As nice as this scheme might be compared to previous quantum cryptography schemes, there are still fundamental problemns with implementing quantum cryptography. First off, you need a single, otherwise unused optical fiber to connect the two boxes. This means running your own cable. There's really no way around that. You're not going to find unrepeated, unused fiber just lying around.
Even not knowing the video format, how hard could it be to hack two tivos such that one broadcasts the data it's storing over the wireless link, and the other stores said data. Combine that with a good antenna, and one guy on the block could provide cable for everyone.
The "polution shifting" problem is much less of a problem than it might seem at first glance. Assume that all the extra electricity necessary to power all traditional electric cars is produced by combusting gasoline. However, instead of doing this in a million independent facilities (the engines of your car) with almost no monitoring and very loose ecological controls, it is done in a single facility carefully designed for maximum efficiency. So instead of people driving untuned decade old gas guzzlers, everyone is driving with the most efficient engine possible.
In addition, since all the polution is produced in one place, many measures can be taken to ensure that the polution is minimized.
Basically, it's like everyone getting their power from one big car that is constantly worked on by a team of engineers to ensure maximum efficiency.
Note that Dahmler-Chrysler is not a US company. They are a German company. While you are right that US oil interests might oppose this, I don't know much about German oil interests. Germany being a european country is in a very different place with respect to cars than the US. They have things like fast trains. You can get from one city to another in Germany by train. You don't need a car quite as much as you do in the US.
So Dahmler-Chrysler has a more or less free hand to do their magic, and when it's ready, they can sell it to the US. It's a lot easier to push something new if it has already been proven.
Twice in this article, it is stated that the artist sees no royalties until the record company recoups its recording costs. Why then do the authors subtract artists' royalties from the record companies profits when discussing how many disc sales it takes for them to break even? The results in the article go something like:
$500000/($8.00-$2.25) = 86957
whereas the result of not paying the artist before recouping your investment goes something like:
$500000/$8.00 = 62500
I would guess that a significantly larger percentage of albums sell this many copies, probaby more like 20%, as opposed to the 16% number quoted for the article's figures.
In any case, this is a much better return rate than, say, veture capitalists get. They can only expect 10% of their investments to make money. VCs are an entirely different group of money grubbing bastards though...
Think of this as a replacement for your lawn mower engine. You use your lawn mower for probably an hour a week 35 weeks a year. That's 42 years of near-silent lawn mowing. And you don't have to rake, unlike an unpowered mower.
It would also make a good second stage for a UPS setup, assuming you could get it to turn on automatically. I wouldn't be surprised to see APC or the like with something along those lines soon.
As for the dangers of hydrogen, look at the tanks of propane that many americans keep in their backyards for their grills. Look at the butane lighter in your pocket. Hydrogen isn't *that* dangerous.
A quick perusal of this company's web site will show you that they've thought of that. First off, the on-shore generator is designed to minimise visual impact. It does a reasonably good idea. From their photos, I would say it's no worse than a life guard shack or something similar.
There is also an offshore variant. It sits in 15m of water within 1km of the shore. It's bright yellow, presumably so ships don't run into it. It's probably less than 3 meters high, when it doesn't have the optional wind power attachment. It generates 2MW w/o wind turbine, 3.5 with. Groups of them can function as a breakwater, which may not be valuable for a resort area, but for a port town without a bay, it's great.
To me, the real promise of this technology is in use as a breakwater. I'm from Oregon. There are many, many places were artificial jetties have been created to make it possible/easier to operate a port on the coast. Instead of just letting the waves dash themselves to death on the rocks and sand of the jetties, these generators make them useful.
And don't worry about ecological disruption. Waves break, force a bunch of water onto the beach, and then that water flows back into the ocean. All the energy of the waves is being transformed into sound and heat. By sucking a little of that energy out, we just decrease the amount of sound and heat comming off of the waves. As the electricity is used to do work, heat is produced. So there's no real net change in energy flow. And don't even think about hurting the environment by stealing a little heat. It's completely negligable.
I would avoid Intel. They probably do use unix for their chip design workstations, but the likelyhood of getting an internship developing that software is rather low. Most of the rest of the organization is completely terrified of anything that doesn't come from Microsoft. I speak from experience.
The work place has a poor reputation for a reason as well. I worked in a "bull pen" last summer. A large cubicle with two large desks and four contractors. It sucked. Not as bad as sharing a compressed cube though...
On the plus side, they pay well, as long as you get to negotiate your own rate. Their intern program doesn't let you do that, so go the contractor route if you can and you want to work there.
Last year while I was at school, a friend of mine was playing around wiht network programming. He wrote a relativly simple piece of software. It simply listens to the network and responds to every TCP packet by spoofing the recipient's IP address and closing that connection. He didn't think it would work, but he ran it. It worked. He then realized that he had sshed into his box in his dorm room across campus to do the coding, and that his connection had just been killed. He quickly called one of his suitemates and had them press the power switch. Thankfully, CWRUnet Services never took action against him. It was basically an accident. But, think about it. For a brief period of time, all broadcast traffic on our network came to a schreeching halt. Thankfully, our network is mostly switched ATM. But, if one were to hang a box with a similar tool installed on it off of an ISP's external line, even if it weren't acting as a gateway (ie, even if traffic didn't need to pass through it to get to its destination), it could effectively cut off all connections to and from the ISP. Put such a box on a larger pipe, and you have an internet off switch. Of course, it doesn't work for UDP, so we could all still play Quake3:)
Now, I don't know that the government would want to be able to turn off the internet. As I understand it, it was originally designed as a communications system that could survive a nucleur exchange. But, I'm not a politician.
Think about it. It's an organization marking these individuals as pornographers, satanists, and everything else they could possibly think of. By listing a site on their ban list under a given category, they make a statement that the site in question falls under that category and that the site's authors are responsible for such content. Whether or not you or I would look down on them for this is immaterial. If a person uses the CyberPatrol software and turns on blocking for a given category, then he thinks that sort of content is distasteful. To list the content of a site as satanic is to accuse the authors of creating that content, and therefore defame them to all who would use CyberPatrol. IANAL, but that's not legal.
I think puzzles, brain teasers and the like are excellent, but I realize that some may not agree. You should give puzzles their own icon so that they can be filtered out, but I would definately say go for it.
So it's biodegradable. How useful is it? One of the best things about plastic as a material is that it last a long time as well as being easy to work with and reasonably strong for its mass. Personally, the idea of my keyboard growing moss on it is not appealing...
This technology is not intended for ISP use. If you read the article, the suggested uses are things like corporate campus networks and special events requiring high bandwidth. You don't get one to your house. You get one between your two great big office buildings or the two ends of your college campus, or you set one of these up at a big conference.
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As nice as this scheme might be compared to previous quantum cryptography schemes, there are still fundamental problemns with implementing quantum cryptography. First off, you need a single, otherwise unused optical fiber to connect the two boxes. This means running your own cable. There's really no way around that. You're not going to find unrepeated, unused fiber just lying around.
Even not knowing the video format, how hard could it be to hack two tivos such that one broadcasts the data it's storing over the wireless link, and the other stores said data. Combine that with a good antenna, and one guy on the block could provide cable for everyone.
The "polution shifting" problem is much less of a problem than it might seem at first glance. Assume that all the extra electricity necessary to power all traditional electric cars is produced by combusting gasoline. However, instead of doing this in a million independent facilities (the engines of your car) with almost no monitoring and very loose ecological controls, it is done in a single facility carefully designed for maximum efficiency. So instead of people driving untuned decade old gas guzzlers, everyone is driving with the most efficient engine possible.
In addition, since all the polution is produced in one place, many measures can be taken to ensure that the polution is minimized.
Basically, it's like everyone getting their power from one big car that is constantly worked on by a team of engineers to ensure maximum efficiency.
So in the worst case, electric cars are better.
Note that Dahmler-Chrysler is not a US company. They are a German company. While you are right that US oil interests might oppose this, I don't know much about German oil interests. Germany being a european country is in a very different place with respect to cars than the US. They have things like fast trains. You can get from one city to another in Germany by train. You don't need a car quite as much as you do in the US.
So Dahmler-Chrysler has a more or less free hand to do their magic, and when it's ready, they can sell it to the US. It's a lot easier to push something new if it has already been proven.
Twice in this article, it is stated that the artist sees no royalties until the record company recoups its recording costs. Why then do the authors subtract artists' royalties from the record companies profits when discussing how many disc sales it takes for them to break even? The results in the article go something like:
$500000/($8.00-$2.25) = 86957
whereas the result of not paying the artist before recouping your investment goes something like:
$500000/$8.00 = 62500
I would guess that a significantly larger percentage of albums sell this many copies, probaby more like 20%, as opposed to the 16% number quoted for the article's figures.
In any case, this is a much better return rate than, say, veture capitalists get. They can only expect 10% of their investments to make money. VCs are an entirely different group of money grubbing bastards though...
Think of this as a replacement for your lawn mower engine. You use your lawn mower for probably an hour a week 35 weeks a year. That's 42 years of near-silent lawn mowing. And you don't have to rake, unlike an unpowered mower.
It would also make a good second stage for a UPS setup, assuming you could get it to turn on automatically. I wouldn't be surprised to see APC or the like with something along those lines soon.
As for the dangers of hydrogen, look at the tanks of propane that many americans keep in their backyards for their grills. Look at the butane lighter in your pocket. Hydrogen isn't *that* dangerous.
A quick perusal of this company's web site will show you that they've thought of that. First off, the on-shore generator is designed to minimise visual impact. It does a reasonably good idea. From their photos, I would say it's no worse than a life guard shack or something similar.
There is also an offshore variant. It sits in 15m of water within 1km of the shore. It's bright yellow, presumably so ships don't run into it. It's probably less than 3 meters high, when it doesn't have the optional wind power attachment. It generates 2MW w/o wind turbine, 3.5 with. Groups of them can function as a breakwater, which may not be valuable for a resort area, but for a port town without a bay, it's great.
To me, the real promise of this technology is in use as a breakwater. I'm from Oregon. There are many, many places were artificial jetties have been created to make it possible/easier to operate a port on the coast. Instead of just letting the waves dash themselves to death on the rocks and sand of the jetties, these generators make them useful.
And don't worry about ecological disruption. Waves break, force a bunch of water onto the beach, and then that water flows back into the ocean. All the energy of the waves is being transformed into sound and heat. By sucking a little of that energy out, we just decrease the amount of sound and heat comming off of the waves. As the electricity is used to do work, heat is produced. So there's no real net change in energy flow. And don't even think about hurting the environment by stealing a little heat. It's completely negligable.
I would avoid Intel. They probably do use unix for their chip design workstations, but the likelyhood of getting an internship developing that software is rather low. Most of the rest of the organization is completely terrified of anything that doesn't come from Microsoft. I speak from experience.
The work place has a poor reputation for a reason as well. I worked in a "bull pen" last summer. A large cubicle with two large desks and four contractors. It sucked. Not as bad as sharing a compressed cube though...
On the plus side, they pay well, as long as you get to negotiate your own rate. Their intern program doesn't let you do that, so go the contractor route if you can and you want to work there.
Last year while I was at school, a friend of mine was playing around wiht network programming. He wrote a relativly simple piece of software. It simply listens to the network and responds to every TCP packet by spoofing the recipient's IP address and closing that connection. He didn't think it would work, but he ran it. It worked. He then realized that he had sshed into his box in his dorm room across campus to do the coding, and that his connection had just been killed. He quickly called one of his suitemates and had them press the power switch. Thankfully, CWRUnet Services never took action against him. It was basically an accident. But, think about it. For a brief period of time, all broadcast traffic on our network came to a schreeching halt. Thankfully, our network is mostly switched ATM. But, if one were to hang a box with a similar tool installed on it off of an ISP's external line, even if it weren't acting as a gateway (ie, even if traffic didn't need to pass through it to get to its destination), it could effectively cut off all connections to and from the ISP. Put such a box on a larger pipe, and you have an internet off switch. Of course, it doesn't work for UDP, so we could all still play Quake3 :)
Now, I don't know that the government would want to be able to turn off the internet. As I understand it, it was originally designed as a communications system that could survive a nucleur exchange. But, I'm not a politician.
Think about it. It's an organization marking these individuals as pornographers, satanists, and everything else they could possibly think of. By listing a site on their ban list under a given category, they make a statement that the site in question falls under that category and that the site's authors are responsible for such content. Whether or not you or I would look down on them for this is immaterial. If a person uses the CyberPatrol software and turns on blocking for a given category, then he thinks that sort of content is distasteful. To list the content of a site as satanic is to accuse the authors of creating that content, and therefore defame them to all who would use CyberPatrol. IANAL, but that's not legal.
I think puzzles, brain teasers and the like are excellent, but I realize that some may not agree. You should give puzzles their own icon so that they can be filtered out, but I would definately say go for it.
So it's biodegradable. How useful is it? One of the best things about plastic as a material is that it last a long time as well as being easy to work with and reasonably strong for its mass. Personally, the idea of my keyboard growing moss on it is not appealing...
This technology is not intended for ISP use. If you read the article, the suggested uses are things like corporate campus networks and special events requiring high bandwidth. You don't get one to your house. You get one between your two great big office buildings or the two ends of your college campus, or you set one of these up at a big conference.