I have no mod points at the moment. But that's a VERY important point: A straight copy may not be good enough, due to outside-the-standards copy protection schemes.
Other floppy-based commercial games used a number of other techniques.
(One, for instance, had track 3 deliberately corrupted, by scratching the medium with a pin. No error on reading it - or writing and re-reading it - and the game would load, erase the disk, and play. This let the person who made the copy think he had a good copy - when in fact he had a blank disk. Let's see you make a good archival copy of THAT. B-b )
You get the same thing on other media as well - even analog. (Example: Macrovision, which plays with the sync and saturation levels, so that analog TVs intended for over-the-air reception (usually) correct the distortion as if it were a fading signal, while videotape machines copy the "fading" picture and regenerate a non-fading sync, so the copy isn't corrected when viewed.)
One of the several copy protection schemes for DVDs includes hidden modulation in sync information, decoded by the drive's hardware and detected by its firmware, so you can make a perfect copy of the bits and it still won't play.
Wikipedia has a long list of such copy-protection schemes, any of which would make archival copying difficult to impossible (without special equipment that would expose you to arrest and federal prosecution if you possessed it).
Once again, Barbara, this isn't a "controversial" opinion, it is a murderous one.
"Controversial" just means the media talking heads are talking about it. It's a propaganda tool that lets them discredit anything, sew doubt in the viewers'/listeners' minds, and divide and distract the population.
1) Pick an idea held by many people. (If that's because it's well-researched, produces prosperity and/or political stability, or otherwise sound, it's particularly suitable because it will be strongly held.) 2) Find some ideal held by a few that contradicts it. (If it's some unresearched or refuted-by-research tinfoil-hat idea, an attractive political ideology that leads to strife, etc. that's especially effectivce as well.) 3) Talk about them as if the first is in question and the second is just as well founded. 4) Because you're talking about them, label them both "controversial", thus lowering the credibility of the first and throwing the issue into doubt. 5) Confused viewers tune in to try to figure out which is right. Never tell them, so your raitings stay high. 6) Profit!
If this leads to children suffering from and dying of loathsome diseases, political strife, tyrannies, wars, economic collapse, and so on, laugh all the way to the bank and goto step 5).
People die because of this.
You betcha!
(And then they wonder why people are waking up, turning them off, and getting their news and analysis from the Internet.)
Ian Fleming, along with Eric Frank Russel, were members of Britain's intelligence community, where such devices were designed and deployed, for real, during WWII. Some of the stuff the "department of dirty tricks" came up with were brilliant.
Russel also used his WWII experience in his post-war writing. Notable (and perhaps my very favorite SF novel) is _Wasp_, which is a thinly-disguised recycling of one of Russel's plans for infiltrated saboteurs targeting Japan, combined with techniques that also ended up in the taining manual for the British Home Guard. (The latter was to be the nucleus of a resistance movement if the NAZIs occupied the British Isles.)
Gadgets in stories are more plausible if they might actually work, and plausible and potentially useful story gadgets have a track record of inspiring the development of the real thing. (Consider, for instance, the clamshell-style cellphone, inspired by the Star Trek communicator - which Motorola implicitly acknowledged by naming the first one the "StarTAC".)
Was that supposed to be a rebreather? I thought it was supposed to be a tiny, very-short-term, SCUBA system using a couple oxygen tanks modeled on the CO2 cartridges for soda bottles.
(It's been decades since I've seen Thunderball, though.)
In the UK, for instance, for a period of many years door-to-door cold callers would attempt to persuade people to change their energy suppliers. Even if a resident was NOT interested, these callers would claim to need a signature so they could prove they had visited, and get paid.
Just had one of those here in the San Francisco Bay Area, like within the last couple weeks. Claimed to be "checking" that we were "getting the government required 20% discount". Tried to get us to sign a form that would switch our gas supplier from PG&E to some pseudo-ecological-responsibility gas supplier (using the common gas distribution system).
Also; I hear plenty of government workers saying Management has a no open source software policy; for security reasons, the more money spent on the product the better, as closed source code is deemed to be more secure...
And that's a convenient meme for the spooks who have been getting the big companies to embed spyware in their systems, where the systems' closed-source or as-a-service nature makes it difficult-to-impossible to detect such spyware, even as it's doing you harm.
Perhaps the revelations about the Prisim program will drive a reevaluation of such policies and a move toward open systems which CAN BE CHECKED for embedded nastiness.
By the way, with Obamacare (or any other single-government-payer system) you can expect such new treatments to NEVER be deployed - or even developed.
If such a new procedure succeeded it would mean paying a lot of extra money saving the person, after which it would mean paying MORE money as they live longer to collect more benefits, further straining an already self-bankrupting system.
Preventing this is what "death panels" are about.
(As a government official once said - about in 1979 or so, when the impending bankruptcy of Social Security was first being hand-wrung over - "We've got to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate.")
As usual, any kind of clinical use of this stem cell stuff is "ten years away". These guys are as bad as fusion researchers.
I'm sure they'd love to try it in a human dying of liver disease. But between the FDA regs, the self-appointed Medical Ethics czars, and the malpractice ambulance-chasers there's a lot of hurdles to jump before they MIGHT be allowed to try it (let alone deploy it as a regular procedure).
I visited him in the late '80s, along with a number of others of the hypertext startup I came out to CA to work for. It was sort of a pilgrimage to see the great man.
One of our people took the mouse from his computer and got Doug to autograph it. This left him with the ONLY mouse (at the time) autographed by Doug, because (as Doug mentioned) nobody had thought to ask him before. B-)
Does she put it in the fridge before using it or something? Or does it use the difference in temperature between your hand and the flashlight.
The latter.
If you RTFA you'll see she's using the aluminum flashlight body as a heat conductor and the "head" and other exposed portions of it as an air-cooled heatsink.
She's stuck the handle of the light into an insulating plastic pipe, cut a hole in the pipe, and stuck the peltier cell in the hole, with the "cold" side in contact with the flashlight handle and the "warm" side in contact with the hand. (I expect the next step is to wrap an outer aluminum tube around it to conduct heat from the whole hand to the cell, rather than just heating it with a patch of palm directly contacting it.)
Voltage boost converter between the peltier assembly and the LED (because the peltier cell she used was not stcked for the right voltage to drive the LED.) The LED shines as long as you hold it, if the air is cool enough. (She's used it for 20 minutes running.)
Also, since this is generating electricity from a temperature differential, rather than generating a temperature differential from electricity, wouldn't this be the Seebeck effect?
Yes. Seebeck discovered current generation from heat differential (with dissimilar metal wires and a compass needle), then Peltier discovered heat-pumping with current.
But, like most rotating electric machinery (where the same device is a motor or generator depending on whether you power it or twist it), the same effect is a heat pump or heat engine (depengding on whether you apply a temperature difference and pull power or apply power and pump heat).
The effect is now often called the "Peltier-Seebeck effect" in textbooks. The cells are typically called Peltier Cells because the efficient ones are manufactured mainly for heat-pumping, though they work just fine both ways.
If you'll read TFA a little more closely than the OP did, you'll find that the noise-canceling thing is NOT how they got the 1G-ish single-pair link to work.
What the noise-canceling thing is about is when you have TWO OR MORE pairs bundled into a single logical link. Then it figures out what the cross-talk between the individual pairs looks like and cancels THAT out. This lets the individual signal pairs run as fast as a lone pair and the total bandwidth of N bundled pair be N times the bandwidth of one, rather than substantially less.
But open source prevents this from happening because the source is constantly being looked at!
No, open source doesn't keep it from happening. Providers can stick any cruft in there that they want.
What it does do is make it much more likely to be discovered when some fool DOES stick it in there. Don't be surprised if you hear about a lot more bad stuff found in open source than you do in closed source, as a result. (At least until the bad guys wise up.) Try to find the malware in Microsoft's stuff, for instance. B-)
(Of course this stuff was found with a packet sniffer before anybody found it in the code. So it's an apples-to-oranges comparison and open/closed source has nothing to do with it.)
I'm in Silicon Valley. I want to live in Nevada, far enough from the neighbors that I can't hear their HIFIs in the daytime or see their lights at night.
I want to live in Nevada so much that I built a house there - a few miles over the state line near Lake Topaz. Fully paid for. Marvelous view. Good neighbors. Also rabbits (jack and cottontail), quail, coyotes, deer, antelope, bobcats, cougars, and black bears. Gun laws are a lot different there, and I have a Nevada CCW that's also valid in many other states due to reciprocity (though not in CA).
For the Town House near work I also moved across the bay from Palo Alto. Just off the other end of the bridge, for less than I was paying in rent in Palo, I was able to BUY a two-story four-bedroom with 7,000+square feet of yard and remodel it. 200A electric service (two 20A circuits to each room for starters). Satellite TV and Cat 5E everywhere. (Only running 100M at the moment but I hear that with house-sized runs you can get away with 5e for gigabit Ethernet.) The yard is now a garden and orchard. We get most of our veggies from it - and our eggs. We were also on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour last year.
They tell me the city here on the Back Bay has a gang problem. But for several blocks around our house it doesn't. It's much like in Palo Alto (where the burglars worked their way down Loma Verde street and skipped only two houses - ours and the retired cop two doors down). It seems the crooks don't like to bother NRA instructors, and the wife's "Ducks Unlimited" sticker tells them she can hit a spot the size of a duck (or a human heart) with a shotgun, from 50 yards, even if it is flying at the time. B-)
Of course NV has no such crime issues. Even machine guns are legal there. B-)
Move to a SF or Oakland? By preference? You've GOT to be kidding.
I think of it as being analogous to injecting separate beams of light at different angles, having them bounce back-and-forth between the walls at different distances between bounces, and emerge at angles corresponding to the angles at which they entered.
Of course it's not angle of flight that's in question, but another property of the light propagation that can be varied to allow different beams to propagate down the fiber and be separable at the far end. But they're still separate because each beam's cross section at a given plane cutting the fiber has a different distribution of phase and intensity, resulting in different propagation mechanisms that conserve a property which can be used to separate the beams when they emerge.
Normally I side more with the D's than the R's (not that I have much faith in either), but this time I'm damn glad there's an R majority in the House.
Why the HELL do you usually side with the Ds? They consistently do the opposite of what they promise. It's the Ds that bring you war, censorship, racisim, and a whole host of other junk that they promise to be fixing: Like government in general they're a problem masquerading as its own solution.
The Rs have their own pathologies. But compared to the Ds they're pikers.
By the way: Charter Oak's mandatory "cornerstone" class was a wonderful experience, and just what I needed. Think of it as a boot camp on how to research and write academic papers (and read them). VERY enabling.
I wish I'd had the equivalent when starting at my first University back in 1975.
I'm using Charter Oak State College. This is because they are an accredited and respected school, specializing in in distance learning, which accepts a high enough score on a recent Computer Science GRE exam for credit-by-exam on many of the course requirements, and (if certain requirements are met, such as being active in an industry using them) accepts older credits (i.e. math, distribution requirements) that many other institutions would consider "stale" and timed-out. They do not currently offer a BSCS, however, so I'm going for a BSGS with a CS concentration. I've taken three classes from them so far, and am currently taking a math class (needed but not offered there) from the University of North Dakota for transfer credit. Several of my few remaining requirements I expect to complete by exam (and a couple - public speaking, English - by waiver due to documented work experience).
Another excellent school (with a more technical orientation) that also specializes in distance learning is Thomas Edison. They do offer a BSCS, but stopped accepting the CS subject GRE for credit (because too few students used it for them to continue the effort of keeping it qualified against their own requirements). In my case this made a big difference in how much work would be required to reach the diploma. For some others, especially those who need many of the classes (or test-out equivalents), are tech focused, and would find the more directly applicable degree a benefit, Thomas Edison would be a good choice.
These schools are oriented toward people who wish to complete their degrees but are employed or located where going to a classic college is impractical. Examples: Deployed military personnel, low-level medical employees seeking higher certifications for career advancement, workers located far from a good subject-appropriate school or working schedules that interfere with school scheduling.
Two credit-by-examination programs are also related to this. DANTES is one - driven by the military's need to provide education for their soldiers without interfering with their duties (but open to all). Another is CLEP (College Level Examination Program), a product of the College Board which provides 33 subject tests which are accepted as proof of accomplishment by most universities. Each program lets you receive college credits without actually taking a class, by testing whether you've successfully taught yourself the subject.
PC manufacturers like HP used to void warranties when clients installed GNU/LInux, not anymore.
Just a year or so ago I bought my wife an HP laptop specifically for a sysadmin class where she'd be installing Linux on it. Got it home, had a question for HP about it, and discovered in the process (from the phone support) that installing Linux would void their warranty. Checked the paperwork: Yep! So we returned it to Staples for a full refund and went with something else.
I am in much the same boat. My branch of the industry went from garage shops to IPOs to conglomerates. The hiring process went from people-in-the-know to armies-of-PHBs-working by the book. The number of potential employers went from hundreds to a handful. The workforce went from top-notch locals to armies of adequate, semi-adequate, or inadequate H1Bs.
I had been a pioneer and well recognized by other actual techies - even those that had gone on into management or entrepreneurship. But after catching a layoff when the conglomerate deemphasized its new acquisition's function, I went from highly-paid pan-expert to 17 months unemployed due to the same HR-is-a-brick-wall for non-commodity heads effect.
I finally ended up contracting at a long-running garage shop in a niche market, a position found through a contact who had just watched them have a project almost fail for lack of a person with my particular skill set.
Meanwhile I'm finishing the degree via "distance learning" through an accredited institution. By the time the contract runs out I hope to have that checkbox checked. (College is a LOT easier when you don't have the draft board trying to send you to Vietnam and you can do the classes online when you're free and alert, rather than at 8 AM when you're a night person.)
Strictly speaking "transistors" are any circuit element that involves a "transfer resistance", i.e. a parameter that is resistance-like and dynamically controlled by another parameter.
Junction transistors do this one way. Field effect transistors do it a completely different way (or perhaps more than one different ways). Both of those happen to be implemented with semiconductors.
This voltage-variable tunneling along gold decorations on a non-conducting nanotube is a transfer resistance and the mechanism of transfer is very akin to a field effect transistor: The tunneling path is modulated by a control signal.
(Or at least it should be. In the example given in TFA, the control signal is actually the end-to-end voltage, so we really don't have a transistor yet. More like an avalanche/tunnel diode built without semiconductors. But it seems virtually certain that a control electrode throwing an E-field into the tunneling path will modulate the amount of tunneling, so an actual transistor should fall out very shortly.)
But what if you have a mile long pole and correlate it's movements into a form of communication. As soon as you move the pole on one end it would instantaneously move on the other for instantaneous communication.
Nope. The motion propagates to the far end at the speed of sound in the pole - much faster than sound in air, but glacial compared to light in vacuum.
Don't bother looking for an unobtanium with near-infinite stiffness and an internal speed of sound faster than light-in-vacuum. The motion at one end encodes information about what is happening at that end and that information is propagated down the pole by interactions between the pole's component particles, interactions that all are no faster than the speed of light.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no mod points at the moment. But that's a VERY important point: A straight copy may not be good enough, due to outside-the-standards copy protection schemes.
Other floppy-based commercial games used a number of other techniques.
(One, for instance, had track 3 deliberately corrupted, by scratching the medium with a pin. No error on reading it - or writing and re-reading it - and the game would load, erase the disk, and play. This let the person who made the copy think he had a good copy - when in fact he had a blank disk. Let's see you make a good archival copy of THAT. B-b )
You get the same thing on other media as well - even analog. (Example: Macrovision, which plays with the sync and saturation levels, so that analog TVs intended for over-the-air reception (usually) correct the distortion as if it were a fading signal, while videotape machines copy the "fading" picture and regenerate a non-fading sync, so the copy isn't corrected when viewed.)
One of the several copy protection schemes for DVDs includes hidden modulation in sync information, decoded by the drive's hardware and detected by its firmware, so you can make a perfect copy of the bits and it still won't play.
Wikipedia has a long list of such copy-protection schemes, any of which would make archival copying difficult to impossible (without special equipment that would expose you to arrest and federal prosecution if you possessed it).
Once again, Barbara, this isn't a "controversial" opinion, it is a murderous one.
"Controversial" just means the media talking heads are talking about it. It's a propaganda tool that lets them discredit anything, sew doubt in the viewers'/listeners' minds, and divide and distract the population.
1) Pick an idea held by many people. (If that's because it's well-researched, produces prosperity and/or political stability, or otherwise sound, it's particularly suitable because it will be strongly held.)
2) Find some ideal held by a few that contradicts it. (If it's some unresearched or refuted-by-research tinfoil-hat idea, an attractive political ideology that leads to strife, etc. that's especially effectivce as well.)
3) Talk about them as if the first is in question and the second is just as well founded.
4) Because you're talking about them, label them both "controversial", thus lowering the credibility of the first and throwing the issue into doubt.
5) Confused viewers tune in to try to figure out which is right. Never tell them, so your raitings stay high.
6) Profit!
If this leads to children suffering from and dying of loathsome diseases, political strife, tyrannies, wars, economic collapse, and so on, laugh all the way to the bank and goto step 5).
People die because of this.
You betcha!
(And then they wonder why people are waking up, turning them off, and getting their news and analysis from the Internet.)
Life imitating art imitating life.
Why not?
Ian Fleming, along with Eric Frank Russel, were members of Britain's intelligence community, where such devices were designed and deployed, for real, during WWII. Some of the stuff the "department of dirty tricks" came up with were brilliant.
Russel also used his WWII experience in his post-war writing. Notable (and perhaps my very favorite SF novel) is _Wasp_, which is a thinly-disguised recycling of one of Russel's plans for infiltrated saboteurs targeting Japan, combined with techniques that also ended up in the taining manual for the British Home Guard. (The latter was to be the nucleus of a resistance movement if the NAZIs occupied the British Isles.)
Gadgets in stories are more plausible if they might actually work, and plausible and potentially useful story gadgets have a track record of inspiring the development of the real thing. (Consider, for instance, the clamshell-style cellphone, inspired by the Star Trek communicator - which Motorola implicitly acknowledged by naming the first one the "StarTAC".)
Was that supposed to be a rebreather? I thought it was supposed to be a tiny, very-short-term, SCUBA system using a couple oxygen tanks modeled on the CO2 cartridges for soda bottles.
(It's been decades since I've seen Thunderball, though.)
In the UK, for instance, for a period of many years door-to-door cold callers would attempt to persuade people to change their energy suppliers. Even if a resident was NOT interested, these callers would claim to need a signature so they could prove they had visited, and get paid.
Just had one of those here in the San Francisco Bay Area, like within the last couple weeks. Claimed to be "checking" that we were "getting the government required 20% discount". Tried to get us to sign a form that would switch our gas supplier from PG&E to some pseudo-ecological-responsibility gas supplier (using the common gas distribution system).
Also; I hear plenty of government workers saying Management has a no open source software policy; for security reasons, the more money spent on the product the better, as closed source code is deemed to be more secure...
And that's a convenient meme for the spooks who have been getting the big companies to embed spyware in their systems, where the systems' closed-source or as-a-service nature makes it difficult-to-impossible to detect such spyware, even as it's doing you harm.
Perhaps the revelations about the Prisim program will drive a reevaluation of such policies and a move toward open systems which CAN BE CHECKED for embedded nastiness.
And if you're going to complain that "hamburgers" must be beef... I'm going to argue they should be "ham."
Nope. A hamburger sandwich should be a sandwich made out of people from Hamburg Germany. B-)
By the way, with Obamacare (or any other single-government-payer system) you can expect such new treatments to NEVER be deployed - or even developed.
If such a new procedure succeeded it would mean paying a lot of extra money saving the person, after which it would mean paying MORE money as they live longer to collect more benefits, further straining an already self-bankrupting system.
Preventing this is what "death panels" are about.
(As a government official once said - about in 1979 or so, when the impending bankruptcy of Social Security was first being hand-wrung over - "We've got to get the death rate up to meet the birth rate.")
As usual, any kind of clinical use of this stem cell stuff is "ten years away". These guys are as bad as fusion researchers.
I'm sure they'd love to try it in a human dying of liver disease. But between the FDA regs, the self-appointed Medical Ethics czars, and the malpractice ambulance-chasers there's a lot of hurdles to jump before they MIGHT be allowed to try it (let alone deploy it as a regular procedure).
I visited him in the late '80s, along with a number of others of the hypertext startup I came out to CA to work for. It was sort of a pilgrimage to see the great man.
One of our people took the mouse from his computer and got Doug to autograph it. This left him with the ONLY mouse (at the time) autographed by Doug, because (as Doug mentioned) nobody had thought to ask him before. B-)
Does she put it in the fridge before using it or something? Or does it use the difference in temperature between your hand and the flashlight.
The latter.
If you RTFA you'll see she's using the aluminum flashlight body as a heat conductor and the "head" and other exposed portions of it as an air-cooled heatsink.
She's stuck the handle of the light into an insulating plastic pipe, cut a hole in the pipe, and stuck the peltier cell in the hole, with the "cold" side in contact with the flashlight handle and the "warm" side in contact with the hand. (I expect the next step is to wrap an outer aluminum tube around it to conduct heat from the whole hand to the cell, rather than just heating it with a patch of palm directly contacting it.)
Voltage boost converter between the peltier assembly and the LED (because the peltier cell she used was not stcked for the right voltage to drive the LED.) The LED shines as long as you hold it, if the air is cool enough. (She's used it for 20 minutes running.)
Also, since this is generating electricity from a temperature differential, rather than generating a temperature differential from electricity, wouldn't this be the Seebeck effect?
Yes. Seebeck discovered current generation from heat differential (with dissimilar metal wires and a compass needle), then Peltier discovered heat-pumping with current.
But, like most rotating electric machinery (where the same device is a motor or generator depending on whether you power it or twist it), the same effect is a heat pump or heat engine (depengding on whether you apply a temperature difference and pull power or apply power and pump heat).
The effect is now often called the "Peltier-Seebeck effect" in textbooks. The cells are typically called Peltier Cells because the efficient ones are manufactured mainly for heat-pumping, though they work just fine both ways.
The noise-cancelling scheme sounds interesting.
If you'll read TFA a little more closely than the OP did, you'll find that the noise-canceling thing is NOT how they got the 1G-ish single-pair link to work.
What the noise-canceling thing is about is when you have TWO OR MORE pairs bundled into a single logical link. Then it figures out what the cross-talk between the individual pairs looks like and cancels THAT out. This lets the individual signal pairs run as fast as a lone pair and the total bandwidth of N bundled pair be N times the bandwidth of one, rather than substantially less.
But open source prevents this from happening because the source is constantly being looked at!
No, open source doesn't keep it from happening. Providers can stick any cruft in there that they want.
What it does do is make it much more likely to be discovered when some fool DOES stick it in there. Don't be surprised if you hear about a lot more bad stuff found in open source than you do in closed source, as a result. (At least until the bad guys wise up.) Try to find the malware in Microsoft's stuff, for instance. B-)
(Of course this stuff was found with a packet sniffer before anybody found it in the code. So it's an apples-to-oranges comparison and open/closed source has nothing to do with it.)
I'm in Silicon Valley. I want to live in Nevada, far enough from the neighbors that I can't hear their HIFIs in the daytime or see their lights at night.
I want to live in Nevada so much that I built a house there - a few miles over the state line near Lake Topaz. Fully paid for. Marvelous view. Good neighbors. Also rabbits (jack and cottontail), quail, coyotes, deer, antelope, bobcats, cougars, and black bears. Gun laws are a lot different there, and I have a Nevada CCW that's also valid in many other states due to reciprocity (though not in CA).
For the Town House near work I also moved across the bay from Palo Alto. Just off the other end of the bridge, for less than I was paying in rent in Palo, I was able to BUY a two-story four-bedroom with 7,000+square feet of yard and remodel it. 200A electric service (two 20A circuits to each room for starters). Satellite TV and Cat 5E everywhere. (Only running 100M at the moment but I hear that with house-sized runs you can get away with 5e for gigabit Ethernet.) The yard is now a garden and orchard. We get most of our veggies from it - and our eggs. We were also on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour last year.
They tell me the city here on the Back Bay has a gang problem. But for several blocks around our house it doesn't. It's much like in Palo Alto (where the burglars worked their way down Loma Verde street and skipped only two houses - ours and the retired cop two doors down). It seems the crooks don't like to bother NRA instructors, and the wife's "Ducks Unlimited" sticker tells them she can hit a spot the size of a duck (or a human heart) with a shotgun, from 50 yards, even if it is flying at the time. B-)
Of course NV has no such crime issues. Even machine guns are legal there. B-)
Move to a SF or Oakland? By preference? You've GOT to be kidding.
Sounds to me like the kid has the makings of a very lucrative suit for denial of civil rights under color of law.
If you want to stop the authorities from misbehaving, hit 'em in their budget.
I think of it as being analogous to injecting separate beams of light at different angles, having them bounce back-and-forth between the walls at different distances between bounces, and emerge at angles corresponding to the angles at which they entered.
Of course it's not angle of flight that's in question, but another property of the light propagation that can be varied to allow different beams to propagate down the fiber and be separable at the far end. But they're still separate because each beam's cross section at a given plane cutting the fiber has a different distribution of phase and intensity, resulting in different propagation mechanisms that conserve a property which can be used to separate the beams when they emerge.
any House GOP member voting for this abortion is going to get skewered
And while we're at it, let's mount primary challenges against all the ones in the senate that turned coat.
Normally I side more with the D's than the R's (not that I have much faith in either), but this time I'm damn glad there's an R majority in the House.
Why the HELL do you usually side with the Ds? They consistently do the opposite of what they promise. It's the Ds that bring you war, censorship, racisim, and a whole host of other junk that they promise to be fixing: Like government in general they're a problem masquerading as its own solution.
The Rs have their own pathologies. But compared to the Ds they're pikers.
I wish I'd had the equivalent when starting at my first University back in 1975.
Typo: Back in 1965.
By the way: Charter Oak's mandatory "cornerstone" class was a wonderful experience, and just what I needed. Think of it as a boot camp on how to research and write academic papers (and read them). VERY enabling.
I wish I'd had the equivalent when starting at my first University back in 1975.
I'm using Charter Oak State College. This is because they are an accredited and respected school, specializing in in distance learning, which accepts a high enough score on a recent Computer Science GRE exam for credit-by-exam on many of the course requirements, and (if certain requirements are met, such as being active in an industry using them) accepts older credits (i.e. math, distribution requirements) that many other institutions would consider "stale" and timed-out. They do not currently offer a BSCS, however, so I'm going for a BSGS with a CS concentration. I've taken three classes from them so far, and am currently taking a math class (needed but not offered there) from the University of North Dakota for transfer credit. Several of my few remaining requirements I expect to complete by exam (and a couple - public speaking, English - by waiver due to documented work experience).
Another excellent school (with a more technical orientation) that also specializes in distance learning is Thomas Edison. They do offer a BSCS, but stopped accepting the CS subject GRE for credit (because too few students used it for them to continue the effort of keeping it qualified against their own requirements). In my case this made a big difference in how much work would be required to reach the diploma. For some others, especially those who need many of the classes (or test-out equivalents), are tech focused, and would find the more directly applicable degree a benefit, Thomas Edison would be a good choice.
These schools are oriented toward people who wish to complete their degrees but are employed or located where going to a classic college is impractical. Examples: Deployed military personnel, low-level medical employees seeking higher certifications for career advancement, workers located far from a good subject-appropriate school or working schedules that interfere with school scheduling.
Two credit-by-examination programs are also related to this. DANTES is one - driven by the military's need to provide education for their soldiers without interfering with their duties (but open to all). Another is CLEP (College Level Examination Program), a product of the College Board which provides 33 subject tests which are accepted as proof of accomplishment by most universities. Each program lets you receive college credits without actually taking a class, by testing whether you've successfully taught yourself the subject.
PC manufacturers like HP used to void warranties when clients installed GNU/LInux, not anymore.
Just a year or so ago I bought my wife an HP laptop specifically for a sysadmin class where she'd be installing Linux on it. Got it home, had a question for HP about it, and discovered in the process (from the phone support) that installing Linux would void their warranty. Checked the paperwork: Yep! So we returned it to Staples for a full refund and went with something else.
When did HP change this policy?
I am in much the same boat. My branch of the industry went from garage shops to IPOs to conglomerates. The hiring process went from people-in-the-know to armies-of-PHBs-working by the book. The number of potential employers went from hundreds to a handful. The workforce went from top-notch locals to armies of adequate, semi-adequate, or inadequate H1Bs.
I had been a pioneer and well recognized by other actual techies - even those that had gone on into management or entrepreneurship. But after catching a layoff when the conglomerate deemphasized its new acquisition's function, I went from highly-paid pan-expert to 17 months unemployed due to the same HR-is-a-brick-wall for non-commodity heads effect.
I finally ended up contracting at a long-running garage shop in a niche market, a position found through a contact who had just watched them have a project almost fail for lack of a person with my particular skill set.
Meanwhile I'm finishing the degree via "distance learning" through an accredited institution. By the time the contract runs out I hope to have that checkbox checked. (College is a LOT easier when you don't have the draft board trying to send you to Vietnam and you can do the classes online when you're free and alert, rather than at 8 AM when you're a night person.)
Strictly speaking "transistors" are any circuit element that involves a "transfer resistance", i.e. a parameter that is resistance-like and dynamically controlled by another parameter.
Junction transistors do this one way. Field effect transistors do it a completely different way (or perhaps more than one different ways). Both of those happen to be implemented with semiconductors.
This voltage-variable tunneling along gold decorations on a non-conducting nanotube is a transfer resistance and the mechanism of transfer is very akin to a field effect transistor: The tunneling path is modulated by a control signal.
(Or at least it should be. In the example given in TFA, the control signal is actually the end-to-end voltage, so we really don't have a transistor yet. More like an avalanche/tunnel diode built without semiconductors. But it seems virtually certain that a control electrode throwing an E-field into the tunneling path will modulate the amount of tunneling, so an actual transistor should fall out very shortly.)
But what if you have a mile long pole and correlate it's movements into a form of communication. As soon as you move the pole on one end it would instantaneously move on the other for instantaneous communication.
Nope. The motion propagates to the far end at the speed of sound in the pole - much faster than sound in air, but glacial compared to light in vacuum.
Don't bother looking for an unobtanium with near-infinite stiffness and an internal speed of sound faster than light-in-vacuum. The motion at one end encodes information about what is happening at that end and that information is propagated down the pole by interactions between the pole's component particles, interactions that all are no faster than the speed of light.