Americans think themselves a bit safer because the NSA is not supposed to spy on them. But what tells me that the NSA is not letting a foreign partner agency collect and evaluate the data of the Americans for them and just gets back the hits? For these hits they would have no problems getting a warrant, even from a non-secret court.
No, he just compared it to an inefficient distribution (a roof with panels on the south and the north side).
As was pointed out in other comments there are 20 cells on the tree and, most probably, 10 cells on each side of the roof. Had he really compared to 20 cells in a flat panel array, he would have found that the tree distribution is less efficient than the flat panel.
By the way, there is an optimum inclination (vertical angle) of a photovoltaic module, which in Europe is between 30 and 50 (depending on the latitude and the height), see this map (pdf, 11 Mb).
I nevertheless admire the idea and the work of the young boy. As an adult I'm sure he would have spotted the error in the result, unlike the jury and the submitter of the story.
If I read the original Science paper correctly this is nothing more than an etalon in front of an absorbing material (i.e. a plate of silicon, as they used in their experiment, in front of a black sheet of paper). Of couse it works as a selective absorber or "anti-laser", this is well known.
I wonder if they wrote the Science paper just to show what you can publish using a lot of buzzwords...
The original image can be resized without showing the watermark, see their demo page (and press Ctrl +/- if you browse with Firefox). But so can the re-encoded picture, it shows the watermark only at the zoom level of 100%.
From this I suppose that there is also one zoom level at which the original picture shows the VOID watermark (you better choose it to be an odd value)!
No, it's not legal to copy the articles to Wikipedia, since they grant no other right than free view. See their copyright: basically the author retains the copyright, and grants Stanford the right to publish the article electronically.
A microwatt terahertz radiation would be a great thing. That made me check their paper. In the Optics Letters the authors just write they had " 1 microwatt", which became "about a microwatt of power" in the linked blog. The maximum really measured was just 0.1 nW. Even assuming that they can focus only 1% of the THz radiation on the detector (I didn't find them specifying it) it seems to be *much* less than 1 microwatt.
My main complaint is the shortcut for Back: neither on the Mac (Cmd + Left) nor on Windows (Alt + Left) it is possible to use the most common command with one hand. The shortcut of Opera (Ctrl + Left) is the choice IMO. Make the common things easy. Unfortunamely not even overriding the Cmd key with Ctrl in the user prefs works, because it screws up everithing. Any ideas how to assign Ctrl + Left to Back are very welcome.
My main wondering is why the Reload-OR-Stop Extension is not in the main trunk. One really needs only one or the other button. Again, the art is to simplify (Bruce Lee).
I agree with the FA that the Go menu should go away. Only the History entry is useful and could be put in Tools under the Downloads entry (as in Opera).
I also don't like the popping up of the Downloads Window. One always has to click it away, if no extension is installed. I think it would also benefit if it could be squeezed in a sidebar. With History and Bookmarks already sidebars it would even add coherency.
Tabbed browsing: for the user there are no big differences between windows and tabs. Why keep both? Keep only tabs (again, as does Opera).
As to the relationship between global warming and hurricanes, there is none. Hurricane frequency occurs on a natural cycle of warmer SSTs (sea surface temperatures) in the Atlantic
Your first statement was drawn a bit too quickly. With warmer temperatures the air has more energy, and thus a hurricane is stronger. In addition, with the global warming also the sea surface temperature gets higher, this probably with a delay of about 1200 years (the period of the oceanic water circulation).
As for the crank and his FA on how to lower the sea surface temperature, I think most don't realise, that if you deploy something that can affect something as big as an hurricane, this affects also many other things. These effects can hardly be predicted. Who thought 20 years ago that we will stop suppressing every possible forest fire?
And before we get a technology that can stop hurricanes I hope we get an international treaty that stops the military from using such a thing to create storms, otherwise we will see its number increase instead of decrease:-)
The need to describe the "best mode" in American patents, i.e. to publish the best parameters, and not just some set of parameters you feel won't be able to compete with your product, is extremely useful when you want to understand or reproduce an invention. In fact, when dealing with European patents, which do not have the "best mode" clause and require a much less detailed description, one often fetches the patent of the USA to understand it.
I hope this will help us in the fight against HIV and also help us realise, that every animal or plant species which faces extintion, takes with it such a possibility.
I had a blank page when using the (excellent, but windows only) ad-filtering program Proxomitron. Now I really don't like web pages that force me to bypass it.
Windows Media Player has only the most basic features. This and the fact than in XP it sends home the titles of the films, makes it useless for me. Keeping Zoom Player and VLC.
In terms of features it is well possible to innovate over the previous versions of WMP.
If you want to do a good job, you have to type it, in LaTeX. It's the only way to get something nice and something the professors will be able to enhance in future.
If a digitized copy of the manuscripts will do for you, you can go the scan -> image enhancement -> OCR -> save to PDF way.
For scanning, you already got a lot of good comments how to automatise the scanning of dozens of scripts. If you lack these possibilities also a SCSI or USB desktop scanner should do the job (it's definitely less than 1 min per page), so you scan a script in 2 hours. No need to bother to outsource the job to India. Probably you can scan B/W and don't need greyscale or colors. I would scan handwritten scripts at 200 DPI and save the whole pictures in front of the OCRed text, so the user doesn't see the OCRed text and can only use it for selecting and copy&paste. It would be too much work to correct the OCRed text here. For machine written text I would use 300 dpi or more for better OCRing.
As image enhancement you only need to be able to automatically orient the page so that the text is horizontal. I don't remember if Acrobat does it, but for this job I would anyhow get a good OCR program.
As OCR program I recommend FineReader, but also Omnipage is ok. FineReader does better OCR than Omnipage and Acrobat. It also saves better to PDF (with retaining all of the paragraph structure) than Omnipage.
If you keep the image before the OCRed text in the PDF you can expect files of 10MB for 100 pages for B/W scan at 200 dpi. OCRing of machine written text has become incredibly accurate, so you can do real OCR there and throw away the bitmap picture. This of course gives much nicer output (and smaller filesize), but you need to spend a lot of time correcting the text. Here the best OCR program really pays off (you probably have a lot of words which are not in a dict, need custom dicts (does Acrobat have them?),...). A program with a single flaw (e.g. that recognized you formula as text, or code as paragraph text,...) will let you waste a lot of time correcting it on every second page.
Note that your five points, which can be summarized as
1. and 2. teachers know only Windows
3. students only have Windows at home
4. tech support knows only Windows
5. colleges and offices only have Windows
show how the market primus is advantaged in this winner-takes-all market, independently of the quality of the software. It is thus better to resolve the problem (the use of proprietary instead of free software) sooner than later, when the grip can be tightened even more. And the fact that despite all Linux goes so well indicates that it has real and strong winning points (hey, it's free and developped by potentially so many people).
You are a moron. Do you think we care about people like you? Of course you're going to download the JVM. Unfortunately, web designers have to write pages for *gasp* average people! Guess what.. they use *gasp* 56k modems! More than that, like others have already said, they're reluctant to install software.
Then *gasp* *don't* *use* *Java*. If average people can't use it, don't design with it. There is more than one way.
the geek appeal of supporting the underdog... Face it, we all love the lame dogs...
We support the underdogs because we know the value of a sound competition. Market domination by a single corporation leads to less quality, higher prices, less choice... So supporting the underdog gives a benefit to the whole comunity. And underdog does not mean lame dogs: there are plenty of examples where they outperform the market holder (AMD vs Intel, Linux vs Windoze, Opera vs Netscape and IE) although it is ways easier for the monopolist to produce their products. In these cases I see a double profit, a collective and an private one, since underdogs are generally forced to give us better price/service ratios.
I make a PhD at ETHZ on this field. I don't think the NSA is worried about holographic storage, because it is still in research stage (what you have on the optical table is worth 100,000$) and because the storage densities won't be much higher than in HDs or in CD like media.
But one thing you can do very efficiently with photorefractive crystals is comparing images (at some Terabit/s). This is because to calculate the correlation of two images (which tells you if two images are similar or where a smaller image is located in an image) you need fourier transform the images. Optically you can do a Fourier transformation very efficiently simply with a lens (in 10^-10 s = 100 ps): at the focus of the lens you have the Fourier transformation of the image and the time you need is just the time the light has to cover the distance of a few centimeters. A good image comparing system can be useful for military applications (guided missiles), security checking (fingerprints, face and voice recognition), person tracking, internet traffic filtering,... All dreams for the NSA, horror for me!
About the cost: LiNbO3 is grown similarly to silicium, so I don't think the cost would be a problem if large quantities are manufactured.
About photopolymers: it is still impossible to make thick films (they are getting at 0.5 mm at present) and they are write once only (they need to be developed by UV light). You are interested in having bulk crystals instead of coated platters, because holograms can use the whole volume instead of some 2D layers as in HDs, DVDs and CDs. But photopolymers are still promising, the change of refractive index (i.e the efficincy) being much larger than in LiNbO3.
The paper addresses tecnical problems, because it is based on the scientific paper given in its references, which reports nothing revolutionary (the photochromic effect was already reported by Germans 6 months ago).
The potential storage density of holographic memories is 1000 Gbit/cm^3 (with green lasers). This limit comes from the wave-like nature of the light, requiring the structures to be greater than half its wavelenght. Typical wavelengths are in the visible (wavelength of green is around 530 nm) and tipical crystals are 1x1x1 cm^3 in size. It is possible to go to slightly shorter wavelenghts, but there the crystals start to absorb to much light (they are not transparent any more).
The demonstrated storage density in photorefractive crystals is 10 Gbit/cm^3. The main reason for the reduced density is that neighbour holograms overwrite each other (called cross talk noise). Other causes are the light scattering (by crystal defects) and the so called self-focusing of the beam in these crystals.
You may note that this is not so far beyond IBM's latest mini hardisks in PCMCIA and smaller devices, where there is even the controller included. The crystal memory needs a laser and some optics, which are not included in the volume above. So the memory density advantage is fading away (it's hard to compete with the computer industry), but there are other things that are much better, for example you can compare images very quickly (Tbit/s).
Slashdot Mirror
Americans think themselves a bit safer because the NSA is not supposed to spy on them. But what tells me that the NSA is not letting a foreign partner agency collect and evaluate the data of the Americans for them and just gets back the hits? For these hits they would have no problems getting a warrant, even from a non-secret court.
No, he just compared it to an inefficient distribution (a roof with panels on the south and the north side).
As was pointed out in other comments there are 20 cells on the tree and, most probably, 10 cells on each side of the roof. Had he really compared to 20 cells in a flat panel array, he would have found that the tree distribution is less efficient than the flat panel.
By the way, there is an optimum inclination (vertical angle) of a photovoltaic module, which in Europe is between 30 and 50 (depending on the latitude and the height), see this map (pdf, 11 Mb).
I nevertheless admire the idea and the work of the young boy. As an adult I'm sure he would have spotted the error in the result, unlike the jury and the submitter of the story.
Visible light would not be safer here, since the pulse is just 100 ns long and thus much faster than any reflex of the eye.
If I read the original Science paper correctly this is nothing more than an etalon in front of an absorbing material (i.e. a plate of silicon, as they used in their experiment, in front of a black sheet of paper). Of couse it works as a selective absorber or "anti-laser", this is well known.
I wonder if they wrote the Science paper just to show what you can publish using a lot of buzzwords...
The original image can be resized without showing the watermark, see their demo page (and press Ctrl +/- if you browse with Firefox). But so can the re-encoded picture, it shows the watermark only at the zoom level of 100%.
From this I suppose that there is also one zoom level at which the original picture shows the VOID watermark (you better choose it to be an odd value)!
The linked article at Connectify says they measured a resistance of 2 Ohm, but on the picture I read 2 MOhm!
Check yourself with the large version of the picture.
I'd say it's nearly a Gi$ = 1,073,741,824 $.
No, it's not legal to copy the articles to Wikipedia, since they grant no other right than free view. See their copyright: basically the author retains the copyright, and grants Stanford the right to publish the article electronically.
A microwatt terahertz radiation would be a great thing. That made me check their paper. In the Optics Letters the authors just write they had " 1 microwatt", which became "about a microwatt of power" in the linked blog. The maximum really measured was just 0.1 nW. Even assuming that they can focus only 1% of the THz radiation on the detector (I didn't find them specifying it) it seems to be *much* less than 1 microwatt.
AC is right, the paradox of the grandparent does not hold, sincea chineVIII.pdf
0*inf=nullity
and
a*nullity=nullity
these are the axioms A16 and A15 in his http://www.bookofparagon.com/Mathematics/PerspexM
I'm very happy with Firefox since its beginning.
My main complaint is the shortcut for Back: neither on the Mac (Cmd + Left) nor on Windows (Alt + Left) it is possible to use the most common command with one hand. The shortcut of Opera (Ctrl + Left) is the choice IMO. Make the common things easy. Unfortunamely not even overriding the Cmd key with Ctrl in the user prefs works, because it screws up everithing. Any ideas how to assign Ctrl + Left to Back are very welcome.
My main wondering is why the Reload-OR-Stop Extension is not in the main trunk. One really needs only one or the other button. Again, the art is to simplify (Bruce Lee).
I agree with the FA that the Go menu should go away. Only the History entry is useful and could be put in Tools under the Downloads entry (as in Opera).
I also don't like the popping up of the Downloads Window. One always has to click it away, if no extension is installed. I think it would also benefit if it could be squeezed in a sidebar. With History and Bookmarks already sidebars it would even add coherency.
Tabbed browsing: for the user there are no big differences between windows and tabs. Why keep both? Keep only tabs (again, as does Opera).
Your first statement was drawn a bit too quickly. With warmer temperatures the air has more energy, and thus a hurricane is stronger. In addition, with the global warming also the sea surface temperature gets higher, this probably with a delay of about 1200 years (the period of the oceanic water circulation).
As for the crank and his FA on how to lower the sea surface temperature, I think most don't realise, that if you deploy something that can affect something as big as an hurricane, this affects also many other things. These effects can hardly be predicted. Who thought 20 years ago that we will stop suppressing every possible forest fire?
And before we get a technology that can stop hurricanes I hope we get an international treaty that stops the military from using such a thing to create storms, otherwise we will see its number increase instead of decrease :-)
I hope the "best mode" will not be lost entirely.
I hope this will help us in the fight against HIV and also help us realise, that every animal or plant species which faces extintion, takes with it such a possibility.
I had a blank page when using the (excellent, but windows only) ad-filtering program Proxomitron. Now I really don't like web pages that force me to bypass it.
Windows Media Player has only the most basic features. This and the fact than in XP it sends home the titles of the films, makes it useless for me. Keeping Zoom Player and VLC.
In terms of features it is well possible to innovate over the previous versions of WMP.
If you want to do a good job, you have to type it, in LaTeX. It's the only way to get something nice and something the professors will be able to enhance in future.
If a digitized copy of the manuscripts will do for you, you can go the scan -> image enhancement -> OCR -> save to PDF way.
For scanning, you already got a lot of good comments how to automatise the scanning of dozens of scripts. If you lack these possibilities also a SCSI or USB desktop scanner should do the job (it's definitely less than 1 min per page), so you scan a script in 2 hours. No need to bother to outsource the job to India. Probably you can scan B/W and don't need greyscale or colors. I would scan handwritten scripts at 200 DPI and save the whole pictures in front of the OCRed text, so the user doesn't see the OCRed text and can only use it for selecting and copy&paste. It would be too much work to correct the OCRed text here. For machine written text I would use 300 dpi or more for better OCRing.
As image enhancement you only need to be able to automatically orient the page so that the text is horizontal. I don't remember if Acrobat does it, but for this job I would anyhow get a good OCR program.
As OCR program I recommend FineReader, but also Omnipage is ok. FineReader does better OCR than Omnipage and Acrobat. It also saves better to PDF (with retaining all of the paragraph structure) than Omnipage.
If you keep the image before the OCRed text in the PDF you can expect files of 10MB for 100 pages for B/W scan at 200 dpi. OCRing of machine written text has become incredibly accurate, so you can do real OCR there and throw away the bitmap picture. This of course gives much nicer output (and smaller filesize), but you need to spend a lot of time correcting the text. Here the best OCR program really pays off (you probably have a lot of words which are not in a dict, need custom dicts (does Acrobat have them?),...). A program with a single flaw (e.g. that recognized you formula as text, or code as paragraph text,...) will let you waste a lot of time correcting it on every second page.
How do you stop overpeer to do nasty things?
You stop buying from Interscope, Universal Music and RIAA in general (and tell them why).
Note that your five points, which can be summarized as
1. and 2. teachers know only Windows
3. students only have Windows at home
4. tech support knows only Windows
5. colleges and offices only have Windows
show how the market primus is advantaged in this winner-takes-all market, independently of the quality of the software. It is thus better to resolve the problem (the use of proprietary instead of free software) sooner than later, when the grip can be tightened even more. And the fact that despite all Linux goes so well indicates that it has real and strong winning points (hey, it's free and developped by potentially so many people).
Of course this is exactly what M$ wants.
This review of Python IDEs by David Mertz is the most recent I know of.
And underdog does not mean lame dogs: there are plenty of examples where they outperform the market holder (AMD vs Intel, Linux vs Windoze, Opera vs Netscape and IE) although it is ways easier for the monopolist to produce their products. In these cases I see a double profit, a collective and an private one, since underdogs are generally forced to give us better price/service ratios.
But one thing you can do very efficiently with photorefractive crystals is comparing images (at some Terabit/s). This is because to calculate the correlation of two images (which tells you if two images are similar or where a smaller image is located in an image) you need fourier transform the images. Optically you can do a Fourier transformation very efficiently simply with a lens (in 10^-10 s = 100 ps): at the focus of the lens you have the Fourier transformation of the image and the time you need is just the time the light has to cover the distance of a few centimeters. A good image comparing system can be useful for military applications (guided missiles), security checking (fingerprints, face and voice recognition), person tracking, internet traffic filtering,... All dreams for the NSA, horror for me!
About photopolymers: it is still impossible to make thick films (they are getting at 0.5 mm at present) and they are write once only (they need to be developed by UV light). You are interested in having bulk crystals instead of coated platters, because holograms can use the whole volume instead of some 2D layers as in HDs, DVDs and CDs. But photopolymers are still promising, the change of refractive index (i.e the efficincy) being much larger than in LiNbO3.
The paper addresses tecnical problems, because it is based on the scientific paper given in its references, which reports nothing revolutionary (the photochromic effect was already reported by Germans 6 months ago).
The demonstrated storage density in photorefractive crystals is 10 Gbit/cm^3. The main reason for the reduced density is that neighbour holograms overwrite each other (called cross talk noise). Other causes are the light scattering (by crystal defects) and the so called self-focusing of the beam in these crystals.
You may note that this is not so far beyond IBM's latest mini hardisks in PCMCIA and smaller devices, where there is even the controller included. The crystal memory needs a laser and some optics, which are not included in the volume above. So the memory density advantage is fading away (it's hard to compete with the computer industry), but there are other things that are much better, for example you can compare images very quickly (Tbit/s).