If he doesn't like people poaching "his code", he shouldn't use a free license. If he starts to obfuscate everything, then he'll likely end up killing his fork anyway.
I see a lot of posts here that are assuming that the question came up because the person who forked the code is griping. Though the parent posting here doesn't explicitly say that, it is the first moderated-into-default-visibility where that possibility is implied. Hence I have chosen it for my reply.
The original posting doesn't claim that there ever was any gripe. It is phrased as a simple question, by someone who is just concerned, himself, about possible ethical issues.
Maybe it DID come up because there was a gripe. But let's assume not unless/until the the article author or someone else in the know says otherwise.
Having said that, I'll now chime in on the original question.
A number of other posters have already pointed out that due to the open license (clearly implied by the circumstances) it's squeaky-clean legal to backport any good pieces. And both because that's the intent of open licenses and because the fork essentially lifted the whole project, it's also fair. I concur with both points.
Additionally, from a practical standpoint, backporting the good stuff from the fork to the main reduces the divergence (and reduces the total effort). This is good for both prongs: It makes it easier for someone familiar with one to work with, or work on, the other. And it simplifies matters if the two forks are ever to be remerged into a single project. These two argue for merging, not just where improvements or bug fixes are major, but even if the improvement is minor, cosmetic, or even when it makes an arbitrary choice among several roughly equal alternatives.
So feel free to merge whenever it makes any sense at all for your branch of the tree.
Even simpler, go to a random internet caffe every day, use a random chat cleint on a random server using passphrase convenied in advance.
But the government already knows that the 9/11 hijackers used cybercafes, libraries, and Kinkos sites to get net access for email and possibly other means of communication. Any guesses where the Dept of Internal Security is focusing its electronic eyes?
(And they busted a guy for installing keyloggers in NYC Kinkos and ripping off bank and credit card account numbers and passwords. Expect non-antiterrorist law enforcement to be peeping, too.)
Using the workstations there for anything you don't want the authorities to know is nuts, since they just might be logging keystrokes or otherwise tapping the machine's guts. And if they're e-watching, hooking up your laptop with the firewall screwed down tight and shipping out encrypted traffic is a great way to see if the acres of supercomputers at NSA are up to busting your crypto or the guys there have a remote exploit you don't know about.
At the risk of falling into an "it's not REAL [x]" argument let me disagree with some of your posting.
Sure. Because it never happens that, as one accumulates "territory", one uses it to enforce dictates on those who don't have it, or have less. It never ever leads to a runaway concentration of power -- to higher prosperity for some combined with general misery for most.
Except of course that's exactly what happens.
"Teritory" can be used to enforce an owner's will on those who try to use the owner's property. It can not be used to enforce his will on those who are using their OWN property - even if their property is much smaller. Attempting to control someone else's use of their own stuff is dominance, not territory (even if a piece of property, such as a club, is used as a tool to enforce the dominance).
In the absense of exercise of government power to distort the market or make non-market ownership transfers, no single person or small group can hoard enough of any available type of property to completely dry up the purchasable supply - because the price rises without limit as the supply dwindles. (Such attemts are just a simple way to dissipate a large fortune. You can't get it back by selling off the horde, because selling it depresses the price again.)
Even if someone does accumulate a large enough chunk of something to invonvenience his neighbors, his heirs, or their heirs, may not be as interested in holding it together, so eventually it is broken up and sold off again. Only institutions can accumulate and hold monopolistic real estate or commodity hordes across generations (as they did in the Middle Ages in Europe - until the resulting civil unrest forced the breakup - of the hordes or the institutions). This is why the US government (the results of one of the earliest of those revolutions) has bans on perpetuities and entailments. (Corporations can also span generations, but they can also be broken up from outside. Non-profits, though, seem to be trying to recreate the problems of the middle ages.)
Unfortunately, governments themselves are authorities, and their codification of the rules of property is an exercise of authority. As a result, property laws tend to be a mix of encoding of territorial and authoritarian mechanisms.
If they JUST encoded territory, for instance, there'd be no emminent domain. There'd have been no sweetheart deals for the railroads in the 18th century, stealing 10-mile wide swaths through people's farms adjacent to the route they picked as they built across the plains. Anyone wanting to build a road, bury a pipeline, run a power line, or do any of the things that currently excuse over 500 agencies bullying people off their land, would have to buy options from landowners until he accumulated a route.
Property taxes are another deviation. If it's YOURS, why do you have to anually pay a significant fraction of its value to the government, which will take the property from you if you don't pay up? That's dominance, not territory. And it's a significant factor in raising the price of housing beyond the reach of the lower income.
Then there's zoning/land use planning. In the name of "quality of life" and "preventing urban sprawl" these severely curtail the availability of real property and again raise its price - protecting the interests of current owners at the expense of prospective home buyers and builders. Pikers compared to "wilderness areas", of course.
Housing codes raise the price again. Contractor licensing ditto. Inspections. All "for your own good" of course, and the government knows what that is better than you, eh? Dominance.
Government "programs": "Urban renewal" - kick the poor out of their houses and sell the land at below market price to developers, who may build walled communities to sell to the rich, or stadiums where only the rich can afford a seat. Or just kick 'em out and let the buildings rot, until the rats and criminals move in. "Housing and Urban D
Michael Powell's Incompetence... They can't even friggn manage Power and Freq.
It's the policies Powell is currently promoting that brought you cordless phones and WiFi, and is bringing you UWB PANs, WiMAX, and a host of other stuff.
They're rehacking underused spectrum to make it easier to get new stuff working and deployed, and make it available to you sooner. Some is being sold off, some is being released to a commons.
It's an experiment to see which works better. And it's already bearing fruit.
Maybe the commons will work better. Maybe the property model will. But one thing we DO know already: EACH has already gotten more handy tech into consumers' hands than the licensing regime they replaced.
Well, I am not sure how great we are at predicting the weather now.
As someone who's lived through a half-century of weather prediction technology, I can assure you that it's gotten a LOT better.
There's good reason to believe that, absent some major theoretical breakthrough, there's a "chaos limit" beyond which it can't go - causing the predictions to become unreliable after a few days - the number depending on the stability of the situation. And the current tools are able to both approach the limit and to estimate its location in the current situation.
Broadcast weather reports are NOT an accurate measure of the reliability of prediction technology.
First: They are oversimplified. They claim to tell you exactly what will happen at your spot on the ground - regardless of whether the prediction gives them a basis for doing so. "Scattered showers" might be dead on. But a hundred foot difference in a particular storm cloud's track means your city block get soaked or shined on.
Second: They are show business. "Nice weather, miniscule probability of disaster" will be predicted as disaster - both because it encourages viewers and because they don't want to predict picnic weather and then have the 5% chance of hail hit the jackpot.
IMHO even if they lose their satelite radar's reliability the predictions will get marginally worse but won't go back to what they were in the '50s. Part of the improvement is better data to feed the models. But that radar info is only a tiny part of the new measurement tech. Losing it just means the models sometimes start a bit further off, and deviate sooner. Part of the improvement is better models, and that will stick.
The spectrum is a natural resource which belongs to everyone equally. No one, and no government, has any right to "own," or sell what belongs to everyone. The only legitimate role of government in spectrum is to regulate it to maximize the public good.
The same could be said about land, or water, or trees, or grain, or edible animals, or sexual partners, or the products of other people's labor, or any other desirable thing that is either consumed or busied out by use. (In fact, it often HAS been said.) And it sounds just as sweet and cuddly (the first time you hear it) when applied to any of them.
But it only stays sweet and cuddly until you try to apply the nicey-nice idea to make actual decisions to settle actual conflicts-of-desire. Then it all goes to hell.
When two (or more) people have differing desires about how a particular piece of some resource is to be used (or remain unused) you have a conflict. Only one of them can be satisfied. In millions of years of evolution (including all of human history and invention) only two non-violent ways have been found to settle such conflicts:
1) Dominance. 2) Territory.
Dominance is authority. The highest-ranking decides. The government tells you what to do and what not to do. The company president gets 10 times the salary and 100 times the stock options. The big ape gets the banannas. The bully gets your lunch money. The jocks get all the non-mousey schoolgirls. The guru gets to sleep with all the chicks.
Territory is property. The bird chases others away if confonted near his nest, flees if confronted near someone else's nest. When the lioness comes into heat the first lion of the pride she accepts mates with her while the others stay clear. "I'm yours, my love, and you're mine." The rest of the world may belong to someone else but this piece is MINE! If you want it, offer a swap for something I'd prefer, and accept my decision. Meanwhile, as long as I keep off YOUR pieces I can use it for any damned thing I please.
Dominance puts all the resources in the hands of a tiny elite - and even there gives no confidence, since the higher members trump the lower and the top dog is always ripe for overthrow. Territory lets anybody play. You might not have as MUCH as the big guys. But you have the confidence that you can do what you want with it, and that actually using it won't just bring it to the attention of a bigger ape who will take it away.
Territorial organization promotes prosperity for the little guys, self-esteem, and behavioral diversity. Authoritarian organization promotes constant conflict, fear, social pressure, conformity, and poverty. Even when it works well (as with a working commons) it works because conformity, driven by social pressure, prevents the "tragedy of..." part. Or it works because the dictator is paying attention, is exceptionally smart, and is benevolent - this week.
Consensus decision making is not the solution. It has been tried repeatedly - invariably leading to social conformity, misery, and authoritarian regimes (when the resulting poverty didn't end the experiment first). First conflicting desires lead to deadlocks and paralysis. Then social pressure mechanisms are developed to encourage conformity in order to break the deadlocks. Then, once the mechanisms are entrenched, someone (who doesn't care who gets hurt) realizes that by holding out for his position he can use them to run the show. And collective decision-making evolves into dictatorship.
The PRIMARY justification for government is to provide a single institution to track which piece of conflict-prone resource (such as land, or water rights) belongs to whom, help defend it against encroachment, and be sure it goes to the right heir when an owner dies.
In land the issues are obvious: There's only so much of it. It can be divided into chunks. You need the exclusive use of a chunk of it to establish a home, without which your standard of living
Once the electron is excited to the higher state equalling the difference between the bandgap (5.5 eV) and the NEA value (which is 2.4 eV on hydrogen saturated surfaces) , the electron just flies out of the material instead of becoming delocalized into the crystal.
I'd have thought it would be "An electron in the 5.5v conduction band would be ejected from the crystal with a momentum equaling the difference between the conduction band and electron affinity voltages."
Very sweet if that's the mechanism.
Given that they mentioned "field emission", though, there might be a simpler mechanism.
Field emission is essentially the same thing in a vacuum as a corona discharge is in a gas. If you have a pointed electrode near a broader conducting surface (like a plate or a ring) with a voltage between them, the electric field strength (volts per unit length) is extremely high near the tip of the pointy electrode and falls off as you approach the broad one.
In a gas, the field is enough to ionize the gas near the point but not enough to maintain an arc over to the broad electrode. So there is an ionization current in the form of a "brush discharge" near the point. But as the ions traveling away from the point get beyond the surface where the electric field can maintain the arc, the individual ions dissociate and begin traveling through the gas independently.
Similarly, in a field-emission device the concentration of the field near the point leads to a field strong enough to lift electrons off the point.
In both cases the sharper the point, the stronger the field.
Field emission cathodes have been around for decades. Big downside for a vacuum tube (including a flat-panel display) is that the traces of gas in the chamber become ionized and the positive ion (which is massive) is accellerated toward the cathode and tends to strike on or near the point with considerable energy. This ablates the point, degrading and eventually destroying the cathode.
Diamond dust makes very sharp points, which would make it emit well. It is also very hard and conducts heat well, which might make it survive a lot of ion bombardment.
Polycrystaline diamond coatings (which have LOTS of nanoscopic points) can be easily depositied on many surfaces using a device that is essentially a microwave oven filled with low-pressure methane. The microwaves dissociate the methane at the surface, lifting off the hydrogen and leaving elemental carbon behind. The carbon deposits as a mix of diamonds and graphite. Then the microwaves are absorbed by the graphite, vaporizing it and combining it with the hydrogen lifted off it earlier. The diamond stays behind, and gradually grows by absorbing the carbon from other methane molecules.
How? the way the GPL works is that it depends on copyright. Without copyright the GPL is worthless. People could "take" you code and do anything with it, not have to contribute back, or even put the GPL back on it.
But the MAIN purpose of the GPL (if I understand it correctly) is to prevent the scenario where a software author donates his work to the Public Domain, only to have someone else upgrade it and keep the upgrades proprietary, locking the author out of extending his own work in the same way. (This is particularly bad if the "improvement" is a bug fix.)
When the means to lock the author out is copyright, if copyright is declared not to apply to software this prevents the problem. The original author can turn around and incorporate the changes or make similar changes of his own without risking copyright infringement claims. So no need for GPL.
Patents, on the other hand, explicitly protect exactly such "improve it and keep the improvements" behavior. But GPL doesn't defend against those. (Fortunately, the bar for getting a patent is a LOT higher - though clearly not as high as we'd like when it comes to software.) Domething SIMILAR might be constructed to do so. But it would be a different game.
Regardless of hwo this might play out, and its implications, I can't see this being retroactive to software that already exists...
Quite the contrary.
If software copyrights are struck down by a court as unconstitutional, the effect is as if they had never existed. If the constitution doesn't authorize them NOW, it didn't authorize them THEN either. (Absent a relevant amendment, of course.)
The prohibition is on PASSING retroactive LAWS (for instance, criminalizing something you did while it was legal and then busting you for it).
Back around the '60s or so the University of Michigan cut a similar deal with University Microfilms.
U Microfilms set up and ran a microfilming operation in the library system, microfilming everything that wasn't under copyright (and much that was with permission of the copyright holders, such as several large newspapers and many magazines and other periodicals), along with much of the University's records. Rare books, etc.
(If I have this right) the U got microfilm prints of the documents for free and didn't have to pay for the microfilming of its records. University Microfilms made its money by selling microfilms of the various publications (forwarding royalties, where appropriate, to the copyright holders). The rare books, for instance, could now be studied on microfilm with no further stress on the original, and their content became available at many other colleges and libraries. Good deal all around.
University Microfilms was founded by a regent, who was later slammed for conflict of interest. He dropped out of the Board of Regents but the business deal continued.
And to imply that a 30-50% improvement makes solar a viable market is absurd. Show me a couple orders of magnitude increase in efficiency and I'll believe that there can be a market for solar beyond the niche of granola eaters living in the desert.
The issue with solar versus grid is cost/performance.
Solar power has already surpassed transmitted power infor numerous applications: Small loads alongside roads, new instalations in rural housing, etc. The infrastructure is in place for building and installing it now.
Any improvements in solar costs or cost boosts in grid power will expand the fraction of customers for whom it's the less expensive alternative.
A large enough improvement will make it cost-effective for supplemental use and/or backfeed even in some urban areas (mainly those with reliable sun illumination). That cutover is within reach - well under a factor of ten.
Some places (urban areas in high lattitudes, cloudy or otherwise shaded areas, large industrial processes) will probably never be better served by local solar than by grid connection. But sufficient improvement in panel efficiency and/or raises in fuel costs will make solar practical for grid generation plants, too, in some parts of the country. Again less than a factor of ten could lead to cutover from fossil fuel to industrial solar arrays especially in sunny areas with low land prices.
China is industrializing and has an enormous population. That alone could driver a massive increase in fossil fuel costs - especially since mobile uses are easier to feed with liquid fuels than stored power (until THAT technology improves further).
Even if that were true, [which it isn't] solar would save hugely on transmission costs.
Which is why it's already in heavy use in places where the load is small (road signs, yard lights, emergency phones) the location is remote (rural areas) or sometimes where solar is more reliable than the grid (areas far from the primary generation with heavy weather causing frequent line damage).
It costs an ENORMOUS amount to run power even a fraction of a mile, let alone tens of miles, for a new hookup in an area not otherwise served. Even if you're only going to count the ENERGY cost, think about how much energy it takes:
- to mine the ore and process it into steel and copper for the transformer, wires, guy wires, fittings, (and that power meter...)
- to melt the sand and make it into insultors
- to cut the trees and process them into poles
- to haul it all onsite, dig holes, set poles in them, string it up, and haul the workers back and forth from home for weeks
- to build the fraction of the rest of the grid and power plant thatbecomes dedicated to supplying power to that hookup. THAT, not the energy supplied by the panel, is the appropriate energy to compare when looking at the panel's "energy cost". The purpose of the panel is not just to extract energy from sun, but to deliver it WHERE IT'S WANTED. The grid has an energy cost far beyond the part that's actually delivered to a remote load. Modern solar panels, on the other hand, are apparently alread, not just better in some situations, but actually a net gain (despite old rumors to the contraray). They should become moreso with further technological improvement.
In the absense of government meddling (and to a large extent even WITH government meddling), price tends to be a reasonably reliable signal of how much stuff that people value (energy, raw material, people's time, environmental quality) is being used up to provide something. When total solar systems become less expensive than grid connections (with their extreme efficiencies), it's a very good sign that they have also become less of a drain on valuable resources - including energy.
Astropower went bankrupt in February and was bought by GE's PV division in March.
Recycling bum wafers may be a great way to get more value out of the chip making process. But as a standalone business, buying wafers, turning them into solar cells, and turning the cells into panels, it probably doesn't compete well with Evergreen Solar's string ribbon fabrication process.
It might work better if the chip companies did the recycling themselves, and also built panels themselves and/or put standardized cells on the market and let the price find its equilibrium.
Some downsides to this sort of recycling:
The market price of a wafer as a solar cell is a drop in the bucket compared to even one or two of the chips on it (let alone maybe half) being good enough to cut out and sell - and deliberately building extras for the cell trade would drastically increase the cost of the cells. That means any money to be made by selling solar cells will not be factor driving their production quantity (beyond trying to convert all the bad wafers).
The supply of such recycled-as-solar-cell wafers will thus be completely driven by the market forces on the company's underlying chip business and the yeild percentage of its processes - with the incentive always being to fix the process to improve the yeild of chips - which cuts into the yeild of cells.
This makes it hard to build an independent business based on building a fab to recycle bum wafers from the chip companies into cells as a necessary step in making panels. The supply of raw wafers is too iffy, and using it to make more cells from fresh wafers to meet production targets makes the cost-of-goods fluctuate too much.
A better model might be for the chip manufacturers themselves to add fab steps to recycle their bum chips into cells themselves, and sell them on the open market to panel assemblers. Ideally some of the steps could be done with the same equipment as the chip fabrication (without risking contaminating it and lowering chip yeilds), minimizing the capital cost. Bum wafers could be stockpiled and processed when market fluctuations created gaps in the fab's schedule, or on older equipment or in older fabs that otherwise would be retired or taken out of production for refurbishment. Multi-company standards for the characteristics of the recycled-wafer cells would let a panel manufacturer use cells from multiple fabs, smoothing out market swings between products of different chip manufacturers.
In this scenario a panel manufacturer could invest in only assembly equipment. He could make a recycled-wafer model when the supply of such cells was adequate, and use new-material cells built by a different process (such as string-ribbon) with a less-pricey start point, to make another model when the supply of recycled wafers was inadequate for the demand for panels.
Take a look at some of the research and data on how much naturally radioactive particles are released into the atmosphere through burning of fossil fuels, you'll probably be surprised. I believe it's a few orders of magnitude more than the amount generated in current fission plants.
That comparison makes an assumption: That the radioactive waste leaked by the plant DURING its operation is the ONLY radioactive waste that will be released as a RESULT of its operation. That the other stuff will be contained until it is no longer radioactive.
Now consider how much radioactivity was released by the Chernobyl incident alone. How many coal plants operating for how long producing how many megawatthours would it take to match just that one?
Then there's the waste dump in the Former Soviet Union (TM) that had a chemical explosion blasting much of its radioactive crud into the air.
Then there's the stuff that's leaked out of various other nuclear sites already. And the stuff that's working its way through the bottoms of the tanks in Washington state. And that English reactor that released the radioiodine all over Gernsey(?). I could go on.
And the ones that I missed.
And the ones that none of us have heard about because they haven't happened. Yet.
Yes, much of it is overblown. (Like Three Mile Island, which didn't let all THAT much out.) And reactor technology is getting much better. And waste disposal and/or recycling may be getting better - and has lots of opportunities for further improvement.
But when you're comparing Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants let's be fair about it.
My only question is can I stick a digicam on my gas powered R/C plane, and get the live video feed from it right there on the R/C controller?
As I read it this is strictly a transmitter. There's no receive channel. The whole second processor/WinCE/display business is just control-panel candy, utterly useless for any feedback (though perhaps handy for giving you information on reconfiguring the controls or what they're INTENDED to do on the craft you're currently controlling.)
So no remote-vision. No "semi-autonomous yacht" either, unless you are willing to run it with no feedback from it.
It may make it easier to operate the controls, automate some standard complex functions (i.e. "pull out of spin" button), or synthesize controls that do coordinated operations on multiple control surfaces. But that's about it.
If it DID have a return channel - especially a TV image from a forward-looking camera - that would be a quantum leap. (Such a channel could carry a lot of telemetry back, too, and could easily be augmented to do just about anything you wanted.)
You can't compare two technologies solely on bitrate, you are forgetting power, range, spectrum, equipment size and equipment cost as factors in your comparison.
But you can compare them when you take some of those items into account.
WiMAX (802.11g) - in the appropriate codec for this comparison - gets 70 Mbps out of a 14 MHz channel (a little wider than two TV channels). This system claims 1 Gbps out of a 100 MHz channel and spatial diversity. That's twice the bps/cps, which is about right for using 3->4 spatial diversity on a channel with the same signal/noise ratio and propagation characteristics.
So this is not a breakthrough. It's just a faster-and-wider version of the same level of technology. Which is about right, since some of the coding options used in WiMAX are within single-digit dB of the shannon limit, so there isn't much more left to get out of the spectrum.
The kicker is the bandwidth of the channel. WHERE are you going to get a spare 100 MHz of bandwidth to use?
The 802 working groups are already begging for bandwidth, getting some thanks to cooperation by the FCC and its opposite numbers in other countries - over strong oppostion from broadcasters and other users of the spectrum. But that bandwidth gets broken up into channels - so a deployment can use multiple channels in nearby cells/sectors to avoid interference and multiple players can use different channels in the same area. This proposal would use up essentially ALL the bandwidth in a given allocation for ONE channel for ONE carrier.
Is it going to be licensed? Who will own the license? Nobody else can play - monopoly carrier time again. Is it going to be unlicensed? How will a carrier write terms-of-service giving quality-of-service guarantees?
Further, spatial diversity requres the antennas to have non-trivial separation between the component antennas with respect to the length of the transmission path. Inches gets you across the room, but more is needed to get you across the city.
I wonder if this article is missing something: Perhaps the system is intended, not as a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network - a last-mile solution), but as a LAN or PAN (Personal Area Network - a very short range wireless link - like bluetooth - intended to replace cabling around a computer or a few cubes in a room.)
I also think that scientists at the various agencies have thought of this and sterilised the probes as best they could.
I know they have thought of and done that in the past. I recall stories about the extreme efforts taken to disinfect the earlier Viking series mars landers before sendinng them. The dual concern was to avoid risk of earth life wiping out any mars life and false positives on the instruments that were attempting to detect mars bacteria.
That the article brought this up makes me think it's just a hand-wringing, speculative, piece of fluff/filler, possibly inspired by the War of the Worlds story, rather than anything based on ome accepted theoretical grounding. (Unless, of course, the theory is that humans are bound to foul up anything they do. "Bad, Bad, Woodchip Mill / Good old Outback Bill.")
As someone who lived through the '60s - with the Red Squads, COINTELPRO, and a plethora of other government responses to the Vietnam non-War, I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who knew people who were Freedom Riders in the '50s, with water cannon, lynchings, axe-handle beatings, and other governmental and government-winked-at "private" organizations such as the KKK (largely manned by goernment employees in their "off hours"), I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who knows the history of the Red Scare / "McCarthy Era" witch hunts (and indeed was toddling during that time) I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who, in his youth, knew some old fogies who were active in the original labor movement (Wobblies - never knew any Knights of Labor though there actually were a few still around), when corporate labor relations involved Pinkertons and machine guns, I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who knows of the history of US, I can attest that this sort of thing has been going on, decade by decade, since at least the Alien and Sedition acts in Jefferson's time (and even before, under other auspices).
Every generation is born ignorant. Its members have to discover for themselves that government officials abuse power and need to be kept in check, that institutions aren't enough, that eternal vigilance (and occasional difficult and expensive effort) is the price of freedom.
This is why the US Constitution consists mainly of carefully-defined limits on the governments' actions. The founders were VERY familiar with the tendency of governments run by real people to gravitate into oppression, constantly finding ways to increase their own power. They did their best to create institutions to limit that trend, and provide the citizens with ways to fight back. But they didn't expect printed words to work on their own.
It has actually worked out far better than their expectations. (Jefferson, for instance, thought civil wars would still be required, at intervals averaging less than twenty years.)
But it still isn't perfect. And while the long-term trendline has been in the right direction, there's a lot of noise in the short term. And keeping the trend going the right direction requires constant effort.
Of course part of the mechanism of control is to keep the controlled ignorant of their own history, so they don't see the puppet strings until they notice being tugged. Thus it's often a surprise when you run into it in some new circumstance. And it's tempting to assume, thanks to this deliberate under-education, that things were fine until the latest outrage was instituted, and now they're going to hell.
Welcome to the real world, where the Tree of Liberty must be watered, from time to time, with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants.
But HANG ON to that outrage! Yes things have been bad - and far worse than they are now. But they're SUPPOSED to keep getting BETTER. When somebody finds a new way to make them worse again, it's time to FIGHT IT!
That things ONCE were WORSE is no reason to let them become bad once again, and knowing they once were worse is no reason to slack off.
Let the knowlege that governments tend to get on everyone's back help you in your fight to get them off - off your back, and everyone elses.
You're fighting the good fight.
This is one piece of your generation's opportunity to be patriots and heros.
The glass both holds the spacing between the gratings constant and reduces the angle through which the light moves, so the clock produces a readable image for nearly 12 hours, rather than being really dim near sunrise and sunset.
The bending of the light also nearly linearizes the rate of motion of the shadow, resulting in a negligible error in the displayed time over the period where it is visible.
I can't quite figure out how to use your list of objects to make one of these. The best I can figure out is that it involves taking all the objects except the laser printer and dumping them in the trash. Then you just look at the display on the laser printer and read the time. Am I missing something?
Assuming you wern't just trying to be funny.
The core of each digit of the "digital sundial" is a sandwich composed of:
- A grating with vertical black/clear bars.
- A layer of glass. (Thickness varies depending on how fast the digit should cycle - the thicker the faster.)
- A second grating with a more complex set of bars that I'll describe later.
- A frosted glass "screen" to diffuse the light for viewing from all angles.
The thickness of the bars on the first grating is such that, if the digit goes through N changes, the clear band is significantly less than 1/Nth the width of the clear band plus the dark band. (To get the appearance of the various digits to match, all of the upper gratings have the same light/dark band width ratio, determined by the digit with the most states.)
Stacking the first grating on the glass produces a band of light stripes on the bottom of the glass that slides sideways as the sun moves. The spacing of the bands and the thickness of the glass are such that the bands move by one band-spacing in one cycle-time for the digit. The glass both holds the spacing between the gratings constant and reduces the angle through which the light moves, so the clock produces a readable image for nearly 12 hours, rather than being really dim near sunrise and sunset.
For every light/dark band pair in the upper grating there are N bands in the lower grating. Each band is a stripe through the image of one of the digits, cycling through the N digits. As the sun moves, the bands move across this pattern, sequentially being "stenciled" by a different digit.
The light coming out of the lower grating strikes the frosted glass "screen" and is diffused sideways, so the clock can be read from many angles.
You use the laser printer to make the gratings, by computing their appearance and printing them on overhead-projector foils.
TBS Superstation has all programming beginning:05 after the hour, which I never understood.
My impression was that they had done it for separate listings - in TV Week
Perhaps that was part of it. But it also gives major lockin.
If you're bored and tuning around, you hit TBS just about when the next movie starts, making you more likely to stay than if it was already in progress.
If you stay until it ends then switch, you've missed the first five minutes of the show you switched to - just enough to be seriously annoying. But staying on TBS puts you at the start of the next movie.
You could make one inexpensively using a laser printer, overhead-projector foils, several sheets of glass (one frosted), and just about anything for the housing.
Slashdot Mirror
If he doesn't like people poaching "his code", he shouldn't use a free license.
If he starts to obfuscate everything, then he'll likely end up killing his fork anyway.
I see a lot of posts here that are assuming that the question came up because the person who forked the code is griping. Though the parent posting here doesn't explicitly say that, it is the first moderated-into-default-visibility where that possibility is implied. Hence I have chosen it for my reply.
The original posting doesn't claim that there ever was any gripe. It is phrased as a simple question, by someone who is just concerned, himself, about possible ethical issues.
Maybe it DID come up because there was a gripe. But let's assume not unless/until the the article author or someone else in the know says otherwise.
Having said that, I'll now chime in on the original question.
A number of other posters have already pointed out that due to the open license (clearly implied by the circumstances) it's squeaky-clean legal to backport any good pieces. And both because that's the intent of open licenses and because the fork essentially lifted the whole project, it's also fair. I concur with both points.
Additionally, from a practical standpoint, backporting the good stuff from the fork to the main reduces the divergence (and reduces the total effort). This is good for both prongs: It makes it easier for someone familiar with one to work with, or work on, the other. And it simplifies matters if the two forks are ever to be remerged into a single project. These two argue for merging, not just where improvements or bug fixes are major, but even if the improvement is minor, cosmetic, or even when it makes an arbitrary choice among several roughly equal alternatives.
So feel free to merge whenever it makes any sense at all for your branch of the tree.
Even simpler, go to a random internet caffe every day, use a random chat cleint on a random server using passphrase convenied in advance.
But the government already knows that the 9/11 hijackers used cybercafes, libraries, and Kinkos sites to get net access for email and possibly other means of communication. Any guesses where the Dept of Internal Security is focusing its electronic eyes?
(And they busted a guy for installing keyloggers in NYC Kinkos and ripping off bank and credit card account numbers and passwords. Expect non-antiterrorist law enforcement to be peeping, too.)
Using the workstations there for anything you don't want the authorities to know is nuts, since they just might be logging keystrokes or otherwise tapping the machine's guts. And if they're e-watching, hooking up your laptop with the firewall screwed down tight and shipping out encrypted traffic is a great way to see if the acres of supercomputers at NSA are up to busting your crypto or the guys there have a remote exploit you don't know about.
At the risk of falling into an "it's not REAL [x]" argument let me disagree with some of your posting.
Sure. Because it never happens that, as one accumulates "territory", one uses it to enforce dictates on those who don't have it, or have less. It never ever leads to a runaway concentration of power -- to higher prosperity for some combined with general misery for most.
Except of course that's exactly what happens.
"Teritory" can be used to enforce an owner's will on those who try to use the owner's property. It can not be used to enforce his will on those who are using their OWN property - even if their property is much smaller. Attempting to control someone else's use of their own stuff is dominance, not territory (even if a piece of property, such as a club, is used as a tool to enforce the dominance).
In the absense of exercise of government power to distort the market or make non-market ownership transfers, no single person or small group can hoard enough of any available type of property to completely dry up the purchasable supply - because the price rises without limit as the supply dwindles. (Such attemts are just a simple way to dissipate a large fortune. You can't get it back by selling off the horde, because selling it depresses the price again.)
Even if someone does accumulate a large enough chunk of something to invonvenience his neighbors, his heirs, or their heirs, may not be as interested in holding it together, so eventually it is broken up and sold off again. Only institutions can accumulate and hold monopolistic real estate or commodity hordes across generations (as they did in the Middle Ages in Europe - until the resulting civil unrest forced the breakup - of the hordes or the institutions). This is why the US government (the results of one of the earliest of those revolutions) has bans on perpetuities and entailments. (Corporations can also span generations, but they can also be broken up from outside. Non-profits, though, seem to be trying to recreate the problems of the middle ages.)
Unfortunately, governments themselves are authorities, and their codification of the rules of property is an exercise of authority. As a result, property laws tend to be a mix of encoding of territorial and authoritarian mechanisms.
If they JUST encoded territory, for instance, there'd be no emminent domain. There'd have been no sweetheart deals for the railroads in the 18th century, stealing 10-mile wide swaths through people's farms adjacent to the route they picked as they built across the plains. Anyone wanting to build a road, bury a pipeline, run a power line, or do any of the things that currently excuse over 500 agencies bullying people off their land, would have to buy options from landowners until he accumulated a route.
Property taxes are another deviation. If it's YOURS, why do you have to anually pay a significant fraction of its value to the government, which will take the property from you if you don't pay up? That's dominance, not territory. And it's a significant factor in raising the price of housing beyond the reach of the lower income.
Then there's zoning/land use planning. In the name of "quality of life" and "preventing urban sprawl" these severely curtail the availability of real property and again raise its price - protecting the interests of current owners at the expense of prospective home buyers and builders. Pikers compared to "wilderness areas", of course.
Housing codes raise the price again. Contractor licensing ditto. Inspections. All "for your own good" of course, and the government knows what that is better than you, eh? Dominance.
Government "programs": "Urban renewal" - kick the poor out of their houses and sell the land at below market price to developers, who may build walled communities to sell to the rich, or stadiums where only the rich can afford a seat. Or just kick 'em out and let the buildings rot, until the rats and criminals move in. "Housing and Urban D
Michael Powell's Incompetence ... They can't even friggn manage Power and Freq.
It's the policies Powell is currently promoting that brought you cordless phones and WiFi, and is bringing you UWB PANs, WiMAX, and a host of other stuff.
They're rehacking underused spectrum to make it easier to get new stuff working and deployed, and make it available to you sooner. Some is being sold off, some is being released to a commons.
It's an experiment to see which works better. And it's already bearing fruit.
Maybe the commons will work better. Maybe the property model will. But one thing we DO know already: EACH has already gotten more handy tech into consumers' hands than the licensing regime they replaced.
Well, I am not sure how great we are at predicting the weather now.
As someone who's lived through a half-century of weather prediction technology, I can assure you that it's gotten a LOT better.
There's good reason to believe that, absent some major theoretical breakthrough, there's a "chaos limit" beyond which it can't go - causing the predictions to become unreliable after a few days - the number depending on the stability of the situation. And the current tools are able to both approach the limit and to estimate its location in the current situation.
Broadcast weather reports are NOT an accurate measure of the reliability of prediction technology.
First: They are oversimplified. They claim to tell you exactly what will happen at your spot on the ground - regardless of whether the prediction gives them a basis for doing so. "Scattered showers" might be dead on. But a hundred foot difference in a particular storm cloud's track means your city block get soaked or shined on.
Second: They are show business. "Nice weather, miniscule probability of disaster" will be predicted as disaster - both because it encourages viewers and because they don't want to predict picnic weather and then have the 5% chance of hail hit the jackpot.
IMHO even if they lose their satelite radar's reliability the predictions will get marginally worse but won't go back to what they were in the '50s. Part of the improvement is better data to feed the models. But that radar info is only a tiny part of the new measurement tech. Losing it just means the models sometimes start a bit further off, and deviate sooner. Part of the improvement is better models, and that will stick.
The spectrum is a natural resource which belongs to everyone equally. No one, and no government, has any right to "own," or sell what belongs to everyone. The only legitimate role of government in spectrum is to regulate it to maximize the public good.
..." part. Or it works because the dictator is paying attention, is exceptionally smart, and is benevolent - this week.
The same could be said about land, or water, or trees, or grain, or edible animals, or sexual partners, or the products of other people's labor, or any other desirable thing that is either consumed or busied out by use. (In fact, it often HAS been said.) And it sounds just as sweet and cuddly (the first time you hear it) when applied to any of them.
But it only stays sweet and cuddly until you try to apply the nicey-nice idea to make actual decisions to settle actual conflicts-of-desire. Then it all goes to hell.
When two (or more) people have differing desires about how a particular piece of some resource is to be used (or remain unused) you have a conflict. Only one of them can be satisfied. In millions of years of evolution (including all of human history and invention) only two non-violent ways have been found to settle such conflicts:
1) Dominance.
2) Territory.
Dominance is authority. The highest-ranking decides. The government tells you what to do and what not to do. The company president gets 10 times the salary and 100 times the stock options. The big ape gets the banannas. The bully gets your lunch money. The jocks get all the non-mousey schoolgirls. The guru gets to sleep with all the chicks.
Territory is property. The bird chases others away if confonted near his nest, flees if confronted near someone else's nest. When the lioness comes into heat the first lion of the pride she accepts mates with her while the others stay clear. "I'm yours, my love, and you're mine." The rest of the world may belong to someone else but this piece is MINE! If you want it, offer a swap for something I'd prefer, and accept my decision. Meanwhile, as long as I keep off YOUR pieces I can use it for any damned thing I please.
Dominance puts all the resources in the hands of a tiny elite - and even there gives no confidence, since the higher members trump the lower and the top dog is always ripe for overthrow. Territory lets anybody play. You might not have as MUCH as the big guys. But you have the confidence that you can do what you want with it, and that actually using it won't just bring it to the attention of a bigger ape who will take it away.
Territorial organization promotes prosperity for the little guys, self-esteem, and behavioral diversity. Authoritarian organization promotes constant conflict, fear, social pressure, conformity, and poverty. Even when it works well (as with a working commons) it works because conformity, driven by social pressure, prevents the "tragedy of
Consensus decision making is not the solution. It has been tried repeatedly - invariably leading to social conformity, misery, and authoritarian regimes (when the resulting poverty didn't end the experiment first). First conflicting desires lead to deadlocks and paralysis. Then social pressure mechanisms are developed to encourage conformity in order to break the deadlocks. Then, once the mechanisms are entrenched, someone (who doesn't care who gets hurt) realizes that by holding out for his position he can use them to run the show. And collective decision-making evolves into dictatorship.
The PRIMARY justification for government is to provide a single institution to track which piece of conflict-prone resource (such as land, or water rights) belongs to whom, help defend it against encroachment, and be sure it goes to the right heir when an owner dies.
In land the issues are obvious: There's only so much of it. It can be divided into chunks. You need the exclusive use of a chunk of it to establish a home, without which your standard of living
Once the electron is excited to the higher state equalling the difference between the bandgap (5.5 eV) and the NEA value (which is 2.4 eV on hydrogen saturated surfaces) , the electron just flies out of the material instead of becoming delocalized into the crystal.
I'd have thought it would be "An electron in the 5.5v conduction band would be ejected from the crystal with a momentum equaling the difference between the conduction band and electron affinity voltages."
Very sweet if that's the mechanism.
Given that they mentioned "field emission", though, there might be a simpler mechanism.
Field emission is essentially the same thing in a vacuum as a corona discharge is in a gas. If you have a pointed electrode near a broader conducting surface (like a plate or a ring) with a voltage between them, the electric field strength (volts per unit length) is extremely high near the tip of the pointy electrode and falls off as you approach the broad one.
In a gas, the field is enough to ionize the gas near the point but not enough to maintain an arc over to the broad electrode. So there is an ionization current in the form of a "brush discharge" near the point. But as the ions traveling away from the point get beyond the surface where the electric field can maintain the arc, the individual ions dissociate and begin traveling through the gas independently.
Similarly, in a field-emission device the concentration of the field near the point leads to a field strong enough to lift electrons off the point.
In both cases the sharper the point, the stronger the field.
Field emission cathodes have been around for decades. Big downside for a vacuum tube (including a flat-panel display) is that the traces of gas in the chamber become ionized and the positive ion (which is massive) is accellerated toward the cathode and tends to strike on or near the point with considerable energy. This ablates the point, degrading and eventually destroying the cathode.
Diamond dust makes very sharp points, which would make it emit well. It is also very hard and conducts heat well, which might make it survive a lot of ion bombardment.
Polycrystaline diamond coatings (which have LOTS of nanoscopic points) can be easily depositied on many surfaces using a device that is essentially a microwave oven filled with low-pressure methane. The microwaves dissociate the methane at the surface, lifting off the hydrogen and leaving elemental carbon behind. The carbon deposits as a mix of diamonds and graphite. Then the microwaves are absorbed by the graphite, vaporizing it and combining it with the hydrogen lifted off it earlier. The diamond stays behind, and gradually grows by absorbing the carbon from other methane molecules.
How? the way the GPL works is that it depends on copyright. Without copyright the GPL is worthless. People could "take" you code and do anything with it, not have to contribute back, or even put the GPL back on it.
But the MAIN purpose of the GPL (if I understand it correctly) is to prevent the scenario where a software author donates his work to the Public Domain, only to have someone else upgrade it and keep the upgrades proprietary, locking the author out of extending his own work in the same way. (This is particularly bad if the "improvement" is a bug fix.)
When the means to lock the author out is copyright, if copyright is declared not to apply to software this prevents the problem. The original author can turn around and incorporate the changes or make similar changes of his own without risking copyright infringement claims. So no need for GPL.
Patents, on the other hand, explicitly protect exactly such "improve it and keep the improvements" behavior. But GPL doesn't defend against those. (Fortunately, the bar for getting a patent is a LOT higher - though clearly not as high as we'd like when it comes to software.) Domething SIMILAR might be constructed to do so. But it would be a different game.
Regardless of hwo this might play out, and its implications, I can't see this being retroactive to software that already exists...
Quite the contrary.
If software copyrights are struck down by a court as unconstitutional, the effect is as if they had never existed. If the constitution doesn't authorize them NOW, it didn't authorize them THEN either. (Absent a relevant amendment, of course.)
The prohibition is on PASSING retroactive LAWS (for instance, criminalizing something you did while it was legal and then busting you for it).
... or even work in the same plant with one.
Back around the '60s or so the University of Michigan cut a similar deal with University Microfilms.
U Microfilms set up and ran a microfilming operation in the library system, microfilming everything that wasn't under copyright (and much that was with permission of the copyright holders, such as several large newspapers and many magazines and other periodicals), along with much of the University's records. Rare books, etc.
(If I have this right) the U got microfilm prints of the documents for free and didn't have to pay for the microfilming of its records. University Microfilms made its money by selling microfilms of the various publications (forwarding royalties, where appropriate, to the copyright holders). The rare books, for instance, could now be studied on microfilm with no further stress on the original, and their content became available at many other colleges and libraries. Good deal all around.
University Microfilms was founded by a regent, who was later slammed for conflict of interest. He dropped out of the Board of Regents but the business deal continued.
And to imply that a 30-50% improvement makes solar a viable market is absurd. Show me a couple orders of magnitude increase in efficiency and I'll believe that there can be a market for solar beyond the niche of granola eaters living in the desert.
The issue with solar versus grid is cost/performance.
Solar power has already surpassed transmitted power infor numerous applications: Small loads alongside roads, new instalations in rural housing, etc. The infrastructure is in place for building and installing it now.
Any improvements in solar costs or cost boosts in grid power will expand the fraction of customers for whom it's the less expensive alternative.
A large enough improvement will make it cost-effective for supplemental use and/or backfeed even in some urban areas (mainly those with reliable sun illumination). That cutover is within reach - well under a factor of ten.
Some places (urban areas in high lattitudes, cloudy or otherwise shaded areas, large industrial processes) will probably never be better served by local solar than by grid connection. But sufficient improvement in panel efficiency and/or raises in fuel costs will make solar practical for grid generation plants, too, in some parts of the country. Again less than a factor of ten could lead to cutover from fossil fuel to industrial solar arrays especially in sunny areas with low land prices.
China is industrializing and has an enormous population. That alone could driver a massive increase in fossil fuel costs - especially since mobile uses are easier to feed with liquid fuels than stored power (until THAT technology improves further).
Even if that were true, [which it isn't] solar would save hugely on transmission costs.
Which is why it's already in heavy use in places where the load is small (road signs, yard lights, emergency phones) the location is remote (rural areas) or sometimes where solar is more reliable than the grid (areas far from the primary generation with heavy weather causing frequent line damage).
It costs an ENORMOUS amount to run power even a fraction of a mile, let alone tens of miles, for a new hookup in an area not otherwise served. Even if you're only going to count the ENERGY cost, think about how much energy it takes:
- to mine the ore and process it into steel and copper for the transformer, wires, guy wires, fittings, (and that power meter...)
- to melt the sand and make it into insultors
- to cut the trees and process them into poles
- to haul it all onsite, dig holes, set poles in them, string it up, and haul the workers back and forth from home for weeks
- to build the fraction of the rest of the grid and power plant thatbecomes dedicated to supplying power to that hookup.
THAT, not the energy supplied by the panel, is the appropriate energy to compare when looking at the panel's "energy cost". The purpose of the panel is not just to extract energy from sun, but to deliver it WHERE IT'S WANTED. The grid has an energy cost far beyond the part that's actually delivered to a remote load. Modern solar panels, on the other hand, are apparently alread, not just better in some situations, but actually a net gain (despite old rumors to the contraray). They should become moreso with further technological improvement.
In the absense of government meddling (and to a large extent even WITH government meddling), price tends to be a reasonably reliable signal of how much stuff that people value (energy, raw material, people's time, environmental quality) is being used up to provide something. When total solar systems become less expensive than grid connections (with their extreme efficiencies), it's a very good sign that they have also become less of a drain on valuable resources - including energy.
Astropower went bankrupt in February and was bought by GE's PV division in March.
Recycling bum wafers may be a great way to get more value out of the chip making process. But as a standalone business, buying wafers, turning them into solar cells, and turning the cells into panels, it probably doesn't compete well with Evergreen Solar's string ribbon fabrication process.
It might work better if the chip companies did the recycling themselves, and also built panels themselves and/or put standardized cells on the market and let the price find its equilibrium.
Some downsides to this sort of recycling:
The market price of a wafer as a solar cell is a drop in the bucket compared to even one or two of the chips on it (let alone maybe half) being good enough to cut out and sell - and deliberately building extras for the cell trade would drastically increase the cost of the cells. That means any money to be made by selling solar cells will not be factor driving their production quantity (beyond trying to convert all the bad wafers).
The supply of such recycled-as-solar-cell wafers will thus be completely driven by the market forces on the company's underlying chip business and the yeild percentage of its processes - with the incentive always being to fix the process to improve the yeild of chips - which cuts into the yeild of cells.
This makes it hard to build an independent business based on building a fab to recycle bum wafers from the chip companies into cells as a necessary step in making panels. The supply of raw wafers is too iffy, and using it to make more cells from fresh wafers to meet production targets makes the cost-of-goods fluctuate too much.
A better model might be for the chip manufacturers themselves to add fab steps to recycle their bum chips into cells themselves, and sell them on the open market to panel assemblers. Ideally some of the steps could be done with the same equipment as the chip fabrication (without risking contaminating it and lowering chip yeilds), minimizing the capital cost. Bum wafers could be stockpiled and processed when market fluctuations created gaps in the fab's schedule, or on older equipment or in older fabs that otherwise would be retired or taken out of production for refurbishment. Multi-company standards for the characteristics of the recycled-wafer cells would let a panel manufacturer use cells from multiple fabs, smoothing out market swings between products of different chip manufacturers.
In this scenario a panel manufacturer could invest in only assembly equipment. He could make a recycled-wafer model when the supply of such cells was adequate, and use new-material cells built by a different process (such as string-ribbon) with a less-pricey start point, to make another model when the supply of recycled wafers was inadequate for the demand for panels.
Take a look at some of the research and data on how much naturally radioactive particles are released into the atmosphere through burning of fossil fuels, you'll probably be surprised. I believe it's a few orders of magnitude more than the amount generated in current fission plants.
That comparison makes an assumption: That the radioactive waste leaked by the plant DURING its operation is the ONLY radioactive waste that will be released as a RESULT of its operation. That the other stuff will be contained until it is no longer radioactive.
Now consider how much radioactivity was released by the Chernobyl incident alone. How many coal plants operating for how long producing how many megawatthours would it take to match just that one?
Then there's the waste dump in the Former Soviet Union (TM) that had a chemical explosion blasting much of its radioactive crud into the air.
Then there's the stuff that's leaked out of various other nuclear sites already. And the stuff that's working its way through the bottoms of the tanks in Washington state. And that English reactor that released the radioiodine all over Gernsey(?). I could go on.
And the ones that I missed.
And the ones that none of us have heard about because they haven't happened. Yet.
Yes, much of it is overblown. (Like Three Mile Island, which didn't let all THAT much out.) And reactor technology is getting much better. And waste disposal and/or recycling may be getting better - and has lots of opportunities for further improvement.
But when you're comparing Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants let's be fair about it.
It was:
No, I DON'T want a laptop powered by a Farnsworth Fusor.
Fortunately, mere heat is temporary, unless it's very excessive.
My only question is can I stick a digicam on my gas powered R/C plane, and get the live video feed from it right there on the R/C controller?
As I read it this is strictly a transmitter. There's no receive channel. The whole second processor/WinCE/display business is just control-panel candy, utterly useless for any feedback (though perhaps handy for giving you information on reconfiguring the controls or what they're INTENDED to do on the craft you're currently controlling.)
So no remote-vision. No "semi-autonomous yacht" either, unless you are willing to run it with no feedback from it.
It may make it easier to operate the controls, automate some standard complex functions (i.e. "pull out of spin" button), or synthesize controls that do coordinated operations on multiple control surfaces. But that's about it.
If it DID have a return channel - especially a TV image from a forward-looking camera - that would be a quantum leap. (Such a channel could carry a lot of telemetry back, too, and could easily be augmented to do just about anything you wanted.)
You can't compare two technologies solely on bitrate, you are forgetting power, range, spectrum, equipment size and equipment cost as factors in your comparison.
But you can compare them when you take some of those items into account.
WiMAX (802.11g) - in the appropriate codec for this comparison - gets 70 Mbps out of a 14 MHz channel (a little wider than two TV channels). This system claims 1 Gbps out of a 100 MHz channel and spatial diversity. That's twice the bps/cps, which is about right for using 3->4 spatial diversity on a channel with the same signal/noise ratio and propagation characteristics.
So this is not a breakthrough. It's just a faster-and-wider version of the same level of technology. Which is about right, since some of the coding options used in WiMAX are within single-digit dB of the shannon limit, so there isn't much more left to get out of the spectrum.
The kicker is the bandwidth of the channel. WHERE are you going to get a spare 100 MHz of bandwidth to use?
The 802 working groups are already begging for bandwidth, getting some thanks to cooperation by the FCC and its opposite numbers in other countries - over strong oppostion from broadcasters and other users of the spectrum. But that bandwidth gets broken up into channels - so a deployment can use multiple channels in nearby cells/sectors to avoid interference and multiple players can use different channels in the same area. This proposal would use up essentially ALL the bandwidth in a given allocation for ONE channel for ONE carrier.
Is it going to be licensed? Who will own the license? Nobody else can play - monopoly carrier time again. Is it going to be unlicensed? How will a carrier write terms-of-service giving quality-of-service guarantees?
Further, spatial diversity requres the antennas to have non-trivial separation between the component antennas with respect to the length of the transmission path. Inches gets you across the room, but more is needed to get you across the city.
I wonder if this article is missing something: Perhaps the system is intended, not as a MAN (Metropolitan Area Network - a last-mile solution), but as a LAN or PAN (Personal Area Network - a very short range wireless link - like bluetooth - intended to replace cabling around a computer or a few cubes in a room.)
I also think that scientists at the various agencies have thought of this and sterilised the probes as best they could.
I know they have thought of and done that in the past. I recall stories about the extreme efforts taken to disinfect the earlier Viking series mars landers before sendinng them. The dual concern was to avoid risk of earth life wiping out any mars life and false positives on the instruments that were attempting to detect mars bacteria.
That the article brought this up makes me think it's just a hand-wringing, speculative, piece of fluff/filler, possibly inspired by the War of the Worlds story, rather than anything based on ome accepted theoretical grounding. (Unless, of course, the theory is that humans are bound to foul up anything they do. "Bad, Bad, Woodchip Mill / Good old Outback Bill.")
Welcome to the new America.
As someone who lived through the '60s - with the Red Squads, COINTELPRO, and a plethora of other government responses to the Vietnam non-War, I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who knew people who were Freedom Riders in the '50s, with water cannon, lynchings, axe-handle beatings, and other governmental and government-winked-at "private" organizations such as the KKK (largely manned by goernment employees in their "off hours"), I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who knows the history of the Red Scare / "McCarthy Era" witch hunts (and indeed was toddling during that time) I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who, in his youth, knew some old fogies who were active in the original labor movement (Wobblies - never knew any Knights of Labor though there actually were a few still around), when corporate labor relations involved Pinkertons and machine guns, I can attest that this is the same old America.
As someone who knows of the history of US, I can attest that this sort of thing has been going on, decade by decade, since at least the Alien and Sedition acts in Jefferson's time (and even before, under other auspices).
Every generation is born ignorant. Its members have to discover for themselves that government officials abuse power and need to be kept in check, that institutions aren't enough, that eternal vigilance (and occasional difficult and expensive effort) is the price of freedom.
This is why the US Constitution consists mainly of carefully-defined limits on the governments' actions. The founders were VERY familiar with the tendency of governments run by real people to gravitate into oppression, constantly finding ways to increase their own power. They did their best to create institutions to limit that trend, and provide the citizens with ways to fight back. But they didn't expect printed words to work on their own.
It has actually worked out far better than their expectations. (Jefferson, for instance, thought civil wars would still be required, at intervals averaging less than twenty years.)
But it still isn't perfect. And while the long-term trendline has been in the right direction, there's a lot of noise in the short term. And keeping the trend going the right direction requires constant effort.
Of course part of the mechanism of control is to keep the controlled ignorant of their own history, so they don't see the puppet strings until they notice being tugged. Thus it's often a surprise when you run into it in some new circumstance. And it's tempting to assume, thanks to this deliberate under-education, that things were fine until the latest outrage was instituted, and now they're going to hell.
Welcome to the real world, where the Tree of Liberty must be watered, from time to time, with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants.
But HANG ON to that outrage! Yes things have been bad - and far worse than they are now. But they're SUPPOSED to keep getting BETTER. When somebody finds a new way to make them worse again, it's time to FIGHT IT!
That things ONCE were WORSE is no reason to let them become bad once again, and knowing they once were worse is no reason to slack off.
Let the knowlege that governments tend to get on everyone's back help you in your fight to get them off - off your back, and everyone elses.
You're fighting the good fight.
This is one piece of your generation's opportunity to be patriots and heros.
The glass both holds the spacing between the gratings constant and reduces the angle through which the light moves, so the clock produces a readable image for nearly 12 hours, rather than being really dim near sunrise and sunset.
The bending of the light also nearly linearizes the rate of motion of the shadow, resulting in a negligible error in the displayed time over the period where it is visible.
I can't quite figure out how to use your list of objects to make one of these. The best I can figure out is that it involves taking all the objects except the laser printer and dumping them in the trash. Then you just look at the display on the laser printer and read the time. Am I missing something?
Assuming you wern't just trying to be funny.
The core of each digit of the "digital sundial" is a sandwich composed of:
- A grating with vertical black/clear bars.
- A layer of glass. (Thickness varies depending on how fast the digit should cycle - the thicker the faster.)
- A second grating with a more complex set of bars that I'll describe later.
- A frosted glass "screen" to diffuse the light for viewing from all angles.
The thickness of the bars on the first grating is such that, if the digit goes through N changes, the clear band is significantly less than 1/Nth the width of the clear band plus the dark band. (To get the appearance of the various digits to match, all of the upper gratings have the same light/dark band width ratio, determined by the digit with the most states.)
Stacking the first grating on the glass produces a band of light stripes on the bottom of the glass that slides sideways as the sun moves. The spacing of the bands and the thickness of the glass are such that the bands move by one band-spacing in one cycle-time for the digit. The glass both holds the spacing between the gratings constant and reduces the angle through which the light moves, so the clock produces a readable image for nearly 12 hours, rather than being really dim near sunrise and sunset.
For every light/dark band pair in the upper grating there are N bands in the lower grating. Each band is a stripe through the image of one of the digits, cycling through the N digits. As the sun moves, the bands move across this pattern, sequentially being "stenciled" by a different digit.
The light coming out of the lower grating strikes the frosted glass "screen" and is diffused sideways, so the clock can be read from many angles.
You use the laser printer to make the gratings, by computing their appearance and printing them on overhead-projector foils.
TBS Superstation has all programming beginning :05 after the hour, which I never understood.
My impression was that they had done it for separate listings - in TV Week
Perhaps that was part of it. But it also gives major lockin.
If you're bored and tuning around, you hit TBS just about when the next movie starts, making you more likely to stay than if it was already in progress.
If you stay until it ends then switch, you've missed the first five minutes of the show you switched to - just enough to be seriously annoying. But staying on TBS puts you at the start of the next movie.
... what kind of battery life does this so-called "Sun" have?
The clock mechanism is powered by a flywheel.
The display is powered by thermonuclear fusion.
Horrors! Have to ban sundials! That "sun" thing is so dangerous when they're working that just a few minutes exposure can give you a radiation burn.
(Bad, bad woodchip mill. Good old outback bill.)
You could make one inexpensively using a laser printer, overhead-projector foils, several sheets of glass (one frosted), and just about anything for the housing.