Maybe the nuclear reactors are a temporary measure until we get enough hydrogen to keep the process running primarily with fuel cells. Seems to me that hydrogen should be easy enough to extract from seawater though without resorting to other drastic measures.
No no no no no..... when you split a mole of water into a mole of hydrogen and half a mole of oxygen, you have to put in a certain amount of energy. When you recombine that mole of hydrogen with another half a mole of oxygen, you get energy and water. And the amount of energy you get back is equal to the amount you put in in the first place.
Hydrogen is just a way of storing energy. Like a lead-acid battery..... you need to charge it up and you only get out what you put in.
Fuel cells have no combustion. It's an entirely different process.
But Hess's law still stands. Fire is, after all, just a chemical reaction between two reagents {in this case fuel and air} in which potential energy {stored in chemical bonds, e.g. the four C-H bonds in methane} is exchanged mainly for heat. In a fuel cell, some of that enrgy is exchanged for electricity.
But if you count up the energy transitions in
CH4 + 2H2O -> CO2 + 4H2
4H2 + 2O2 -> 2H2O
then you get the same amount of energy changing state as
CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O
anyway!
It's obvious that a combustion engine is not 100% efficient, because the exhaust gases are hot and moving, i.e. they are carrying away heat and kinetic energy. This can be mitigated to an extent by using a turbocharger {which slows down the exhaust gases} and an intercooler {which chills the fuel/air mixture before the power stroke}. The breakeven point comes when you need to expend more energy on the recovery operation than you are capable of recovering.
Another problem is, any electrical source that depends on a chemical reaction rather than relative motion between a magnet and a coil of wire will give you DC. Real world applications like power distribution demand AC. So you either need to keep swapping the wires back and forth 100 times a second {two swaps per full cycle - this needs big transistors} or you can't carry that power very far. {Although you can pipe the H2 to the appliance}.
The press release says that 2/3 of their 300,000 song catalog is available for CD burning, while everything is available for 'on-demand' listening."
Hmmmm..... Surely every piece of digital music available for listening is available for CD burning if you stick a logic-analyser on the bus and trap the zeros and ones as they are being sent to the sound card? Sound card specs are necessarily published (otherwise nobody could ever write any software to get a note out of them), and a bus by definition makes the data available to all devices; so it shouldn't be too hard a matter to get the raw sound card data and then transliterate it into a more usable, compressed format.
Since you can get USB sound cards, and USB memory / hard disk devices, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to make a USB device that pretends it is a sound card but is merely storing the audio data rather than using it to position loudspeaker diaphragms. It could then be interrogated like any mass-storage device (digital camera, slot reader, external CDRW/HDD &c.) and spit out files of captured raw sound card data.
Of course, if you did not mind total lameness then you could just plug the speaker socket of one sound card into the line-in of another and do it all in the analogue domain..... but that's only one step up from pointing a mic at the speakers.
Meanwhile, here's a question for the music industry to think on. Given the ready availability of photocopiers, scanners, printers &c., why is there not a problem with mass 'piracy' of books, magazines and newspapers?
It means "Paper Cassette - load US letter paper", which is 216 x 280 if I remember right. Every other country in the world uses BS A4 paper which is 210 x 297.
If you're prepared to destroy something you own just so someone else can't have it, you don't deserve to have it.
Wait till these things start falsely triggering..... and then of course are the other questions. Like what if it's behind a firewall? What if it's not connected to the Internet at all?
Despite the availability of pirate copies, The Matrix Reloaded has made more than $363.5m at the box office worldwide so far.
Then that's 363 500 000 good reasons not to complain about it. For crying out loud, how much money do you want?
Reasons why buying a bootleg of a movie is no substitute for seeing it in the pictures:
Screen sizes. The biggest computer monitor I've ever seen was square on half a metre. So the screen measured 400 * 300mm., but at a 16:9 aspect ratio you can only use 400 * 225mm. Effective diagonal size = 459mm. Mine at home is only 320 * 240mm., 16:9 area 320 * 180mm., giving an effective diagonal of 367mm. There are TV sets, usually 16:9, in the 800mm. class; these are modern enough to have SCART [Peritel] input and so probably would work with a modern graphics card with video out. I've never actually measured a cinema screen, but it is safe to say they would be measured in metres.
Sound. Computer speakers are notoriously poor, because otherwise they would reveal the imperfections in most cheap sound cards, outrageous claims made regarding output power notwithstanding. 2kW requires the best part of 10 amps at 230V. 'Nuff said.
People. Seeing a film in the cinema is a social occasion. There is no substitute! You get to do all sorts of cool stuff when you aren't at home - like peeing in communal toilets, smuggling food and beer past security, sneaking a crafty fag in a no-smoking area, &c.
Cheap DivX CDs aren't going to hurt Hollywood's pockets any more than cheap audio CDs hurt Michael Eavis's pockets.
It's the volts what jolts, but it's the mils what kills, as they say.
It's easy enough to make the controller; it's just a step-up inverter. Probably two-stage; 9V up to about 400V DC, use it to charge a capacitor, about 1uF; then discharge it through the primary of a ferrite-cored pulse transformer. The awkward bit is the final secondary, which needs to be wound on a bobbin with insulating discs between segments, otherwise it'll arc between the windings. It also helps to encapsulate the whole lot in resin. Having worked for a company manufacturing ignition sequence controllers for gas boilers, I have learned a few things about high voltages.....
My dad was a radio presenter, on the BBC no less. He was also unafraid of the sight of solder and would usually be mending something or other..... if it wasn't ours, it'd be someone else's kit that he'd be fixing. One week he brought home a disco console that needed a new power transistor in the amplifier..... it didn't really take as long to fix as he made out, but he was teaching me how to spin dem choonz;) And I have many happy memories of stripping down electric motors on the hearth rug.
In those days, both my parents had Minis, his a 1959 Mark One that he first customised then took back retro, hers a Clubman Estate. And my dad did everything except welding {something I'm going to have to learn}. Even transferred a rear subframe, which - considering how a Mini is built - is easier said than done. Also my mum would make clothes for me and my sister.
Times changed and the necessity for make-do-and-mend disappeared when people started importing cheap goods from third world countries without our stringent quality control and labour laws, leaving our manufacturing industry unable to compete; but these were the Thatcher years and manufacturing wasn't important anymore, we were now a nation of middlemen.
Back to the point. Somehow, I feel a compulsion to learn things: to question, to experiment, and to understand for myself why things behave the way they do. Although I use a breadmaker, this is strictly for realistic reasons. I probably would make my dough by hand if I had the time available..... Same with other mod cons.
Finding that a bollocking was generally an acceptable price to pay for finding something out, I got lucky and found computers before I got the chance to do any real damage. {Although there is a certain motor traction company that isn't keen on my experiment to find out whether or not it was possible to print my own tickets at considerably less cost than buying them from the bus driver - it was - and it was only my disastrous record with glassare in chemistry lessons at school that made me question the viability of synthesising certain chemicals in my kitchen. Specifically, trinitroalphamethylphenylethylamine. Anyone who's successfully made TNA, or has proof that it's impossible, please let me know!}
I guess it's morbid curiosity: the same thing that makes people stare at road accidents, poke a dead body with a stick, or go into dark cupboards in creaky old houses with only a flashlight.....
I still make-do-and-mend, and I can't walk past a rubbish skip without having a good look inside. My mobile phone is 3 years old, it still sends and receives text messages and I can still answer it when it rings.
Final thoughts: I was talking to someone about making soap using fire ash {good source of metal oxides, i.e. alkali} and cooking fat {glyceryl triesters of C12-C18 carboxylic acids}. He said, "Do you really think that making your own soap at home is going to bring down the government?" I looked him squarely in the face, and responded: "No, but at least when the government does come down, I'll know how to make my own soap."
The problem with making a lightsabre is getting the beam to come to an end. You would need to bounce it off a perfectly reflective mirror, because if the beam is carrying enough energy to cut anything, then you don't want the far-end reflector to absorb any of that energy - you want to send it all back.
An oxy-propane burner with a long, thin flame is probably the nearest thing anyone's going to make yet.....
Laser pointers use a cheap laser which consists of an LED {a nearly-monochromatic light source; it should be MC in therory, but the act of it emitting a photon alters the wavelength of the next photon to be emitted} shining into a lump of some stuff with a weak mirror on each end, so the light mostly just bounces back and forth inside it. This sets up the light equivalent of a guitar string {maximum vibration in the middle, no vibration at the ends}; i.e. you get all the crests and all the troughs lining up at some particular frequency, and any other frequencies end up annihilating one another due to a crest and trough meeting up. Interestingly, this energy doesn't change state - the diode just doesn't let as much current flow while it's happening. Or rather, just after it's happened:-) Think transmission lines. On average, about half of the light - that doesn't get absorbed by the imperfect reflective materials and turned into heat - eventually makes it out of the non-LED end. But there is definitely a zero-crossing where the beam is leaving the resonance cavity, and only one wavelength, so all the crests and troughs line up perfectly. This property of coherence is what defines laser light.
When the batteries are getting spent, the LED becomes too dim to bounce back and forth very many times. All you see is what shines straight through the resonance cavity and out the other end; it is not perfectly monochromatic and not coherent.
The beam also tends to diverge unless it is well focused. Fit new batteries, aim at a target several metres distant and adjust the focus. Keep trying further and further targets..... although natural experimental errors will eventually take over and you won't be able to get it perfect. If you get it as far as the moon {doubtful with clouds in the way..... which makes me highly suspicious of claims that spy satellites can read a number plate on a vehicle} then, in all probability, it'll be much, much dimmer than whatever light is bouncing off the moon. Maybe on a new moon it would work. But you also have to bear in mind that the beam of light is making a round trip of c.800Mm {that's right, megametres}; and, unless perfectly collimated, then it will spread over an area proportional to the square of the distance travelled (assuming light travels in straight lines). Even if you could get it not to diverge noticebably over 200m., multiply this by 4 million and you see the problem.
As for this colour-changing thing..... A photon of blue light carries more energy than a photon of red light, nearly twice as much if I remember correctly (E = h * c / lambda, where lambda varies from 400E-9m. to 700E-9m). So if I put in 7 photons at 700nm, does this mean I would only get out 4 photons at 400nm? Or does the extra energy come from the work done by the shock wave?
Someone reverse-engineers the device in question and posts the source code on the Internet.
If OpenTV complain about this, then the respondent could claim that such reverse engineering constituted "reasonable force" to persuade them to release the source - which the GPL clearly requires them to do, so reasonable force is in order.
{side note: Is there a guncc? It'd come out with many ifs and gotos, rather than neat structures.....}
If the GPL is found not legally enforceable, then this could set a precedent and make the MS EULA equally unenforceable. If there is precedent for other software licences, then this stands in favour of the GPL.
Give vendors of goods the right to refuse payment according to how they believe the money was obtained. As well as the obvious stolen money / drug dealing / prostitution / arms dealing profits, this may well come to be extened to things like gambling winnings and lawsuit money.
Once people find their Pound Notes getting refused even despite having the Queen's head on them, these activities will cease to be profitable.
The complicated bit is finding out where someone's money came from in the first place.....
The point with the scrabble tiles is this. Let's assume just 26 tiles in the bag, one of each letter, each tile returned to the bag after use. That keeps the maths simple.
The probability of making "FOURSCOREANDSEVENYEARSAGO" is 26 ** -25, or about 4.22344 E-36. Which sounds tiny. BUT this is ignoring the size of the universe, which is huge. And it's also ignoring the fact that, while there are many 25-letter sequences that do not make sense, there are more than one that do, particularly if we don't limit ourselves to English. After all, there could be many, many viable life-forms; we have just a tiny subset on this planet. DNA has a large (though finite) number of variations, but may not be the only self-replicating molecule. Other self-replicators may well exist; we just haven't found them yet. {It's impossible to prove that a person is a non-smoker - they might just be hiding their fags whenever you're looking.}
So, with one person on each planet in the universe pulling random scrabble tiles, and now many, many more valid combinations to choose from, the odds against getting a sensible sentence are starting to look shorter.
And that's pretty much what we've got..... yes, it looks pretty improbable at first sight that all this would happen by chance; but it has and, taking a step back to look at the wider picture, it wasn't all that improbable. {Also, bear in mind that this planet must have been much more radioactive in the past. We all know what effect certain kinds of radiation have on DNA.....}
Yes, exactly. Good luck setting up your sendmail, though if you have only 40 users then exim might be a better choice simply because it's less hard (as opposed to 'easier') to configure.
99.4 could be a bit of a low estimate if you ask me. IMOX, in recent years, evolution has gone into full-speed reverse..... the evidence is all around us.....
Of course, the chrimbos are going to be annoyed about this. They're generally offended by any suggestion that human beings are descended from the same ancestors as other animals, and particularly sensitive about being reminded that superstitious / religious behaviour doesn't put us that far above
pigeons.
As long as your ISP provides True Virtual Hosting,
the extraneous digits don't matter. Virtual
Hosting allocates an entire subdomain to each
user, and anything sent to that subdomain goes
into a single mailbox. When you receive your
e-mail (usually by POP3 though most ISPs should
be able to push SMTP to you if you have a static
IP address) your own procmail (or Inbox Assistant
for Windoze users) can sort out the addresses if
you want. If you don't have VH then you will need
to get a proper domain registered and have all its
e-mail sent to one address.
Any address that attracts one piece of
spam can be safely barred. Since each address
gets used multiple times (people sell them on.....) you ought to be able to reduce your spam
intake, even if not eliminate it.
So, running a lawnmower engine for 1 day is equivalent to the pollution put out by your average car in 2200 miles, about 2 months worth of standard driving.
Only in terms of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, which are just one of many pollutants emitted by any type of engine.
As soon as someone comes up with an internal combustion engine that does not require lubricating oil, expect to see small engines powered by propane blowtorch / camping stove canisters..... straight chains tend to burn cleaner.
UK law recognises that life is more important than property. No person is considered to be so worthless that their life is less important than a piece of property, and no piece of property is considered so valuable that its protection justifies the taking of a human life.
If it were the other way round, then some less sorted person could find a way to twist it around somehow and consider their property worth more than your, or my, life.
Americans boast of the right to bear arms, but UK gun laws grant us a more fundamental right: the right to not have to bear arms!
In this country, and probably many others, software cannot legally be patented. I am not an expert, but I would guess that this means software patents granted in other countries are not enforceable in the UK - and therefore no offence would be committed using "patent-violating" software here.
Governments should, if they don't already, have the power to annul any patent, and that power should be exercised against abusers of the system.
Meanwhile, if your ISP offers virtual hosting, you can always use disposable addresses. (well - at least until the spam merchants twig onto that). This is my attempt at disposable addressing.
Perhaps it's because they want a robot that will do more than move about slowly and occasionally start shrieking loudly for no reason, and end up needing its arse squeezing when its bowel muscles pack up after a couple of years?
Imagine a device looking like a sawn-off CRT, with A-to-D converters (with appropriate signal preconditioning and artificial impedances) on the red, green and blue gate drive terminals (to get the video signals) and the scan coil terminals (to get the picture timing signals).
NO system can get around that, except perhaps if the final decryption is performed in the user's own brain under the influence of a psychotropic drug. Just buy more pills for more viewings..... if the drug can be made to react with HGH, you can also add the 12/15/18 age restriction. Damn, I wish I hadn't said that on here, I could have made a fortune patenting it:)
It's all irrelevant anyway, as CSS does not impede copying at all. Can you copy text written in a language you don't understand? Exactly. Ting! Next please.
Pipe lynx -source http://somewebsite.co.uk through appropriate grep, sed and awk filters, or a Perl script, or Python if you think Perl isn't trendy enough. Then edit your crontab so all this happens by itself. Easy enough:-)
That is exactly the point. It only takes one illicit copy to ruin the whole effort.
It wouldn't be too hard to take a feed of the zeros and ones as picked up by the laser in a standalone CD player (even if there wasn't a digital out) and decode that. The process is published in the Red Book:) The track breaks &c. can be got either from the embedded timecode or (for real diehard hackers with points to prove) the LCD drive signals.
Or, you could build a card that sat on a computer's bus, and emulated a well-documented sound card well enough to fool Windows - and grabbed the resulting data in onboard RAM, or possibly a dedicated separate HDD. All in all, copy protection is a fallacy. The only workable scheme would be one that could truthfully detect whether or not the listener is doing anything dishonest.
Anyway, even if the record companies do succeed in implementing such a scheme (I for one believe it's impossible) we can always make our own music! Unless/until the record companies find a way to regulate the manufacture and sale of instruments [excuse me chummy, that there guitar looks as if it might be going to be used to play a copyrighted song - you're nicked], anyway.....
Slashdot Mirror
has replaced tomsrtbt as my rescue tool of choice.
..... what these people have managed to pull off is fantastic.
It probably would have done so even if any of my latest machines had a floppy drive
Hydrogen is just a way of storing energy. Like a lead-acid battery
But if you count up the energy transitions in
- CH4 + 2H2O -> CO2 + 4H2
- 4H2 + 2O2 -> 2H2O
then you get the same amount of energy changing state as- CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O
anyway!It's obvious that a combustion engine is not 100% efficient, because the exhaust gases are hot and moving, i.e. they are carrying away heat and kinetic energy. This can be mitigated to an extent by using a turbocharger {which slows down the exhaust gases} and an intercooler {which chills the fuel/air mixture before the power stroke}. The breakeven point comes when you need to expend more energy on the recovery operation than you are capable of recovering.
Another problem is, any electrical source that depends on a chemical reaction rather than relative motion between a magnet and a coil of wire will give you DC. Real world applications like power distribution demand AC. So you either need to keep swapping the wires back and forth 100 times a second {two swaps per full cycle - this needs big transistors} or you can't carry that power very far. {Although you can pipe the H2 to the appliance}.
Since you can get USB sound cards, and USB memory / hard disk devices, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to make a USB device that pretends it is a sound card but is merely storing the audio data rather than using it to position loudspeaker diaphragms. It could then be interrogated like any mass-storage device (digital camera, slot reader, external CDRW/HDD &c.) and spit out files of captured raw sound card data.
Of course, if you did not mind total lameness then you could just plug the speaker socket of one sound card into the line-in of another and do it all in the analogue domain
Meanwhile, here's a question for the music industry to think on. Given the ready availability of photocopiers, scanners, printers &c., why is there not a problem with mass 'piracy' of books, magazines and newspapers?
It means "Paper Cassette - load US letter paper", which is 216 x 280 if I remember right. Every other country in the world uses BS A4 paper which is 210 x 297.
If you're prepared to destroy something you own just so someone else can't have it, you don't deserve to have it.
..... and then of course are the other questions. Like what if it's behind a firewall? What if it's not connected to the Internet at all?
Wait till these things start falsely triggering
Stupid idea. Ting! Next please.
Reasons why buying a bootleg of a movie is no substitute for seeing it in the pictures:
Screen sizes. The biggest computer monitor I've ever seen was square on half a metre. So the screen measured 400 * 300mm., but at a 16:9 aspect ratio you can only use 400 * 225mm. Effective diagonal size = 459mm. Mine at home is only 320 * 240mm., 16:9 area 320 * 180mm., giving an effective diagonal of 367mm. There are TV sets, usually 16:9, in the 800mm. class; these are modern enough to have SCART [Peritel] input and so probably would work with a modern graphics card with video out. I've never actually measured a cinema screen, but it is safe to say they would be measured in metres.
Sound. Computer speakers are notoriously poor, because otherwise they would reveal the imperfections in most cheap sound cards, outrageous claims made regarding output power notwithstanding. 2kW requires the best part of 10 amps at 230V. 'Nuff said.
People. Seeing a film in the cinema is a social occasion. There is no substitute! You get to do all sorts of cool stuff when you aren't at home - like peeing in communal toilets, smuggling food and beer past security, sneaking a crafty fag in a no-smoking area, &c.
Cheap DivX CDs aren't going to hurt Hollywood's pockets any more than cheap audio CDs hurt Michael Eavis's pockets.
It's the volts what jolts, but it's the mils what kills, as they say.
.....
It's easy enough to make the controller; it's just a step-up inverter. Probably two-stage; 9V up to about 400V DC, use it to charge a capacitor, about 1uF; then discharge it through the primary of a ferrite-cored pulse transformer. The awkward bit is the final secondary, which needs to be wound on a bobbin with insulating discs between segments, otherwise it'll arc between the windings. It also helps to encapsulate the whole lot in resin. Having worked for a company manufacturing ignition sequence controllers for gas boilers, I have learned a few things about high voltages
My dad was a radio presenter, on the BBC no less. He was also unafraid of the sight of solder and would usually be mending something or other ..... if it wasn't ours, it'd be someone else's kit that he'd be fixing. One week he brought home a disco console that needed a new power transistor in the amplifier ..... it didn't really take as long to fix as he made out, but he was teaching me how to spin dem choonz ;) And I have many happy memories of stripping down electric motors on the hearth rug.
..... Same with other mod cons.
.....
In those days, both my parents had Minis, his a 1959 Mark One that he first customised then took back retro, hers a Clubman Estate. And my dad did everything except welding {something I'm going to have to learn}. Even transferred a rear subframe, which - considering how a Mini is built - is easier said than done. Also my mum would make clothes for me and my sister.
Times changed and the necessity for make-do-and-mend disappeared when people started importing cheap goods from third world countries without our stringent quality control and labour laws, leaving our manufacturing industry unable to compete; but these were the Thatcher years and manufacturing wasn't important anymore, we were now a nation of middlemen.
Back to the point. Somehow, I feel a compulsion to learn things: to question, to experiment, and to understand for myself why things behave the way they do. Although I use a breadmaker, this is strictly for realistic reasons. I probably would make my dough by hand if I had the time available
Finding that a bollocking was generally an acceptable price to pay for finding something out, I got lucky and found computers before I got the chance to do any real damage. {Although there is a certain motor traction company that isn't keen on my experiment to find out whether or not it was possible to print my own tickets at considerably less cost than buying them from the bus driver - it was - and it was only my disastrous record with glassare in chemistry lessons at school that made me question the viability of synthesising certain chemicals in my kitchen. Specifically, trinitroalphamethylphenylethylamine. Anyone who's successfully made TNA, or has proof that it's impossible, please let me know!}
I guess it's morbid curiosity: the same thing that makes people stare at road accidents, poke a dead body with a stick, or go into dark cupboards in creaky old houses with only a flashlight
I still make-do-and-mend, and I can't walk past a rubbish skip without having a good look inside. My mobile phone is 3 years old, it still sends and receives text messages and I can still answer it when it rings.
Final thoughts: I was talking to someone about making soap using fire ash {good source of metal oxides, i.e. alkali} and cooking fat {glyceryl triesters of C12-C18 carboxylic acids}. He said, "Do you really think that making your own soap at home is going to bring down the government?" I looked him squarely in the face, and responded: "No, but at least when the government does come down, I'll know how to make my own soap."
The problem with making a lightsabre is getting the beam to come to an end. You would need to bounce it off a perfectly reflective mirror, because if the beam is carrying enough energy to cut anything, then you don't want the far-end reflector to absorb any of that energy - you want to send it all back.
.....
An oxy-propane burner with a long, thin flame is probably the nearest thing anyone's going to make yet
Laser pointers use a cheap laser which consists of an LED {a nearly-monochromatic light source; it should be MC in therory, but the act of it emitting a photon alters the wavelength of the next photon to be emitted} shining into a lump of some stuff with a weak mirror on each end, so the light mostly just bounces back and forth inside it. This sets up the light equivalent of a guitar string {maximum vibration in the middle, no vibration at the ends}; i.e. you get all the crests and all the troughs lining up at some particular frequency, and any other frequencies end up annihilating one another due to a crest and trough meeting up. Interestingly, this energy doesn't change state - the diode just doesn't let as much current flow while it's happening. Or rather, just after it's happened :-) Think transmission lines. On average, about half of the light - that doesn't get absorbed by the imperfect reflective materials and turned into heat - eventually makes it out of the non-LED end. But there is definitely a zero-crossing where the beam is leaving the resonance cavity, and only one wavelength, so all the crests and troughs line up perfectly. This property of coherence is what defines laser light.
..... although natural experimental errors will eventually take over and you won't be able to get it perfect. If you get it as far as the moon {doubtful with clouds in the way ..... which makes me highly suspicious of claims that spy satellites can read a number plate on a vehicle} then, in all probability, it'll be much, much dimmer than whatever light is bouncing off the moon. Maybe on a new moon it would work. But you also have to bear in mind that the beam of light is making a round trip of c.800Mm {that's right, megametres}; and, unless perfectly collimated, then it will spread over an area proportional to the square of the distance travelled (assuming light travels in straight lines). Even if you could get it not to diverge noticebably over 200m., multiply this by 4 million and you see the problem.
..... A photon of blue light carries more energy than a photon of red light, nearly twice as much if I remember correctly (E = h * c / lambda, where lambda varies from 400E-9m. to 700E-9m). So if I put in 7 photons at 700nm, does this mean I would only get out 4 photons at 400nm? Or does the extra energy come from the work done by the shock wave?
When the batteries are getting spent, the LED becomes too dim to bounce back and forth very many times. All you see is what shines straight through the resonance cavity and out the other end; it is not perfectly monochromatic and not coherent.
The beam also tends to diverge unless it is well focused. Fit new batteries, aim at a target several metres distant and adjust the focus. Keep trying further and further targets
As for this colour-changing thing
Someone reverse-engineers the device in question and posts the source code on the Internet.
.....}
If OpenTV complain about this, then the respondent could claim that such reverse engineering constituted "reasonable force" to persuade them to release the source - which the GPL clearly requires them to do, so reasonable force is in order.
{side note: Is there a guncc? It'd come out with many ifs and gotos, rather than neat structures
If the GPL is found not legally enforceable, then this could set a precedent and make the MS EULA equally unenforceable. If there is precedent for other software licences, then this stands in favour of the GPL.
Make it impossible to patent any software.
.....
.....
It already works in this country
Complicated idea:
Give vendors of goods the right to refuse payment according to how they believe the money was obtained. As well as the obvious stolen money / drug dealing / prostitution / arms dealing profits, this may well come to be extened to things like gambling winnings and lawsuit money.
Once people find their Pound Notes getting refused even despite having the Queen's head on them, these activities will cease to be profitable.
The complicated bit is finding out where someone's money came from in the first place
The point with the scrabble tiles is this. Let's assume just 26 tiles in the bag, one of each letter, each tile returned to the bag after use. That keeps the maths simple.
..... yes, it looks pretty improbable at first sight that all this would happen by chance; but it has and, taking a step back to look at the wider picture, it wasn't all that improbable. {Also, bear in mind that this planet must have been much more radioactive in the past. We all know what effect certain kinds of radiation have on DNA .....}
The probability of making "FOURSCOREANDSEVENYEARSAGO" is 26 ** -25, or about 4.22344 E-36. Which sounds tiny. BUT this is ignoring the size of the universe, which is huge. And it's also ignoring the fact that, while there are many 25-letter sequences that do not make sense, there are more than one that do, particularly if we don't limit ourselves to English. After all, there could be many, many viable life-forms; we have just a tiny subset on this planet. DNA has a large (though finite) number of variations, but may not be the only self-replicating molecule. Other self-replicators may well exist; we just haven't found them yet. {It's impossible to prove that a person is a non-smoker - they might just be hiding their fags whenever you're looking.}
So, with one person on each planet in the universe pulling random scrabble tiles, and now many, many more valid combinations to choose from, the odds against getting a sensible sentence are starting to look shorter.
And that's pretty much what we've got
Yes, exactly. Good luck setting up your sendmail, though if you have only 40 users then exim might be a better choice simply because it's less hard (as opposed to 'easier') to configure.
99.4 could be a bit of a low estimate if you ask me. IMOX, in recent years, evolution has gone into full-speed reverse ..... the evidence is all around us .....
Of course, the chrimbos are going to be annoyed about this. They're generally offended by any suggestion that human beings are descended from the same ancestors as other animals, and particularly sensitive about being reminded that superstitious / religious behaviour doesn't put us that far above pigeons.
As long as your ISP provides True Virtual Hosting, the extraneous digits don't matter. Virtual Hosting allocates an entire subdomain to each user, and anything sent to that subdomain goes into a single mailbox. When you receive your e-mail (usually by POP3 though most ISPs should be able to push SMTP to you if you have a static IP address) your own procmail (or Inbox Assistant for Windoze users) can sort out the addresses if you want. If you don't have VH then you will need to get a proper domain registered and have all its e-mail sent to one address.
.....) you ought to be able to reduce your spam
intake, even if not eliminate it.
Any address that attracts one piece of spam can be safely barred. Since each address gets used multiple times (people sell them on
As soon as someone comes up with an internal combustion engine that does not require lubricating oil, expect to see small engines powered by propane blowtorch / camping stove canisters
UK law recognises that life is more important than property. No person is considered to be so worthless that their life is less important than a piece of property, and no piece of property is considered so valuable that its protection justifies the taking of a human life.
If it were the other way round, then some less sorted person could find a way to twist it around somehow and consider their property worth more than your, or my, life.
Americans boast of the right to bear arms, but UK gun laws grant us a more fundamental right: the right to not have to bear arms!
In this country, and probably many others, software cannot legally be patented. I am not an expert, but I would guess that this means software patents granted in other countries are not enforceable in the UK - and therefore no offence would be committed using "patent-violating" software here.
Governments should, if they don't already, have the power to annul any patent, and that power should be exercised against abusers of the system.
Meanwhile, if your ISP offers virtual hosting, you can always use disposable addresses. (well - at least until the spam merchants twig onto that). This is my attempt at disposable addressing.
So whose patent does this violate?
Perhaps it's because they want a robot that will do more than move about slowly and occasionally start shrieking loudly for no reason, and end up needing its arse squeezing when its bowel muscles pack up after a couple of years?
Copy protection is inherently unworkable.
..... if the drug can be made to react with HGH, you can also add the 12/15/18 age restriction. Damn, I wish I hadn't said that on here, I could have made a fortune patenting it :)
Imagine a device looking like a sawn-off CRT, with A-to-D converters (with appropriate signal preconditioning and artificial impedances) on the red, green and blue gate drive terminals (to get the video signals) and the scan coil terminals (to get the picture timing signals).
NO system can get around that, except perhaps if the final decryption is performed in the user's own brain under the influence of a psychotropic drug. Just buy more pills for more viewings
It's all irrelevant anyway, as CSS does not impede copying at all. Can you copy text written in a language you don't understand? Exactly. Ting! Next please.
Pipe lynx -source http://somewebsite.co.uk through appropriate grep, sed and awk filters, or a Perl script, or Python if you think Perl isn't trendy enough. Then edit your crontab so all this happens by itself. Easy enough :-)
That is exactly the point. It only takes one illicit copy to ruin the whole effort.
:) The track breaks &c. can be got either from the embedded timecode or (for real diehard hackers with points to prove) the LCD drive signals.
.....
It wouldn't be too hard to take a feed of the zeros and ones as picked up by the laser in a standalone CD player (even if there wasn't a digital out) and decode that. The process is published in the Red Book
Or, you could build a card that sat on a computer's bus, and emulated a well-documented sound card well enough to fool Windows - and grabbed the resulting data in onboard RAM, or possibly a dedicated separate HDD. All in all, copy protection is a fallacy. The only workable scheme would be one that could truthfully detect whether or not the listener is doing anything dishonest.
Anyway, even if the record companies do succeed in implementing such a scheme (I for one believe it's impossible) we can always make our own music! Unless/until the record companies find a way to regulate the manufacture and sale of instruments [excuse me chummy, that there guitar looks as if it might be going to be used to play a copyrighted song - you're nicked], anyway