It's not the technology that is dangerous, just how it is used. There is no doubt that extensive use of video cameras around our cities can be used for much good. They can reduce muggings, help apprehend criminals and be useful when searching for missing persons.
I think it's important not to forget this. The challenge is making sure that the technology is not misused.
This is just further evidence that the music industry has badly misjudged the new technology that has come along over the past few years. There is serious money to be from legal downloading, and every day that the music industry wastes is a day's revenue lost.
We need a new business model: Music is enjoyed by all and so should be a public resource such as the postal service or the army. In the past it was impossble for the government to buy large quantities of CDs for its citizens, however now we have a great opportunity. The govenment could buy a license for all music released in the US over the course of the year and then make this available to it's citizens over a p2p network. After a year the licence would expire and the files would be deleted (the government already has the technology to do this). If you liked the music then you could go out and buy the CD, as the evidence of the article suggests you will.
At first this seems unusual, but in Europe government owned business are common, especially in the areas of steel and agriculture. In the past, even Russia has beeen a world leader providing services for the people, and at one stage even facilitated this in countries such as Poland and Hungary. Think about how good a communal attitude could be.
I am seriously worried by the number of new file sharing services that seem to be popping up. Despite all the arguments to the contrary music 'sharing' is piracy and in the long term it can only hurt the consumer as musicians will not make music if there is no profit on it.
The worst thing about it is that our children are growing up thinking that stealing is ok. I expressly banned my son from pirating music but the other day I saw him playing an MP3. Needless to say I've now taken all his CD's away from him in order to teach him a lesson but I doubt his is old enough to understand why filesharing is wrong. Unfortunately I then caught him again so I've had take more practical action. Now I've put a short script on his computer that will delete a random file from his userspace whenever he attempts to play an MP3.
The best thing about this hard drive is the revolutionary new method it uses to cool itself. Previously the main problem with using really small hard drives was that they used to get too hot and overheat.
The beauty of this drive is that it uses an algorithm to arrange the stored data in the configuration with the maximum order and minimum entropy. As entropy always increases (The 2nd law of thermodynamics) creating all this order takes power which can be taken from the heat given off by the drive.
Strangely this effect can be made to work in reverse which means that the processor in future computers could be a net power emitter. In terms of entropy computing will often put out more energy than you put in as you are increasing the entropy. At the moment this power (and more) is wasted due to inefficient transistors. However on slow processors such as the XScale the transistors can be made to superconduct meaning that they are extremely efficint and so the processor generates a small amount of power. This should help the next generation of laptops.
Selling computer cycles is a great idea that is already up and running in several countries in Eastern Europe. Universities there cannot afford to buy high performance supercomputers so they rent computer cycles from local businessmen in order to solve complex numerical problems. Unfortunately many of these businessmen are part of the local Mafia and there have been several unsavouray incidents where University projects have been devoted to calculating the optimum strategy for criminal activities such as money laundering and illegal gambling.
Now that wireless technologies such as Bluetooth and GPRS are becoming commonplace there is an even more promising attempt to harness ALL of the computing power available to the modern american.
Almost every electronic device you own has a complex microprocessor in it: your DVD player, your shaver, your stereo and even your car. Each one of these processors is fairly slow compared to a modern day Athlon, but you have perhaps 100 in your house and what is more they are almost always off. By integrating bluetooth into each of them it will be possible for the average American to sell perhaps 10 dollars of computer time per day to Universities in Eastern Europe, thus both helping the American economy and preventing Mafia gangs from exerting undue influence over polish academics.
Its good to see that apple have finally made it back into the mainstream, even if their internal architecture is beginning to look like a PC what with PCI slots and all. Interestingly when I was in Rhodesia the other week, I noticed that almost all computers there are apples running yellow dog linux. Apparently this is because the government there has passed a law decreeing that all software allowed in the country must be 64 bit by 2005. Unbelievable!
Exactly, any engine that relies on the carnot cycle is going to be inefficient, it is just one of those facts of life. Hopefully we will not have to rely on gasoline for much longer.
Interestingly although hydrogen fuel cells are an excellent choice for powering small vehicles, it is unlikely that they could be made powerful enough for trucks and even large SUV's and so another solution will have to be found. Some of the possibilities include LPG or bitumen based engines but perhaps the biggest hope is for ion drives similar to the ones currently being tested on Norwegian buses.
They are ideal in that they are practically silent and have no moving parts so they will almost never go wrong. Currently there is an environmental risk as they emit dangerous cl- ions but it is hoped that by adding h+ ions at the exhaust stage these can mopped up.
If I remember correctly Ford is building an ion drive based dragster to compete at the high speed trials in May next year. It should be very interesting to see how it stacks up against conventional NOx based machines.
Like many slashdotters I do not like the idea of personal security cards as they restrict my ability to do what I please without nosy people checking up on me. What is more worrying is that the US government already has the capability to spy on people via satellite, and is using this technique despite it being outlawed by the first ammendment.
What I would like to see is the introduction of id cards for only the members of society considered to be 'high risk' for example ex convicts and people known to sympathise with al jazeera. In this people known to be a risk society could be monitored while the rest of us law abiding citizens could continue our lives without the risk of government interference.
While this is good news for the geek community I think that it would be more important if the qualtiy of the robots were improved rather than the quantity.
The first robots actually predate the computer, they came about over 100 years ago and were purely mechanical with a babbage style difference engine for a 'cpu'. The problem is that in these early days the foundations of robotics were established and now that new techniques are available we cannot break free from those shackles.
I would like to see robots that are based upon living things as opposed to inanimate opjects. We should use organic molecules instead of steel and plastic, and move to neural nets instead of SParC processors. Maybe then we will be able to design a robot that is useful outside a car production plant.
The next generation of nuclear reactors will be much safer, the current problems are caused because the designs require heavy nuclei (Uranium, Plutonium) to be split into lighter nuclei, liberating energy. The problems occur because the decay products are often fairly unstable themselves and consequently radioactive.
Hopefully the progress on fission in lighter elements should reduce the need for this. We can for example build a reactor that induces fission in Magnesium 24 to create 2 atoms of Nitrogen 14, which, as everybody knows, is perfectly harmless. Admittedly the process isn't completely clean as ammonia can be formed, but it should cut radioactive waste from small reactors by up to 23.8%.
Re:Wireless still = Dangerous
on
Wireless Hacks
·
· Score: 2, Troll
While you are right to be concerned about the security aspects of 802.11 I think that the situation will improve before too long.
The current problem is that wireless cards work by broadcasting the signal out over a sphere, typically having a radius of around about 100m. This is great in that neither the transmitter or the receiver need to have much spatial directionality, however it meansd that anybody within that radius can tap into your traffic and start breaking any encryption you hyave going.
Now most people are trying to solve this by improving the encryption but here in the lab we are working on a different technique. We are using a directional system whereby a conducting channel is set up between the user and the access point meaning that any intruder would have to sit directly on this lne of sight, thereby greatly increasing their chances of detection.
The system works by not by electromagnetic radiation, but by using a stream of ions, which can be produced by common salt (NaCl), with a Na+ ion representing a binary 1 and a CL- representing a binary 0. At present the system is fairly experimental but I would expect to see it commercialized within a few years.
I know this is meant to be a joke but the actual technology involved in deploying a battlefield laser is immense. Here in the lab we've been working on civilian grade laser weapons (obviously at much lower power than the military; they are purely non lethal) and there are several major obsticals.
The main problem is that any reflecting surface can act as a mirror, meaning that you are constantly at risk of the laser beam bouncing back and obliterating you. What is worse is that if the surface is concave and you are roughly a focal length away then the beam with become focussed upon you and will so be many times more powerful. You can overcome this by making your laser beam non monochromatic and out of phase, but the engineering challenges in doing this are immense.
In addition the power contained by a laser can be enough to break down the chemical bonds in many innocuous compounds to form toxins. We had one nasty incident where our laser hit a puddle of water and turned the h20 into h202 which is deadly hydrogen peroxide. This would not look good for the US government if it started turning enemy cities into poisonous wastegrounds with a supposedly surgical weapon.
This looks pretty exciting, although this is not going to replace nuclear power as the main hope for renewable energy, its always good to know that we have other options if need be.
Here in the lab we've been researching a new method of providing power to small devices such as watches, which is almost a new way of generating electricity although it has many similarities to maxwells devil device.
The main component of our device is a ratchet wheel that can only turn in one direction, which we place inside a box containing a pressurised gas. As the gas molecules hit the ratchet they will cause it to turn in one direction only, and so small potentials can be genrated. The beauty of this device is that as the collisons are perfectly elastic there will be no energy losses and so no bulky power supply is needed. Hopefully within 10 years most cell phones could be powered this way.
This is great news, the development of 3G services in the US has been held up for long enough by beaurocracy. Countries such as Japan, South Korea and Rhodesia have established a technical lead in this area, which can only harm the already weak economy.
What might be interesting, however, is when the new 4G technologies come along. These will be different from previous technologies that work by modulating a carrier frequency, but will instead be analagous to ethernet with each phone using the same frequency and collisions being detected.
The advantages of this is that much lower frequencies can be used (50Hz is being talked about), but by allowing the phones to transmit many millions of times per second, data transfer rates of up to 15Gigabytes can be achieved. That should make video on the cellphone a realistic goal.
The only worry is that again government beaurocracy will not allow theses low frequencies to be used meaning that even poor countries will be able to have better services than the US.
This is actually a very good point, the impact marks do look very crude and not at all like the type of art found at sites of a similar age. Perhaps the best way would be analyse the stones in a mass spectrometer to look for traces of metal from an axe.
I think the most impressive thing about stonehenge is that in order to build it, the neaderthal men would have had to understand an awful lot about the world. They managed to align it so that it produces perfectly circular shadows on the two solstice days, which implies that not only did they realise that the sun was at the center of the solar system, but they had correctly estimated the earth-sun distance to within.5%. As an example of how impressive this was, the stones were disturbed in the mid 17th Centuary and the best scholars of the day (including Robert Hooke) were unable to realign them properly. It was only a hundred years later with the invention of mechanical calculating machines that the correct positions could be identified and the correct shadows re-established.
Althought I think the average slashdotter will have a knee jerk reaction to this, I think Microsoft have been pretty good at realeasing patches so far and that most windows viruses have either been spread by either unpatched machines or buggy third party software.
Here in the lab we have a cluster of windows machines that regularly have uptimes of over two weeks (essential when evaluating climatic models involving quadratic equations). Our Linux machines have slightly longer uptimes, but they often require (admittedly infrequent) kernel rebuilds which can leave them out of action for up to a day. In addition we find windows update far easier than compiling linux fixes from source (we are after all partical physcists and not sys admins)
The conclusions drawn by this article would appear to be fairly trivial at first. Basically energy can neither be created or destroyed and as the universe is expanding the overall energy density of the universe is faling. Less energy density means less luminosity.
I think, however that the scientists haven't accounted for the effects of hawking radiation, which is basically the energy given out when a piece of matter falls into a black hole. Hawking radiation is obtained from matter that is otherwise lost frrm the universe and as such does not obey the classical laws of thermodynamics. Because of this the amount of energy in the universe is actually increasing although the rate at which it is doing so is extremely slow. As mentioned by the article however the number of black holes is increasing (all matter is drawn together by gravity so in a long enough timescale it will eventually coalesce to form a black hole) and so the hawking radiation will increase. It is therefore likely that in a billion years from now, the sky will actually be brighter than it is now, not from stars (which as the article points out will have disappeared) but from a brilliant glow of hawking radiation.
This seems like a great idea. Google might be number 1 in the search engine rankings at the moment but it would be good to see them have a bit of competition so that they do not use their dominant position for financial gain.
Here in the lab we're doing some work on using the principles of thermodynamics in order to improve search engines. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system ethalpy will alway increase, which is a lot like the disorder cause by sites spamming themselves to search engines . In addition the searching patterns of users can be thought as analogous to the fermi level of a solid. In theory applying thermodynamic equations to the process of search engines should allow for more efficient algorithms to be developed. Although this has been known for some time the process involves solving some fairly hefty quadratic equations which have needed some serious computing power to process. Hopefully though a real leap forward should be no more than a few months away.
Hopefully this will help the scientists who are crossbreeding intelligent apes in order to try and create another advanced species and uderstand how humans have evolved. Although they've increased the average ape intelligence by nearly 40% and even bread some individuals who are able to play simple games such as snap, they are unable to develop more advanced behavious such as speach and the concept of friendship.
. It might raise some interesting questions about the morality of creating these creatures if they become truely sentient though.
My most infuriating experience with Linux happened a few months back when the University asked me to help on witht he installation of a new data processing centre.
Originally that had wanted to buy a large supercomputer such as a cray (we were modelling weather so there were a large number of quadratic equations to solve) but they ran into probles with snmp and realised that it would be easier (and cheaper)to just get a large cluster of x86 boxes and use linux.
Anyway I got Mandrake 9 put on them ok, but at some point ssh went down on all of the boxes simultaneously. As some idiot had configure them all not to accept telnet (on security grounds!) I couldn't correct the problem and had to spend the next 3 weeks reinstalling. I was not happy at the time, I can tell you.
A few of my colleagues have been looking into the effects of surface tension in various liquids and you'll be amazed to learn what you can do if you have the right circumstances.
H20 doesn't have that much surface tension becuase of its low valency, but other liquids such as bromine are held together by strong Van der Waals attractions meaning that they have much stronger surface tensions. In one famous experiment at MIT researches showed just how strong the surface tension could be by placing a cat onto a large pool of bromine and observing that not only did it not sink but that it could also move abount (albeit with difficulty). Some people have suggested (tongue in cheek) that if Jesus could have introduced bromine into the red sea then that would explain how he could have walked on water.
Its great to see VoIP finally starting to take off, it has always seemed strange to me that we should live in a world where most people have a highspeed internet connection and yet our phone system still relies on copper wires and lossy a/d converters. If VoIP really takes off then a fully digital system would mean an end to those crackly phone calls and slow connections.
What might be intereting though is if people set up their own VoIP systems over existing mobiles. Here in Europe we have GRPS which is a high speed circuit switched data system. If somebody could write a SIP client for Symbian then users could run VoIP on the GRPS sytem and cut out the extortianate charges imposed by the telcos.
Java is good but slow
on
Head First Java
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Congrats on choosing Java, its a great language, and far better than javascript which is more like assembly than anything else. The only problem with it is speed: here in the lab we tried using it to control our partical physics experiments but it simply couldn't execute fast enough to deal with the particles before they disappeared (most leptons, Baryons and Hadrons will decay in a few femtoseconds). Further examination showed that C could do the job as it was significantly faster due to being more object oriented and using a just in time compiler.
Its amazing just how many gadgets that are invented in the minds of science fiction writers actually make it to the real world, hovercraft and mobile phones being just two examples that I can think of. Perhaps the next big one will be francium as a construction material.
Although it has long been known that Francium would make an ideal lightweight building material most scientists had given up on it because it was simply far too expensive to isolate. In the 60s series Space: Above and Beyond, however, we saw a world were Francium was abundent. Lightweight buildings 3 miles high could be built and personal helicopters were easy to produce with this new leightweight material.
Now obviously we're not at that stage yet but Ford has just started trials of its new Hybrid car which uses a Francium spaceframe. Unlike Aluminium it does not easily oxidise and rust, although there have been some other issues when it has been exposed to water. More importantly the weight saved means the car is over 4 times as efficient as a typical SUV.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.nd.edu/~jsmith30/xul/test/spoof.html
It's not the technology that is dangerous, just how it is used. There is no doubt that extensive use of video cameras around our cities can be used for much good. They can reduce muggings, help apprehend criminals and be useful when searching for missing persons. I think it's important not to forget this. The challenge is making sure that the technology is not misused.
This is just further evidence that the music industry has badly misjudged the new technology that has come along over the past few years. There is serious money to be from legal downloading, and every day that the music industry wastes is a day's revenue lost.
We need a new business model: Music is enjoyed by all and so should be a public resource such as the postal service or the army. In the past it was impossble for the government to buy large quantities of CDs for its citizens, however now we have a great opportunity. The govenment could buy a license for all music released in the US over the course of the year and then make this available to it's citizens over a p2p network. After a year the licence would expire and the files would be deleted (the government already has the technology to do this). If you liked the music then you could go out and buy the CD, as the evidence of the article suggests you will.
At first this seems unusual, but in Europe government owned business are common, especially in the areas of steel and agriculture. In the past, even Russia has beeen a world leader providing services for the people, and at one stage even facilitated this in countries such as Poland and Hungary. Think about how good a communal attitude could be.
I am seriously worried by the number of new file sharing services that seem to be popping up. Despite all the arguments to the contrary music 'sharing' is piracy and in the long term it can only hurt the consumer as musicians will not make music if there is no profit on it.
The worst thing about it is that our children are growing up thinking that stealing is ok. I expressly banned my son from pirating music but the other day I saw him playing an MP3. Needless to say I've now taken all his CD's away from him in order to teach him a lesson but I doubt his is old enough to understand why filesharing is wrong. Unfortunately I then caught him again so I've had take more practical action. Now I've put a short script on his computer that will delete a random file from his userspace whenever he attempts to play an MP3.
The best thing about this hard drive is the revolutionary new method it uses to cool itself. Previously the main problem with using really small hard drives was that they used to get too hot and overheat.
The beauty of this drive is that it uses an algorithm to arrange the stored data in the configuration with the maximum order and minimum entropy. As entropy always increases (The 2nd law of thermodynamics) creating all this order takes power which can be taken from the heat given off by the drive.
Strangely this effect can be made to work in reverse which means that the processor in future computers could be a net power emitter. In terms of entropy computing will often put out more energy than you put in as you are increasing the entropy. At the moment this power (and more) is wasted due to inefficient transistors. However on slow processors such as the XScale the transistors can be made to superconduct meaning that they are extremely efficint and so the processor generates a small amount of power. This should help the next generation of laptops.
Selling computer cycles is a great idea that is already up and running in several countries in Eastern Europe. Universities there cannot afford to buy high performance supercomputers so they rent computer cycles from local businessmen in order to solve complex numerical problems. Unfortunately many of these businessmen are part of the local Mafia and there have been several unsavouray incidents where University projects have been devoted to calculating the optimum strategy for criminal activities such as money laundering and illegal gambling.
Now that wireless technologies such as Bluetooth and GPRS are becoming commonplace there is an even more promising attempt to harness ALL of the computing power available to the modern american.
Almost every electronic device you own has a complex microprocessor in it: your DVD player, your shaver, your stereo and even your car. Each one of these processors is fairly slow compared to a modern day Athlon, but you have perhaps 100 in your house and what is more they are almost always off. By integrating bluetooth into each of them it will be possible for the average American to sell perhaps 10 dollars of computer time per day to Universities in Eastern Europe, thus both helping the American economy and preventing Mafia gangs from exerting undue influence over polish academics.
Its good to see that apple have finally made it back into the mainstream, even if their internal architecture is beginning to look like a PC what with PCI slots and all. Interestingly when I was in Rhodesia the other week, I noticed that almost all computers there are apples running yellow dog linux. Apparently this is because the government there has passed a law decreeing that all software allowed in the country must be 64 bit by 2005. Unbelievable!
Exactly, any engine that relies on the carnot cycle is going to be inefficient, it is just one of those facts of life. Hopefully we will not have to rely on gasoline for much longer.
Interestingly although hydrogen fuel cells are an excellent choice for powering small vehicles, it is unlikely that they could be made powerful enough for trucks and even large SUV's and so another solution will have to be found. Some of the possibilities include LPG or bitumen based engines but perhaps the biggest hope is for ion drives similar to the ones currently being tested on Norwegian buses.
They are ideal in that they are practically silent and have no moving parts so they will almost never go wrong. Currently there is an environmental risk as they emit dangerous cl- ions but it is hoped that by adding h+ ions at the exhaust stage these can mopped up.
If I remember correctly Ford is building an ion drive based dragster to compete at the high speed trials in May next year. It should be very interesting to see how it stacks up against conventional NOx based machines.
Like many slashdotters I do not like the idea of personal security cards as they restrict my ability to do what I please without nosy people checking up on me. What is more worrying is that the US government already has the capability to spy on people via satellite, and is using this technique despite it being outlawed by the first ammendment.
What I would like to see is the introduction of id cards for only the members of society considered to be 'high risk' for example ex convicts and people known to sympathise with al jazeera. In this people known to be a risk society could be monitored while the rest of us law abiding citizens could continue our lives without the risk of government interference.
While this is good news for the geek community I think that it would be more important if the qualtiy of the robots were improved rather than the quantity.
The first robots actually predate the computer, they came about over 100 years ago and were purely mechanical with a babbage style difference engine for a 'cpu'. The problem is that in these early days the foundations of robotics were established and now that new techniques are available we cannot break free from those shackles.
I would like to see robots that are based upon living things as opposed to inanimate opjects. We should use organic molecules instead of steel and plastic, and move to neural nets instead of SParC processors. Maybe then we will be able to design a robot that is useful outside a car production plant.
The next generation of nuclear reactors will be much safer, the current problems are caused because the designs require heavy nuclei (Uranium, Plutonium) to be split into lighter nuclei, liberating energy. The problems occur because the decay products are often fairly unstable themselves and consequently radioactive.
Hopefully the progress on fission in lighter elements should reduce the need for this. We can for example build a reactor that induces fission in Magnesium 24 to create 2 atoms of Nitrogen 14, which, as everybody knows, is perfectly harmless. Admittedly the process isn't completely clean as ammonia can be formed, but it should cut radioactive waste from small reactors by up to 23.8%.
While you are right to be concerned about the security aspects of 802.11 I think that the situation will improve before too long.
The current problem is that wireless cards work by broadcasting the signal out over a sphere, typically having a radius of around about 100m. This is great in that neither the transmitter or the receiver need to have much spatial directionality, however it meansd that anybody within that radius can tap into your traffic and start breaking any encryption you hyave going.
Now most people are trying to solve this by improving the encryption but here in the lab we are working on a different technique. We are using a directional system whereby a conducting channel is set up between the user and the access point meaning that any intruder would have to sit directly on this lne of sight, thereby greatly increasing their chances of detection.
The system works by not by electromagnetic radiation, but by using a stream of ions, which can be produced by common salt (NaCl), with a Na+ ion representing a binary 1 and a CL- representing a binary 0. At present the system is fairly experimental but I would expect to see it commercialized within a few years.
I know this is meant to be a joke but the actual technology involved in deploying a battlefield laser is immense. Here in the lab we've been working on civilian grade laser weapons (obviously at much lower power than the military; they are purely non lethal) and there are several major obsticals.
The main problem is that any reflecting surface can act as a mirror, meaning that you are constantly at risk of the laser beam bouncing back and obliterating you. What is worse is that if the surface is concave and you are roughly a focal length away then the beam with become focussed upon you and will so be many times more powerful. You can overcome this by making your laser beam non monochromatic and out of phase, but the engineering challenges in doing this are immense.
In addition the power contained by a laser can be enough to break down the chemical bonds in many innocuous compounds to form toxins. We had one nasty incident where our laser hit a puddle of water and turned the h20 into h202 which is deadly hydrogen peroxide. This would not look good for the US government if it started turning enemy cities into poisonous wastegrounds with a supposedly surgical weapon.
This looks pretty exciting, although this is not going to replace nuclear power as the main hope for renewable energy, its always good to know that we have other options if need be.
Here in the lab we've been researching a new method of providing power to small devices such as watches, which is almost a new way of generating electricity although it has many similarities to maxwells devil device.
The main component of our device is a ratchet wheel that can only turn in one direction, which we place inside a box containing a pressurised gas. As the gas molecules hit the ratchet they will cause it to turn in one direction only, and so small potentials can be genrated. The beauty of this device is that as the collisons are perfectly elastic there will be no energy losses and so no bulky power supply is needed. Hopefully within 10 years most cell phones could be powered this way.
This is great news, the development of 3G services in the US has been held up for long enough by beaurocracy. Countries such as Japan, South Korea and Rhodesia have established a technical lead in this area, which can only harm the already weak economy.
What might be interesting, however, is when the new 4G technologies come along. These will be different from previous technologies that work by modulating a carrier frequency, but will instead be analagous to ethernet with each phone using the same frequency and collisions being detected.
The advantages of this is that much lower frequencies can be used (50Hz is being talked about), but by allowing the phones to transmit many millions of times per second, data transfer rates of up to 15Gigabytes can be achieved. That should make video on the cellphone a realistic goal.
The only worry is that again government beaurocracy will not allow theses low frequencies to be used meaning that even poor countries will be able to have better services than the US.
This is actually a very good point, the impact marks do look very crude and not at all like the type of art found at sites of a similar age. Perhaps the best way would be analyse the stones in a mass spectrometer to look for traces of metal from an axe.
.5%. As an example of how impressive this was, the stones were disturbed in the mid 17th Centuary and the best scholars of the day (including Robert Hooke) were unable to realign them properly. It was only a hundred years later with the invention of mechanical calculating machines that the correct positions could be identified and the correct shadows re-established.
I think the most impressive thing about stonehenge is that in order to build it, the neaderthal men would have had to understand an awful lot about the world. They managed to align it so that it produces perfectly circular shadows on the two solstice days, which implies that not only did they realise that the sun was at the center of the solar system, but they had correctly estimated the earth-sun distance to within
Althought I think the average slashdotter will have a knee jerk reaction to this, I think Microsoft have been pretty good at realeasing patches so far and that most windows viruses have either been spread by either unpatched machines or buggy third party software.
Here in the lab we have a cluster of windows machines that regularly have uptimes of over two weeks (essential when evaluating climatic models involving quadratic equations). Our Linux machines have slightly longer uptimes, but they often require (admittedly infrequent) kernel rebuilds which can leave them out of action for up to a day. In addition we find windows update far easier than compiling linux fixes from source (we are after all partical physcists and not sys admins)
The conclusions drawn by this article would appear to be fairly trivial at first. Basically energy can neither be created or destroyed and as the universe is expanding the overall energy density of the universe is faling. Less energy density means less luminosity.
I think, however that the scientists haven't accounted for the effects of hawking radiation, which is basically the energy given out when a piece of matter falls into a black hole. Hawking radiation is obtained from matter that is otherwise lost frrm the universe and as such does not obey the classical laws of thermodynamics. Because of this the amount of energy in the universe is actually increasing although the rate at which it is doing so is extremely slow. As mentioned by the article however the number of black holes is increasing (all matter is drawn together by gravity so in a long enough timescale it will eventually coalesce to form a black hole) and so the hawking radiation will increase. It is therefore likely that in a billion years from now, the sky will actually be brighter than it is now, not from stars (which as the article points out will have disappeared) but from a brilliant glow of hawking radiation.
This seems like a great idea. Google might be number 1 in the search engine rankings at the moment but it would be good to see them have a bit of competition so that they do not use their dominant position for financial gain.
Here in the lab we're doing some work on using the principles of thermodynamics in order to improve search engines. The second law of thermodynamics states that in a closed system ethalpy will alway increase, which is a lot like the disorder cause by sites spamming themselves to search engines . In addition the searching patterns of users can be thought as analogous to the fermi level of a solid. In theory applying thermodynamic equations to the process of search engines should allow for more efficient algorithms to be developed. Although this has been known for some time the process involves solving some fairly hefty quadratic equations which have needed some serious computing power to process. Hopefully though a real leap forward should be no more than a few months away.
Hopefully this will help the scientists who are crossbreeding intelligent apes in order to try and create another advanced species and uderstand how humans have evolved. Although they've increased the average ape intelligence by nearly 40% and even bread some individuals who are able to play simple games such as snap, they are unable to develop more advanced behavious such as speach and the concept of friendship.
.
It might raise some interesting questions about the morality of creating these creatures if they become truely sentient though.
My most infuriating experience with Linux happened a few months back when the University asked me to help on witht he installation of a new data processing centre.
Originally that had wanted to buy a large supercomputer such as a cray (we were modelling weather so there were a large number of quadratic equations to solve) but they ran into probles with snmp and realised that it would be easier (and cheaper)to just get a large cluster of x86 boxes and use linux.
Anyway I got Mandrake 9 put on them ok, but at some point ssh went down on all of the boxes simultaneously. As some idiot had configure them all not to accept telnet (on security grounds!) I couldn't correct the problem and had to spend the next 3 weeks reinstalling. I was not happy at the time, I can tell you.
Still better than windows thogh.
A few of my colleagues have been looking into the effects of surface tension in various liquids and you'll be amazed to learn what you can do if you have the right circumstances.
H20 doesn't have that much surface tension becuase of its low valency, but other liquids such as bromine are held together by strong Van der Waals attractions meaning that they have much stronger surface tensions. In one famous experiment at MIT researches showed just how strong the surface tension could be by placing a cat onto a large pool of bromine and observing that not only did it not sink but that it could also move abount (albeit with difficulty). Some people have suggested (tongue in cheek) that if Jesus could have introduced bromine into the red sea then that would explain how he could have walked on water.
Its great to see VoIP finally starting to take off, it has always seemed strange to me that we should live in a world where most people have a highspeed internet connection and yet our phone system still relies on copper wires and lossy a/d converters. If VoIP really takes off then a fully digital system would mean an end to those crackly phone calls and slow connections.
What might be intereting though is if people set up their own VoIP systems over existing mobiles. Here in Europe we have GRPS which is a high speed circuit switched data system. If somebody could write a SIP client for Symbian then users could run VoIP on the GRPS sytem and cut out the extortianate charges imposed by the telcos.
Congrats on choosing Java, its a great language, and far better than javascript which is more like assembly than anything else. The only problem with it is speed: here in the lab we tried using it to control our partical physics experiments but it simply couldn't execute fast enough to deal with the particles before they disappeared (most leptons, Baryons and Hadrons will decay in a few femtoseconds). Further examination showed that C could do the job as it was significantly faster due to being more object oriented and using a just in time compiler.
Its amazing just how many gadgets that are invented in the minds of science fiction writers actually make it to the real world, hovercraft and mobile phones being just two examples that I can think of. Perhaps the next big one will be francium as a construction material.
Although it has long been known that Francium would make an ideal lightweight building material most scientists had given up on it because it was simply far too expensive to isolate. In the 60s series Space: Above and Beyond, however, we saw a world were Francium was abundent. Lightweight buildings 3 miles high could be built and personal helicopters were easy to produce with this new leightweight material.
Now obviously we're not at that stage yet but Ford has just started trials of its new Hybrid car which uses a Francium spaceframe. Unlike Aluminium it does not easily oxidise and rust, although there have been some other issues when it has been exposed to water. More importantly the weight saved means the car is over 4 times as efficient as a typical SUV.