Initially when I read this story I thought (momemtarily forgetting the ACTUAL laws of physics):
"Hold on, wouldn't the refractive index of the material be between 0 and 1?"
The theory being that objects with an index above 1 "focus" electromagnetic waves while ones with an index below 1 would diffract them (same shaped object, btw).
This would mean though, that the speed of electromegntic waves in this material would be faster than light in air / a vacuum. this is just blatantly wrong as far a current knowledge dictates.
Now if this substance has a negative refractive index, there exists a 'hole' in the range of refractive indices from -1 to 1.
There is a possibility that the atoms in this material are placed so that the microwaves are reflected off some of the copper - resulting in diffraction. A substance that is transparent to a portion of the electromangetic spectrum does not interact with the radiation as it passes through. Although, a perfectly transparent substance is virtually impossible to find.
To prove this theory, I will lead an expedition - striking out to the Galactic West ('left' on star charts) - to find an alternate route to the Spice Planet of Dune.
(I wonder is I can get funding from the Queen of Spain....)
> If you look at the UNIX world, the POSIX
> standards were only a subset of what you needed
> in an OS. The attempt by the Open Group to
> define the UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 standards still
> fell short of what it would take to build a > fully functional UNIX operating system.
Of course these standards fell short of a fully functional operating system. If the definitions were too rigid, then there would be reluctance to adopt the standards.
Some people on the standards drafting boards probably would have liked a standard fully functional OS. This has to be tempered by commercial requirements. Few groups would adhere to a standard that made their product exactly the same as everyone else's.
The ideas behind the standards are to give developers / users a core base that they can fall back on. Things that they know will work irrespective of the OS.
People can bitch and moan about this invasion of privacy all they like, but (as far as I can see) they don't have a leg to stand on.
If you agree to the terms of use of Microsoft's services, you waive the rights specified in the terms. It's just like an EULA - few people bother reading them, but they're still a binding agreement.
If you don't like it, you don't have to use it but 99.9% of passport users aren't going to care. All thanks to the "it will never happen to me" syndrome.
After reading the press release document, this is starting to smell like an early April fools prank.
Anyone seen the movie / read the book of "2001: A Space Odyssey" ?
- This year happens to be 2001.
- The computer on board the ship sent to Jupiter was called HAL (NASA has built a HAL-15).
- The "space" NASA thing is a bit too scary.
These high school shootings are just a symptom of a disease. The underlying cause may be bullying or teasing of students, but where do the bullies get their hate from? What causes them to make someone else's life a misery?
Its times like thse when cartoons about parenting licenses start to make sense.
Unfortunately, society cannot be corrected in one move. Education programs will hit a portion of their target, but many kids will just not listen.
Its an age-old problem, but the way its currently manifesting itself is a lot more violent than before.
Yes, sales will drop to the portion of society that care about where they can play their CDs. the rest of society will just try the broken CDs, find they don't work on some players and then accept it.
Some will probably think" "Gee, it's good that the record companies are trying to stamp out piracy. That way they lose less money and can charge less for CDs." But from the actions of these companies to date, they are incredibly wrong.
The majority of society will not act to shun this breach of fair-use until their favourite current affairs show sensationally exposes the music giants. The short of it is: TV stations won't run the show because the music companies either have a stake in the station or will lean on the management types.
I know this view is rather cynical, but what's left after the record labels have acted as they have recently?
The low speed that people are using could be down to their distance from the exchange.
Here in Australia, the only speed conenctions you can rent from Telstra are 256kb, 512kb or 1.5Mb. They don't offer anything higher probably because they can't guarantee the service (or their too dman lazy:) ).
Another reason could be the connections that DSL providers have to the outside world. For the number of users / modems they have, their outside connections may be too slow for higher speeds. Faster connections for them may be prohibitively expensive too. Reducing the connection speed they sell to end users avoids having to explain to people why they can only ever seem to get 15kB per sec. on a 512kb line.
I agree with your opinions on encryption export from the USA, as I am not a resident of America.
I think it would be rather humurous if someone, somewhere came up with a ground-breaking (at least to the public's eye) form of encryption (like the PGP saga). This person would not be American and their government would quickly create a law legalising the export of this encryption method to everywhere except the US.
It would probably get many politicians upset and hot under the collar when they first hear about it but al least it would make them re-think their position on the silliness of export restrictions.
With regard to this systems use in first-person shooters, turning / looking would be quite hard.
What if you quickly want to execute a 180 degree turn? Do you whip your head around and then back again (I can just see a new wave of computer-related injuries)? Or do you have to look at the edge of the screen and wait for the view to turn around?
It wouldn't be much of an improvement over keyboard-only quake. Anyone that figures out how to use a mouse with a FPS quickly jumps ahead of most keyboard users.
This would be good in MechWarrior though. Your targeting crosshair would follow the enemy 'mech you're looking at on the screen.
Creating copy-proof hardware just isn't going to work. Granted, region locking DVD players / drives could have worked if no companyhad released multi region readers or put region information into an easily accessible EEPROM.
Copy protected hard disk drives would have to know when the information being accessed is copyrighted. This could be done with a one byte flag per sector, but would require the OS to keep the data on the disk coherent.
(Can you imagine booting windows - Sorry, the file win32.dll is copyrighted - access denied).
Alternatively, copyright data could be attached on a per-file basis. i.e. The disk must know something about the file system. With the number of existing file system formats and taking into account new ones being created after disks are produced, the HDD would have to have some means of disabling the copyright flags.
Therefore, if stored data can't be protected, it must be done through an algorithm. The key fact that most companies so far forget is that: "There's always someone smarter than you."
In previous cases, the smarter people tend to be labelled "hackers". No matter how hard they try, companies will not be able to hide the algorithms they use to access the data.
What if they encrypt the algorithm? the decryption key / method must be unencrypted. it just slows the process down.
I don't think that the majority of people that want to protect copyrighted data will ever come to the conclusion that their efforts are futile. They'll just keep banging their heads against the wall.
I personally don't think that DivX should be considered a standard as yet. I like the codec as it produces excellent quality, in small files. The thing I don't like are the two halves of the codec (fast motion / low motion). The high motion codec looks great in car chases, but is really bad when people are sitting around chatting. The opposite goes for the low motion version.
A lot of movies have more low motion scenes than high action ones. This even goes for action movies. Why couldn't some smart cookie add some code to detect the difference between scenes and seamlessly switch between the two styles of compression?
There's probably some good explanation for all this, but I haven't seen it yet.
I am (fortunately) a resident of a country outside the USA. Over her in quaint little Australia we actually use the PROPER English language convention of writing a date. i.e. DD/MM/YYYY. As there is no 31st of April, we don't have a pi day.
If current TCP connection timeouts sit at 1-2 minutes for something that should be negotiated within a few seconds, what will the settings have to be for a Martian link?
Next thing you know, it will take 2 days for Internet Explorer to detect the nearest proxy server...
Part of your choice of degree should be the department that it is based at. An engineering department means that you can get accredited as an engineer.
I hate to say it, but engineers get more respect in society than scientists and tend to get better, higher paying jobs.
The "zero pollution" claim is a bit dubious. When the ydrogen fuel it uses is burnt, water vapour results. Of course, water vapour is produced naturally and falls back to the earth's surface as rain.
Unfortunately, water has one of the highest specific heats of atmospheric gases. Some information I have seen (I forget exactly where) labels water vapour as a much worse green-house gas than carbon dioxide.
All in all, I would rather have our atmosphere contaminated with water than with CO2. In high concentrations, we just get hotter, more humid days. With CO2, breathing becomes labourious.
The South Australian government would have seen the effect similar efforts in other states has had in recent years. The laws were tabled in parliament and passed. The huge public outcry was basically ignored.
As already mentioned in many comments, the proposed censorship is (virtually) unenforceable. The people suggesting the law probably know this.
The aim of this proposed law is probably to sidetrack the public from some other issue the government doesn't want talked about. What better way to hide some embarrassing crome statistics or a pay rise for politicians?
I was the administrator at Currie Hall, a residential college over the road from the University of Western Australia, for the last 18 months. Ever since UTP cable was wired to every room, students have run the show.
The network can have up to 220 computers connected. Unfortunately, there aren't enough places on the hubs for every student's room. Each person has to be manually patched into the network. Good for security, but bad when you have to unplug 30kg. of copper at the start of every year.
Scarily enough, the method of recruiting the next administrator was like the Sith Lord system. (Always two there are, a master and an apprentice)
AMD doesn't have to worry about fighting Intel. From the number of screw ups the company has made, they are doing a good job of destroying themselves. Too bad the public is usually too stupid to see how bad the company has become.
This may sound a bit harsh, but they've been getting lax sitting at the top all the time. A similar market takeover occurred between 3dfx and Nvidia. Nvidia had (and still has) a superior product which caught the makers of the voodoo series by surprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Initially when I read this story I thought (momemtarily forgetting the ACTUAL laws of physics):
"Hold on, wouldn't the refractive index of the material be between 0 and 1?"
The theory being that objects with an index above 1 "focus" electromagnetic waves while ones with an index below 1 would diffract them (same shaped object, btw).
This would mean though, that the speed of electromegntic waves in this material would be faster than light in air / a vacuum. this is just blatantly wrong as far a current knowledge dictates.
Now if this substance has a negative refractive index, there exists a 'hole' in the range of refractive indices from -1 to 1.
There is a possibility that the atoms in this material are placed so that the microwaves are reflected off some of the copper - resulting in diffraction. A substance that is transparent to a portion of the electromangetic spectrum does not interact with the radiation as it passes through. Although, a perfectly transparent substance is virtually impossible to find.
The universe is not flat!
To prove this theory, I will lead an expedition - striking out to the Galactic West ('left' on star charts) - to find an alternate route to the Spice Planet of Dune.
(I wonder is I can get funding from the Queen of Spain....)
> If you look at the UNIX world, the POSIX
> standards were only a subset of what you needed
> in an OS. The attempt by the Open Group to
> define the UNIX 95 and UNIX 98 standards still
> fell short of what it would take to build a > fully functional UNIX operating system.
Of course these standards fell short of a fully functional operating system. If the definitions were too rigid, then there would be reluctance to adopt the standards.
Some people on the standards drafting boards probably would have liked a standard fully functional OS. This has to be tempered by commercial requirements. Few groups would adhere to a standard that made their product exactly the same as everyone else's.
The ideas behind the standards are to give developers / users a core base that they can fall back on. Things that they know will work irrespective of the OS.
People can bitch and moan about this invasion of privacy all they like, but (as far as I can see) they don't have a leg to stand on.
If you agree to the terms of use of Microsoft's services, you waive the rights specified in the terms. It's just like an EULA - few people bother reading them, but they're still a binding agreement.
If you don't like it, you don't have to use it but 99.9% of passport users aren't going to care. All thanks to the "it will never happen to me" syndrome.
I think the guy that submitted this "Ask Slashdot" has been sniffing the plasma manifold exhaust again.
After reading the press release document, this is starting to smell like an early April fools prank.
Anyone seen the movie / read the book of "2001: A Space Odyssey" ?
- This year happens to be 2001.
- The computer on board the ship sent to Jupiter was called HAL (NASA has built a HAL-15).
- The "space" NASA thing is a bit too scary.
(Insert twilight zone music)
What happens after ring mouse drivers allow multiple devices to be installed in the system?
One finger typists are replaced by one finger mousers. That population would probably be exactly the same size as the current set of Mac users....
These high school shootings are just a symptom of a disease. The underlying cause may be bullying or teasing of students, but where do the bullies get their hate from? What causes them to make someone else's life a misery?
Its times like thse when cartoons about parenting licenses start to make sense.
Unfortunately, society cannot be corrected in one move. Education programs will hit a portion of their target, but many kids will just not listen.
Its an age-old problem, but the way its currently manifesting itself is a lot more violent than before.
It's good to see that someone still remembers Churchill's words, even if they are a bit twisted :).
Yes, sales will drop to the portion of society that care about where they can play their CDs. the rest of society will just try the broken CDs, find they don't work on some players and then accept it.
Some will probably think" "Gee, it's good that the record companies are trying to stamp out piracy. That way they lose less money and can charge less for CDs." But from the actions of these companies to date, they are incredibly wrong.
The majority of society will not act to shun this breach of fair-use until their favourite current affairs show sensationally exposes the music giants. The short of it is: TV stations won't run the show because the music companies either have a stake in the station or will lean on the management types.
I know this view is rather cynical, but what's left after the record labels have acted as they have recently?
The low speed that people are using could be down to their distance from the exchange.
:) ).
Here in Australia, the only speed conenctions you can rent from Telstra are 256kb, 512kb or 1.5Mb. They don't offer anything higher probably because they can't guarantee the service (or their too dman lazy
Another reason could be the connections that DSL providers have to the outside world. For the number of users / modems they have, their outside connections may be too slow for higher speeds. Faster connections for them may be prohibitively expensive too. Reducing the connection speed they sell to end users avoids having to explain to people why they can only ever seem to get 15kB per sec. on a 512kb line.
I agree with your opinions on encryption export from the USA, as I am not a resident of America.
I think it would be rather humurous if someone, somewhere came up with a ground-breaking (at least to the public's eye) form of encryption (like the PGP saga). This person would not be American and their government would quickly create a law legalising the export of this encryption method to everywhere except the US.
It would probably get many politicians upset and hot under the collar when they first hear about it but al least it would make them re-think their position on the silliness of export restrictions.
Unfortunately many modern radars don't report the altitude of an aircraft.
Seeing the altitude wouldn't really help anyway. A place that's 10km up and 300km (ground distance) away wouldn't display well.
With regard to this systems use in first-person shooters, turning / looking would be quite hard.
What if you quickly want to execute a 180 degree turn? Do you whip your head around and then back again (I can just see a new wave of computer-related injuries)? Or do you have to look at the edge of the screen and wait for the view to turn around?
It wouldn't be much of an improvement over keyboard-only quake. Anyone that figures out how to use a mouse with a FPS quickly jumps ahead of most keyboard users.
This would be good in MechWarrior though. Your targeting crosshair would follow the enemy 'mech you're looking at on the screen.
Creating copy-proof hardware just isn't going to work. Granted, region locking DVD players / drives could have worked if no companyhad released multi region readers or put region information into an easily accessible EEPROM.
Copy protected hard disk drives would have to know when the information being accessed is copyrighted. This could be done with a one byte flag per sector, but would require the OS to keep the data on the disk coherent.
(Can you imagine booting windows - Sorry, the file win32.dll is copyrighted - access denied).
Alternatively, copyright data could be attached on a per-file basis. i.e. The disk must know something about the file system. With the number of existing file system formats and taking into account new ones being created after disks are produced, the HDD would have to have some means of disabling the copyright flags.
Therefore, if stored data can't be protected, it must be done through an algorithm. The key fact that most companies so far forget is that: "There's always someone smarter than you."
In previous cases, the smarter people tend to be labelled "hackers". No matter how hard they try, companies will not be able to hide the algorithms they use to access the data.
What if they encrypt the algorithm? the decryption key / method must be unencrypted. it just slows the process down.
I don't think that the majority of people that want to protect copyrighted data will ever come to the conclusion that their efforts are futile. They'll just keep banging their heads against the wall.
I personally don't think that DivX should be considered a standard as yet. I like the codec as it produces excellent quality, in small files. The thing I don't like are the two halves of the codec (fast motion / low motion). The high motion codec looks great in car chases, but is really bad when people are sitting around chatting. The opposite goes for the low motion version.
A lot of movies have more low motion scenes than high action ones. This even goes for action movies. Why couldn't some smart cookie add some code to detect the difference between scenes and seamlessly switch between the two styles of compression?
There's probably some good explanation for all this, but I haven't seen it yet.
I am (fortunately) a resident of a country outside the USA. Over her in quaint little Australia we actually use the PROPER English language convention of writing a date. i.e. DD/MM/YYYY. As there is no 31st of April, we don't have a pi day.
I reckon Intel first chip after the apocalypse would still be compatible with programs written for an 8086 processor.
If current TCP connection timeouts sit at 1-2 minutes for something that should be negotiated within a few seconds, what will the settings have to be for a Martian link?
Next thing you know, it will take 2 days for Internet Explorer to detect the nearest proxy server...
Part of your choice of degree should be the department that it is based at. An engineering department means that you can get accredited as an engineer.
:) )
I hate to say it, but engineers get more respect in society than scientists and tend to get better, higher paying jobs.
(Hey, this is from my experience only
The "zero pollution" claim is a bit dubious. When the ydrogen fuel it uses is burnt, water vapour results. Of course, water vapour is produced naturally and falls back to the earth's surface as rain.
Unfortunately, water has one of the highest specific heats of atmospheric gases. Some information I have seen (I forget exactly where) labels water vapour as a much worse green-house gas than carbon dioxide.
All in all, I would rather have our atmosphere contaminated with water than with CO2. In high concentrations, we just get hotter, more humid days. With CO2, breathing becomes labourious.
The South Australian government would have seen the effect similar efforts in other states has had in recent years. The laws were tabled in parliament and passed. The huge public outcry was basically ignored.
As already mentioned in many comments, the proposed censorship is (virtually) unenforceable. The people suggesting the law probably know this.
The aim of this proposed law is probably to sidetrack the public from some other issue the government doesn't want talked about. What better way to hide some embarrassing crome statistics or a pay rise for politicians?
(I am a resident of Western Australia, btw)
I was the administrator at Currie Hall, a residential college over the road from the University of Western Australia, for the last 18 months. Ever since UTP cable was wired to every room, students have run the show. The network can have up to 220 computers connected. Unfortunately, there aren't enough places on the hubs for every student's room. Each person has to be manually patched into the network. Good for security, but bad when you have to unplug 30kg. of copper at the start of every year. Scarily enough, the method of recruiting the next administrator was like the Sith Lord system. (Always two there are, a master and an apprentice)
My signal processing lecturer told me that noise is any part of a signal that is unwanted.
:)
Virtually everyone's parents dislike their kid's music because it isn't a signal that their brains will "accept".
Offtopic? I'm too tired to care.
AMD doesn't have to worry about fighting Intel. From the number of screw ups the company has made, they are doing a good job of destroying themselves. Too bad the public is usually too stupid to see how bad the company has become.
This may sound a bit harsh, but they've been getting lax sitting at the top all the time. A similar market takeover occurred between 3dfx and Nvidia. Nvidia had (and still has) a superior product which caught the makers of the voodoo series by surprise.