gradual but accelerating descent into the next ice age, which should have been moderately steep by now. Instead it pretty much leveled out (ignoring "minor" bumps like the two I just named and the recent upslope). If fossil-fuel greenhouse gasses are indeed holding back a downhill slide we could be in pretty sad shape in about four more centuries, when the fossil carbon runs out. And once that snow persists into summer it does a darned good job of reflecting sunlight, too.
Meanwhile, if we're going into a cold period and at the same time are cutting our carbon emissions in order to "stave off global warming" - with a resulting drastic hit on the economy - we could generate the scenario Niven and Pournelle described in _Angels Down_.
Bummer!
... if you want to beat google in the search engine market, give good "erotic" results.
Google gives just FINE erotic search results if you turn off "safe search".
Go to image search and search for anything. You'll find a link to the safe search configuration at the bottom of the results page. Set it to show you everything and rerun your search. (If you've got cookies on it will also remember you turned it off when it does future searches.)
The other thing that caught my attention was Bussard's comment that they should go straight to full scale. ... Most people ... would be sceptical... When you are trying something new, there is almost always a gotcha or two.
In this case he believed he had the scaling laws down. With power proportional to the seventh power of the radius and energy gain proportional to the fifth power, you were only talking about building a device maybe 10 times the radius of the lab device. That's TINY as fusion experiments go, and also compared to fission plants. And the thing is basically a slightly gassy vacuum tube with some magnets in it, i.e. mostly empty space, very little material.
If there are any gotchas you'd have to scale it up about that much to find them. So why go halfway and then build a full-size one when, if it turns out there AREN'T any gotchas you've got an operating power plant on the next step?
His plan was to do two more small prototypes, to get some more solid data than his three-neutron final run and compare two geometries for the final deaign, then go for the gotchas-or-gold. If it works, it gets you to production right away and you didn't spend a dime on yet another intermediate prototype. If it doesn't, you're not out all that much more than if you built some intermediate size that was maybe big enough to find the gotchas.
Suppose there AREN'T any gotchas. Then we get to working fusion power years sooner. Ditto if there are gotchas that only show up at the scale between the intermediate prototype and the full-size design. In either case the time spent on the middle-size below-break-even prototype was wasted.
Baby steps are for people who get their money from researching and will be looking for a new job once things are actually working. Big steps are for people who want to get to the finish line.
This thread is starting to drop off the end of my posting history.
If you'd like to continue I've started a journal entry for further discussion.
I'll reply to your above post after you've posted there to indicate that you made the move.
For what it's worth, this story appears to be fake.
If so, I would not be surprised if it inspired the real thing at some point in the near future.
Any bets?
You're off on several items:
...
... meanwhile creating the navigational hazards of the power beams and still requiring distribution from receiving stations rather than simply generating it via panels at the point of use?
...) rather than being strongly absorbed (like the K-band microwaves used in ovens, which are tuned to one of water's absorption bands.)
How is it better to lift your solar panels into orbit, generate your electricity, then beam it to the surface at (optimistically) 50% efficiency, and then receive the beamed power at (optimistically) 50% efficiency,
First: It isn't necessarily panels. Steam plants work just fine, and are much cheaper to build and lift.
Second: There's 7 times the power per square foot available up there due to lack of atmospheric attenuation and the 24/7 nature of sunlight in space, compared to the atmosphere-and-weather-compromised equivalent of 5 or so noontime-hours-worth you get on the ground.
Third: As of the '60s they could already do > 90% DC in at orbit to DC out on the ground, using masers and TWT amplifiers in orbit and schottky diode based rectennas on the ground, not the 25% you consider optimistic. (Vacuum tubes are EASY when you don't need to pump air out of them and can heat the cathodes with focussed sunlight...)
The power beams are not a navigational hazard. You can fly right through them - as can birds. You can also sit on the ground where they're strongest - grazing cattle under the rather lacy rectennas (assuming you put 'em up on grazing land rather than, say, some sterile hunk of rocks and sand.) This is accomplished by picking the right band for the beam - in the millimeter range - where it passes right through water (clouds, birds, people,
The distribution grid is already there and very efficient. It's eminently suitable for taking power from a few rectennas located in remote regions and distributing it to cities, towns, and rural consumers across the country. What's your gripe with it?
The L5 society investigated and was pushing this a half century ago, and this is what they came up with back then. Some things have improved since. But they didn't really NEED to improve in order to make it practical.
Just what we need: A phone that can also serve as a polygraph. Now when the spooks record your conversations they can tell when you're lying. ;-)
This is slashdot. The population is diverse.
Thinking of "submitters" as a homogeneous mass of nearly-identical units is the kind of category/magical thinking characteristic of the old-line media. That's one of the reasons they're dying off as the internet rises.
Here on the internet the population really is diverse.
Heck: The same individual is often "diverse" from hour to hour. B-)
So who cares if the thing can fly...you're probably going to get creamed once you join up with traffic on a busy road.
My first thought on seeing that was: "What's a fender-bender going to do to your expensive folding plane when the 'fender' is a wing?"
Will these things be airworthy after a 5MPH crash? Bet they're not.
Antigravity makes flying vehicles much more controllable.
And violating conservation of energy (or puling the extra energy from somewhere unexplained) helps a lot with fuel costs.
But you repeatedly said that I could send signals simultaneously and independantly to multiple [remote stations]. If I cannot choose those signals to be identical or different on my whim, then they aren't really independant, are they?
I just showed you a case where the two stations get independent signals.
I happened to pick two examples where I ran the whole math:
- Send a sine wave to station SE but not NE and the same sine wave to station NE but not SW.
- Send a sine wave to station SE but not NE and the negation of that sine wave to station NE but not SW.
You can generalize that to sending any signal you want, separately to each remote station.
The general form (for these particular angles) is:
Antenna N signal = real(carrier * ((mod(NE) * coef(N,NE)) + (Mod(SE) * coef(N,SE)))
Antenna S signal = real(carrier * ((mod(NE) * coef(S,NE)) + (mod(SE) * coef(S,SE)))
Arithmetic is complex numbers. Carrier is e^(i*omega*t), i.e. a cosine wave and an imaginary sine wave (i.e. the cosine wave delayed by a quarter cycle is the imaginary part of the complex number).
For this two-antenna, two-station case: one of the coef(ficients) is 1 and the other just a phase rotation: (cos(d) + i*sin(d)), where d-pi radians is the delay you would need to make the signals from the two antennas match exactly at the station you're trying NOT to send this modulation to. Adding pi inverts the signal from that antenna and causes it to cancel exactly at the "don't hear me" station. This second coefficient is a complex number which also has magnitude one. (For more than two antennas and two remote stations the coefficients will have varying magnitudes as well as phase angles.)
... [$]222,000 is in no way reasonable (~9k per song).
Penalties for copyright violations are deliberately draconian and have been since the beginning of the law.
The idea is apparently that:
- It's very hard to identify the violators (or even that a violation took place).
- So only a small fraction will be caught.
- If the penalties are comparable to the actual damage of the offense (a pittance), potential offenders may simply make take the chance - and be rewarded on the average by nearly-free copies.
- So the penalties are set high in proportion to this fraction.
- With high penalties the offenders' bet becomes a losing proposition, a low probability of a big hit. Paying for the content in the first place becomes cheap insurance.
- And with high penalties the copyright holders can make enough from the small fraction they do catch and convict to be "made whole" on their losses from the great mass they miss.
Of course there are problems with this. And the biggest one is with the standard of proof.
Civil law is about making things right. Two roughly equal parties with a dispute go to a court. The court decides which is more likely to be right ("preponderance of evidence" rather than "beyond a reasonable doubt"). The one found to be in the wrong pays the amount needed to make things right. If the one found in the wrong was found to have known what was right and been wrong deliberately, that typically means he pays the wronged party three times the amount of correcting the harm, rather than just the amount.
- Draconian penalties to shift the expected outcome of a rule-breaker's bet is the stuff of criminal law, with its higher standard of proof.
- A person paying, not only for his own misdeeds, but for that of thousands of others, is hardly "setting right" the result of their own misbehavior.
- If the punishment is to be, not three times, but nine thousand times the cost of the alleged offense, how fair is it to use a "more likely than not" standard? If an innocent person is to be put at risk of paying nine thousand times the price of the stuff he allegedly obtained, shouldn't this require a "nine-thousand-to-one" standard to prove the case?
... the AP's writeup, which like most MSM coverage doesn't mention any privacy implications.
Privacy? With OnStar?
They can already:
- Locate the vehicle and
- Bug the conversations in it.
Seems to me adding the ability to halt the car has no privacy implications because there IS no privacy with OnStar (or a similar system) installed.
On re-reading I see what you were getting at. Let's try that again:
Two sine waves of the same frequency added together will always add to one single sine wave (which is how you get 208V from two 120V power phases), and if the two components are 105 degrees apart (360-255=105), that single sine wave will have 159% of the strength of one of the components (whereas if the signal power was not split between the antennas this would be 200%). Since it leaves both antennas at the same time, and they are one wavelength apart, the radiation pattern will have a 3db gain (not relative to the 159%) at the north, south, east, and west points with nulls in between each point. What am I missing?
You're missing that the two sine waves are equal strength and phase (in your simplified, symmetric, case) only when both stations are supposed to hear an equal amount of signal and hear it with the same phase (as measured at the transmitting location). If the modulation later calls for the NE station to hear the signal 180 degrees out of phase (compared to the previous case) its component at the antennas will be phase shifted. The signals at the two antennas will no longer be in-phase and equal.
In your first case the N antenna gets one sine wave at 0 degrees and another at -0.207 * 360 = -74.52. In the second case it gets one sine wave at 0 degrees and another at -0.707 * 360 = -105.48. Meanwhile the S antenna had 0 & -74.5 in the first case and -180 & -74.52 in the second.
case 1:
- N antenna: Phase -37.26 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 74.52 degrees.
- S antenna: Phase -37.26 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 74.52 degrees.
case 2:
- N antenna: Phase -52.74 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 105.48 degrees.
- S antenna: Phase -127.26 degrees. Amplitude 1+cos 105.48 degrees.
See how that works?
Let me describe the simplest example I can think of so you can point out to me where I'm not getting it.
.707 wavelengths (or sqrt(2)/2*360 = 255 degrees) ahead of the northern antenna. For the southeast station to receive a coherent signal, the opposite is true.
Sure.
Say you want to transmit the same simple carrier wave to two points at the same time. You are using two dipoles oriented vertically to transmit, one is directly north of the other, one wavelength away (just using one wavelength to make the math simple - if a different number is needed, let me know). One of the receivers is at 45 degrees (northeast) and the other is at 135 degrees (southeast).
So far so good. Here comes the oopsie:
For the northeast station to receive a coherent signal, the signal needs to leave the southern antenna
Here's where you're starting to go wrong. You don't need the northeast station to hear the strongest possible signal (be in the middle of the antenna pattern's major "loop".) What you need is for it to NOT hear the signal intended for the SOUTHEAST station (be bang in the middle of one of the "null"s in the pattern intended for that station.) Loops are broad. Nulls are sharp. You want the best ratio of "my signal vs. other guy's signal", which is achieved by minimizing the other guy's signal rather than maximizing your own.
So if you just add the signals together, you're sending out two sine waves simultaneously out of both antennas. Two sine waves of the same frequency added together will always add to one single sine wave (which is how you get 208V from two 120V power phases),
Yes.
But that will also be true if they're NOT in phase. Adding two sine waves of divergent amplitude and phase still gives you a sine wave of the same frequency. But to get the strength and phase you need to take the vector sum. If the vector sum from all the antennas cancels out you STILL get a sine wave of the correct frequency - but one with zero amplitude.
In your two antenna case they have to be the same strength and the phase difference plus the propagation time difference total to 180 degrees to cancel completely.
and if the two components are 105 degrees apart (360-255=105), that single sine wave will have 159% of the strength of one of the components (whereas if the signal power was not split between the antennas this would be 200%). Since it leaves both antennas at the same time, and they are one wavelength apart, the radiation pattern will have a 3db gain (not relative to the 159%) at the north, south, east, and west points with nulls in between each point. What am I missing?
That's fine as far as it goes. Your in-phase signal goes N, S, E, and W and has four nulls in between. But this has nothing to do with the remote stations in the NE and SE directions.
You're not analyzing what happens when you shift the phase of the signals going to the two antennas.
The South antenna's signal gets to the SE receiver 0.707 of a cycle earlier than that from the north antenna. To put a null on the SE receiver you need that to be 0.5. So you delay the signal to the S antenna by 0.207 cycle.
As viewed by the NE receiver the signal from the South antenna is delayed by 0.707 cycle by the propagation delay plus 0.207 cycle by the deliberate phase difference at the South antenna, for a total delay of 0.914 cycle. They're almost in phase, and add up really well. So the SE station is at a null, while the NE station is ALMOST at the middle of a loop. The NE station hears this signal just fine, while the SE station doesn't hear it at all.
Similarly if you delay the NE antenna by 0.207 cycle the NE station will not hear THIS signal at all and the SE station will hear it just fine.
Now modulate the two signals separately, one with the stuff you want to send to the NE station, one with stuff for the SE. Add 'em up and put 'em into the antennas. It's a linear process so the sum of the comp
The SIP protocol offers many novel ways to communicate. The least of which is a simple phone call. In one way, it is vonage's fault for choosing to stick to dumb phone call only because there were many neat possibilities awaiting consumers in SIP.
The SIP protocol also lets anybody play without paying for anything (except for generic network service).
With SIP the ONLY thing Vonage has to sell that can't be had for free is bridging to the public switched telephone network. Which is what those patents are about.
Hell, they even landed a city (Atlantis) from a non-orbit.
Whatever. I suppose with enough shields and inertia dampeners you can do almost anything.
No Kidding.
The stuff they did with Boston after mounting it on that guitar-shaped spaceframe are really impressive.
Reentry capability after interstellar flight was a necessity, while hovering on pressor beams simplified the search for a suitable landing area. The asteroid clearing capabilities made manouvering in planetary ring systems possible and the debris shielding was impressive. Needed a little boost to get out of the atmosphere, though.
The early prototypes weren't as sleek but worked pretty well, too.
"Invention" is coming up with the idea, by definition.
Once someone comes up with the idea, there's a lot of development to do before it becomes a working prototype and then a marketable product. (Edison: "... one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration.") That 99% stage requires a lot of money.
If somebody isn't already independently wealthy, he'll need to find backers. One of the primary purposes of the patent system is to protect the inventor during this stage. A prospective backer would get a LOT more money from a good invention if he just went ahead and developed it himself than if he paid the inventor a healthy chunk of the profits. When the inventor has a patent in hand this sort of cheating is precluded.
Without a patent system (or something like it) the little guys with expensive-but-profitable ideas have NO chance of benefitting from their own work. With it they have a shot.
= = = =
Software is a very different case from most inventions: There the capital cost is small enough that a single person working in "spare time" or a small team under non-disclosure agreement can bring a product to market without a large infustion of venture capital. Copyright is adequate to prevent verbatim cloning and with very low manufacturing costs a large profit can be made and a brand established before competition can re-implement most products. The patent system, designed around high capital costs and long implementation and payback times, isn't necessary for software-product incentive creation - but does produce a massive retardation by creating a "MINE! field" for future innovators.
I'll change my registration just before the primary to Republican so I can vote for Ron Paul. Then afterwards I'll change it right back to "No Party Preference".
Since your affiliation affects only which primary you can vote in, it doesn't hurt to have it set any way that's convenient.
I understand that for some states the cutoff for party change is coming up in a week or so. Even if it isn't, changing now means you won't risk forgetting it until it's too late. It also means you'll have a chance to correct any errors before the deadline.
(Errors are very common. I've registered once and changed my party affiliation about three times since moving to California, and twice they screwed up and gave me a second registration instead - once with my name misspelled. They also "lost" my initial registration, which had to be repeated.)
This is stupid, with an open primary I could vote for the best candidate for each party.
The party system consists of competing factions, who each chose their own candidate. As independent, non-governmental, organizations, they get to set their own rules for that process. Primaries are just a convenience for the parties, letting them poll their supporters. They are strictly advisory, regardless of what laws the states chose to pass.
California tried an open primary. They couldn't make it stick: The Republicans chose only to pay attention to the votes of those whose registered preference was Republican. If they'd wanted, they could have held caucuses where the actual party members selected the deligates (which is what they would have done if California hadn't broken out the vote totals by party preference).
So if you want to help get Ron Paul onto the election ballot, you need to change your affiliation in time to have it take effect.
(Which reminds me: *I* need to check whether I'm registered as R this time around... B-) )
A store somehow registering you so you can walk in, pick up an item and put it in your pocket to purchase, and walk out.
Not quite right.
How about: "A store recording your billing and shipping information, so you can walk in, point to an item, and tell the salesman to 'deliver it to my place and put it on my account'"
No patents without implementation! That's one essential reform.
So you'd deny Keith Henson his satellite launching whip patent - just because he can't afford to buy a 747, modify it to attach the tow cable, and do aerobatics with it until he gets a payload out of the atmosphere?
Ditto if I put a cellphone-net modem in my laptop and programmed the laptop to advertise its new IP address to the routing daemon of my home machine whenever the laptop came up on the net - or did the equivalent on, say, a linux-based cellphone.
In this case would a mail transfer agent on the home machine, programmed in the normal way to forward mail to the laptop's or cellphone's MTA, also be infringing "push technology"?
Now substitute "the ISP's routing daemon" for "my home machine's routing daemon". Isn't that just a normal internet-connected computer that happens to connect to its ISP by a wireless link (and maybe happens to be portable)? Isn't everything else absolutely normal?
Technically NTP's patents are not for sending wireless email... rather, the patents are more about the "push" technology that is used.
How is their patented "push technology" different from, say, someone with a linux based phone running a stock mail transfer agent (such as sendmail or its successors) on the phone, with his ISP's MTA programmed to forward his mail to his own MTA in the normal fashion, and BIFF (or one of its successors) set up to beep at him when new mail arrives? This is a straightforward configuration of standard components. If you want to be able to read your email when out of range of the cell network it's the obvious way to configure it. No "invention" required.
I have a site, for instance, that receives mail by periodic polling of the ISP using UUCP-over-IP with dialup UUCP backup. If I were to move it to a linux phone - or clone the configuration - and switch the initiation of scheduled UUCP polling from my side to the ISP's side, I'd have one form of what I described in the paragraph above. It would be a typical mail configuration from the earliest days of UUCP-internet mail bridging. The sole change would be that the user's terminal happens to be a cellphone and the dialup polling happens to be by "radio phone" rather than landline.
Similarly if the cloned configuration accepted mail forwarded via SMTP, with the ISP's mail servers as some of the MX record entries (or the only ones), so inbound mail has somewhere to go when the phone itself isn't present on the net.
The only threat is if someone where to enable this, not reboot, and then have the machine stolen.
I see what is possibly another. I may enable a hole of this form:
If someone gets access to the disk or its contents before the reboot, they can clone the state of the encryption software - which will do one "unlocked" reboot. Later (up to a point where the encryption key is changed) they can shut down the machine, reapply this state, and bring it up without the password, gaining access to data that has been added or updated since the state was cloned.
I see ways to prevent this sort of attack. But they'd have to be built in with blocking such an attack in mind - which means the feature and defense against its corruption would have to be taken into account in the architecture of the rest of the product. (They'd also greatly increase the risk of corrupting the encryption software in a way that prevents even the authorized user from referencing the disk in case of, for instance, power problems on startup or an ungraceful shutdown.)