If I lived 15 miles to the west, on the other side of a hill, I would have great TV reception and this would be wonderful. As it is, I'm stuck with Comcast, and all their scrambled DRM bullshit, and it sucks to be me:-(
It's probably a frequency doubled Nd:YAG laser or something similar. YAG stands for Yttrium Aluminum Garnet, a synthetic crystal. The Nd ion is what actually lases, and nowadays, there are several crystals besides YAG that are used for these lasers. It lases in the near infrared, at 1064 nm if it's YAG, or somewhere nearby depending on the crystal that's used. That wavelength just comes from the spectrum of the Nd ion and is dictated by quantum mechanics. Often people want shorter wavelengths. Through the wonders on non-linear optics, the frequency can be doubled to make 532 nm light. That's green.
These lasers are common because this material just happens to be one of the most efficient at turning the electrically generated photons that pump the lasing transition into a coherent laser beam.
There are many varieties of these lasers. There are non-pulsed diode (diode pumped solid-state) or lamp pumped versions, and high peak power pulsed fashlamp pumped versions. It's possible to get over 30 watts (and much more) average power of green out of these things, but such lasers are often big and bulky and suck lots of power. A small 300 mW laser such as the one linked in earlier posts is definitely dangerous at short range. At long range the danger depends on the divergance of the mode and the distance to the target.
As many have pointed out, the difficult part of the problem is steering the beam into the cockpit.
The other issue that confounds me is cost. If you want a high powered laser, you need to be prepared to drop a lot of money. The cost is about the same as a new car, and you can easily spend more. The price, and the fact that they haven't actually blinded anybody, makes me suspect the smaller 300 mW lasers are being used.
I would like to know if these guys did anything worthwhile other than float around and consume resources? I would love to see a comparison of the number of high impact journal papers (Science, Nature, Physics Review Letters...) produced by the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station.
This could work well for near-IR (and deep red) wavelengths. A coating that would block 780 nm and longer would prevent many high power diode lasers and Nd:YAG lasers from entering the cockpit while not interfering with normal color vision.
My corporate intranet uses several active-X based web apps that were designed by Microsoft Certified IT Monkeys. (No link--everything's password protected & firewalled...) I suspect that I'm not the only one suffering with this problem.
I find you statement scary. Public funding for basic research is critical for development of new technology.
Research costs real money. Salaries must be paid, and equipment must be purchased and maintained. State of the art scientific equipment isn't cheap, and neither are Ph.D. researchers. (Well, OK, grad students, post-docs are cheap but that's another story.)
Where do you think these "well funded" universities you write about get their money? While many of these universities, especially the private universities have large endowments and alumni donations, this money typically goes to bricks and mortar infrastructure. That's where the buildings come from. The truth is that the bulk of the day-to-day operating resources for scientific research come from the Federal Government. Without federal funding, the science buildings at even the most richly endowed ivy league institutions would be empty shells.
Furthermore, most research is high-risk. Even if the payoff is potentially high, the probability of hitting a commercial home-run from basic research is low. Most companies and private investors are averse to that level of risk, and their tolerance for such risk is no longer what it was in the good old days. Bell Labs, for example, is no longer the institution that generated Nobel prize winning research decades ago.
The bottom line is without federal funding, science in the US would stagnate, and we would no longer be a world leader in science and technology.
The high energy laser is not a CO_2 laser; it's a COIL (chemical oxygen iodine laser). The wavelength is in the near-infrared at 1.315 microns. Atmospheric propagation in the absence of clouds works really well.
I'm not sure how they deal with clouds, but if it's a problem, they could always fly the plane at 35,000 feet and aim at missles at equal or higher elevation.
The thing that has me scratching my head is the parallel development of Camino and Firefox. While choice is a wonderful thing, choosing between these two very similar browsers has me wondering wtf?
I also wonder whether developer resources would be better focused on one or the other.
Could somebody in the Firefox or Camino community enlighten us on the need for both browsers?
(Posted from Camino. Camino is getting long in the tooth, but I'm too lazy to move bookmarks to Firefox and now I might not need to.)
I'm assuming that you're confused by the astronomy lingo. Many astrophysicists use the term "water-ice" to refer to frozen water, as opposed to other frozen materials such as methane, and other small hydrocarbons. As a physical chemist, the terminology annoys me, but that's the way they talk. So when you hear somebody from NASA talk about water-ice, they are referring to good old frozen water, not a water-ice equilibrium.
For the record, in a vacuum, liquid water is not thermodynamically stable and water does indeed sublime. (Just like frozen CO2 sublimes.) However that certainly doesn't mean that ice can't exist in a vacuum. It just needs to be sufficiently cold that the vapor pressure is negligable. Since comets spend most of their lives out in the Kuiper belt, they are indeed plenty cold. When a comet approaches the sun, the comet heats up and water, along with other volatile compounds, does indeed sublime.
My fundamental problem with HVAC...
on
DIY HVAC
·
· Score: 1
All you need to do is have the domestic Chinese software packaged in really big shrink-wrapped boxes that are mostly air, and force the international market to supply minimally packaged software.
What would be cool is to leave most of the window transparent and add a few images to spice up your backyard. Want to add a shade tree? Go for it!
Want to add something iteresting under the tree? Put a picture of Newton under the tree and have it drop an apple on his head once in a while. Too geeky? How about a nude model sunbathing...
Slashdot Mirror
The thing that really baffles me is why this pseudo-science is so widely accepted in Europe.
Oh well...I guess we have our polygraph tests in the states.
No.
In the end, the bugetary decisions are up to Congress. They have the power to restore the Hubble funding to the budget.
I'll need a high end graphics card to play Duke Nukem Forever.
If I lived 15 miles to the west, on the other side of a hill, I would have great TV reception and this would be wonderful. As it is, I'm stuck with Comcast, and all their scrambled DRM bullshit, and it sucks to be me :-(
It's probably a frequency doubled Nd:YAG laser or something similar. YAG stands for Yttrium Aluminum Garnet, a synthetic crystal. The Nd ion is what actually lases, and nowadays, there are several crystals besides YAG that are used for these lasers. It lases in the near infrared, at 1064 nm if it's YAG, or somewhere nearby depending on the crystal that's used. That wavelength just comes from the spectrum of the Nd ion and is dictated by quantum mechanics. Often people want shorter wavelengths. Through the wonders on non-linear optics, the frequency can be doubled to make 532 nm light. That's green.
These lasers are common because this material just happens to be one of the most efficient at turning the electrically generated photons that pump the lasing transition into a coherent laser beam.
There are many varieties of these lasers. There are non-pulsed diode (diode pumped solid-state) or lamp pumped versions, and high peak power pulsed fashlamp pumped versions. It's possible to get over 30 watts (and much more) average power of green out of these things, but such lasers are often big and bulky and suck lots of power. A small 300 mW laser such as the one linked in earlier posts is definitely dangerous at short range. At long range the danger depends on the divergance of the mode and the distance to the target.
As many have pointed out, the difficult part of the problem is steering the beam into the cockpit.
The other issue that confounds me is cost. If you want a high powered laser, you need to be prepared to drop a lot of money. The cost is about the same as a new car, and you can easily spend more. The price, and the fact that they haven't actually blinded anybody, makes me suspect the smaller 300 mW lasers are being used.
Has Vigor been ported to the Mac? I for one could use an animated assistant when I'm working with VI.
I would like to know if these guys did anything worthwhile other than float around and consume resources? I would love to see a comparison of the number of high impact journal papers (Science, Nature, Physics Review Letters...) produced by the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station.
This could work well for near-IR (and deep red) wavelengths. A coating that would block 780 nm and longer would prevent many high power diode lasers and Nd:YAG lasers from entering the cockpit while not interfering with normal color vision.
My corporate intranet uses several active-X based web apps that were designed by Microsoft Certified IT Monkeys. (No link--everything's password protected & firewalled...) I suspect that I'm not the only one suffering with this problem.
10 TB of data that can't be compressed? That's one hell of a Pr0n collection!
Let's face it. If they were so desperate that they needed to recruit flight crew from /., anybody who signs up is a sure bet for a Darwin award.
I find you statement scary. Public funding for basic research is critical for development of new technology.
Research costs real money. Salaries must be paid, and equipment must be purchased and maintained. State of the art scientific equipment isn't cheap, and neither are Ph.D. researchers. (Well, OK, grad students, post-docs are cheap but that's another story.)
Where do you think these "well funded" universities you write about get their money? While many of these universities, especially the private universities have large endowments and alumni donations, this money typically goes to bricks and mortar infrastructure. That's where the buildings come from. The truth is that the bulk of the day-to-day operating resources for scientific research come from the Federal Government. Without federal funding, the science buildings at even the most richly endowed ivy league institutions would be empty shells.
Furthermore, most research is high-risk. Even if the payoff is potentially high, the probability of hitting a commercial home-run from basic research is low. Most companies and private investors are averse to that level of risk, and their tolerance for such risk is no longer what it was in the good old days. Bell Labs, for example, is no longer the institution that generated Nobel prize winning research decades ago.
The bottom line is without federal funding, science in the US would stagnate, and we would no longer be a world leader in science and technology.
I guess the editors were too lazy to make an Icon for a French flag.
Now that we have this list, we have an official metric for the performance requirements of an assistant professor seeking tenure at Harvard.
Really?
I, for one, can't tell one Tentacle Monster from another.
The high energy laser is not a CO_2 laser; it's a COIL (chemical oxygen iodine laser). The wavelength is in the near-infrared at 1.315 microns. Atmospheric propagation in the absence of clouds works really well.
I'm not sure how they deal with clouds, but if it's a problem, they could always fly the plane at 35,000 feet and aim at missles at equal or higher elevation.
The thing that has me scratching my head is the parallel development of Camino and Firefox. While choice is a wonderful thing, choosing between these two very similar browsers has me wondering wtf?
I also wonder whether developer resources would be better focused on one or the other.
Could somebody in the Firefox or Camino community enlighten us on the need for both browsers?
(Posted from Camino. Camino is getting long in the tooth, but I'm too lazy to move bookmarks to Firefox and now I might not need to.)
I'm assuming that you're confused by the astronomy lingo. Many astrophysicists use the term "water-ice" to refer to frozen water, as opposed to other frozen materials such as methane, and other small hydrocarbons. As a physical chemist, the terminology annoys me, but that's the way they talk. So when you hear somebody from NASA talk about water-ice, they are referring to good old frozen water, not a water-ice equilibrium. For the record, in a vacuum, liquid water is not thermodynamically stable and water does indeed sublime. (Just like frozen CO2 sublimes.) However that certainly doesn't mean that ice can't exist in a vacuum. It just needs to be sufficiently cold that the vapor pressure is negligable. Since comets spend most of their lives out in the Kuiper belt, they are indeed plenty cold. When a comet approaches the sun, the comet heats up and water, along with other volatile compounds, does indeed sublime.
If it doesn't suck, it blows.
All you need to do is have the domestic Chinese software packaged in really big shrink-wrapped boxes that are mostly air, and force the international market to supply minimally packaged software.
Now my upper arms will be cold.
What would be cool is to leave most of the window transparent and add a few images to spice up your backyard. Want to add a shade tree? Go for it!
Want to add something iteresting under the tree? Put a picture of Newton under the tree and have it drop an apple on his head once in a while. Too geeky? How about a nude model sunbathing...
"Those bits that do (databases and simulations requiring large blocks of memory)..."
Isn't this the target market for the Xgrid and Xserve cluster node?
Now that Apple's trying to get into the big league number crunching market, I wonder if we will see a 64 bit version of OS X any time soon?
I don't know about you, but I go to coffee shops to get wired!