What if the greek comments are a tracer to find out who leaked it?
The comment in the picture used the letter 'o' which isn't in greek, what if every person who looked at this got a slightly different obfuscation from English to Greek (e.g. using a 'w' instead of omega). This would allow SCO to trace the pictures back to the leak.
Obviously, this is not SCO code, a google check reveals that, what if it's a method for SCO to weed out those 'expert' witnesses whho side with IBM instead of them? If you don't leak this code, you get to see the good stuff...I'ts like porn:)
Nobody is insane (well, in general). This is exactly what the Pentagon's betting-on-terrorism was meant to do.
You ask 100 people who don't have all the information about the event and you take the consensus opinion as the result.
10 may know that Canada had blackouts first because they were talking to their family in Toronto. 15 may know there is no fire in the New York power station. 40 may have seen the News regarding the event, 10 will be working on the problem directly etc.. (sadly, 1 will be a first post, 1 will be a tinyurl version of goat...x, 15 will be AC postings who think it's a left wing conspiracy and 15 will think it's a right wing conspiracy and point out the numbers don't add up).
It worked quite well on 9/11 when News outlets (Fox..ahem) reported Lear jets flying into the WTC and car fires outside the Pentagon. Slashdot disseminated an aggregated view that there were 4 planes, one hit the pentagon....etc. I think the news of the 4th plane was reported here much quicker than it got to the newdesks of the BBC/SkyNews in the UK. Some of it was noise, some not.
It works like the futures market, with any luck the answer the Slashdot beast comes out with in 12 hours will be an approximate version of the report out next month:)
Yeah, and what do you know Mr "Carmack", I doubt you know how to program a realistic physics engine:) (please don't send the goons with the rail guns around...shotguns and rockets I can handle, but not the railguns, or the jumpy jumpy nonsense)
Seriously though, where are you learning this stuff from, I had a quick look for intertial guidance and MEMS (not such a sensible idea in these TIA times) but I only got the encyclopaedia answers.
For bonus points, pull Bob's trousers down far enough to expose at least 2" of arse cleavage and give him a copy of 'The Sun' (doesn't work if he's meant to be American though...)
If he was American then he would be Bob the Construction Worker, and he'd be `unionised' with some friendly Sicilians.
Of course, the job still wouldn't be finished on time and would still have unforseen costs, there'd just be more incentive to pay him.
It's funny. laugh, I'm an evil computer hacker leering at your children in chatrooms...
Are there two different SCO's out there that decide what to do every other day, maybe the board are actually sliders, one day it's we want all your money day, the next it's let get our collective asses kicked in court...
Yet another reason why this method won't work in the UK. British law says goods and services bought my mail order (which includes the internet) can be returned for any reason within a 14 day limit (could be 7).
This law was created partially in response to false advertising in mail order catalogues but also because door-to-door salesman would encourage you to sign the contract while they sat there. The 7 days is then a cooling off period
With digital music/video, you probably don't even need to send it back, they have the original, you'd have to send the `license' back, whatever form that comes in.
You seem to be working explicitely with files, I tried to type "average 1 2 3" and got a file error, why not use?
cat numbers.file | average
This would make the commands script friendlier I think.
Also, echo '1 2 3' | average output 1, which confused me, I fixed this by changing line 117 in 'average' to read
while (m/\s*(\-?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+)/g) {
,i.e., the if -> while, and ^ has gone, and the 'g' flag is used, this does all white-space separated numbers on a line. (That can be your first(?) bug-fix)
Also, some countries use spacing to group `thousands` together, where American/English speaking countries use a comma, the French/Germans use commas to indicate decimal points, then there's comma separated values and the locale settings...(at least now I know why your using Perl:)
random, I hope 'rand' uses/dev/null or something internally,numprocess doesn't like me doing ^ (power) first, after the comma, it's fine, expect that (5*1)^2 != 7 and
(5*1)^1 != 4, whatever the carrat ^ does in Perl,it's not power, power is ** (carrat is xor looking at the results).
I'll stop there, sorry for...um, you know..The only other thing I would say (and this doesn't really apply because your using Perl) is if all these functions are supposed to be doing essentially the same thing (code re-use is clear from the source) then the busybox method of compiling all of the commands as functions (saving some space) seems good, then you can softlink the commands to relevant functions. (e.g. 'numgrep file' would call 'all_function --numgrep file', where all_function is the real executable).
(having said all that, numgrep does look useful though, grepping template source code for numbers when the templates have each line numbered is not fun).
The `tool` that got kicked off a BA flight was John Gilmore, cofounder of the EFF. He wasn't doing it for the fun of it, he was doing it to point out that everybody is considered a terrorist in the New America and how bad the FUD is when Flight attendants believe that the airport security hand out badges to suspected terrorists.
The BBC is an international organisation and the BBC.com website is their international site, and it's mostly american based anyway. When I, from a uk address, go to www.bbc.com, I get redirected to the.co.uk site. Isn't that what I was suggesting?
Bormio is a place in the italian alps, so yes it probably should have a.it address, I could have found it by looking on a map then. The fist thing I typed in was www.alps.it.
Bob's bread and Cheese shop doesn't sound like a national chain, so it could be under.wi.us, then when you order from it, you'll know where it's coming from.
The point I was making, only half-seriously, was that.com should probably be for international sites only, not that we should maintain the polluted namespace because it has become polluted.
Do you propose that companies that aren't prepared to undertake the expense and risk involved in doing business with every last country on the planet not be able to do business on the web?
No, but how about you stop polluting the.com namespace with your us only websites, there are perfectly good alternatives which most companies from other countries use.
People don't care about science, they don't understand science for the most part. People understand people, they like to read stories about normal people in extraordinary circumstances, that's why `reality tv' is so popular.
The first (hu)man on Mars landing on Mars would be hugely important for human curiosity, the journey to Mars would be even more important, imagine doing a part `reality tv' show and part science/education show from the Mars-bound shuttle. Do it right and everybody would watch.
The probes would still do the science, people haven't done any scientific measurements for a while now, since the invention of computers, people don't measure accuratly enough for our level of understanding anymore.
When your probe says gravity 0.4G, pressure 15mbar, T=259K, F=22.5W/m2, your scientists could tell you the probe was broken, very few places on mars would get those conditions anyway
...but you'd likely get images of astronauts jumps about with suits weighing twice their body weight with silvered visors and planting flags, that's the money shot, as long as it's not a Nike flag (unless they pay for the whole damn thing) nobody would really care which flag it was, it was manmade
One of the most important things to come out of the Moon landings didn't involve landing on the moon, it was Frank Borman's photograph of earthrise. The probe wouldn't think of doing that.
For the scientists, who do care about the science. The people who land on Mars would do so in the knowledge that they are there for about a year until the planets align again, keeping 6 people alive without any external help for 24 months isn't easy (or possible yet). The biosphere project wasn't completely succesful because of the leaky window seals and the double glazing which blocked too much sunlight.
On Mars, we won't have the luxury of pumping more oxygen in, it'll will likely need to be extracted from the ferrous soil or grown in inflatible greenhouses. The technology to maintain this human habitat in an environmentall neutral way would have huge impact on the way we live on Earth...sustainable farming and production, recycling waste products, space ice cream (well I like it:)
Surely the email harvester will just 'learn' to remove it's own IP number and possibly a date (or even better, just increment the IP number date to generate an infinite number of email addresses)
A more advanced method would probably hash the ip with the date in a non-obvious way, but it'd have to be a one-to-one mapping of IP's at least and a two way hash to retreive the IP number.
Even storing the IP number as the apache-log line (if that's possible) would work, but real addresses would always work better but would require a dummy domain (e.g a dictionary of names stuck together with._-). But unless you encode the IP you need a lookup table from your logs which is overhead.
Of course, this still doesn't address the real problem, the people who should be traced and punished are not the spammers but the companies that use the spammers, there will always be foreign companies willing to spam for you if the law makes it illegal. Few of the spams I see are international companies (ok, most of them are porn sites which are probably just harvesters).
The first link in the story also had a link to Cyveilance, which keeps appearing in my spamcop reports as "3rd party interested in spam), apparently their a chase (suspected) copyright infringement on the web....not sure I want to help them anymore..
The US military and the US Immigration service use them on the border with Mexico, they use them for long range radar to they can see the drug smuggling planes flying/cars driving along a dirt trail.
18 to cover the UK probably leaves out a number of things, like how much of the networking is covered by wire, what you need to connect to these things and how long can the balloons stay up before their Helium leaks out and needs to be replaced.
It's likely they would need a replacement every few days at least, if not then why don't Nasa use Helium more in their solar powered "stay up forever" plane.
For example, this would be like a company which writes a computer program, that during the normal course of operations, spawns a virus that infects other programs on your hard drive. One of the programs that it infects is your compiler. Can this company now sue to get revenues for the programs you write and distribute that are compiled with this infected compiler? After all, this infected compiler now incorporates their IP...
Except for the virus part, that's pretty much what the GPL does for you, if you use a GPL'd compiler with GPL libraries (such that your code won't work without those libraries) then you must GPL your code. (question 2)
Actually, I'd ask you what a Kleinian bottle is and why you need a 4-dimensional space when 6 billion people manage with 3.
That's if I didn't know what a Kleinina bottle was and that in 4D space it doesn't have the intersecting planes that it does in 3D.
It's probably not because basic mathematical education fucked up my brain, it's because, for some stupid reason, I live in a 3 dimensional world. The insect the lives on the rotating record player doesn't understand 3d objects as well as I do.
If you want to teach your kids Lie matrix groups then you might want to start with matrix theory, and with..shit, counting and algebra.
You don't reduce "Joe Average" problems to Lie groups, you generalize them, you encompass them in a mathematically correct proof, Joe doesn't want this, he want's to know how much tax he has to pay this year.
You gave the example of a Kleinian bottle, why? Surely a better education would be had by not limiting yourself to specific examples of 4D non-intersecting geometries? If you think teaching a 14 year old to visualise n dimensional space (instead of just algebra and math) when 99% will never need to use it, you may as well tell the proletariat to learn latin so they can understand their remote control.
We may need a 'permanent revolution' in education, not just to maintain our 'lead' but to improve our society, Your method isn't the best way to do it.
money and politics speak
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just because some comments seem slightly in awe of the house of Lords, Lord Sainsbury is the owner of a large national supermarket (my local one enjoys gouging the prices under the auspices of being an 'express' store, but that's another matter).
Lord Sainsbury is a major benefactor or the current governing party (the Labour party) and as a result is the UK science minister, which I'm sure doesn't cause a conflict of interest for GMO food, which his shops don't sell.
He's also part of the government who's education secretary wants to cut funding of purely academic study whilst increasing reaserch into "baltic studies". Lucky he's already done his tour of two of the best universities in the country.[sorry, rant, being paid less than minimum wage for research sucks.]
Not to be a conspiracy theorist but a general election and possible euro referendum will be coming soon,the Labour party is in debt in fact and have passed exemptions based on donations in the past (some have been refunded and exemptions rescinded (sp?)) so watch for the donations..
Lord Mackie is the Liberal Democrat spokeperson for Scotland (a bit like Canada, cold), other than beind old and a career politican he seems ok.
On the subject of junk faxes, this was discusse in June 98, probably as a result of an EU directive (yay EU) 97/66/ec
, as a result the telephone preference service TPS was created, which IIRC is a not a law-enforced scheme but is an advertising industry creation.
Anyway, it ain't over till the fat wallet sings, and I can see this being tacked on to the national I.D card scheme or privacy/piracy laws to pacify us.
42 eh. so that's what the human race was created for by the mice, to find the critical doubling speed of spam:)
"Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge."Not on my planet, bucko.
It really does, always does with real waves, only its tiny, roughly lamba/width (of gap/lens/window), so it's irrelevant unless you want to focues something onto a tiny tiny spot. *cough* DVDs
Exactly what numerical quantity corresponds with "focusing?"
How does the size of your image of the infitesimal point sound? if you have a lens it will always make a point on the object appear to be a smudgy blob on the image, the less smudgy the better. This is what limits current optical storage, you can't make the image of a point so good as to hit the wavelength limit yet. When you do Messrs Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Bohr join the party.
2) But if I set up a conventional refractive/reflective (I specifically omit "diffractive") optical system of any sort, can't I also run the light the other way identically?
Not by obeying the laws of physics, no. Diffraction isn't something you have control over, it's part of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
The copper grid + microwave experiment they describe is semi-undegrad stuff, IIRC it's the evanscent waves which they capture before it decays away.
The bit that hits my BS detector is the bit where they claim that the infinite energy problem can be solved by "address certain issues in metamaterials in a more efficient and direct manner", infinite energy is infinite energy.
I also don't think negative permattivity and negative permeability would work, one should be enough to flip the refractive index (as in copper), two should flip it back >0, but the equations escape me right now.
BB.
-I wish I could remember by 5 digit username...
Slashdot Mirror
What if the greek comments are a tracer to find out who leaked it?
The comment in the picture used the letter 'o' which isn't in greek, what if every person who looked at this got a slightly different obfuscation from English to Greek (e.g. using a 'w' instead of omega). This would allow SCO to trace the pictures back to the leak.
Obviously, this is not SCO code, a google check reveals that, what if it's a method for SCO to weed out those 'expert' witnesses whho side with IBM instead of them? If you don't leak this code, you get to see the good stuff...I'ts like porn :)
BB
Nobody is insane (well, in general). This is exactly what the Pentagon's betting-on-terrorism was meant to do.
You ask 100 people who don't have all the information about the event and you take the consensus opinion as the result.
10 may know that Canada had blackouts first because they were talking to their family in Toronto. 15 may know there is no fire in the New York power station. 40 may have seen the News regarding the event, 10 will be working on the problem directly etc.. (sadly, 1 will be a first post, 1 will be a tinyurl version of goat...x, 15 will be AC postings who think it's a left wing conspiracy and 15 will think it's a right wing conspiracy and point out the numbers don't add up).
It worked quite well on 9/11 when News outlets (Fox ..ahem) reported Lear jets flying into the WTC and car fires outside the Pentagon. Slashdot disseminated an aggregated view that there were 4 planes, one hit the pentagon....etc. I think the news of the 4th plane was reported here much quicker than it got to the newdesks of the BBC/SkyNews in the UK. Some of it was noise, some not.
It works like the futures market, with any luck the answer the Slashdot beast comes out with in 12 hours will be an approximate version of the report out next month :)
Yeah, and what do you know Mr "Carmack", I doubt you know how to program a realistic physics engine :) (please don't send the goons with the rail guns around...shotguns and rockets I can handle, but not the railguns, or the jumpy jumpy nonsense)
Seriously though, where are you learning this stuff from, I had a quick look for intertial guidance and MEMS (not such a sensible idea in these TIA times) but I only got the encyclopaedia answers.
BB
For bonus points, pull Bob's trousers down far enough to expose at least 2" of arse cleavage and give him a copy of 'The Sun' (doesn't work if he's meant to be American though...)
If he was American then he would be Bob the Construction Worker, and he'd be `unionised' with some friendly Sicilians.Of course, the job still wouldn't be finished on time and would still have unforseen costs, there'd just be more incentive to pay him.
It's funny. laugh, I'm an evil computer hacker leering at your children in chatrooms...
Are there two different SCO's out there that decide what to do every other day, maybe the board are actually sliders, one day it's we want all your money day, the next it's let get our collective asses kicked in court...
repeat ad nasuem..
Yet another reason why this method won't work in the UK. British law says goods and services bought my mail order (which includes the internet) can be returned for any reason within a 14 day limit (could be 7).
This law was created partially in response to false advertising in mail order catalogues but also because door-to-door salesman would encourage you to sign the contract while they sat there. The 7 days is then a cooling off period
With digital music/video, you probably don't even need to send it back, they have the original, you'd have to send the `license' back, whatever form that comes in.
It seems to be dead in the water already . The question is, has it really (cough *Echelon* cough).
Users can watch the film an unlimited amount of times before the movie expires.
That's not what the BBC article says, it says they can watch the film once, then they have 24 hours to watch it as many times as they want
That means they can (if it's watched continuousely) watch it 24/length_in_hours times, unless length is zero that's no unlimited.
You seem to be working explicitely with files, I tried to type "average 1 2 3" and got a file error, why not use?
cat numbers.file | averageThis would make the commands script friendlier I think.
Also, echo '1 2 3' | average output 1, which confused me, I fixed this by changing line 117 in 'average' to read
while (m/\s*(\-?[0-9]*\.?[0-9]+)/g) {,i.e., the if -> while, and ^ has gone, and the 'g' flag is used, this does all white-space separated numbers on a line. (That can be your first(?) bug-fix)
Also, some countries use spacing to group `thousands` together, where American/English speaking countries use a comma, the French/Germans use commas to indicate decimal points, then there's comma separated values and the locale settings...(at least now I know why your using Perl :)
random, I hope 'rand' uses /dev/null or something internally,numprocess doesn't like me doing ^ (power) first, after the comma, it's fine, expect that (5*1)^2 != 7 and
(5*1)^1 != 4, whatever the carrat ^ does in Perl,it's not power, power is ** (carrat is xor looking at the results).
I'll stop there, sorry for...um, you know..The only other thing I would say (and this doesn't really apply because your using Perl) is if all these functions are supposed to be doing essentially the same thing (code re-use is clear from the source) then the busybox method of compiling all of the commands as functions (saving some space) seems good, then you can softlink the commands to relevant functions. (e.g. 'numgrep file' would call 'all_function --numgrep file', where all_function is the real executable).
(having said all that, numgrep does look useful though, grepping template source code for numbers when the templates have each line numbered is not fun).
BB
The `tool` that got kicked off a BA flight was John Gilmore, cofounder of the EFF. He wasn't doing it for the fun of it, he was doing it to point out that everybody is considered a terrorist in the New America and how bad the FUD is when Flight attendants believe that the airport security hand out badges to suspected terrorists.
The BBC is an international organisation and the BBC.com website is their international site, and it's mostly american based anyway. When I, from a uk address, go to www.bbc.com, I get redirected to the .co.uk site. Isn't that what I was suggesting?
Bormio is a place in the italian alps, so yes it probably should have a .it address, I could have found it by looking on a map then. The fist thing I typed in was www.alps.it.
Bob's bread and Cheese shop doesn't sound like a national chain, so it could be under .wi.us, then when you order from it, you'll know where it's coming from.
The point I was making, only half-seriously, was that .com should probably be for international sites only, not that we should maintain the polluted namespace because it has become polluted.
Anti-americanism as a verb? Muy bueno.
Do you propose that companies that aren't prepared to undertake the expense and risk involved in doing business with every last country on the planet not be able to do business on the web?
No, but how about you stop polluting the .com namespace with your us only websites, there are perfectly good alternatives which most companies from other countries use.
Have you ever read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, how about ? How about any of the good weblogs? Or KSR Mars trilogy, Jules Verne
People don't care about science, they don't understand science for the most part. People understand people, they like to read stories about normal people in extraordinary circumstances, that's why `reality tv' is so popular.
The first (hu)man on Mars landing on Mars would be hugely important for human curiosity, the journey to Mars would be even more important, imagine doing a part `reality tv' show and part science/education show from the Mars-bound shuttle. Do it right and everybody would watch.
The probes would still do the science, people haven't done any scientific measurements for a while now, since the invention of computers, people don't measure accuratly enough for our level of understanding anymore.
When your probe says gravity 0.4G, pressure 15mbar, T=259K, F=22.5W/m2, your scientists could tell you the probe was broken, very few places on mars would get those conditions anyway
...but you'd likely get images of astronauts jumps about with suits weighing twice their body weight with silvered visors and planting flags, that's the money shot, as long as it's not a Nike flag (unless they pay for the whole damn thing) nobody would really care which flag it was, it was manmade
One of the most important things to come out of the Moon landings didn't involve landing on the moon, it was Frank Borman's photograph of earthrise. The probe wouldn't think of doing that.
For the scientists, who do care about the science. The people who land on Mars would do so in the knowledge that they are there for about a year until the planets align again, keeping 6 people alive without any external help for 24 months isn't easy (or possible yet). The biosphere project wasn't completely succesful because of the leaky window seals and the double glazing which blocked too much sunlight.
On Mars, we won't have the luxury of pumping more oxygen in, it'll will likely need to be extracted from the ferrous soil or grown in inflatible greenhouses. The technology to maintain this human habitat in an environmentall neutral way would have huge impact on the way we live on Earth...sustainable farming and production, recycling waste products, space ice cream (well I like it :)
BB
Surely the email harvester will just 'learn' to remove it's own IP number and possibly a date (or even better, just increment the IP number date to generate an infinite number of email addresses)
A more advanced method would probably hash the ip with the date in a non-obvious way, but it'd have to be a one-to-one mapping of IP's at least and a two way hash to retreive the IP number.
Even storing the IP number as the apache-log line (if that's possible) would work, but real addresses would always work better but would require a dummy domain (e.g a dictionary of names stuck together with ._-). But unless you encode the IP you need a lookup table from your logs which is overhead.
Of course, this still doesn't address the real problem, the people who should be traced and punished are not the spammers but the companies that use the spammers, there will always be foreign companies willing to spam for you if the law makes it illegal. Few of the spams I see are international companies (ok, most of them are porn sites which are probably just harvesters).
The first link in the story also had a link to Cyveilance, which keeps appearing in my spamcop reports as "3rd party interested in spam), apparently their a chase (suspected) copyright infringement on the web....not sure I want to help them anymore..
BBThe US military and the US Immigration service use them on the border with Mexico, they use them for long range radar to they can see the drug smuggling planes flying/cars driving along a dirt trail.
18 to cover the UK probably leaves out a number of things, like how much of the networking is covered by wire, what you need to connect to these things and how long can the balloons stay up before their Helium leaks out and needs to be replaced.
It's likely they would need a replacement every few days at least, if not then why don't Nasa use Helium more in their solar powered "stay up forever" plane.
BB
For example, this would be like a company which writes a computer program, that during the normal course of operations, spawns a virus that infects other programs on your hard drive. One of the programs that it infects is your compiler. Can this company now sue to get revenues for the programs you write and distribute that are compiled with this infected compiler? After all, this infected compiler now incorporates their IP...
Except for the virus part, that's pretty much what the GPL does for you, if you use a GPL'd compiler with GPL libraries (such that your code won't work without those libraries) then you must GPL your code. (question 2)
BB
Actually, I'd ask you what a Kleinian bottle is and why you need a 4-dimensional space when 6 billion people manage with 3.
That's if I didn't know what a Kleinina bottle was and that in 4D space it doesn't have the intersecting planes that it does in 3D.
It's probably not because basic mathematical education fucked up my brain, it's because, for some stupid reason, I live in a 3 dimensional world. The insect the lives on the rotating record player doesn't understand 3d objects as well as I do.
If you want to teach your kids Lie matrix groups then you might want to start with matrix theory, and with ..shit, counting and algebra.
You don't reduce "Joe Average" problems to Lie groups, you generalize them, you encompass them in a mathematically correct proof, Joe doesn't want this, he want's to know how much tax he has to pay this year.
You gave the example of a Kleinian bottle, why? Surely a better education would be had by not limiting yourself to specific examples of 4D non-intersecting geometries? If you think teaching a 14 year old to visualise n dimensional space (instead of just algebra and math) when 99% will never need to use it, you may as well tell the proletariat to learn latin so they can understand their remote control.
We may need a 'permanent revolution' in education, not just to maintain our 'lead' but to improve our society, Your method isn't the best way to do it.
Just because some comments seem slightly in awe of the house of Lords, Lord Sainsbury is the owner of a large national supermarket (my local one enjoys gouging the prices under the auspices of being an 'express' store, but that's another matter).
Lord Sainsbury is a major benefactor or the current governing party (the Labour party) and as a result is the UK science minister, which I'm sure doesn't cause a conflict of interest for GMO food, which his shops don't sell.
He's also part of the government who's education secretary wants to cut funding of purely academic study whilst increasing reaserch into "baltic studies". Lucky he's already done his tour of two of the best universities in the country.[sorry, rant, being paid less than minimum wage for research sucks.]
Not to be a conspiracy theorist but a general election and possible euro referendum will be coming soon,the Labour party is in debt in fact and have passed exemptions based on donations in the past (some have been refunded and exemptions rescinded (sp?)) so watch for the donations..
Lord Mackie is the Liberal Democrat spokeperson for Scotland (a bit like Canada, cold), other than beind old and a career politican he seems ok.
On the subject of junk faxes, this was discusse in June 98, probably as a result of an EU directive (yay EU) 97/66/ec , as a result the telephone preference service TPS was created, which IIRC is a not a law-enforced scheme but is an advertising industry creation.
Anyway, it ain't over till the fat wallet sings, and I can see this being tacked on to the national I.D card scheme or privacy/piracy laws to pacify us.
42 eh. so that's what the human race was created for by the mice, to find the critical doubling speed of spam :)
BB
It's called product <drinks Pepsi(r)-cola, yum , that was nice.> placement.
"Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge."Not on my planet, bucko.
It really does, always does with real waves, only its tiny, roughly lamba/width (of gap/lens/window), so it's irrelevant unless you want to focues something onto a tiny tiny spot. *cough* DVDs
Exactly what numerical quantity corresponds with "focusing?"
How does the size of your image of the infitesimal point sound? if you have a lens it will always make a point on the object appear to be a smudgy blob on the image, the less smudgy the better. This is what limits current optical storage, you can't make the image of a point so good as to hit the wavelength limit yet. When you do Messrs Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Bohr join the party.
2) But if I set up a conventional refractive/reflective (I specifically omit "diffractive") optical system of any sort, can't I also run the light the other way identically?
Not by obeying the laws of physics, no. Diffraction isn't something you have control over, it's part of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. The copper grid + microwave experiment they describe is semi-undegrad stuff, IIRC it's the evanscent waves which they capture before it decays away.
The bit that hits my BS detector is the bit where they claim that the infinite energy problem can be solved by "address certain issues in metamaterials in a more efficient and direct manner", infinite energy is infinite energy.
I also don't think negative permattivity and negative permeability would work, one should be enough to flip the refractive index (as in copper), two should flip it back >0, but the equations escape me right now.
BB.-I wish I could remember by 5 digit username...