Shit, while you are at it might as well give yourself [] one of those james bond, "uber homeland security dude, do whatever he tells you, no questions asked, get of jail free" flags.
I believe it's called "Federal Courier". The delivery guys for nuke bomb parts, secret documents, etc. I hear they vary their appearance and routes, drive fast cars, and may borrow a friend's hot rod (or the friend as a passenger) for protective coloration on a trip.
(I hear this from someone who claims to have been such a friend, who was taken on a wild ride one night. Got pulled over on a country road they'd been burning up, and the cop's attitude did a 180 when he saw the ID and he INSTANTLY sent him on his way. The guy says he still has no idea what, if anything, was being carried, pretty much had no clue what his buddy did for a living until then - and mostly still doesn't.)
I suspect that this will lead to increased penalties for having or using software that does any ether sniffing on 802.11b. They can claim you're trying to intercept police transmissions.
It will also lead to "prowl car detectors" for the crooks - little boxes that detect the low-level network protocols that WiFi cards occasionally mumble or can be provoked to emit. Even if they're firmware-hacked to shut up unless they hear an AP's broadcast you can still fake it and get them to respond.
There are ways around this. But we're starting to get into major security mods.
This would NOT be a good idea for something that is magnetically sensitive, as it would effectively erase floppy/hard disks, cassette tapes, etc...
Well, putting degaussing coils on all the desktops in the guise of power supplies for portable devices is ONE way to create an incentive to retrofit or replace any remaining legacy equipment and complete the migration away from floppy disks.
I wish someone would explain to me why I have to pay someone NOT to include my name (and why I pay every month).
Originally it was (allegedly) to pay for the extra information operator time that resulted when somebody tried to reach you and couldn't find you listed in the phone book.
Of course now that you pay for information calls, it's just a matter of taking advantage of a pre-existing tarrif for "revenue enhancement" - also known as "gouging".
Makes it easier to deal with student loans, scholarships, and other financial aids a student might recieve.
That's a side-issue (which could be done as easily by storing the SSN in a database attached to the student's record - and not until the first time it's needed).
The real reason IT departments try to use SSNs: It's a very close approximation to a "unique identifier" - i.e. (with few exceptions) everybody has exactly one and no two people have the same one. So it heads off some problems when one person gets entered twice or two people get mixed up.
Then there's a side benefit: Easy correlation of documents about the same person from other bureaucracies (credit, health, criminal justice, etc.) should that ever become desirable (to the bureaucracy). The financial aid simplification you discuss above is a small subset of this.
what steps are being taken to protect the data and users privacy ? [... is the info] for sale to the highest bidder ?
What privacy?
The whole POINT of the service is to tell other users who listen to similar music who you are.
So execs don't even need to buy the info in a special transaction. Just subscribe a pseudo-user who "listens to the songs" they're interested in, and BINGO! The service gives 'em a contact list.
From the article:...without alienating neophytes who type in "amazon.com" to find . . . Amazon.com. (Yes, people really do that. Google doesn't know why. )
I can tell you why. Because I have done it. (Well, maybe not to find amazon.com. But typing a URL in the Google search box.)
I wanted to find the google cache of an article that was slashdotted.
I had hoped that Google's interface would be clueful enough to include pages whose URL was an exact match for the search string - bringing up the index page with a link to the cache.
No dice.
The google front-page interface doesn't give an obvious way to get from a URL to the cache entry without knowing the content of the page you're trying to find. And cache links themselves include magic numbers, which implies that you can't just come up with a default conversion of a URL into a google cache link.
Since the phase is changed, the resulting image on the CCD or film is fuzzy and has to be "decoded". You can think of it as "encoding" the wavefront in a special way that preserves the depth of field, capturing the image, and then "decoding" it into a sharp picture.
When I first saw the article it sounded like the post-processing that is done to improve the focus of images that were originally taken out-of-focus. You can extract a lot of features by convolving an image with the inverse of the defocussing transfer function.
But doing this has a downside: It also brings to a point focus, or nearly so, the light from patches of a certain range of shapes. They weren't originally points - but photographing them defocussed made the same shape blur as a point light source would have, so the post-processing turned them into points. You extract features that would have been unreadable (like a license plate number), but also "sprinkle glitter and pepper" over the image.
Your explanation gives me some hope that the phenomenon might not occur with this system, due to a judicial choice of transfer function. But I'll wait to see the results from, not just a contrived demo, but a bunch of real-world pictures, plus some that were generated by a competitor who might have done a study of the physics and contrived, say, a "camouflage background" pattern tuned to spray crud all over the processed image.
(Such a pattern might make for interesting camouflage background and/or clothing. It would certainly screw up photos taken with the system, and might also produce strange results even with ordinary cameras. And any bets on whether human and animal eyes and brains use a similar trick?)
One barrier to rollout of EvDO has been that the technology requires wireless companies to set aside valuable airwaves just to carry data.
Not really.
You can just put the voice on the same packet stream. Use MPLS and a bandwidth-reservation protocol to reserve a slice of the channel, giving the voice connection the necessary bandwidth and latency gurarntees for voice service. Non-phone-call packet servcie get everything left over after the currently-active phone calls reserve their cut.
This also lets the phone company charge you a telephone-ish rate for the reserved bandwidth. Charge cell-phone minutes for a phonecall-sized reserved slice, flat rate for taking your chances.
They can also do multi-tier billing:
- Charge regular rate for a cellphone-quality compressed connection.
- Charge a premium (1 1/2 cell minutes per minute?) for a landline-quality 64kbps (plus overhead) slot and run G.711 (like a DOCSIS-compliant POTS-over-cable box) or some other DS0-in-packets protocol. Run your fax machine via your cellphone at full rate. (Or your laptop's 56k modem if you're feeling silly, or can't get hold of the right cables and software.)
(If the base has a LOT of capacity they might just want to charge the same for 64k as for other calls, or just make all calls 64k: They take more bandwidth than compressed but are a straight encoding of a digital phone line, so the don't require a bunch of DSP crunch at the POTS/packet gateway.)
- Charge a discount (1/2 cell minute per minute?) for highly-compressed voice.
- Maybe charge a steeply discounted premium rate for, say, participating in an outbound multicast group to hear a broadcast stream. (Think XM radio or webcasts via your cellphone, or at least via its network infrastructure.)
And so on.
Maybe let you make premium-priced bandwidth reservations on any suitable stream, rather than just those that represent calls via, or broadcasts from, their own servers.
This lets you take your own choice:
- Make an internet "free" phonecall, and take your chances on voice quality. If it's breaking up too badly:
- Reconnect (or promote) the call to a reserved-bandwidth service if the net weather is stormy.
- Pay different rates for different quality connections. Sound just like a POTS landline for a bit extra. Sound like a cheap long-distance carrier if you're on a budget.
Now the carrier might want to limit the percentage of bandwidth that can be reserved, so a heavy phone day will only slow, not stop, internet access. But there's no need to earmark a bunch of channels and install a bunch of hardware JUST for the low-dollar IP packets.
Of the developers surveyed, more than 50 percent who now develop primarily for Linux used to develop primarily for Windows. Only 30 percent used to develop for some other Unix or Unix derivative.
But since Linux is a posix-compliant UNIX variant, many apps developed for it can be ported straight to Unix flavors by simply recompiling. Windows is a whole different ballgame (unless you develop with the Wine libraries for portability).
Drivers need a bit of porting, but are still 'way closer to Unix than Windows, and apps that use Lunix-specific features will need some tuning (or just not go if the whole POINT is to interact with the Linux feature).
But when a developer switches from Unix to Windows his work is likely still available in the Unix world. (Perhaps moreso, if he's GPLing it now.) Those that switch from Windows to Linux are pretty much GONE on the Windows side of the world.
I'd love to dump my gasoline powered RV generator.
Which is why I want the little one to fit in about the space of a water heater.
And backup power for the off-grid (or on-grid) house. Great for a sunless week on a photovoltaic system, windless ditto on a windmill system. Top off the batteries preparatory to running power tools for construction or if it's swealtering and you need active air conditioning.
Water cooled lets you use the waste heat to heat your water tank and/or the house or trailer in winter.
On the other hand, if it runs hot enough you might use the waste heat to pump an ammonia-cycle 'fridge. You'd be burning gas into low-grade heat to run the 'fridge anyhow, so you'd get the power nearly for free. Use the high-grade energy to charge the batteries. (If the batteries get full, dump the extra power in the water heater's electric element. If that's up to temperature, too, dump it into the 'fridge's electric element and the gas throttles back to idle when all the appliances are at setpoint. Only takes a minor logic tweak on the charge controller and a couple extra solid-state relays.)
I want a fuel cell that runs on odorized propane. About 1/2 to 3 kilowatts average, with the model in the 1/2 to 1 kilowatt range fitting in about a cubic foot. Either water or air cooled is OK.
But how long until it gets harassed by the RIAA for paying the music fees ?
Good grief! Streaming to a multicast or broadcast address over unencrypted (or WEP encrypted with a key published in conjunction with an appropriate open license) 802.11b is broadcast radio, yet legal without FCC license.
If the wording of the federal mandatory license agrees (or a court says it does), this could be a way for a local commercial webcaster to come under that license, rather than the CARP rules.
I was about to say that Benevolence International [benevolence.org] is only alleged to have contributed to terrorist orgs and that nothing has been decided yet. Apparently this is not the case, as you can read at The Economist [economist.com] or Google News [google.com] (don't forget to disable the cookie!)
Interestingly, while some Muslim (or other!) charities may fund terrorists, others appear to be falsely accused of doing so.
For instance: Charities that give aid to widows, orphans, and/or starving unemployed in Palestine are accused of funding terrorism if they include the families of suicide bombers in their programs. (This accusation might have substance for any that SELECTIVELY support such people - creating an incentive to become a bomber in order to feed your family. But if they don't discriminate? Are the starving children of a terrorist less worthy of charity than the starving children of a non-terrorist?)
Similarly, the Israeli army routinely destroys any vehicles or official buildings operated by the Palestinian Authority - including especially ambulances and occasionally hospitals - in their retaliatory raids. And charities that supply replacement ambulances are apparently high on the list of alleged "charities supporting terrorism" - specifically because they provide the Palestinian Authority with vehicles. (Did I miss a report of Palestinian Ambulances being used as car bombs, armored personnel carriers, or tanks?)
One faction of the Israeli power structure seems to view infrastructure destruction and Palestinian removal as a desirable goal - which makes infrastructure reconstruction and charity for Palestinians, in their view, something to be stopped. Accusations of "supporting terrorism" against, not just charities actually supporting terrorism, but ALL charities supporting Palestinian people or infrastructure reconstruction efforts, further their agenda.
So while there may be terrorist funding operations masquerading as charities (and taking advantage of Islam's charity-giving mandates), I'd say that there's good reason not to halt a Muslim charity's work unless it is PROVED that they actually ARE supporting terrorism, rather than freezing their accounts upon accusation.
"The MPAA funds terrorism by making movies available."
How about "The MPAA funds terrorism by overpricing its movies and making cheap legal copies UNavailable."
But I'm not too hopeful that will take. If the drug warriors can get away with "Drug Users Fund Terrorism." without getting "The Drug War Funds Terrorism (by creating a lucrative illegal market for otherwise cheap drugs)" thrown in their faces, what hope do we nerds have in the "Marketplace of Public Opinion" - where virtually all the markets are owned and operated by media megacorporations?
[...] nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
As I recall the patent office's ability to declare a patent secret is predicated on the belief that general availibility of the patented invention would be a danger to national security.
Taking something to improve "National Security" is certainly a "public use", while keeping you from licensing your invention for all the traffic will bear is most definitely a "taking".
So "just compensation" in this case would be the maximum expected royalties if paid at the time the royalties would be paid, or the same amount plus interest if paid later.
mostly it's the 5 years service and support that is being paid for from what I can figure out
Note that five years of enterprise-class support for an enterprise-class server product is REALLY CHEAP!
Enterprise-class means that a business can trust it to perform mission-critical functions and preserve mission-critical data (such as recievables). For, say, a phone company's real-time call accounting application that could be several million bucks per hour of outage. (All the calls are free.) For, say, a commodities broker that could be MUCH more.
Also the vendor certification program for hardware is probably part of why enterprises would pay in.
Also the fact that a major support player has beaten it into sufficiently good shape that they CAN support it for $160/year (minimum 5 years), and WITHOUT charging another arm and leg every time somebody tries to USE the support. That shows confidence - implying low bug rates and easy configuration.
can you add/modify GPL software with proprietary code and sell it?
Yes you can. Charge as much as you want.
And as soon as you sell even one copy, your customer(s) can demand the source. They can then give away copies of the source, build from it, modify it, install their home-built version on extra machines, etc.
And if your proprietary software is sufficiently closely integrated with the GPL code (see the GPL, LGPL, and their interpretations), your proprietary code also comes under the GPL. So you have to give the source to THAT to your customers, too, for them to modify, give away, or what-have-you.
If your code is a separate add-on (rather than a modification that actually includes somebody else's GPLed code), you can additionally sell or license it under any other terms you want. It doesn't stop it from ALSO being available under the GPL - but you can make it available under other terms as well. (For instance: Letting your customer modify it and include it into some other non-GPLed system without having to GPL that.)
You can do the same even if it DOES include GPLed code, PROVIDED you get the appropriate additional licenses from ALL the authors of the GPLed code you included. (For much GPLed code that may be very difficult or impossible.)
But that's wrong. If you don't believe me, take the Schwarzschild metric and compute the curvature tensor. The black hole interior does not expand.
All my ranting above was based on the assumption that it was right. If it's wrong, my speculation is just noise.
Theories are cheap. Formulating them into testable predictions is much more difficult - and beyond me at the moment. It isn't science unless it can be formulated into something that can be falsified, then tested against other theories by comparison with emperical data. At this point I don't even have a self-consistent mathematical model, so I don't know if I'm even making sense, let alone whether this matches the real universe.
Nevertheless, I find gravity as a stretching, rather than just a warping, of the coordinate system to be more satisfying. For starters it explains why light can't make it out of a black hole even if it's going exactly along a radius, and why two masses at rest next to each other accellerate toward each other, without putting everything at lightspeed in a warped four-dimensional spacetime.
Now maybe everything moving at lightspeed on locally-straight, globally-curved paths in four-space is dead on, bendy 4-D coordinate systems are what the universe is made of, while stretchy coordinate systems are right out. And if I were another Einstein I'd be writing mathematical models rather than shooting off my keyboard without 'em.
But hey - it's slashdot! B-) Here we get to shoot from the wrist and see if comes anywhere near a target.
That's all very nice, but it doesn't have anything to do with what goes on inside a black hole.
You mean with what current models predict is going on inside a black hole? (After all, current models also say that anybody who goes in to look isn't going to come out - or even get inside before the heat death of the outside universe - even if the fall takes a very short time along the victim's world line.)
So basically you're saying that a black hole really is a universe being formed, which for the observer inside of the black hole is a similar experience as the big bang that we think formed ours.
IF the speculation about stretching coordinate systems has any meaning. B-)
Plus: So all we have to do to prove it is find this hawking radiation, that is thinned out to infenitesimal low density?
Not sure.
If the conjecture is true, one possible outcome might be that the hawking radiation can never get to the original matter. When the black hole "evaporates" in the original universe the detached "inside" ends up as two separated sub-universes, one filled with the original matter, the other with the antiparticles from the "inside" half of the Hawking radiation. Sum of the quantum numbers comes out to zero (maintaining parity in the original universe).
A sphere of matter inside the horizon collapses to a singularity -- but that doesn't mean that it looks like it is in an expanding universe, anymore than someone sitting on a deflating beach ball would think he's in an expanding universe.
See my more extensive answer to a previous poster.
Short form: The space soon is stretching more than the matter is collapsing - outward at lightspeed at the edges, fast enough to overcome the gravitatinal crush in the middle.
You're sitting on a beachball that started inflating VERY fast. The collapse to a singularity doesn't happen. All that matter in the middle expands outward into the newer, bigger, vacuum.
"Think a "taffy sheet", or a "stem" of the "morning glory" stretching like a stream of honey."
Except it can only get stretched so far until you run into the brick wall that is quantum mechanics. Space-time isn't infinitely smooth, and the finer a view of it you get, the less uniform it is.
Why? The more it stretches, the more of it there is to stretch. You're constantly creating more coordinate system. No quantum limit on the INSIDE at all.
From the inside it never DID collapse to a singularity. Before that happened the stretching of the space overcame the gravitational collapse. Presto! No singularity. Physics can continue without nasty divide-by-zeros.
"space is being stretched at least as fast as it moves (or maybe even faster), so it never makes it out of the hole."
Except that relativity tells us that light is always moving 3E8 m/s faster than that. Even an observer in that space that's getting stretched to the breaking point would measure light as going 3E8 m/s away from him.
That's right. Because the observer is farther down the hole. The space BETWEEN them is ALSO being stretched, fast enough that the photon is observed as leaving him behind at c, as well.
The WHOLE SPACE inside the event horizon is being stretched. From any point, in any direction, it looks like the "far edge" - the most distant place observable - is receeding at c. Fire some photons at it and you observe the photons traveling at c and never getting there - i.e. going on forever.
"What does a black hole look like from the INSIDE? What would one see from the viewpoint of the matter that was already there when the event horizon formed?"
As you pass through the event horizon [...]
But you DON'T pass through the event horizon. You (i.e. the mass/energy that eventually became you) were inside it when it formed. Your scenairo is from the viewpoint of matter that falls in AFTER the event horizon formed.
"An expanding universe, starting from a very small but finite volume and expanding indefinitely, containing a large-but-finite amount of matter, which was initially compressed into an EXTREMELY dense lump"
You're forgetting about the space being taken up by you. As the space you occupy gets stretched out, so do you. And you can only get stretched out so far before you're torn apart (the old quantum mechanics bit again). That finite mas being smeared out into a seemingly infinite volume is you.
Nope. That large-but-finite mass being smeared out into a seemingly infinite volume of space is the sea of quarks (or whatever) that started out as the matter forming the initial black hole. The stretching of space is what lets it escape its mutual gravatation sufficiently to thin out, cool down, become atoms, stars, supernovae, solar systems, and eventually evolve observers like you and me.
"In other words, something like the current universe."
Our universe looks uniform in any direction we look.
Well, actually it doesn't. That's what the article is about, after all. B-)
The view inside a black hole would be a whole lot of nothing in the sky except for that point directly away from the center of the black hole.
I think you're talking about the viewpoint of an infalling object ABOVE the event horizon again. I won't go there. (Lots of physicists already have. Besides, I can't get there from inside. B-) )
Seems to me that beneath the horizon you'd see an infinite space (or at least as much of it as light leaving at the "big bang"/"horizon forming" moment could have reached), filled with the matter that was inside the event horizon at the moment it formed.
Look toward the center and you see matter that was farther in. Look away and you see matter that was farther out. Look far enough in ANY direction and you're looking at the event horizon - where you see either the photons from infalling hawking radiation (spread out very thin by the sheer size of the "surface" and red-shifted almost to zilch) or nothing at all.
So from the viewpoint of the initial ball of matter there's space around the ball, expanding at the speed of light in all directions and carrying with it the outermost layer of the ball. This layer includes inward-moving photons that are red-shifted down to near nothing, along with outer mass layers that get stretched out into a very hard vacuum. Meanwhile the rest of the matter of the ball fills the rest of the space (perhaps more densely in some places than others - ESPECIALLY near the center).
Sounds like a big bang (starting at the end of the "inflationary period") to me.
I've always been uncomfortable with a faster-than-light "inflation" phase. That seems like a kludge to rescue the extrapolation of an expanding universe backward to a point. This way you never GET back to a point - because you never came from one. The closest you get to a point is the center of mass of the matter trapped in (and forming) the new black hole.
===
I'm not sure what happens to the Hawking radiation. Maybe we should ask Hawking. (And see if he laughs us off or tells us he already thought of it and rejected or published it decades ago. B-) )
Seems to me its a toss-up: Either we eventually get hit by the infalling Hawking matter or we don't.
The first is bad: From our viewpoint the Hawking matter is biased toward antimatter and eventually wipes out the hole. We disappear in a high-density big crunch under a rain of antiparticles.
The second is good: The evaporation of the black hole from the outside corresponds to the final disconnection of its guts from the outer universe and continuation as a separate universe inside, with the negative energy from the mutual attraction balancing the positive mass-energy of the contained mass and energy.
Either way the outer universe never gets to know the configuration of matter/energy/space that was inside the event horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
Shit, while you are at it might as well give yourself [] one of those james bond, "uber homeland security dude, do whatever he tells you, no questions asked, get of jail free" flags.
I believe it's called "Federal Courier". The delivery guys for nuke bomb parts, secret documents, etc. I hear they vary their appearance and routes, drive fast cars, and may borrow a friend's hot rod (or the friend as a passenger) for protective coloration on a trip.
(I hear this from someone who claims to have been such a friend, who was taken on a wild ride one night. Got pulled over on a country road they'd been burning up, and the cop's attitude did a 180 when he saw the ID and he INSTANTLY sent him on his way. The guy says he still has no idea what, if anything, was being carried, pretty much had no clue what his buddy did for a living until then - and mostly still doesn't.)
I suspect that this will lead to increased penalties for having or using software that does any ether sniffing on 802.11b. They can claim you're trying to intercept police transmissions.
It will also lead to "prowl car detectors" for the crooks - little boxes that detect the low-level network protocols that WiFi cards occasionally mumble or can be provoked to emit. Even if they're firmware-hacked to shut up unless they hear an AP's broadcast you can still fake it and get them to respond.
There are ways around this. But we're starting to get into major security mods.
This would NOT be a good idea for something that is magnetically sensitive, as it would effectively erase floppy/hard disks, cassette tapes, etc...
Well, putting degaussing coils on all the desktops in the guise of power supplies for portable devices is ONE way to create an incentive to retrofit or replace any remaining legacy equipment and complete the migration away from floppy disks.
I wish someone would explain to me why I have to pay someone NOT to include my name (and why I pay every month).
Originally it was (allegedly) to pay for the extra information operator time that resulted when somebody tried to reach you and couldn't find you listed in the phone book.
Of course now that you pay for information calls, it's just a matter of taking advantage of a pre-existing tarrif for "revenue enhancement" - also known as "gouging".
Makes it easier to deal with student loans, scholarships, and other financial aids a student might recieve.
That's a side-issue (which could be done as easily by storing the SSN in a database attached to the student's record - and not until the first time it's needed).
The real reason IT departments try to use SSNs: It's a very close approximation to a "unique identifier" - i.e. (with few exceptions) everybody has exactly one and no two people have the same one. So it heads off some problems when one person gets entered twice or two people get mixed up.
Then there's a side benefit: Easy correlation of documents about the same person from other bureaucracies (credit, health, criminal justice, etc.) should that ever become desirable (to the bureaucracy). The financial aid simplification you discuss above is a small subset of this.
what steps are being taken to protect the data and users privacy ? [... is the info] for sale to the highest bidder ?
What privacy?
The whole POINT of the service is to tell other users who listen to similar music who you are.
So execs don't even need to buy the info in a special transaction. Just subscribe a pseudo-user who "listens to the songs" they're interested in, and BINGO! The service gives 'em a contact list.
They don't advertise it, but the "cache:" prefix works just like you think it does.
Thanks! (Tried it, works great!)
Will sombody please mod ChaosDiscord's post +informative? Thanks.
From the article: ...without alienating neophytes who type in "amazon.com" to find . . . Amazon.com. (Yes, people really do that. Google doesn't know why. )
I can tell you why. Because I have done it. (Well, maybe not to find amazon.com. But typing a URL in the Google search box.)
I wanted to find the google cache of an article that was slashdotted.
I had hoped that Google's interface would be clueful enough to include pages whose URL was an exact match for the search string - bringing up the index page with a link to the cache.
No dice.
The google front-page interface doesn't give an obvious way to get from a URL to the cache entry without knowing the content of the page you're trying to find. And cache links themselves include magic numbers, which implies that you can't just come up with a default conversion of a URL into a google cache link.
Since the phase is changed, the resulting image on the CCD or film is fuzzy and has to be "decoded". You can think of it as "encoding" the wavefront in a special way that preserves the depth of field, capturing the image, and then "decoding" it into a sharp picture.
When I first saw the article it sounded like the post-processing that is done to improve the focus of images that were originally taken out-of-focus. You can extract a lot of features by convolving an image with the inverse of the defocussing transfer function.
But doing this has a downside: It also brings to a point focus, or nearly so, the light from patches of a certain range of shapes. They weren't originally points - but photographing them defocussed made the same shape blur as a point light source would have, so the post-processing turned them into points. You extract features that would have been unreadable (like a license plate number), but also "sprinkle glitter and pepper" over the image.
Your explanation gives me some hope that the phenomenon might not occur with this system, due to a judicial choice of transfer function. But I'll wait to see the results from, not just a contrived demo, but a bunch of real-world pictures, plus some that were generated by a competitor who might have done a study of the physics and contrived, say, a "camouflage background" pattern tuned to spray crud all over the processed image.
(Such a pattern might make for interesting camouflage background and/or clothing. It would certainly screw up photos taken with the system, and might also produce strange results even with ordinary cameras. And any bets on whether human and animal eyes and brains use a similar trick?)
Ok, so:
- NBC is using Apple G4 w/Final Cut Pro and Discreet Cleaner.
- CBS is using Windows PCs w/Avid (editing centers), Adobe Premiere (producers & photojournalists close to action), or MovieMaker 2 (for dumbkopfs?).
- CNN and Fox aren't talking, and ABC's tech wasn't mentioned.
So lets see who flakes out and compare quality and timeliness. B-)
(Note that we'll probably be able to find out what CNN, Fox, and ABC used after the fact, once the info won't give their competitors an advantage.)
One barrier to rollout of EvDO has been that the technology requires wireless companies to set aside valuable airwaves just to carry data.
Not really.
You can just put the voice on the same packet stream. Use MPLS and a bandwidth-reservation protocol to reserve a slice of the channel, giving the voice connection the necessary bandwidth and latency gurarntees for voice service. Non-phone-call packet servcie get everything left over after the currently-active phone calls reserve their cut.
This also lets the phone company charge you a telephone-ish rate for the reserved bandwidth. Charge cell-phone minutes for a phonecall-sized reserved slice, flat rate for taking your chances.
They can also do multi-tier billing:
- Charge regular rate for a cellphone-quality compressed connection.
- Charge a premium (1 1/2 cell minutes per minute?) for a landline-quality 64kbps (plus overhead) slot and run G.711 (like a DOCSIS-compliant POTS-over-cable box) or some other DS0-in-packets protocol. Run your fax machine via your cellphone at full rate. (Or your laptop's 56k modem if you're feeling silly, or can't get hold of the right cables and software.)
(If the base has a LOT of capacity they might just want to charge the same for 64k as for other calls, or just make all calls 64k: They take more bandwidth than compressed but are a straight encoding of a digital phone line, so the don't require a bunch of DSP crunch at the POTS/packet gateway.)
- Charge a discount (1/2 cell minute per minute?) for highly-compressed voice.
- Maybe charge a steeply discounted premium rate for, say, participating in an outbound multicast group to hear a broadcast stream. (Think XM radio or webcasts via your cellphone, or at least via its network infrastructure.)
And so on.
Maybe let you make premium-priced bandwidth reservations on any suitable stream, rather than just those that represent calls via, or broadcasts from, their own servers.
This lets you take your own choice:
- Make an internet "free" phonecall, and take your chances on voice quality. If it's breaking up too badly:
- Reconnect (or promote) the call to a reserved-bandwidth service if the net weather is stormy.
- Pay different rates for different quality connections. Sound just like a POTS landline for a bit extra. Sound like a cheap long-distance carrier if you're on a budget.
Now the carrier might want to limit the percentage of bandwidth that can be reserved, so a heavy phone day will only slow, not stop, internet access. But there's no need to earmark a bunch of channels and install a bunch of hardware JUST for the low-dollar IP packets.
Of the developers surveyed, more than 50 percent who now develop primarily for Linux used to develop primarily for Windows. Only 30 percent used to develop for some other Unix or Unix derivative.
But since Linux is a posix-compliant UNIX variant, many apps developed for it can be ported straight to Unix flavors by simply recompiling. Windows is a whole different ballgame (unless you develop with the Wine libraries for portability).
Drivers need a bit of porting, but are still 'way closer to Unix than Windows, and apps that use Lunix-specific features will need some tuning (or just not go if the whole POINT is to interact with the Linux feature).
But when a developer switches from Unix to Windows his work is likely still available in the Unix world. (Perhaps moreso, if he's GPLing it now.) Those that switch from Windows to Linux are pretty much GONE on the Windows side of the world.
I'd love to dump my gasoline powered RV generator.
Which is why I want the little one to fit in about the space of a water heater.
And backup power for the off-grid (or on-grid) house. Great for a sunless week on a photovoltaic system, windless ditto on a windmill system. Top off the batteries preparatory to running power tools for construction or if it's swealtering and you need active air conditioning.
Water cooled lets you use the waste heat to heat your water tank and/or the house or trailer in winter.
On the other hand, if it runs hot enough you might use the waste heat to pump an ammonia-cycle 'fridge. You'd be burning gas into low-grade heat to run the 'fridge anyhow, so you'd get the power nearly for free. Use the high-grade energy to charge the batteries. (If the batteries get full, dump the extra power in the water heater's electric element. If that's up to temperature, too, dump it into the 'fridge's electric element and the gas throttles back to idle when all the appliances are at setpoint. Only takes a minor logic tweak on the charge controller and a couple extra solid-state relays.)
I want a fuel cell that runs on odorized propane. About 1/2 to 3 kilowatts average, with the model in the 1/2 to 1 kilowatt range fitting in about a cubic foot. Either water or air cooled is OK.
But how long until it gets harassed by the RIAA for paying the music fees ?
Good grief! Streaming to a multicast or broadcast address over unencrypted (or WEP encrypted with a key published in conjunction with an appropriate open license) 802.11b is broadcast radio, yet legal without FCC license.
If the wording of the federal mandatory license agrees (or a court says it does), this could be a way for a local commercial webcaster to come under that license, rather than the CARP rules.
(And doesn't "CARP" have the A and R swapped?)
I was about to say that Benevolence International [benevolence.org] is only alleged to have contributed to terrorist orgs and that nothing has been decided yet. Apparently this is not the case, as you can read at The Economist [economist.com] or Google News [google.com] (don't forget to disable the cookie!)
Interestingly, while some Muslim (or other!) charities may fund terrorists, others appear to be falsely accused of doing so.
For instance: Charities that give aid to widows, orphans, and/or starving unemployed in Palestine are accused of funding terrorism if they include the families of suicide bombers in their programs. (This accusation might have substance for any that SELECTIVELY support such people - creating an incentive to become a bomber in order to feed your family. But if they don't discriminate? Are the starving children of a terrorist less worthy of charity than the starving children of a non-terrorist?)
Similarly, the Israeli army routinely destroys any vehicles or official buildings operated by the Palestinian Authority - including especially ambulances and occasionally hospitals - in their retaliatory raids. And charities that supply replacement ambulances are apparently high on the list of alleged "charities supporting terrorism" - specifically because they provide the Palestinian Authority with vehicles. (Did I miss a report of Palestinian Ambulances being used as car bombs, armored personnel carriers, or tanks?)
One faction of the Israeli power structure seems to view infrastructure destruction and Palestinian removal as a desirable goal - which makes infrastructure reconstruction and charity for Palestinians, in their view, something to be stopped. Accusations of "supporting terrorism" against, not just charities actually supporting terrorism, but ALL charities supporting Palestinian people or infrastructure reconstruction efforts, further their agenda.
So while there may be terrorist funding operations masquerading as charities (and taking advantage of Islam's charity-giving mandates), I'd say that there's good reason not to halt a Muslim charity's work unless it is PROVED that they actually ARE supporting terrorism, rather than freezing their accounts upon accusation.
Or should we just sling it right back at them?
"The MPAA funds terrorism by making movies available."
How about "The MPAA funds terrorism by overpricing its movies and making cheap legal copies UNavailable."
But I'm not too hopeful that will take. If the drug warriors can get away with "Drug Users Fund Terrorism." without getting "The Drug War Funds Terrorism (by creating a lucrative illegal market for otherwise cheap drugs)" thrown in their faces, what hope do we nerds have in the "Marketplace of Public Opinion" - where virtually all the markets are owned and operated by media megacorporations?
As I recall the patent office's ability to declare a patent secret is predicated on the belief that general availibility of the patented invention would be a danger to national security.
Taking something to improve "National Security" is certainly a "public use", while keeping you from licensing your invention for all the traffic will bear is most definitely a "taking".
So "just compensation" in this case would be the maximum expected royalties if paid at the time the royalties would be paid, or the same amount plus interest if paid later.
I'm just a little fuzzy on what's being paid for.
mostly it's the 5 years service and support that is being paid for from what I can figure out
Note that five years of enterprise-class support for an enterprise-class server product is REALLY CHEAP!
Enterprise-class means that a business can trust it to perform mission-critical functions and preserve mission-critical data (such as recievables). For, say, a phone company's real-time call accounting application that could be several million bucks per hour of outage. (All the calls are free.) For, say, a commodities broker that could be MUCH more.
Also the vendor certification program for hardware is probably part of why enterprises would pay in.
Also the fact that a major support player has beaten it into sufficiently good shape that they CAN support it for $160/year (minimum 5 years), and WITHOUT charging another arm and leg every time somebody tries to USE the support. That shows confidence - implying low bug rates and easy configuration.
can you add/modify GPL software with proprietary code and sell it?
Yes you can. Charge as much as you want.
And as soon as you sell even one copy, your customer(s) can demand the source. They can then give away copies of the source, build from it, modify it, install their home-built version on extra machines, etc.
And if your proprietary software is sufficiently closely integrated with the GPL code (see the GPL, LGPL, and their interpretations), your proprietary code also comes under the GPL. So you have to give the source to THAT to your customers, too, for them to modify, give away, or what-have-you.
If your code is a separate add-on (rather than a modification that actually includes somebody else's GPLed code), you can additionally sell or license it under any other terms you want. It doesn't stop it from ALSO being available under the GPL - but you can make it available under other terms as well. (For instance: Letting your customer modify it and include it into some other non-GPLed system without having to GPL that.)
You can do the same even if it DOES include GPLed code, PROVIDED you get the appropriate additional licenses from ALL the authors of the GPLed code you included. (For much GPLed code that may be very difficult or impossible.)
- System software upgrades via the Internet
- performance notification via e-mail alerts
Oh, joy. A DDoS robot and spam exploder on every appliance.
But that's wrong. If you don't believe me, take the Schwarzschild metric and compute the curvature tensor. The black hole interior does not expand.
All my ranting above was based on the assumption that it was right. If it's wrong, my speculation is just noise.
Theories are cheap. Formulating them into testable predictions is much more difficult - and beyond me at the moment. It isn't science unless it can be formulated into something that can be falsified, then tested against other theories by comparison with emperical data. At this point I don't even have a self-consistent mathematical model, so I don't know if I'm even making sense, let alone whether this matches the real universe.
Nevertheless, I find gravity as a stretching, rather than just a warping, of the coordinate system to be more satisfying. For starters it explains why light can't make it out of a black hole even if it's going exactly along a radius, and why two masses at rest next to each other accellerate toward each other, without putting everything at lightspeed in a warped four-dimensional spacetime.
Now maybe everything moving at lightspeed on locally-straight, globally-curved paths in four-space is dead on, bendy 4-D coordinate systems are what the universe is made of, while stretchy coordinate systems are right out. And if I were another Einstein I'd be writing mathematical models rather than shooting off my keyboard without 'em.
But hey - it's slashdot! B-) Here we get to shoot from the wrist and see if comes anywhere near a target.
That's all very nice, but it doesn't have anything to do with what goes on inside a black hole.
You mean with what current models predict is going on inside a black hole? (After all, current models also say that anybody who goes in to look isn't going to come out - or even get inside before the heat death of the outside universe - even if the fall takes a very short time along the victim's world line.)
So basically you're saying that a black hole really is a universe being formed, which for the observer inside of the black hole is a similar experience as the big bang that we think formed ours.
IF the speculation about stretching coordinate systems has any meaning. B-)
Plus: So all we have to do to prove it is find this hawking radiation, that is thinned out to infenitesimal low density?
Not sure.
If the conjecture is true, one possible outcome might be that the hawking radiation can never get to the original matter. When the black hole "evaporates" in the original universe the detached "inside" ends up as two separated sub-universes, one filled with the original matter, the other with the antiparticles from the "inside" half of the Hawking radiation. Sum of the quantum numbers comes out to zero (maintaining parity in the original universe).
Or I could be blowing smoke.
A sphere of matter inside the horizon collapses to a singularity -- but that doesn't mean that it looks like it is in an expanding universe, anymore than someone sitting on a deflating beach ball would think he's in an expanding universe.
See my more extensive answer to a previous poster.
Short form: The space soon is stretching more than the matter is collapsing - outward at lightspeed at the edges, fast enough to overcome the gravitatinal crush in the middle.
You're sitting on a beachball that started inflating VERY fast. The collapse to a singularity doesn't happen. All that matter in the middle expands outward into the newer, bigger, vacuum.
"Think a "taffy sheet", or a "stem" of the "morning glory" stretching like a stream of honey."
Except it can only get stretched so far until you run into the brick wall that is quantum mechanics. Space-time isn't infinitely smooth, and the finer a view of it you get, the less uniform it is.
Why? The more it stretches, the more of it there is to stretch. You're constantly creating more coordinate system. No quantum limit on the INSIDE at all.
From the inside it never DID collapse to a singularity. Before that happened the stretching of the space overcame the gravitational collapse. Presto! No singularity. Physics can continue without nasty divide-by-zeros.
"space is being stretched at least as fast as it moves (or maybe even faster), so it never makes it out of the hole."
Except that relativity tells us that light is always moving 3E8 m/s faster than that. Even an observer in that space that's getting stretched to the breaking point would measure light as going 3E8 m/s away from him.
That's right. Because the observer is farther down the hole. The space BETWEEN them is ALSO being stretched, fast enough that the photon is observed as leaving him behind at c, as well.
The WHOLE SPACE inside the event horizon is being stretched. From any point, in any direction, it looks like the "far edge" - the most distant place observable - is receeding at c. Fire some photons at it and you observe the photons traveling at c and never getting there - i.e. going on forever.
"What does a black hole look like from the INSIDE? What would one see from the viewpoint of the matter that was already there when the event horizon formed?"
As you pass through the event horizon [...]
But you DON'T pass through the event horizon. You (i.e. the mass/energy that eventually became you) were inside it when it formed. Your scenairo is from the viewpoint of matter that falls in AFTER the event horizon formed.
"An expanding universe, starting from a very small but finite volume and expanding indefinitely, containing a large-but-finite amount of matter, which was initially compressed into an EXTREMELY dense lump"
You're forgetting about the space being taken up by you. As the space you occupy gets stretched out, so do you. And you can only get stretched out so far before you're torn apart (the old quantum mechanics bit again). That finite mas being smeared out into a seemingly infinite volume is you.
Nope. That large-but-finite mass being smeared out into a seemingly infinite volume of space is the sea of quarks (or whatever) that started out as the matter forming the initial black hole. The stretching of space is what lets it escape its mutual gravatation sufficiently to thin out, cool down, become atoms, stars, supernovae, solar systems, and eventually evolve observers like you and me.
"In other words, something like the current universe."
Our universe looks uniform in any direction we look.
Well, actually it doesn't. That's what the article is about, after all. B-)
The view inside a black hole would be a whole lot of nothing in the sky except for that point directly away from the center of the black hole.
I think you're talking about the viewpoint of an infalling object ABOVE the event horizon again. I won't go there. (Lots of physicists already have. Besides, I can't get there from inside. B-) )
Seems to me that beneath the horizon you'd see an infinite space (or at least as much of it as light leaving at the "big bang"/"horizon forming" moment could have reached), filled with the matter that was inside the event horizon at the moment it formed.
Look toward the center and you see matter that was farther in. Look away and you see matter that was farther out. Look far enough in ANY direction and you're looking at the event horizon - where you see either the photons from infalling hawking radiation (spread out very thin by the sheer size of the "surface" and red-shifted almost to zilch) or nothing at all.
So from the viewpoint of the initial ball of matter there's space around the ball, expanding at the speed of light in all directions and carrying with it the outermost layer of the ball. This layer includes inward-moving photons that are red-shifted down to near nothing, along with outer mass layers that get stretched out into a very hard vacuum. Meanwhile the rest of the matter of the ball fills the rest of the space (perhaps more densely in some places than others - ESPECIALLY near the center).
Sounds like a big bang (starting at the end of the "inflationary period") to me.
I've always been uncomfortable with a faster-than-light "inflation" phase. That seems like a kludge to rescue the extrapolation of an expanding universe backward to a point. This way you never GET back to a point - because you never came from one. The closest you get to a point is the center of mass of the matter trapped in (and forming) the new black hole.
===
I'm not sure what happens to the Hawking radiation. Maybe we should ask Hawking. (And see if he laughs us off or tells us he already thought of it and rejected or published it decades ago. B-) )
Seems to me its a toss-up: Either we eventually get hit by the infalling Hawking matter or we don't.
The first is bad: From our viewpoint the Hawking matter is biased toward antimatter and eventually wipes out the hole. We disappear in a high-density big crunch under a rain of antiparticles.
The second is good: The evaporation of the black hole from the outside corresponds to the final disconnection of its guts from the outer universe and continuation as a separate universe inside, with the negative energy from the mutual attraction balancing the positive mass-energy of the contained mass and energy.
Either way the outer universe never gets to know the configuration of matter/energy/space that was inside the event horizon.