I doubt that gene doping does a good job of inserting exactly one copy of the foreign gene in all cells of an athletes' body. Doing a genetic tests of a sample of cells and discovering that only x% (where X is not near 0% or near 100%) would show that the athlete is a chimera. A bit more study would then prove that the individual is not a naturally occurring in utero chimera, and thus must be an artificially created one. And if the tests show multiple copies of the gene in some cells, then that cinches the finding of being a GMA (genetically modified athlete). The only issue is cost, which might be a bit steep at first.
The near zero cost of communication is the root cause of spam (and the reason the net is the best of places and worst of places). Until the recipient, who bears the high labor cost of coping with spam, can levy a charge on the sender, who bears near zero cost for mass-produced messages, spam will persist and proliferate.
At what point in time do employees spend more time (= money) creating, remembering and retreiving inscutable passwords than they spend recovering from hacker incursions. An employee's ability to handle rapidily changing, complex passwords is fixed by evolution whereas, hackers abilities to break or phish passwords is only going to increase. At some point the curves will cross and organizations will spend more to keep things locked than they lose with leaky passwords.
With so many people using so many spam filters, I'd bet that a fair amount of "legitimate " email is automatically deleted by service providers and automated email filters. How can one prove to a judge that SpamCop had a given domain on its blacklist on a given date or that the sent email did not accidentally contain some filter-triggering word on that date? It seems that either spam filters create a legal risk or that the legal system has a naive view of the legal standing of email.
I reality, email is no better than a slip of paper tossed an the front yard of the recipient. It has a greater chance of being thrown in the trash than read.
If this is a security issue, then the government should definitely not buy closed source from any software company that uses any offshore (non-U.S.) programmers. Who knows what those offshore programmers are inserting into the closed code. Of course, that rules out just about every large closed source maker in the world as I'm sure most have some non-U.S. development groups.
Why bother? If you had any decent anti-virus product, or applied security patches like you were supposed to, Download.ject would not be your problem.
Were the antivirus/security patches to prevent Download.ject running on a client computer available before Download.ject ever appeared? As a site owner, yes, proactive action would prevent the original IIS exploit that inserted download.ject on to the web site. But I don't believe that anitvirus makers had a solution for download.ject until after it appeared. A PC user with all the latest patches and antivirus was still vulnerable if they visited a site of a nonclueful site owner.
In short... the existing toolset would have protected us from this threat vector. It only was a threat at all because of all the people who didn't. The solution isn't creating a new security program, but getting the clueless to use the ones we're already running.
I agree that the clueless are a major problem. The proposed P2P system addresses this issue in two ways. First, threat of public humiliation, loss of customers, and loss of market value should motivate clueless site owners to keep their patches current. Second, this P2P system is part of being clueful -- users protecting themselves by proactively scanning the sites that they visit for malware.
Finally, this P2P system serves a crucial role in the toolset -- helping detect new server-side malware. There will always be zero-day exploits for which there is, by definition, no available patch or AV signature. A P2P monitoring system can serve as an early warning system for faster detection of novel exploits.
It seems like one could create a distributed site monitoring system for this purpose. A simple sandbox web app would periodically reload a list of sites and log a signature of either the contents or attempted actions encoded in the site. Each participant would offer to monitor a few sites in the background. A P2P comparison process would then correlate signature elements across sites -- peers would transmit their findings to other peers looking for something like Download.ject that appears as a new object/behavior across disparate sites. The peers could then alert each other across the mesh of the system when suspicious new objects show up.
Lacking a central authority, the companies would be powerless to shutdown publication of these types of security breaches.
Applications like this suggest a steath transformation of the iPod into a more general purpose mobile information device. Who is to say that somewhere inside Apple is not a frankenPod combo of an iPod and Airport Express wifi chipset or an Spotlight-derived information navigator that uses a Click Wheel interface. Mix in a little i of Newton, and Apple might just produce something interesting
What apps and OSes need is scalable UIs - UIs that scale as the knowledge level of the user grows. A total novice, non-technical, casual users should be just as comfortable and productive as a hard-core, 80-hour-per-week developer. This has not happened yet because there are two distinct camps in UI development. Profits in the mass market drove closed source, mass-market software to create useability on the low-end. The natural interests and abilities of its contributors drove open-source to create useability at the high end.
The biggest challenge to scalability is creating inuitive metaphors or abstractions between the human interface (i/o modalities) and underlying digital constructs that does not get in the way of the power-user. Apple's early OS effort were great for the novice, but derided by more experienced users - the UI was not scalable in the upward direction. In contrast, Unix/DOS/CPM was fine for power-users, but it arcane command interface made it not scalable in the downward direction.
I suspect that the answer will be concepts like Mac OS X that combine GUI and CLI elements. But even OS X is not as scalable as one might like because it is really an intuitive Apple GUI grafted on to a separate powerful *nix CLI core. Although novice Mac users can "graduate" to the command line, the transition is not smooth -- using Finder does not teach one how to use ls, cd, mv, cp, rm, etc. Rather than being scalable in a continuous sense, Mac OS X offers interfaces at two different scales - the intuitive GUI and a separate power-user CLI.
Perhaps future OS/app UIs will be truely scalable -- early GUI use will seamlessly teach the user and help them slowly become more powerful users. Developign scalable UIs will require contributions from both novice-oriented usability experts and power-oriented developers. It will require forethought and coordination so that the disparate elements of the system are "consistent" without being inflexible.
I was 8 when they landed on the Moon. I remember having an Apollo 11 poster, a nice commemorative book from the local Gulf Oil gas station, a nice leather-bound book on the history of scape flight, and more space books than I can count. Looking up at the moon and thinking that people were there made a huge impression on me because I have always wanted to visit any visible, yet distant, location. My parents even used my fascination with space to encourage me to do better in school.
It's too bad that we don't have such noble and exciting frontiers these days. I now wonder if increasing energy costs and environment/safety concerns have pushed humanity over the hill into the caution that afflicts the middle-aged.
What if we all donated spare refrigerator magnets, magnets from old hard disks, etc. and carefully arranged them at the north and south poles. These giant piles would hold the poles in place. Perhaps a lucky chain letter spam from Bill Gates would help get people to donate magnets to the cause.
I wonder when Wal-Mart wil step into this fray and slap the combatants until all they can see is little yellow smiley faces. Wal-Mart seems pretty serious about RFID and won't be happy if the vendors start squabbling over IP rights.
If a company buys a tool or a building, they don't expense it because it has on-going value -- assets are held and used for the ongoing value they create. If a company buys paper or electricity, they do expense it because such goods are used almost immediately - expensible items are consumed or flow through the company. By that logic, options are an asset -- they have ongoing value and they are not consumed.
Warren Buffet is wrong, options are not like standard compensation -- options don't walk out the door like a paycheck does. Instead, options are intended to increase the productive value of the company's workforce - having options motivates employees to work hard. The longer the employee has the option, the more work they are likely to do. This makes the option more asset-like -- the longer you have a tool the more use you get from it. Thus, options have and create future value in a way very unlike standard compensation. In many ways, options create assets out of human resources.
The double-edge sword of options is that they do encourage the employees and managers to try to inflate the stock price. Although most managers and employees boost the company's stock price through honest, hard work, some decide to screw outside investors through financial gimickry. But expensing options won't eliminate this bad behavior - if the company still uses options, the employees still have incentive to drive up the stock price (by unethical means if they are so inclined).
I'd think about three factors in negotiating the monetary side of the licensing terms. The first are the costs that you incurred or will incur in providing or supporting X-copies of software. Even if you give them the source under generous terms, there will be times when they would like some assistance in customizing or debugging the code. And the more seats they sell or have, the more customizing and debugging they might want. This will cost you time and effort that you should charge for.
The second is to think about the value of the software to the client (or their clients). As the creator of the software, its not unreasonable to get a cut of that value. However, your client is also adding value by getting your software -- by getting your software out there and supporting it (perhaps). You might negotiate a sliding scale with your percentage dropping as the number of seats increases -- reflecting the value that your client adds in selling and supporting the next thousand seats and then the next thousand seats, etc.
If your software is good, the price you can charge will exceed your costs without exceeding the perceived value of the software (too many products fail this test).
Third, you also have not said anything about the nature of your customer and relationship with them. If they are fair-minded and seek a long-term relationship with you, then a frank discussion of costs and values will help you arrive at an equitable agreement. If they are greedyslime balls looking for a quick buck, then you may need to lawyer-up or write-off the project as one of life's lessons.
This article reminds of the optical systems of mantis shrimp as a supreme example of controlled visual integration of optical information.
With up to 10 color bands and 2 to 4 polarizations in a multi-band linear array across each eye, the little beastie is the champion for color vision . Because the eye bands of the left and right eyes are at an angle to each other, the shrimp can sweep the two linear arrays across an area to create binocular polychromatic vision (more remarkable is that each eye has a central trinocular field of vision so each eye has independent depth perception). The entire system is controlled by X-Y scanning of the two eyes (either independently or in sync) to sweep across an area to to create a 2-D high resolution multi-spectral image from 1-D linear arrays.
The point, for satellite sensors, is that more dynamic control of a multi-spectral sensor Earth-observing system can adaptively gather data at multiple resolutions -- gathering super-resolution scans on interesting regions such as a flash floods, forest fires - while retaining a low resolution full-image situation awareness. This intelligence needs to be local because, in the mantis shrimp at least, the control loop operates on millisecond timescales. Satellite-local processing would also reduce the downlink bandwidth requirements as the raw sensor output could easily exceed 10 gigabits/sec.
So many places say "this site best when viewed with IE." IANAL, but it seems irresponsible for a site to recommend IE, especially if site handles sensitive materials such as financial services or downloadable software. If IE includes known vulnerabilities, can sites be held liable for making that recommendation?
Any thoughts from the more legally minded amongst us?
Another article reports that the power output is only 100 milliwatts for the 8.5 gm device. This suggests that a 1/2 kg version of the thing would only put out 5.9 watts - not enough to power a laptop. It looks like an interesting powersource for low-power devices, but anything with a backlit display or modern mobile processor is probably not feasible with this tiny unit.
This case presents an interesting opportunty. If some of those 92 million names were faked, AOL-internal-only addresses (i.e., no outsider ever had them or ever could have them) then anyone caught using or selling them is guilty of accepting or selling stolen property. Any email arriving to a never-released, but stolen name would let AOL and authorities track the spammer network and subpeona spam-using e-commerce sites to reveal the identity of marketing affiliates.
It would seem that the ultimate version of this would use RGB lasers as the light source and notch filters on the screen. The narrowness of the notches would determine the depths of the black. The biggest trick would be in tuning the notch filters to reflect the off-axis, angled laser light.
I've always liked the idea of using origami for spacecraft. I can also envision universal constructor machines that convert asteroid materials into flat sheet and robotic systems that then fold long pieces of flat sheet stock into any shape that's needed (such as full size versions of these Star Wars spacecraft).
For exploring real-valued phase spaces, one solution is to combine a GA with a classical hill-climber. A hill-climber evaluates the local gradient (the partial derivatives of fitness with respect to the independent variables) and then makes a directed adjustment of the solution in the direction of better performance. Hillclimbers can reach optima in floating-point spaces very quickly, but tend to get stuck on local solutions.
GAs are great for jumping out of local optima to find new realms of the solution space, but don't converge as quickly on the neighborhood optima. So the combination of a GA with more classical optimzation can work well.
This story illustrates that the profitability of spamming is not that great. It would be even less profitable if spammers e-mail address books were even more polluted by bad addresses. And spam would be even less profitable if spam-using sites were innudated with mail.
I wonder if we could kill two birds with one stone. Littering the web with dummy e-mail addresses that include the domains of spam-supported sites. That way, the sites become overwhelmed by inbound mail traffic. It would be a version of this or, better yet, this using real domains of spam-using sites (from a blacklist service). E-mail addys such as sdadhja@viagraspammer.com, eywheh@viagraspammer.com, wywhdi@viagraspammer.com would both cost the spammer and the site that is using spam.
Re:Perfect for theaters and airplanes
on
RF-Blocking Wallpaper
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
if the people don't care about others movie experience enough to turn the mobile off when they clearly should, what makes you think they'll act properly when you try to force them?
No "force" is involved. Their cell phones would simply get no signal which means no inbound calls, no outbound calls, and no shouting. I'd say that cellphones in theaters is both a people and technological problem because the technology lets people use noisy telecom devices where they shouldn't and lets people think they must be in constant contact. If technology can passively block cellphone signals, then that's a nice solution to a problem created by technology in the first place. With the controllable version that's mentioned in the article, theaters could even let cellphones work before the movie starts and then warn the audience that they will be disabling cellphone signals when the lights go down.
anyways if you had read the article you'd notice that this material can be used to block ONLY wifi frequencies(I'm assuming 2.4ghz), whilst letting other rf pass(including mobile phone frequencies).
Yes, and if you read between the lines of the article, you'd notice that the technology is extremely adaptible. The size and shape of the pattern controls the frequency characteristics. It would be just as easy (and inexpensive) to make a sheet that blocks cellphones and lets wifi signals pass.
Perfect for theaters and airplanes
on
RF-Blocking Wallpaper
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Stuff like this will restore the peace and quiet to theaters and restaurants. And the passive nature of the material means it should not run afoul of U.S. FCC regs on "interference" (I don't know about other countries' rules).
Assuming the material is actually absorptive (not reflective) at cell-phone frequencies, it would also reduce the passage of cellphone signals into and out of airplanes and reduce any chance of passenger's cell phone transmissions from interfering with the airplane's electronics or the ground-based cells they are flying over.
Finally, they could use the stuff to help separate WiFi networks in office and apartment buildings. A layer of the stuff under the carpet or in the ceiling would keep wifi signals confined to a single tenant's floor or section of the building so that different tenant's wireless nets don't collide.
If the data and rules disagree (and the data is valid) then "the rules" were never ever really correct. This is the most interesting and cognitively confounding element of science. So many experiments cause the perceived "rules" to change when in fact the true rules of the universe never change, only our approximations and estimations of them. This is why I wonder if so much of science is really just curve-fitting (F = m*a + delta, where delta contains relativistic effects, quantum effects, etc.) Similarly, I wonder if E = mc^2 + delta, where delta includes effects unseen because we haven't tested the formula over the entire span of possible conditions (energies, distances, mass concentrations, etc.)
As an aside, a friend in college was religious because of this very issue. He hated the fact that science couldn't "make up its mind" abut what was true or not -- for him, an erroneous certainty was more comfortable than a changing, but progressively more correct uncertainty.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that gene doping does a good job of inserting exactly one copy of the foreign gene in all cells of an athletes' body. Doing a genetic tests of a sample of cells and discovering that only x% (where X is not near 0% or near 100%) would show that the athlete is a chimera. A bit more study would then prove that the individual is not a naturally occurring in utero chimera, and thus must be an artificially created one. And if the tests show multiple copies of the gene in some cells, then that cinches the finding of being a GMA (genetically modified athlete). The only issue is cost, which might be a bit steep at first.
The near zero cost of communication is the root cause of spam (and the reason the net is the best of places and worst of places). Until the recipient, who bears the high labor cost of coping with spam, can levy a charge on the sender, who bears near zero cost for mass-produced messages, spam will persist and proliferate.
At what point in time do employees spend more time (= money) creating, remembering and retreiving inscutable passwords than they spend recovering from hacker incursions. An employee's ability to handle rapidily changing, complex passwords is fixed by evolution whereas, hackers abilities to break or phish passwords is only going to increase. At some point the curves will cross and organizations will spend more to keep things locked than they lose with leaky passwords.
With so many people using so many spam filters, I'd bet that a fair amount of "legitimate " email is automatically deleted by service providers and automated email filters. How can one prove to a judge that SpamCop had a given domain on its blacklist on a given date or that the sent email did not accidentally contain some filter-triggering word on that date? It seems that either spam filters create a legal risk or that the legal system has a naive view of the legal standing of email.
I reality, email is no better than a slip of paper tossed an the front yard of the recipient. It has a greater chance of being thrown in the trash than read.
If this is a security issue, then the government should definitely not buy closed source from any software company that uses any offshore (non-U.S.) programmers. Who knows what those offshore programmers are inserting into the closed code. Of course, that rules out just about every large closed source maker in the world as I'm sure most have some non-U.S. development groups.
Why bother? If you had any decent anti-virus product, or applied security patches like you were supposed to, Download.ject would not be your problem.
Were the antivirus/security patches to prevent Download.ject running on a client computer available before Download.ject ever appeared? As a site owner, yes, proactive action would prevent the original IIS exploit that inserted download.ject on to the web site. But I don't believe that anitvirus makers had a solution for download.ject until after it appeared. A PC user with all the latest patches and antivirus was still vulnerable if they visited a site of a nonclueful site owner.
In short... the existing toolset would have protected us from this threat vector. It only was a threat at all because of all the people who didn't. The solution isn't creating a new security program, but getting the clueless to use the ones we're already running.
I agree that the clueless are a major problem. The proposed P2P system addresses this issue in two ways. First, threat of public humiliation, loss of customers, and loss of market value should motivate clueless site owners to keep their patches current. Second, this P2P system is part of being clueful -- users protecting themselves by proactively scanning the sites that they visit for malware.
Finally, this P2P system serves a crucial role in the toolset -- helping detect new server-side malware. There will always be zero-day exploits for which there is, by definition, no available patch or AV signature. A P2P monitoring system can serve as an early warning system for faster detection of novel exploits.
It seems like one could create a distributed site monitoring system for this purpose. A simple sandbox web app would periodically reload a list of sites and log a signature of either the contents or attempted actions encoded in the site. Each participant would offer to monitor a few sites in the background. A P2P comparison process would then correlate signature elements across sites -- peers would transmit their findings to other peers looking for something like Download.ject that appears as a new object/behavior across disparate sites. The peers could then alert each other across the mesh of the system when suspicious new objects show up.
Lacking a central authority, the companies would be powerless to shutdown publication of these types of security breaches.
Applications like this suggest a steath transformation of the iPod into a more general purpose mobile information device. Who is to say that somewhere inside Apple is not a frankenPod combo of an iPod and Airport Express wifi chipset or an Spotlight-derived information navigator that uses a Click Wheel interface. Mix in a little i of Newton, and Apple might just produce something interesting
What apps and OSes need is scalable UIs - UIs that scale as the knowledge level of the user grows. A total novice, non-technical, casual users should be just as comfortable and productive as a hard-core, 80-hour-per-week developer. This has not happened yet because there are two distinct camps in UI development. Profits in the mass market drove closed source, mass-market software to create useability on the low-end. The natural interests and abilities of its contributors drove open-source to create useability at the high end.
The biggest challenge to scalability is creating inuitive metaphors or abstractions between the human interface (i/o modalities) and underlying digital constructs that does not get in the way of the power-user. Apple's early OS effort were great for the novice, but derided by more experienced users - the UI was not scalable in the upward direction. In contrast, Unix/DOS/CPM was fine for power-users, but it arcane command interface made it not scalable in the downward direction.
I suspect that the answer will be concepts like Mac OS X that combine GUI and CLI elements. But even OS X is not as scalable as one might like because it is really an intuitive Apple GUI grafted on to a separate powerful *nix CLI core. Although novice Mac users can "graduate" to the command line, the transition is not smooth -- using Finder does not teach one how to use ls, cd, mv, cp, rm, etc. Rather than being scalable in a continuous sense, Mac OS X offers interfaces at two different scales - the intuitive GUI and a separate power-user CLI.
Perhaps future OS/app UIs will be truely scalable -- early GUI use will seamlessly teach the user and help them slowly become more powerful users. Developign scalable UIs will require contributions from both novice-oriented usability experts and power-oriented developers. It will require forethought and coordination so that the disparate elements of the system are "consistent" without being inflexible.
I was 8 when they landed on the Moon. I remember having an Apollo 11 poster, a nice commemorative book from the local Gulf Oil gas station, a nice leather-bound book on the history of scape flight, and more space books than I can count. Looking up at the moon and thinking that people were there made a huge impression on me because I have always wanted to visit any visible, yet distant, location. My parents even used my fascination with space to encourage me to do better in school.
It's too bad that we don't have such noble and exciting frontiers these days. I now wonder if increasing energy costs and environment/safety concerns have pushed humanity over the hill into the caution that afflicts the middle-aged.
What if we all donated spare refrigerator magnets, magnets from old hard disks, etc. and carefully arranged them at the north and south poles. These giant piles would hold the poles in place. Perhaps a lucky chain letter spam from Bill Gates would help get people to donate magnets to the cause.
I wonder when Wal-Mart wil step into this fray and slap the combatants until all they can see is little yellow smiley faces. Wal-Mart seems pretty serious about RFID and won't be happy if the vendors start squabbling over IP rights.
If a company buys a tool or a building, they don't expense it because it has on-going value -- assets are held and used for the ongoing value they create. If a company buys paper or electricity, they do expense it because such goods are used almost immediately - expensible items are consumed or flow through the company. By that logic, options are an asset -- they have ongoing value and they are not consumed.
Warren Buffet is wrong, options are not like standard compensation -- options don't walk out the door like a paycheck does. Instead, options are intended to increase the productive value of the company's workforce - having options motivates employees to work hard. The longer the employee has the option, the more work they are likely to do. This makes the option more asset-like -- the longer you have a tool the more use you get from it. Thus, options have and create future value in a way very unlike standard compensation. In many ways, options create assets out of human resources.
The double-edge sword of options is that they do encourage the employees and managers to try to inflate the stock price. Although most managers and employees boost the company's stock price through honest, hard work, some decide to screw outside investors through financial gimickry. But expensing options won't eliminate this bad behavior - if the company still uses options, the employees still have incentive to drive up the stock price (by unethical means if they are so inclined).
I'd think about three factors in negotiating the monetary side of the licensing terms. The first are the costs that you incurred or will incur in providing or supporting X-copies of software. Even if you give them the source under generous terms, there will be times when they would like some assistance in customizing or debugging the code. And the more seats they sell or have, the more customizing and debugging they might want. This will cost you time and effort that you should charge for.
The second is to think about the value of the software to the client (or their clients). As the creator of the software, its not unreasonable to get a cut of that value. However, your client is also adding value by getting your software -- by getting your software out there and supporting it (perhaps). You might negotiate a sliding scale with your percentage dropping as the number of seats increases -- reflecting the value that your client adds in selling and supporting the next thousand seats and then the next thousand seats, etc.
If your software is good, the price you can charge will exceed your costs without exceeding the perceived value of the software (too many products fail this test).
Third, you also have not said anything about the nature of your customer and relationship with them. If they are fair-minded and seek a long-term relationship with you, then a frank discussion of costs and values will help you arrive at an equitable agreement. If they are greedyslime balls looking for a quick buck, then you may need to lawyer-up or write-off the project as one of life's lessons.
Good Luck!
This article reminds of the optical systems of mantis shrimp as a supreme example of controlled visual integration of optical information.
With up to 10 color bands and 2 to 4 polarizations in a multi-band linear array across each eye, the little beastie is the champion for color vision . Because the eye bands of the left and right eyes are at an angle to each other, the shrimp can sweep the two linear arrays across an area to create binocular polychromatic vision (more remarkable is that each eye has a central trinocular field of vision so each eye has independent depth perception). The entire system is controlled by X-Y scanning of the two eyes (either independently or in sync) to sweep across an area to to create a 2-D high resolution multi-spectral image from 1-D linear arrays.
The point, for satellite sensors, is that more dynamic control of a multi-spectral sensor Earth-observing system can adaptively gather data at multiple resolutions -- gathering super-resolution scans on interesting regions such as a flash floods, forest fires - while retaining a low resolution full-image situation awareness. This intelligence needs to be local because, in the mantis shrimp at least, the control loop operates on millisecond timescales. Satellite-local processing would also reduce the downlink bandwidth requirements as the raw sensor output could easily exceed 10 gigabits/sec.
So many places say "this site best when viewed with IE." IANAL, but it seems irresponsible for a site to recommend IE, especially if site handles sensitive materials such as financial services or downloadable software. If IE includes known vulnerabilities, can sites be held liable for making that recommendation?
Any thoughts from the more legally minded amongst us?
Another article reports that the power output is only 100 milliwatts for the 8.5 gm device. This suggests that a 1/2 kg version of the thing would only put out 5.9 watts - not enough to power a laptop. It looks like an interesting powersource for low-power devices, but anything with a backlit display or modern mobile processor is probably not feasible with this tiny unit.
This case presents an interesting opportunty. If some of those 92 million names were faked, AOL-internal-only addresses (i.e., no outsider ever had them or ever could have them) then anyone caught using or selling them is guilty of accepting or selling stolen property. Any email arriving to a never-released, but stolen name would let AOL and authorities track the spammer network and subpeona spam-using e-commerce sites to reveal the identity of marketing affiliates.
It would seem that the ultimate version of this would use RGB lasers as the light source and notch filters on the screen. The narrowness of the notches would determine the depths of the black. The biggest trick would be in tuning the notch filters to reflect the off-axis, angled laser light.
I've always liked the idea of using origami for spacecraft. I can also envision universal constructor machines that convert asteroid materials into flat sheet and robotic systems that then fold long pieces of flat sheet stock into any shape that's needed (such as full size versions of these Star Wars spacecraft).
For exploring real-valued phase spaces, one solution is to combine a GA with a classical hill-climber. A hill-climber evaluates the local gradient (the partial derivatives of fitness with respect to the independent variables) and then makes a directed adjustment of the solution in the direction of better performance. Hillclimbers can reach optima in floating-point spaces very quickly, but tend to get stuck on local solutions.
GAs are great for jumping out of local optima to find new realms of the solution space, but don't converge as quickly on the neighborhood optima. So the combination of a GA with more classical optimzation can work well.
This story illustrates that the profitability of spamming is not that great. It would be even less profitable if spammers e-mail address books were even more polluted by bad addresses. And spam would be even less profitable if spam-using sites were innudated with mail.
I wonder if we could kill two birds with one stone. Littering the web with dummy e-mail addresses that include the domains of spam-supported sites. That way, the sites become overwhelmed by inbound mail traffic. It would be a version of this or, better yet, this using real domains of spam-using sites (from a blacklist service). E-mail addys such as sdadhja@viagraspammer.com, eywheh@viagraspammer.com, wywhdi@viagraspammer.com would both cost the spammer and the site that is using spam.
if the people don't care about others movie experience enough to turn the mobile off when they clearly should, what makes you think they'll act properly when you try to force them?
No "force" is involved. Their cell phones would simply get no signal which means no inbound calls, no outbound calls, and no shouting. I'd say that cellphones in theaters is both a people and technological problem because the technology lets people use noisy telecom devices where they shouldn't and lets people think they must be in constant contact. If technology can passively block cellphone signals, then that's a nice solution to a problem created by technology in the first place. With the controllable version that's mentioned in the article, theaters could even let cellphones work before the movie starts and then warn the audience that they will be disabling cellphone signals when the lights go down.
anyways if you had read the article you'd notice that this material can be used to block ONLY wifi frequencies(I'm assuming 2.4ghz), whilst letting other rf pass(including mobile phone frequencies).
Yes, and if you read between the lines of the article, you'd notice that the technology is extremely adaptible. The size and shape of the pattern controls the frequency characteristics. It would be just as easy (and inexpensive) to make a sheet that blocks cellphones and lets wifi signals pass.
Stuff like this will restore the peace and quiet to theaters and restaurants. And the passive nature of the material means it should not run afoul of U.S. FCC regs on "interference" (I don't know about other countries' rules).
Assuming the material is actually absorptive (not reflective) at cell-phone frequencies, it would also reduce the passage of cellphone signals into and out of airplanes and reduce any chance of passenger's cell phone transmissions from interfering with the airplane's electronics or the ground-based cells they are flying over.
Finally, they could use the stuff to help separate WiFi networks in office and apartment buildings. A layer of the stuff under the carpet or in the ceiling would keep wifi signals confined to a single tenant's floor or section of the building so that different tenant's wireless nets don't collide.
If the data and rules disagree (and the data is valid) then "the rules" were never ever really correct. This is the most interesting and cognitively confounding element of science. So many experiments cause the perceived "rules" to change when in fact the true rules of the universe never change, only our approximations and estimations of them. This is why I wonder if so much of science is really just curve-fitting (F = m*a + delta, where delta contains relativistic effects, quantum effects, etc.) Similarly, I wonder if E = mc^2 + delta, where delta includes effects unseen because we haven't tested the formula over the entire span of possible conditions (energies, distances, mass concentrations, etc.)
As an aside, a friend in college was religious because of this very issue. He hated the fact that science couldn't "make up its mind" abut what was true or not -- for him, an erroneous certainty was more comfortable than a changing, but progressively more correct uncertainty.