From time to time,I hear stories of clocks stopping when their owners die. I consider a few of them reliable accounts. I wonder if these type of things are coincidential, or if there would be some sort of interaction going on here as well?
An obvious interaction:
The grandfater clock stops when grandfather dies because grandfather is the fellow who WOUND the darned thing.
So it's not unreasonable for it to stop at roughly the time grandfather does. And if he's dying in the house with the clock, the family is likely to be around the bed when he goes or otherwise distracted.
When they start paying attention to anything but granddad it's likely that they'll notice the stopped clock. They won't KNOW if it stopped EXACTLY when grandpa's heart did. But since it stopped roughly at that time, to the limits of their measurement (running when grandpa cried out, stopped next time we wanted to know the time), it's easy to believe it stopped right when grandpa did.
That's called the Harem effect (or something like that). Basically you get any number of women, greater than 1, put them into close contact with each other and they all have their period at the (nearly) same time. Well documented phenomeon(sp?)
It MAY be related to the fact that roughly half the estrogen in the body is produced by cells in the lungs. (It's the particular cell type that sometimes becomes cancerous, which is why lung cancers often have effects on secondary sexual characteristics, such as breast enlargement.)
Now I don't KNOW of any proven causual relationship. But the location of these cells in the lungs makes me wonder if they might be acting as chemosensors, with their estrogen output modulated by some airborne signaling chemical. This in turn could be responsible for all sorts of interesting and advantageous effects (both in humans and other animals), such as ovulation and/or coming into heat in response to proximity to a fertile male.
One such effect might be synchronization of periods of women in long-term proximity, via estrogen release by these cells in response to a signaling pheromone emitted by the other women. Synchronized periods would help maintain pair bonding by reducing the temptation for a man to mate with other women when his usual mate was having a period and the other women were not.
Is the preservation of wildlife even more important than the preservation of human lives?
I'll take this question. Yes, the preservation of wildlife is more important than the preservation of human lives
An answer of that form - a member of a social species putting the wellbeing of members of all other species over that of members of his own - is a symptom of mental illness.
You are welcome to put the survival of members of other species over your own PERSONAL survival. But when you make that choice for other humans you're exhibiting a form of psychopathy that can easily lead to multiple murder.
After all, you consider it RIGHT for humans to die to promote the survival of a disease-carrying parisitic fly. Will you therefore consider it right to kill people who are trying to kill the flies?
Will you act on your convictions and kill them yourself? Will you commit sabotage that might kill them? Will you call it "monkeywrenching" rather than "attempted murder"? Will you do the equivalent of spiking trees (defending trees by maiming and killing the workers whose chainsaws hit the spikes)? Will you bomb the sites where the work is done? Will you break into labs and release or kill the lab animals, setting back the work and resulting in more human death?
I would rather take the chance of getting bit and dying, than introduce a potentially disasterous new element into as fragile and infinately complex an equation as an ecosystem.
So many pieces of bullshit, so little time.
If you'd rather take the chance for yourself, that's fine - and I see you claim to have visited the areas infested. But you're trying to make that choice for OTHERS, who must live there for their whole lives.
Stuck-up elitists who don't HAVE to live with the disease-ridden flies always seem to find it easy to put the lives of the flies above those of the starving poor who must live with them.
As for "fragile ecosystems", that's a buzzphrase that's false to fact. Ecosystems in general are about the most robust dynamic systems ever to come into existence. The "balance of nature" isn't something precarious you can tip over, like a rock on a pinpoint. It's something that, when you push, will push back and maybe even crush you, like a rock in a deep hole. (Push hard enough and you MIGHT move it into the next hole over. Beat on it with a sledge long enough and you might crush it. But you're not going to make the rock evaporate.)
As for the "new element", it's sterile. So it only lasts until it dies - days, in the case of flies. The only thing "new" is that, if it works, a disease-ridden pest and its associated disease organism may go missing, leaving an eco-niche open to other organisms that might accomplish the beneficial functions (if any) without simultaneously causing human suffering and death.
But if you find suffering and death among poor dark-skinned humans desirable, then your attitude is easy to understand.
... cell phones work on those big planes ie. 911 calls before crashing.
But it's a good idea not to use them in a plane - unless it's an emergency. They won't screw up the navigation equipment. But from a plane they can be "heard" by dozens or hundreds of cells on the ground (depending on your altitude and location) and they chew up one call's worth of bandwidth resource at each cell base site.
Since when did SCSI terms because the naming noveau trend? UltraWide.
It's from radio terminology from (human) generations ago.
ELF (extremely low frequency)
VLF (very low frequency)
LF (low frequency)
HF (high frequency)
VHF (very high frequency)
UHF (ultra high frequency)
microwave (microwave - subdivided in to bands designated by one or two letters which HAVE changed)
IR (infrared)
X-ray (x-ray)
Gamma ray (gamma ray)
I think there may have been a medium frequency but I'm not sure. There's also:
IF (intermediate frequency) which is unrelated, referring to an internal signal in a superheterodyne receiver.
RF (radio frequency) which is more generic, covering everything from ELF to UHF or perhaps microwave, although its use tends to drop off outside the range between LF and HF.
Similarly there was narrow band and wide/broad band (referring to signal bandwidth significantly less than, or more than, that of AM or early-version FM signals modulated by telephone-quality voice). It's logical for radio engineers to apply the same set of modifiers when they start working with more extreme schemes and have to differentiate them from previous technology.
Do you really think they're putting a 1 watt laser in this thing?
Doesn't matter if it's a laser or a diode, one watt or one milliwatt. If it's bright enough to paint a visible picture it's bright enough to fry the spot that's illuminated if the scanning stops with the beam on.
So they'll need a safety interlock of some sort to cut off or dim the light source if the scanning stops, or make the amount of light emitted dependent on the actual motion of the mirror, unless they can guarantee that the scanning failure modes all deflect the light away from the eye.
One other question, what about those of us with glasses, can the system work around that, or will I have to start wearing a monocle like Mr. Peanut?
If the marketing sketches of the optic path accurately show the geometry of the system, you'd be able to see in focus without your glasses. (But your iris would have to be in the correct spot, i.e. you're looking in the right direction, or the image will disappear.)
The focus issue occurs because the light from a given real-world "pixel" arrives as a wide, essentially colimated (rays essentially parallel) beam, and your lens has to focus the light hitting it all over its surface down to a point, or a very small patch, on the retina. If your lens is less than perfect or not currently adjusted correctly, light from one real-world pixel striking different parts of it arrive at different spots on the retina, rather than all at one spot, defocusing the image.
Most displays illuminate the whole retina with a broad beam, allowing you to move your eye or head about and still see the image, but requiring your lens or lens-plus-glasses system to focus properly. This system MAY hit your eye with a narrow beam, which would reduce or eliminate the need for the lens to focus accurately.
But it would also require your eye to be in exactly the right spot, within the size of your pupil as viewed through your eye's lens. Eye motion would make you lose the image. So I suspect the display actually spreads out the light on its way to your eye, and you'd still need the glasses.
Back in school, we had spectrum analyzers that used regular oscilloscopes for display. They're a cheap, but very good alternative. I forget exactly who made ours, but they were based out of Quebec
You can make your own spectrum analyzer out of:
An oscilloscope with a high-persistence screen and a horizontal sweep output.
A receiver for the desired frequency.
A handfull of components
provided you're willing to hack up the receiver. Here's the basic drill:
Probe the receiver's AGC feedback line to feed the osciloscope's vertical deflection circuitry. (This gives you a roughly logarithmic measure of the signal intensity at the center of the IF passband on the way to the detector.)
Disconnect the AFC circuit and substitute the sweep signal from the oscilloscope - with enough conditioning (such as DC blocking capacitors and attenuating resistors) to sweep the radio rather than fry it.
If the receiver doesn't have an AFC, or at least the part that sweeps the receiver, make your own:
Connect one end of a diode to ground near (one of) the local oscilator(s) of the receiver. A variactor (PIN) diode works best, because it's optimized for this service. But essentially any diode will do.
Capacitively couple the hot end to the tuned circuit of the local oscilator (with a small capacitor).
Inductively couple the hot end to a bias and signal network I'm about to describe. The inductor should be large enough to block the RF from the oscilator but small enough to pass the audio-rate scope sweep. At the other end of the inductor connect:
A resistor to ground and another to a handy bypassed power supply connection, providing a voltage that back-biases the diode - say a half-volt - and also providing a load resistance for the incoming sweep signal.
A capacitor-resistor series combination to the wire from the sweep output of the oscilloscope.
Pick your resistors to get maybee a quarter-volt of the sweep to appear at the diode junction. (I'm guessing about these voltages, so play around a bit.)
Set the oscilloscope for a sawtooth timebase, as slow as you can without flickering. Shazam: A low budget spectrum analyzer, at least for the tuning range of the hacked receiver. (Calibrating it is another can of worms, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.)
How it works:
The variable back-bias of the diode (in sync with the horizontal sweep of the 'scope) moves the conduction regions of the two sides of the diode junction closer/farter, making the diode act as a variable capacitor. This is coupled to the tuned circuit of the local oscilator, thus sweeping it in sync with the scope and dragging the receiver's tuning along with it. (Adjust the amount of sweep voltage applied to the diode to adjust the horizontal scale of the display. Don't get too close to conduction or the sweep will get very non-linear.)
The receiver tunes across the signal range you want to observe, and the AGC feedback signal gives you a measure of the strength of the signals that make it through the IF into the detector, which you display on the 'scope's vertical deflection.
To calibrate frequency a small crystal oscilator with a square-wave output will produce a "comb" of frequency markers that show up as little pips on the display. Calbirating amplitude is tougher.
A quarter-century sounds right. I wasn't sure how far back it went. But knew I'd seen it well before I moved out to CA about 12 years ago so called it "over a decade". But it could easily have predated the Altair.
The roof/pole mounted device was quite large - about the volume of a monitor but twice as deep and half as high, with two big lenses (looking something like eyes) on the front. Curved cover which also overhung the lenses to keep rain of that made it look a bit streamlined, in a style consistent with the '60s and reminiscent of automobiles dating even earlier.
I visited their San Antonio site at one point. They had a sign on the door of the wiring closet behind the server room that was apparently originally intended for a welding machine. It said "do not look into Arc". Seemed appropriate, both as a reference to the high-power infrared link (which was really on the roof) and the truly piled-full-of-snarled-cables wiring closet. B-)
There's a LOT more to an artificial womb than getting the embryo to attach. The baby/mother system has lots of biochemical communication, turning mommy into a nutrient factory for the little tyke under construction.
Her body sacrifices the calcium in her bones, the energetic compounds and trace elements in her fat, and the vitamins in her bloodstream, handing it off to the foetus as directed by a plethora of signals. She gets morning sickness from folic acid deficiency and strange appetites at odd hours ("Honey, run out and get me some Ice Cream and Pickles!") whenever baby needs some oddball compound. And then there's the support, massage, and shaping performed by the bag of muscles the kid lives in for 9 months.
The signals are FAR from all known, and you can bet that kidlet will not form up healthy and happy if you just give him/her a stock nutrient solution rather than adjusting it according to his/her signals.
Infrared line-of-sight links have been done for well over a decade. Datapoint's Arcnet had an infrared link device called Arclight that they used for a line-of-sight link for several miles. It would flake out in rain or fog - because rain and fog both absorb and refract infrared. So it might as well have been as opaque as black smoke.
Arcnet was a self-healing token ring network with an underlying broadcast topology. So if two buildings were connected by Arclight and it went down, the network split into two rings, and when it came back up it healed into a single ring. Reconfig took miliseconds so it was no big deal.
You may not have heard of Datapoint. But have probably heard of the Intel. Seems Datapoint had a discrete-component standalone computer/smart terminal which was the basic node in their network - a diskless-workstation, fileserver, compute-server archetecture. They cut a deal with a semiconductor company called Intel to try to port their instruction set to a silicon chip for the next generation. But the resulting chip was too slow, so they went with another discrete component solution.
And Intel had cut the deal so they could sell the chip. So they took the chip to market, perhaps with a few tweaks, as the 8008 - first in the line that continued with the 8080, 8086, 80x86, Pentium,...
Allow the trading of only EARNED (by gameplay) items, and
TAKE A COMMISSION ON THE SALES!
This would prevent the inflation of the "currency" of game items, provide an "aftermarket" for people who tire of the game to recover some of their costs, limit the impact on players who don't want to fork out for assistance or extra equipment, and provide an additional income stream to the company (which could be partially converted to reduced cost to ordinary players).
... (or at least the perceived scumbags) before they go after the good guys.
That's why they go after kiddie-pornographers first when what they really want to do is censor opinions they don't like.
That's why they go after terrorists first when they want to disarm the general population.
That's why they go after self-confessed promotors of the violation of copyrights first when they want to shut down competitive outlets for content.
And so on.
Getting a conviction of someone perceived as a "bad guy" - and the "badder" the better - is easier than going after someone who isn't harming others. Courts and juries, in their desire to make the "bad guy" stop dong "bad stuff", may overlook the fact that the prosecutor or plantif is using the wrong legal tool to go after him, or may overlook how the precedent could be appllied to a non-"bad guy". Once the precedent is established, it becomes a tool to go after people who are NOT "bad guys".
Additionally "Bad guys" also often have shallow pockets, leaving them unable to mount as effective a defense as the more affluent citizens. And that puts them in a similar situation to the "go after the little guy first" model in the previous post.
This would be a keystoke-by-keystroke, mouseclick-by-mouseclick, recipie for going:
From a minimal fresh install of Linux
To an identical fresh install of the same Linux with the kernel built from the sources (with a comments-only edit to one of the source files), and
Build a set of install/source disks identical to the distribution except for the modified kernel and kernel sources.
For the latest release of each of the common Linux distributions available to the authors in time to be included in the book.
This is something the distribution packagers (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, etc.) SHOULD provide with the distribution.
I don't know about the others. But Red Hat provides adequate documentation to get a bare PC loaded to the point of displaying a login screen. And then their documentation just stops. And their prepaid support ALSO stops at that point. No help for setting up devices, networks, printers, or what-have-you. No explanation of the internals of their proprietary install software (or translation between it and the edit-config-file, build from scratch approach). NOTHING to walk you through applying security patches (just an enormous man page for RPM). And especially NOTHING on how to build a kernel. (But attempting to build the kernel from the supplied sources according to the usual rules dies.)
So there's a big learning curve before somebody new to Linux can do "hello kernel world". And there's no easy bridge from the stock install of the packaged release to a kernel build from the sources.
(There's also no easy bridge between the administration tools to the configuration file changes that result from poking a control. Cookbooks to get people started, and manuals describing what's going on behind the scenes, would also be grist for books. But that's a separate issue.)
propstoalldedhomiez: It's a very unintrusive form of advertising. I don't see anything wrong with it. It doesn't take away from the game, or perhaps make it more real.
gimpboy:... i really dont like paying for something then having to view advertisements.
I'm with gimpboy on this one. If I paid for it, I expect to be able to put my entire attention into the experience I paid for. If an ad enhances that experience, i.e. by creating a more realistic environment or being parodied as part of a plot line, it's acceptable. But if it's intrusive, it's just stolen my time and vandalized my property, just as if someone had spraypainted it on the side of my house.
As near as I can tell, if it's intrusive enough to actually sell the product, it's also gone over the line into degrading the experience, whether movie or video game. So that ruins product placement as a legitimate advertising technique, with the possible exception of joke-as-plot-element.
Ah, I forgot to mention I live in a geographical hole. They came out to my house and stuck an antenna up 30 feet in the sky, apparently they got no signal..:(
Are there other buildings nearby in the direction opposite the head end that aren't in the hole? You can use those as mirrors - especially with a high-gain directional antenna.
If not, you can always install a tower taller than the hole is deep. B-) If the budget and zoning don't prohibit. B-(
Maybe I haven't seen the parts of Iowa that actually have decent technology, but Davenport seems pathetic. The thing that really annoys me, is we've got Cable, DSL, and recently 2.4Ghz Wireless, but they're all IN town.
What's the topography like between you and the wireless head-end in Davenport? Do you have line-of-sight to it from, say, a tower or roofmount at your location?
If so, go get a 24 DB 2.4g dish and mount it high enough to "see" the head-end. Then borrow a townie friend's box or sweet-talk an installer long enough to check whether you can "hear" it. If it works, subscribe!
Or just skip the hardware hacking and ASK the ISP if they can hit your location from their base, perhaps with an optional oversize antenna at your end, as part of their normal service.
The typical RF cable network requires 2-way amplifiers and can span about a 1 mile radius from the fiber->rf conversion node.
I was under the impression that the span of an RF cable TV data link was limited more by the attenuation and the noise level than by cable distortion.
So to a large extent it's the number of splitter ports and house drops, plus a smaller contribution from the radius of the cable, that is the critical factor.
This would mean that equipment which produces a one-mile radius segment in an urban area might produce a much larger segment in a rural area. You wouldn't get QUITE the same number of houses when they're a tenth of a mile apart as when they're almost touching. But you wouldn't be limited to a half-dozen houses per conversion node, either.
Now I could be wrong for particular RF cable tech. (For instance, some products might not be able to handle the increased time delay without losing their collision control.) But I'd expect that in general the selective-and-otherwise attenuation in the cabling would be compensated in the normal manner and the amplifiers, so the branch could be extended in rural areas until the noise ate the return signal.
#2 Balancing this thing so that it doesn't wobble. For every pound that goes upward, we need approximately as much going down, right?
No. (See my previous post. You just need to have the center of gravity a bit high and be careful about how fast you go up at any moment.)
#3 Can we sit a free floating space station just a few hundred yards outside of it?
Yes, at the geosynchronous level. (Though climbing and lowering loads will move the tether forward and backward a LONG way as they are moving up and down.)
#4 If we can do that, can we build a bridge to it (of course, you'd need to do this in both directions) ?
Yes. But if you connect them your satellite will move forward and backward as the tether is displaced by payloads moving up and down. Or else your bridge will fold up.
#5 If the bridges get long enough, could they meet up with another strategically placed beanstalk?
Yep. But this is REALLY long. (Of course it also lets you have a "slip joint" so each tether can "slide along" the bridge.)
And be careful about stability: A long thin object in orbit is in an energy valley when pointing along the line to the primary and on a ridge when at right angles to it. You need active compensation or you lose your orientation the first time anybody scratches his nose.
#6 Could we wrap a bridge around the entire earth?
Now that's REALLY long. Yes you could. But now the instability gets worse and quickly breaks up your ring or crashes it into the primary. (See "The Ringworld Engineers" by Larry Niven.)
To transport you (70 kg) up to an altitude of 200 km would take [at 100% efficiency] roughly 300 kWh of energy. At 0.30/kWh (say), that's roughly $100.
Here's how to do it for zero energy cost, once the tether is up and the first set of vehicles are "charged".
(By the way: I haven't seen this anywhere else so I may have just invented it. Dibs! B-) )
Build your tether so it goes out FAR BEYOND geosynchronous orbit.
Your vehicle consumes energy as it climbs to geosync orbit.
But as it goes further out, it is going DOWNHILL against the local apparent gravity again, experiencing increasing centripital force from the tether. It collects energy by DEcellerating itself against the tether. When it has collected enough (and released the payload at a desirable velocity) the vehicle decellerates to a stop (collecting still more energy) and starts back toward earth.
It uses part of its stored energy to "climb back down" to the geosync point. Then it continues to ground, accumulating more energy by regenerative braking against the tether (just as it did above the geosync level). It arrives at the ground with as much power as it started with, or more.
Make the tether long enough and your payload can achieve solar escape velocity and still leave you with more "charge" in the vehicle's storage than you started with. (Launch some cheap rocks to power the space terminal's parking lot lights. B-) ) Of course the tether might end up so long that, even using the extra length as the entire counterweight, you have to strengthen the lower end a bunch. (This I haven't worked out.)
With no-cost (except storage) energy, your trip only costs the ROI on the equipment. (Probably reasonably large. But still LOTS cheaper than rocket-based space shuttles.)
It's not perpetual motion: Like tidal power, you're getting your energy from the spin of the earth, slowing it down to power your system.
But if the envirowackos complain, a millenium or two later, that their watches say sunrise is a couple nanoseconds late, you can bring down some ore from an asteroid mine and balance things out.
Unless the payload applies some sort of thrust perpendicular to the axis of the elevator, that difference in inertia only works to pull the whole system back down to earth.
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
To some extent those two are each others' solutions.
The low-frequency vibration solves the pull-back problem. Thinking discretely: The weight of the payload on the thether and the taut teather form a loaded "stringed-instrument" string:
Go up a bit, you pull the string back.
Stop and wait a bit, the string accellerates you forward.
Now go up some more while the string is still going forward, providing a "pull" backward that damps the vibration, stopping the string at the vertical position.
Repeat.
In fact you do this continuously, modulating your ascent slightly so the net result is the string stays nearly vertical. When a vibration starts to build up you adjust your speed in sync to damp it.
Similarly the tether and the weight at the end (large compared to the payload) form a pendulum. It's a much more complicated pendulum than one near the surface, due to the varying gravity and the rotating coordinate system, but that's the basic idea. Again thinking discretely:
Go up a bit. The couterweight pulls back.
Stop and hang around. The counterweight starts going forward.
Go up some more. You decelerate the counterweight and bring it to a stop near the top again.
Repeat.
Again you do it continuously, this time keeping the weight at a constant displacement behind the point over the tether's base. The slant of the tether corresponds to a forward accellerating force from the rotation of the earth, providing your angular-momentum transfer by accellerating your payload and decellerating the earth. (Coming down you push the counterweight forward to accellerate the earth and decellerate the payload.)
Now there may be one or more locations along the tether where what you have to do to damp the two modes is exactly opposite. But if you've kept it damped on your way to those spots you should be through before an oscilation builds up. Or run two or more payloads simultaneously and coordinate them so you can always damp both modes. (Multiple coordinated payloads can also provide better damping and trade off each others' effects on the tether to achieve faster travel.)
Of course you have to put your counterweight a bit further above geosync, so lift losses when it is displaced downward slightly don't turn into a positive-feedback collapse.
If you don't have enough payloads in transit you can damp higher-frequency modes against the atmosphere with a few active airfoils spotted along the tether. (REALLY high frequency stuff - like seconds-to-audio - you can damp with a couple small structures attached near the geosync level.)
Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
No.
The amount you have to put in is only a small delta above the amount that you would have had to put in to run an electric elevator up an idealized stiff structure of the same height - and the delta approaches zero as your damping approaches perfection.
But once it's up you don't need to power it AT ALL, which I'll get to in another posting.
Smaller parts mean smaller battery, for the most part - except when you have to moving parts like MEMS does.
I doubt that a slower, more expensive and more highly breakable technology is going to bereplacing the current one. A general rule of thumb is that no moving parts can be faster/safer/lower power/smaller than moving parts.
I think you're confused about what the "moving parts" are and what they do. Those rules apply to moving parts that rub against each other. These devices are resonators and diplexers, implemented as parts that vibrate and flex, like a bell ringing or a tuning fork humming.
Matter flexes all the time, regardless of whether the motion is deliberate or just a response to heat. Unless the flexing is so large that atoms are displaced from their resting place they don't wear out for geological time.
(Even some displacement is possible without wear. It's called "annealing". Atoms move around slightly to release stresses, resulting in a part the same shape but less brittle.)
For a resonator: In place of electronic tuned circuits (capacitors and inductors, with the action taking place in the motion of electrons and the electric fields between, and magnetic fields around, large conductive structures) you use nanoscopic tuning forks or other shapes with sudden discontinuities.
The motion of electrons through long circuits at about 2/3 the speed of light is repaced by the motion of atoms through distances comparable to their own diameter, at speeds more typical of large masses pushed by moderate forces.
The electric field between two metal plates is miniaturized as the electric fields between pairs of atoms.
The "inertia" of the magnetic field around a long conductor is replaced by the physical inertia of moving atomic nuclei.
The operating speed is EXACTLY the same, as is the amount of energy used. (For a given "Q" factor the friction losses are the same, whether a tuned circuit is implemented as an electrical or nanomechanical structure.)
This kind of thing has been done before - about the time transistor radios became pocket-sized. One example is a miniature quartz crystal about the size of a large ant, precision cut and with precision-deposited electrodes and "doping" weights, replacing (and doing a better job than) about a half-dozen tuned circuits, each pair about the size of a pencil eraser.
But that was for a frequency under half a megahertz. Now we're talking several factors of ten faster - which translates to several factors of ten smaller. And we're now in the range where we can replace several tuned circuits the size of the chip with several silicon and metal structures each about the size of a large transistor.
As for "expensive" to construct, we're not talking microscopic robot arms mounting tiny levers and wheels on axles. We're talking etching a shape into silicon, glass, or conductive metal. This can be done using the same processes that put the circuitry and interconnections onto the chip. (It might not even take any extra steps.)
The rest of you AC's...thye guy condescends to post here on the topic (which he did not submit), and you respond with flames and insults. Nice way to "grow the community."
I suspect that the bulk of the AC postings flaming the guy for "elitism" are Microsofties attempting an Astroturf (fake grass-roots) operation on Slashdot.
Much like the way they recently circulated an internal memo encouraging their employees to respond to an online poll about what server software their organizations were going to use, resulting in a stink when the media organization taking the poll noticed (and published) the sudden burst of responses from microsoft.com IP addresses. B-)
Given that Microsoft has chosen, deliberately, to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" non-Microsoft networking standards, and... after a careful analysis of the competing Netscape browser, sell tools that excercised bugs in it, causing it to crash...
Given that Microsoft has chosen, deliberately, to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" non-Microsoft networking standards, and , why should there be any complaint when a private individual gives them a dose of their own medicine?
Why should there be a complaint when an internet user choses to defend a standard by sending email that is only readable by standards-compliant email clients?
And why should there be a complaint when an internet user choses to exercise his free speach rights by posting anything he damned well pleases?
Slashdot Mirror
From time to time,I hear stories of clocks stopping when their owners die. I consider a few of them reliable accounts. I wonder if these type of things are coincidential, or if there would be some sort of interaction going on here as well?
An obvious interaction:
The grandfater clock stops when grandfather dies because grandfather is the fellow who WOUND the darned thing.
So it's not unreasonable for it to stop at roughly the time grandfather does. And if he's dying in the house with the clock, the family is likely to be around the bed when he goes or otherwise distracted.
When they start paying attention to anything but granddad it's likely that they'll notice the stopped clock. They won't KNOW if it stopped EXACTLY when grandpa's heart did. But since it stopped roughly at that time, to the limits of their measurement (running when grandpa cried out, stopped next time we wanted to know the time), it's easy to believe it stopped right when grandpa did.
That's called the Harem effect (or something like that). Basically you get any number of women, greater than 1, put them into close contact with each other and they all have their period at the (nearly) same time. Well documented phenomeon(sp?)
It MAY be related to the fact that roughly half the estrogen in the body is produced by cells in the lungs. (It's the particular cell type that sometimes becomes cancerous, which is why lung cancers often have effects on secondary sexual characteristics, such as breast enlargement.)
Now I don't KNOW of any proven causual relationship. But the location of these cells in the lungs makes me wonder if they might be acting as chemosensors, with their estrogen output modulated by some airborne signaling chemical. This in turn could be responsible for all sorts of interesting and advantageous effects (both in humans and other animals), such as ovulation and/or coming into heat in response to proximity to a fertile male.
One such effect might be synchronization of periods of women in long-term proximity, via estrogen release by these cells in response to a signaling pheromone emitted by the other women. Synchronized periods would help maintain pair bonding by reducing the temptation for a man to mate with other women when his usual mate was having a period and the other women were not.
Is the preservation of wildlife even more important than the preservation of human lives?
I'll take this question. Yes, the preservation of wildlife is more important than the preservation of human lives
An answer of that form - a member of a social species putting the wellbeing of members of all other species over that of members of his own - is a symptom of mental illness.
You are welcome to put the survival of members of other species over your own PERSONAL survival. But when you make that choice for other humans you're exhibiting a form of psychopathy that can easily lead to multiple murder.
After all, you consider it RIGHT for humans to die to promote the survival of a disease-carrying parisitic fly. Will you therefore consider it right to kill people who are trying to kill the flies?
Will you act on your convictions and kill them yourself? Will you commit sabotage that might kill them? Will you call it "monkeywrenching" rather than "attempted murder"? Will you do the equivalent of spiking trees (defending trees by maiming and killing the workers whose chainsaws hit the spikes)? Will you bomb the sites where the work is done? Will you break into labs and release or kill the lab animals, setting back the work and resulting in more human death?
I would rather take the chance of getting bit and dying, than introduce a potentially disasterous new element into as fragile and infinately complex an equation as an ecosystem.
So many pieces of bullshit, so little time.
If you'd rather take the chance for yourself, that's fine - and I see you claim to have visited the areas infested. But you're trying to make that choice for OTHERS, who must live there for their whole lives.
Stuck-up elitists who don't HAVE to live with the disease-ridden flies always seem to find it easy to put the lives of the flies above those of the starving poor who must live with them.
As for "fragile ecosystems", that's a buzzphrase that's false to fact. Ecosystems in general are about the most robust dynamic systems ever to come into existence. The "balance of nature" isn't something precarious you can tip over, like a rock on a pinpoint. It's something that, when you push, will push back and maybe even crush you, like a rock in a deep hole. (Push hard enough and you MIGHT move it into the next hole over. Beat on it with a sledge long enough and you might crush it. But you're not going to make the rock evaporate.)
As for the "new element", it's sterile. So it only lasts until it dies - days, in the case of flies. The only thing "new" is that, if it works, a disease-ridden pest and its associated disease organism may go missing, leaving an eco-niche open to other organisms that might accomplish the beneficial functions (if any) without simultaneously causing human suffering and death.
But if you find suffering and death among poor dark-skinned humans desirable, then your attitude is easy to understand.
... cell phones work on those big planes ie. 911 calls before crashing.
But it's a good idea not to use them in a plane - unless it's an emergency. They won't screw up the navigation equipment. But from a plane they can be "heard" by dozens or hundreds of cells on the ground (depending on your altitude and location) and they chew up one call's worth of bandwidth resource at each cell base site.
It's from radio terminology from (human) generations ago.
ELF (extremely low frequency)
VLF (very low frequency)
LF (low frequency)
HF (high frequency)
VHF (very high frequency)
UHF (ultra high frequency)
microwave (microwave - subdivided in to bands designated by one or two letters which HAVE changed)
IR (infrared)
X-ray (x-ray)
Gamma ray (gamma ray)
I think there may have been a medium frequency but I'm not sure. There's also:
IF (intermediate frequency) which is unrelated, referring to an internal signal in a superheterodyne receiver.
RF (radio frequency) which is more generic, covering everything from ELF to UHF or perhaps microwave, although its use tends to drop off outside the range between LF and HF.
Similarly there was narrow band and wide/broad band (referring to signal bandwidth significantly less than, or more than, that of AM or early-version FM signals modulated by telephone-quality voice). It's logical for radio engineers to apply the same set of modifiers when they start working with more extreme schemes and have to differentiate them from previous technology.
Do you really think they're putting a 1 watt laser in this thing?
Doesn't matter if it's a laser or a diode, one watt or one milliwatt. If it's bright enough to paint a visible picture it's bright enough to fry the spot that's illuminated if the scanning stops with the beam on.
So they'll need a safety interlock of some sort to cut off or dim the light source if the scanning stops, or make the amount of light emitted dependent on the actual motion of the mirror, unless they can guarantee that the scanning failure modes all deflect the light away from the eye.
One other question, what about those of us with glasses, can the system work around that, or will I have to start wearing a monocle like Mr. Peanut?
If the marketing sketches of the optic path accurately show the geometry of the system, you'd be able to see in focus without your glasses. (But your iris would have to be in the correct spot, i.e. you're looking in the right direction, or the image will disappear.)
The focus issue occurs because the light from a given real-world "pixel" arrives as a wide, essentially colimated (rays essentially parallel) beam, and your lens has to focus the light hitting it all over its surface down to a point, or a very small patch, on the retina. If your lens is less than perfect or not currently adjusted correctly, light from one real-world pixel striking different parts of it arrive at different spots on the retina, rather than all at one spot, defocusing the image.
Most displays illuminate the whole retina with a broad beam, allowing you to move your eye or head about and still see the image, but requiring your lens or lens-plus-glasses system to focus properly. This system MAY hit your eye with a narrow beam, which would reduce or eliminate the need for the lens to focus accurately.
But it would also require your eye to be in exactly the right spot, within the size of your pupil as viewed through your eye's lens. Eye motion would make you lose the image. So I suspect the display actually spreads out the light on its way to your eye, and you'd still need the glasses.
You can make your own spectrum analyzer out of:
An oscilloscope with a high-persistence screen and a horizontal sweep output.
A receiver for the desired frequency.
A handfull of components
provided you're willing to hack up the receiver. Here's the basic drill:
Probe the receiver's AGC feedback line to feed the osciloscope's vertical deflection circuitry. (This gives you a roughly logarithmic measure of the signal intensity at the center of the IF passband on the way to the detector.)
Disconnect the AFC circuit and substitute the sweep signal from the oscilloscope - with enough conditioning (such as DC blocking capacitors and attenuating resistors) to sweep the radio rather than fry it.
If the receiver doesn't have an AFC, or at least the part that sweeps the receiver, make your own:
Connect one end of a diode to ground near (one of) the local oscilator(s) of the receiver. A variactor (PIN) diode works best, because it's optimized for this service. But essentially any diode will do.
Capacitively couple the hot end to the tuned circuit of the local oscilator (with a small capacitor).
Inductively couple the hot end to a bias and signal network I'm about to describe. The inductor should be large enough to block the RF from the oscilator but small enough to pass the audio-rate scope sweep. At the other end of the inductor connect:
A resistor to ground and another to a handy bypassed power supply connection, providing a voltage that back-biases the diode - say a half-volt - and also providing a load resistance for the incoming sweep signal.
A capacitor-resistor series combination to the wire from the sweep output of the oscilloscope.
Pick your resistors to get maybee a quarter-volt of the sweep to appear at the diode junction. (I'm guessing about these voltages, so play around a bit.)
Set the oscilloscope for a sawtooth timebase, as slow as you can without flickering. Shazam: A low budget spectrum analyzer, at least for the tuning range of the hacked receiver. (Calibrating it is another can of worms, which I leave as an exercise for the reader.)
How it works:
The variable back-bias of the diode (in sync with the horizontal sweep of the 'scope) moves the conduction regions of the two sides of the diode junction closer/farter, making the diode act as a variable capacitor. This is coupled to the tuned circuit of the local oscilator, thus sweeping it in sync with the scope and dragging the receiver's tuning along with it. (Adjust the amount of sweep voltage applied to the diode to adjust the horizontal scale of the display. Don't get too close to conduction or the sweep will get very non-linear.)
The receiver tunes across the signal range you want to observe, and the AGC feedback signal gives you a measure of the strength of the signals that make it through the IF into the detector, which you display on the 'scope's vertical deflection.
To calibrate frequency a small crystal oscilator with a square-wave output will produce a "comb" of frequency markers that show up as little pips on the display. Calbirating amplitude is tougher.
A quarter-century sounds right. I wasn't sure how far back it went. But knew I'd seen it well before I moved out to CA about 12 years ago so called it "over a decade". But it could easily have predated the Altair.
The roof/pole mounted device was quite large - about the volume of a monitor but twice as deep and half as high, with two big lenses (looking something like eyes) on the front. Curved cover which also overhung the lenses to keep rain of that made it look a bit streamlined, in a style consistent with the '60s and reminiscent of automobiles dating even earlier.
I visited their San Antonio site at one point. They had a sign on the door of the wiring closet behind the server room that was apparently originally intended for a welding machine. It said "do not look into Arc". Seemed appropriate, both as a reference to the high-power infrared link (which was really on the roof) and the truly piled-full-of-snarled-cables wiring closet. B-)
There's a LOT more to an artificial womb than getting the embryo to attach. The baby/mother system has lots of biochemical communication, turning mommy into a nutrient factory for the little tyke under construction.
Her body sacrifices the calcium in her bones, the energetic compounds and trace elements in her fat, and the vitamins in her bloodstream, handing it off to the foetus as directed by a plethora of signals. She gets morning sickness from folic acid deficiency and strange appetites at odd hours ("Honey, run out and get me some Ice Cream and Pickles!") whenever baby needs some oddball compound. And then there's the support, massage, and shaping performed by the bag of muscles the kid lives in for 9 months.
The signals are FAR from all known, and you can bet that kidlet will not form up healthy and happy if you just give him/her a stock nutrient solution rather than adjusting it according to his/her signals.
Infrared line-of-sight links have been done for well over a decade. Datapoint's Arcnet had an infrared link device called Arclight that they used for a line-of-sight link for several miles. It would flake out in rain or fog - because rain and fog both absorb and refract infrared. So it might as well have been as opaque as black smoke.
...
Arcnet was a self-healing token ring network with an underlying broadcast topology. So if two buildings were connected by Arclight and it went down, the network split into two rings, and when it came back up it healed into a single ring. Reconfig took miliseconds so it was no big deal.
You may not have heard of Datapoint. But have probably heard of the Intel. Seems Datapoint had a discrete-component standalone computer/smart terminal which was the basic node in their network - a diskless-workstation, fileserver, compute-server archetecture. They cut a deal with a semiconductor company called Intel to try to port their instruction set to a silicon chip for the next generation. But the resulting chip was too slow, so they went with another discrete component solution.
And Intel had cut the deal so they could sell the chip. So they took the chip to market, perhaps with a few tweaks, as the 8008 - first in the line that continued with the 8080, 8086, 80x86, Pentium,
Allow the trading of only EARNED (by gameplay) items, and
TAKE A COMMISSION ON THE SALES!
This would prevent the inflation of the "currency" of game items, provide an "aftermarket" for people who tire of the game to recover some of their costs, limit the impact on players who don't want to fork out for assistance or extra equipment, and provide an additional income stream to the company (which could be partially converted to reduced cost to ordinary players).
... (or at least the perceived scumbags) before they go after the good guys.
That's why they go after kiddie-pornographers first when what they really want to do is censor opinions they don't like.
That's why they go after terrorists first when they want to disarm the general population.
That's why they go after self-confessed promotors of the violation of copyrights first when they want to shut down competitive outlets for content.
And so on.
Getting a conviction of someone perceived as a "bad guy" - and the "badder" the better - is easier than going after someone who isn't harming others. Courts and juries, in their desire to make the "bad guy" stop dong "bad stuff", may overlook the fact that the prosecutor or plantif is using the wrong legal tool to go after him, or may overlook how the precedent could be appllied to a non-"bad guy". Once the precedent is established, it becomes a tool to go after people who are NOT "bad guys".
Additionally "Bad guys" also often have shallow pockets, leaving them unable to mount as effective a defense as the more affluent citizens. And that puts them in a similar situation to the "go after the little guy first" model in the previous post.
From a minimal fresh install of Linux
To an identical fresh install of the same Linux with the kernel built from the sources (with a comments-only edit to one of the source files), and
Build a set of install/source disks identical to the distribution except for the modified kernel and kernel sources.
For the latest release of each of the common Linux distributions available to the authors in time to be included in the book.
This is something the distribution packagers (Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake, etc.) SHOULD provide with the distribution.
I don't know about the others. But Red Hat provides adequate documentation to get a bare PC loaded to the point of displaying a login screen. And then their documentation just stops. And their prepaid support ALSO stops at that point. No help for setting up devices, networks, printers, or what-have-you. No explanation of the internals of their proprietary install software (or translation between it and the edit-config-file, build from scratch approach). NOTHING to walk you through applying security patches (just an enormous man page for RPM). And especially NOTHING on how to build a kernel. (But attempting to build the kernel from the supplied sources according to the usual rules dies.)
So there's a big learning curve before somebody new to Linux can do "hello kernel world". And there's no easy bridge from the stock install of the packaged release to a kernel build from the sources.
(There's also no easy bridge between the administration tools to the configuration file changes that result from poking a control. Cookbooks to get people started, and manuals describing what's going on behind the scenes, would also be grist for books. But that's a separate issue.)
propstoalldedhomiez: It's a very unintrusive form of advertising. I don't see anything wrong with it. It doesn't take away from the game, or perhaps make it more real.
... i really dont like paying for something then having to view advertisements.
gimpboy:
I'm with gimpboy on this one. If I paid for it, I expect to be able to put my entire attention into the experience I paid for. If an ad enhances that experience, i.e. by creating a more realistic environment or being parodied as part of a plot line, it's acceptable. But if it's intrusive, it's just stolen my time and vandalized my property, just as if someone had spraypainted it on the side of my house.
As near as I can tell, if it's intrusive enough to actually sell the product, it's also gone over the line into degrading the experience, whether movie or video game. So that ruins product placement as a legitimate advertising technique, with the possible exception of joke-as-plot-element.
Ah, I forgot to mention I live in a geographical hole. They came out to my house and stuck an antenna up 30 feet in the sky, apparently they got no signal.. :(
Are there other buildings nearby in the direction opposite the head end that aren't in the hole? You can use those as mirrors - especially with a high-gain directional antenna.
If not, you can always install a tower taller than the hole is deep. B-) If the budget and zoning don't prohibit. B-(
Maybe I haven't seen the parts of Iowa that actually have decent technology, but Davenport seems pathetic. The thing that really annoys me, is we've got Cable, DSL, and recently 2.4Ghz Wireless, but they're all IN town.
What's the topography like between you and the wireless head-end in Davenport? Do you have line-of-sight to it from, say, a tower or roofmount at your location?
If so, go get a 24 DB 2.4g dish and mount it high enough to "see" the head-end. Then borrow a townie friend's box or sweet-talk an installer long enough to check whether you can "hear" it. If it works, subscribe!
Or just skip the hardware hacking and ASK the ISP if they can hit your location from their base, perhaps with an optional oversize antenna at your end, as part of their normal service.
The typical RF cable network requires 2-way amplifiers and can span about a 1 mile radius from the fiber->rf conversion node.
I was under the impression that the span of an RF cable TV data link was limited more by the attenuation and the noise level than by cable distortion.
So to a large extent it's the number of splitter ports and house drops, plus a smaller contribution from the radius of the cable, that is the critical factor.
This would mean that equipment which produces a one-mile radius segment in an urban area might produce a much larger segment in a rural area. You wouldn't get QUITE the same number of houses when they're a tenth of a mile apart as when they're almost touching. But you wouldn't be limited to a half-dozen houses per conversion node, either.
Now I could be wrong for particular RF cable tech. (For instance, some products might not be able to handle the increased time delay without losing their collision control.) But I'd expect that in general the selective-and-otherwise attenuation in the cabling would be compensated in the normal manner and the amplifiers, so the branch could be extended in rural areas until the noise ate the return signal.
#2 Balancing this thing so that it doesn't wobble. For every pound that goes upward, we need approximately as much going down, right?
No. (See my previous post. You just need to have the center of gravity a bit high and be careful about how fast you go up at any moment.)
#3 Can we sit a free floating space station just a few hundred yards outside of it?
Yes, at the geosynchronous level. (Though climbing and lowering loads will move the tether forward and backward a LONG way as they are moving up and down.)
#4 If we can do that, can we build a bridge to it (of course, you'd need to do this in both directions) ?
Yes. But if you connect them your satellite will move forward and backward as the tether is displaced by payloads moving up and down. Or else your bridge will fold up.
#5 If the bridges get long enough, could they meet up with another strategically placed beanstalk?
Yep. But this is REALLY long. (Of course it also lets you have a "slip joint" so each tether can "slide along" the bridge.)
And be careful about stability: A long thin object in orbit is in an energy valley when pointing along the line to the primary and on a ridge when at right angles to it. You need active compensation or you lose your orientation the first time anybody scratches his nose.
#6 Could we wrap a bridge around the entire earth?
Now that's REALLY long. Yes you could. But now the instability gets worse and quickly breaks up your ring or crashes it into the primary. (See "The Ringworld Engineers" by Larry Niven.)
Here's how to do it for zero energy cost, once the tether is up and the first set of vehicles are "charged".
(By the way: I haven't seen this anywhere else so I may have just invented it. Dibs! B-) )
Build your tether so it goes out FAR BEYOND geosynchronous orbit.
Your vehicle consumes energy as it climbs to geosync orbit.
But as it goes further out, it is going DOWNHILL against the local apparent gravity again, experiencing increasing centripital force from the tether. It collects energy by DEcellerating itself against the tether. When it has collected enough (and released the payload at a desirable velocity) the vehicle decellerates to a stop (collecting still more energy) and starts back toward earth.
It uses part of its stored energy to "climb back down" to the geosync point. Then it continues to ground, accumulating more energy by regenerative braking against the tether (just as it did above the geosync level). It arrives at the ground with as much power as it started with, or more.
Make the tether long enough and your payload can achieve solar escape velocity and still leave you with more "charge" in the vehicle's storage than you started with. (Launch some cheap rocks to power the space terminal's parking lot lights. B-) ) Of course the tether might end up so long that, even using the extra length as the entire counterweight, you have to strengthen the lower end a bunch. (This I haven't worked out.)
With no-cost (except storage) energy, your trip only costs the ROI on the equipment. (Probably reasonably large. But still LOTS cheaper than rocket-based space shuttles.)
It's not perpetual motion: Like tidal power, you're getting your energy from the spin of the earth, slowing it down to power your system.
But if the envirowackos complain, a millenium or two later, that their watches say sunrise is a couple nanoseconds late, you can bring down some ore from an asteroid mine and balance things out.
Then there's the whole issue of vibrational harmonics. Accumulated shocks from winds, payloads, and even space dust would propagate up and down the string (any human structure of that incredible length would effectively be a string in tension) and create severe vibration problems. That'd take some *seriously* epic engineering to dampen.
To some extent those two are each others' solutions.
The low-frequency vibration solves the pull-back problem. Thinking discretely: The weight of the payload on the thether and the taut teather form a loaded "stringed-instrument" string:
Go up a bit, you pull the string back.
Stop and wait a bit, the string accellerates you forward.
Now go up some more while the string is still going forward, providing a "pull" backward that damps the vibration, stopping the string at the vertical position.
Repeat.
In fact you do this continuously, modulating your ascent slightly so the net result is the string stays nearly vertical. When a vibration starts to build up you adjust your speed in sync to damp it.
Similarly the tether and the weight at the end (large compared to the payload) form a pendulum. It's a much more complicated pendulum than one near the surface, due to the varying gravity and the rotating coordinate system, but that's the basic idea. Again thinking discretely:
Go up a bit. The couterweight pulls back.
Stop and hang around. The counterweight starts going forward.
Go up some more. You decelerate the counterweight and bring it to a stop near the top again.
Repeat.
Again you do it continuously, this time keeping the weight at a constant displacement behind the point over the tether's base. The slant of the tether corresponds to a forward accellerating force from the rotation of the earth, providing your angular-momentum transfer by accellerating your payload and decellerating the earth. (Coming down you push the counterweight forward to accellerate the earth and decellerate the payload.)
Now there may be one or more locations along the tether where what you have to do to damp the two modes is exactly opposite. But if you've kept it damped on your way to those spots you should be through before an oscilation builds up. Or run two or more payloads simultaneously and coordinate them so you can always damp both modes. (Multiple coordinated payloads can also provide better damping and trade off each others' effects on the tether to achieve faster travel.)
Of course you have to put your counterweight a bit further above geosync, so lift losses when it is displaced downward slightly don't turn into a positive-feedback collapse.
If you don't have enough payloads in transit you can damp higher-frequency modes against the atmosphere with a few active airfoils spotted along the tether. (REALLY high frequency stuff - like seconds-to-audio - you can damp with a couple small structures attached near the geosync level.)
Effectively, the amount of energy you'd have to put into the system to keep it up would equal the thrust expended to send the payload into orbit by conventional means.
No.
The amount you have to put in is only a small delta above the amount that you would have had to put in to run an electric elevator up an idealized stiff structure of the same height - and the delta approaches zero as your damping approaches perfection.
But once it's up you don't need to power it AT ALL, which I'll get to in another posting.
I doubt that a slower, more expensive and more highly breakable technology is going to bereplacing the current one. A general rule of thumb is that no moving parts can be faster/safer/lower power/smaller than moving parts.
I think you're confused about what the "moving parts" are and what they do. Those rules apply to moving parts that rub against each other. These devices are resonators and diplexers, implemented as parts that vibrate and flex, like a bell ringing or a tuning fork humming.
Matter flexes all the time, regardless of whether the motion is deliberate or just a response to heat. Unless the flexing is so large that atoms are displaced from their resting place they don't wear out for geological time.
(Even some displacement is possible without wear. It's called "annealing". Atoms move around slightly to release stresses, resulting in a part the same shape but less brittle.)
For a resonator: In place of electronic tuned circuits (capacitors and inductors, with the action taking place in the motion of electrons and the electric fields between, and magnetic fields around, large conductive structures) you use nanoscopic tuning forks or other shapes with sudden discontinuities.
The motion of electrons through long circuits at about 2/3 the speed of light is repaced by the motion of atoms through distances comparable to their own diameter, at speeds more typical of large masses pushed by moderate forces.
The electric field between two metal plates is miniaturized as the electric fields between pairs of atoms.
The "inertia" of the magnetic field around a long conductor is replaced by the physical inertia of moving atomic nuclei.
The operating speed is EXACTLY the same, as is the amount of energy used. (For a given "Q" factor the friction losses are the same, whether a tuned circuit is implemented as an electrical or nanomechanical structure.)
This kind of thing has been done before - about the time transistor radios became pocket-sized. One example is a miniature quartz crystal about the size of a large ant, precision cut and with precision-deposited electrodes and "doping" weights, replacing (and doing a better job than) about a half-dozen tuned circuits, each pair about the size of a pencil eraser.
But that was for a frequency under half a megahertz. Now we're talking several factors of ten faster - which translates to several factors of ten smaller. And we're now in the range where we can replace several tuned circuits the size of the chip with several silicon and metal structures each about the size of a large transistor.
As for "expensive" to construct, we're not talking microscopic robot arms mounting tiny levers and wheels on axles. We're talking etching a shape into silicon, glass, or conductive metal. This can be done using the same processes that put the circuitry and interconnections onto the chip. (It might not even take any extra steps.)
The rest of you AC's...thye guy condescends to post here on the topic (which he did not submit), and you respond with flames and insults. Nice way to "grow the community."
I suspect that the bulk of the AC postings flaming the guy for "elitism" are Microsofties attempting an Astroturf (fake grass-roots) operation on Slashdot.
Much like the way they recently circulated an internal memo encouraging their employees to respond to an online poll about what server software their organizations were going to use, resulting in a stink when the media organization taking the poll noticed (and published) the sudden burst of responses from microsoft.com IP addresses. B-)
Given that Microsoft has chosen, deliberately, to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" non-Microsoft networking standards, and ... after a careful analysis of the competing Netscape browser, sell tools that excercised bugs in it, causing it to crash ...
Given that Microsoft has chosen, deliberately, to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" non-Microsoft networking standards, and , why should there be any complaint when a private individual gives them a dose of their own medicine?
Why should there be a complaint when an internet user choses to defend a standard by sending email that is only readable by standards-compliant email clients?
And why should there be a complaint when an internet user choses to exercise his free speach rights by posting anything he damned well pleases?
That's freedom. Get used to it!