It doesn't matter how much they protest; it doesn't make the whole episode any less ironic. The more they promise they won't do it that way again unless they feel they have a legal right to, the more they point out the fact that they can delete your books (and modify them? and inspect notes? reading patterns? what else?) any time they really want to.
The upshot is: they've demonstrated the presence of the memory hole and their ability and willingness to use it. They're sorry they got caught, and they'd like you to forget all about it and by yourself a Kindle.
instead of abstracting everything and assuming everyone knew as much as them [...] resent the way mathematicians try to maintain their elitist clique
Umm... parent article is so many flavors of wrong I don't know where to start, so I'll just tick off some things:
For about the past hundred years, abstracting everything is what has allowed modern mathematics to become further advanced
If you go back before math got so abstract, things don't get easier -- they just get more complicated and arbitrary.
Notation looks scary if you're not familiar with it, but it's harder to learn the math without it. We've tried writing it all down in prose, and that seriously doesn't work.
Mathematicians aren't born knowing all of math and its associated notation; every time we go into a new subfield we have to learn all of that, same as you.
As a math guy, I would love it if more people were interested in learning and doing serious math. Many mathematicians devote their lives to trying to do improve this situation. So, if you've got some magical formula that'll make John Conway eclipse rock stars and hotel heiresses in the tabloids, then by all means let us know about it!
I won't hold my breath, though.
In summary: maintaining our elitist clique takes no effort whatsoever. And if you've got an allergy to abstract thought, then maybe you're just not 37337 enough to join us...
First off, the way you want to make the stuff is as a thin plastic film. Aluminize both sides, and you can apply the voltage very easily. Fold it in half, and the high voltage electrode is sealed inside the plastic, so you're less likely to electrocute people.
Next, roll it up, except keep a gap between each layer so you can blow air through the roll. This will need something like the middle layer of corrugated cardboard -- making little air channels against the film.
Finally, you want a bellows, to pump air back and forth through the roll. Syncronize the voltage with the bellows, but out of phase, and you'll get a heat pump, which works like this:
turn on the voltage: plastic heats up
pump the air out: push hot air to outside of fridge
turn off the voltage: plastic cools down
pump the air in: pull cool air into fridge
The great thing about this is that if you use a long roll of the stuff, you can make a temperature difference much greater than the on vs. off temperature gap. Each segment of the roll does the same refrigeration trick in parallel, but temperature difference is wired up in series, so your the temperature of the fridge is limited only by practical matters like leakage.
Note that you don't even need to pump air all the way through the roll; as long as the air is moving back and forth, you'll get the refrigeration effect.
However, they still deposit the GaN as a thin layer on GaAs wafers. So, never fear: your LED's will still have plenty of carcinogenic arsenic in it, for the forseeable future!
If you've been doing pure math, you might not be as practiced with analysis and applied functions as people who've been doing physics for a while. Just because you know Bessel functions, elliptical integrals, and stuff doesn't mean you're familiar enough with their use to pass a time-limited exam...
The books I have are:
Mathews and Walker's Mathematical Methods of Physics
Arfken and Weber's Mathematical Methods for Physicists
If you don't already have it, I also recommend the Handbook of Mathematical Functions as a classic reference.
You're right, this is basically a fancy LED. The difference seems to be that they're exercising control over when the holes and electrons recombine, in order to switch it off and on much faster.
In a regular LED, you have to flood the diode with minority carriers, and wait for them to recombine spontaneously, which presumably has a nice long time constant, so you can't actually turn it off and on very easily...
In this exciton thing, they're letting the minority carriers combine into excitons first, which (somehow) lets them control the recombination more precisely, and allows them to switch it off and on directly with the current.
In high-speed communications, they use lasers, which are basically LED's where the recombination is accelerated by stimulated emission, instead of spontaneous emission. You can look at the exciton thing as an attempt to do the same thing more cheaply, and on a smaller scale.
Counterpoint of order: You are wrong. Galileo was not "imprisoned for using a Papal imprimatur" on his book. He was imprisoned because he was accused of writing about heliocentrism, after he'd been told not to by the Catholic Church. Hey, that makes it all OK, doesn't it?
There's actually some dispute over exactly what he was told not to. It seems pretty clear that Galileo's personal understanding was that he was told not to advocate heliocentrism, so the book he wrote didn't explicitly affirm it one way or another -- it just laid out the arguments. But the people who had him arrested, on "vehement suspicion of heresy" IIRC, didn't see it that way.
So, he wasn't tortured or killed, he was just threatened with torture and death. And, ultimately, kept under house arrest for the rest of his life for it.
Seriously, you need to do some research. I'd read all this stuff years ago, and checking up on Wikipedia confirmed most of it. Unless you actually knew it already, and you're deliberately trying to spin-doctor one of the biggest PR catastrophes the RCC has ever brought on itself (and that's really saying something).
So, yes, it *is* something that needs to be apologized for, and frankly, a statue doesn't cut it.
Are there any reasons why current GPU designs can't be adapted for hardware assisted raytracing?
Yes. Current GPU designs are very poor at branching; and the the geometry acceleration structures in ray tracing (which take a big part of the time) use lots of branches to traverse. It's possible there may be some way to circumvent this problem, but I haven't heard of anyone finding one yet...
You may still be able to use the GPU to accelerate some parts of the ray tracing pipeline. Surface shading in ray tracing is very similar to pixel shading in rasterization; and at any rate you should be able to use the GPU as a postprocessor to combine the rays into the final image. But so far the GPU has proven poorly adapted to the abovementioned geometry processing.
The obvious problem with layering hacks on top of hacks to make your games look better is that it takes more time and money to pay programmers to develop them.
However, one of the clear trends in gaming is spending more on game art and artists than on programming and programmers, and maybe a less obvious problem is that working with hacks is a lot harder for the artists, as well. As an example: setting up shadows in rasterization is not too difficult, codewise (it's fairly expensive, timewise, but clearly workable if you don't have too many lights).
However, from an artist's point of view, rasterized shadows are wonky, counterintuitive, and fiddly to use. You have to specify which lights cast shadows of which objects on which other objects. The specific angles of lights, cameras, and the scene in question can cause ugly artifacts, which may or may not be possible to eradicate. This is particularly a problem in interactive play, where it may not be practical to preview all possible combinations of the above.
So, an overlooked advantage of ray tracing may be to provide a better artistic *medium* for game developers -- if you can afford it....
Read the original TPM spec. Enabling ubiquitous, hardware-enforced DRM was a primary design goal. More to the point, that's what TPM hardware companies are selling themselves as, whenever they talk to anyone except potential end-users. The mere fact that you can potentially use it for other, comparatively benign things, is beside the point except inasmuch as it allows this kind of marketing.
Besides, there are two problems with these "boot security" features:
TPM doesn't, and can't, provide as much security as the marketing implies
you don't need TPM to get the same concrete benefits TPM does provide.
First off, just because you sign your kernel doesn't mean it's secure. If your entire system is controlled by an insecure OS, and if somebody exploits a hole, they can still tell it to do whatever they want. An attacker can still use your key to sign or decode anything they want, even if they can't read it from the TPM hardware.
But, for the sake of argument, say that this is still a step up. You still don't need a TPM chip for that; you can build crypto hardware with a write-only keyspace, and throw in user-controlled tripwire services on boot, without adding a manufacturer-fixed unique identity key in a tamper-resistant chip. The only practical use for that is the kind of ubiquitous DRM games that TPM was designed to deliver in the first place.
The only way I'd buy hardware with security features like this is if the user (with physical access to the hardware) was able to completely scrub all identity information from it, and generate a new identity key -- tabula rasa. Of course this means that the whole thing could be simulated in software, and nobody else could be certain you were running a particular piece of hardware with hardware-enforced constraints on the software configuration. Which, of course, is the entire goddamn point.
Google can't possibly corner the market on communications. It makes more sense as a defense against the breakdown of network neutrality -- the whole point of killing network neutrality is so that big teleco's can extort money from big network players like Google; the little guys aren't worth billing...
If Google owns it's own pipes, they have a level of immunity.
Back in the early 20th century, Edison was the Bill Gates of the technology world. And, like Gates, he wasn't above stealing his "innovations" from the actual innovators. And, one of the things he "invented" was movie technology -- cameras, projectors, etc.
So, that's interesting enough, but the IP aspect is: once Edison, by hook or by crook, managed to get the US patents for the movies, he formed the Motion Picture Patents trust, and tried to leverage this to a monopoly on movie production, distribution, and performance...
Ultimately, this effort failed, but one of the consequences was that the companies that actually made it big in the movie biz set themselves up all the way out in California, because that made it harder for them to evade the MPP peoples' attempts to enforce their legal IP rights.
In other words, the same organizations that are trying to crack down on filesharing are the ones that made it big by ignoring the intellectual property of others...
It sucks the moisture out of the air, then you heat it up and evaporate the water, leaving the salts behind to be reused.
The great thing about is, all you need is a heat source. You can either burn fuel, or use waste heat coming off a turbine, or even use solar energy -- you need temperatures above boiling, but not too much higher.
This is the same stuff they use for solar-powered heat pumps, except there they use a closed loop system, and evaporate the water at low pressure to get air conditioning.
... plus, it's very finely divided, which makes it much more active than the big chunks of lead that we avoid because they cause brain damage.
In general, any "nanotechnology" that isn't encapsulated will have this problem; a very large specific surface area can make things hazardous even if the substance is otherwise chemically inert.
And I'll second parent's assertion that it's not actually nanotechnology; it's friggin' chemistry. When you can program it, or it can reproduce, *then* you can call it genuine nanotech; not before.
They actually use 4 projectors mounted around the equator. So, the "typical setup" still has a problem at the poles (like a 3-projector setup would). However, presumably most people will be standing around looking at the equator, so that might not be such a practical problem.
You'd get very bad distortion on the boundary between the two. Three has the same problem; four is the minimum you need to avoid "singularities" in the projection.
I'm actually a little surprised they didn't use more. I'd be interested to know how they keep the projectors in focus over the whole surface...
... when MS actually does something to, like, promote interoperability.
Such as, release useful information on SMB. Publically, not under NDA. Or, release the specs to their current office suite format, without "licenses" that make it useless to anyone who wants to actually use it. Or, if they actually ported one of their applications to, y'know, operate under Linux.
Plus, I'm a little unclear on what this "truce" entails from the open source side. Are we supposed to stop taking their market share? Swear off the desktop? Honestly, I ordered the Free Software commandos to back off last week; the MS OSS interoperability team can now resume operations.
Overdoing it much, are we? Come on, "disgusting"? "music which didn't belong"?
I suppose it's possible this guy isn't a shill. We've all met somebody with that self-righteous fundie attitude, right? Gravitating that kind of crap to a religion is more common, but there are other things to attach it to -- the point is to feel superior to everyone else...
So, I'm tempted to say vulgar things about sock puppets, but on the off chance that this guy is for real (and since on the internet nobody knows you're a dog), I'll reply on that basis:
News flash for you, buddy -- some students drink alcohol, even though they're underage! And, some people use druuuugs! And trespass, and, like, jaywalk and stuff. We must stop all this disgusting, illegal behavior right now!
So, how about we have mandatory drug tests for all students. And, we could have campus cops with breathalyzers on weekends. Being a student is a privilege, you know -- any student who refuses to be tested on demand can be expelled.
Since you're posting on Slashdot, I assume you know what a computer is. Computers copy bits, that's what makes them useful. So, tell me: ultimately, what kind of enforcement do you think will necessary to stop college students from trading files?
and I haven't actually used the new shell. But from what I've read about it, Monad is something I've been looking for for years, in a shell.
Basically, shell programming sucks. And I say this as someone who has to do a lot of it, for a living. You can work with it, but it's awkward, and error-prone, and fragile because everything has to be passed as an friggin' untyped text stream. Yes, text streams are simple, and to their credit, they do allow Unix tools to work together, kinda. And everyone knows that suckage is relative; you're brilliant as long as everything else sucks worse.
But, the *right* way to pipe data is to pass streams of objects; if you have a set of tools can do that, they will suck less. It is of course unfortunate that Monad is tied to such a proprietary platform...
I think the confusing part is that, in the terminology of conventional, "synchronous" design, "asynchronous logic" is used to mean "the combinatorial logic in a single stage". What conventional, clock-based design typically does is break the logic up into stages with clocked latches in between, thus limiting the depth of each "asynchronous" logic stage.
Unfortunately, self-clocked design (like the reported ARM uses) is also sometimes called "asynchronous" logic design; however, this is a completely different kind of thing than the "asynchronous" combinatorial logic used in clock-based design. Self-clocked design also does combinatorial logic in latched stages, but uses a self-timed asynchronous protocol to run the latches instead of a synchronous clock. Basically, the combinatorial logic figures out when it's finished, and tells both the next stage ("data's ready, latch it") and the input latch from the previous stage ("I'm done; gimme some more data").
To close the loop, each stage can wait until there's new data ready at its inputs, and space to put the output data. Thus, in absence of some bottleneck, your chip will simply run as fast as it can.
To overclock a self-timed design, you simply increase the voltage. No need to screw around with clock multipliers; as long as your oxide holds up, your traces don't migrate, and the chip doesn't melt...
I won't even look at DRM formats. Even if it weren't a matter of principle (which it is), I don't want to fiddle with exotic (expensive) devices or weird non-portable "authentication".
Also, charging *more* than a paperback is ridiculous. Not only have they cut out the entire physical distribution system (which is the main cost for print books anyway), they don't even have to print the damn things. If it's not cheaper and more convenient for me than going to a bookstore (or a library...) then why should I bother?
What's with this loaded "holding me back" BS, anyway? Didn't your mommy tell you "if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" You have the additional problem that very few people seem to want to jump off the cliff in the first place...
I often read large PDF, PS, html, and text files offline on my laptop. If that counts as E-books, I'm an avid user already.
There are high tech flywheels you can buy for UPS service; they may also be useful for load control.
You'd buy more UPS capacity than you need for emergency power outage, then use the additional margin to cut off demand peaks.
Well, you could also have an automated cutoff for nonessential load (like 3 of 4 fluorescent lights or something). Or, you could use a battery UPS instead. But the flywheel is cooler...
IIRC, the oceans are the primary CO2 sink for the environment -- much bigger than all land biomass. There's a lot of dissolved CO2, and if you heat up the cold water, it won't hold as much; you'll be emitting huge amounts of greenhouse gases.
On top of that, the amount of electrical energy you get out of OTEC is very small compared to the total amount of heat transferred. 40F to 80F is a pretty thin heat gradient compared to nuclear or fossil fuels, so the basic laws of thermodynamics dictate a much lower thermal efficiency. On top of that, you're dealing with low pressures and low pressure gradients, so the practical inefficiencies are going to be worse than conventional fossil fuels too.
So you can expect an OTEC plant to be a much worse CO2 producer than even the worst coal-burning plants.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC the author was Charles Stross, and the story was "Yellow Snow".
It doesn't matter how much they protest; it doesn't make the whole episode any less ironic. The more they promise they won't do it that way again unless they feel they have a legal right to, the more they point out the fact that they can delete your books (and modify them? and inspect notes? reading patterns? what else?) any time they really want to.
The upshot is: they've demonstrated the presence of the memory hole and their ability and willingness to use it. They're sorry they got caught, and they'd like you to forget all about it and by yourself a Kindle.
instead of abstracting everything and assuming everyone knew as much as them [...] resent the way mathematicians try to maintain their elitist clique
Umm... parent article is so many flavors of wrong I don't know where to start, so I'll just tick off some things:
In summary: maintaining our elitist clique takes no effort whatsoever. And if you've got an allergy to abstract thought, then maybe you're just not 37337 enough to join us...
First off, the way you want to make the stuff is as a thin plastic film. Aluminize both sides, and you can apply the voltage very easily. Fold it in half, and the high voltage electrode is sealed inside the plastic, so you're less likely to electrocute people.
Next, roll it up, except keep a gap between each layer so you can blow air through the roll. This will need something like the middle layer of corrugated cardboard -- making little air channels against the film.
Finally, you want a bellows, to pump air back and forth through the roll. Syncronize the voltage with the bellows, but out of phase, and you'll get a heat pump, which works like this:
The great thing about this is that if you use a long roll of the stuff, you can make a temperature difference much greater than the on vs. off temperature gap. Each segment of the roll does the same refrigeration trick in parallel, but temperature difference is wired up in series, so your the temperature of the fridge is limited only by practical matters like leakage.
Note that you don't even need to pump air all the way through the roll; as long as the air is moving back and forth, you'll get the refrigeration effect.
However, they still deposit the GaN as a thin layer on GaAs wafers. So, never fear: your LED's will still have plenty of carcinogenic arsenic in it, for the forseeable future!
If you've been doing pure math, you might not be as practiced with analysis and applied functions as people who've been doing physics for a while. Just because you know Bessel functions, elliptical integrals, and stuff doesn't mean you're familiar enough with their use to pass a time-limited exam...
The books I have are:
If you don't already have it, I also recommend the Handbook of Mathematical Functions as a classic reference.
You're right, this is basically a fancy LED. The difference seems to be that they're exercising control over when the holes and electrons recombine, in order to switch it off and on much faster.
In a regular LED, you have to flood the diode with minority carriers, and wait for them to recombine spontaneously, which presumably has a nice long time constant, so you can't actually turn it off and on very easily...
In this exciton thing, they're letting the minority carriers combine into excitons first, which (somehow) lets them control the recombination more precisely, and allows them to switch it off and on directly with the current.
In high-speed communications, they use lasers, which are basically LED's where the recombination is accelerated by stimulated emission, instead of spontaneous emission. You can look at the exciton thing as an attempt to do the same thing more cheaply, and on a smaller scale.
Counterpoint of order: You are wrong. Galileo was not "imprisoned for using a Papal imprimatur" on his book. He was imprisoned because he was accused of writing about heliocentrism, after he'd been told not to by the Catholic Church. Hey, that makes it all OK, doesn't it?
There's actually some dispute over exactly what he was told not to. It seems pretty clear that Galileo's personal understanding was that he was told not to advocate heliocentrism, so the book he wrote didn't explicitly affirm it one way or another -- it just laid out the arguments. But the people who had him arrested, on "vehement suspicion of heresy" IIRC, didn't see it that way.
So, he wasn't tortured or killed, he was just threatened with torture and death. And, ultimately, kept under house arrest for the rest of his life for it.
Seriously, you need to do some research. I'd read all this stuff years ago, and checking up on Wikipedia confirmed most of it. Unless you actually knew it already, and you're deliberately trying to spin-doctor one of the biggest PR catastrophes the RCC has ever brought on itself (and that's really saying something).
So, yes, it *is* something that needs to be apologized for, and frankly, a statue doesn't cut it.
Yes. Current GPU designs are very poor at branching; and the the geometry acceleration structures in ray tracing (which take a big part of the time) use lots of branches to traverse. It's possible there may be some way to circumvent this problem, but I haven't heard of anyone finding one yet...
You may still be able to use the GPU to accelerate some parts of the ray tracing pipeline. Surface shading in ray tracing is very similar to pixel shading in rasterization; and at any rate you should be able to use the GPU as a postprocessor to combine the rays into the final image. But so far the GPU has proven poorly adapted to the abovementioned geometry processing.
The obvious problem with layering hacks on top of hacks to make your games look better is that it takes more time and money to pay programmers to develop them.
However, one of the clear trends in gaming is spending more on game art and artists than on programming and programmers, and maybe a less obvious problem is that working with hacks is a lot harder for the artists, as well. As an example: setting up shadows in rasterization is not too difficult, codewise (it's fairly expensive, timewise, but clearly workable if you don't have too many lights).
However, from an artist's point of view, rasterized shadows are wonky, counterintuitive, and fiddly to use. You have to specify which lights cast shadows of which objects on which other objects. The specific angles of lights, cameras, and the scene in question can cause ugly artifacts, which may or may not be possible to eradicate. This is particularly a problem in interactive play, where it may not be practical to preview all possible combinations of the above.
So, an overlooked advantage of ray tracing may be to provide a better artistic *medium* for game developers -- if you can afford it....
Besides, there are two problems with these "boot security" features:
First off, just because you sign your kernel doesn't mean it's secure. If your entire system is controlled by an insecure OS, and if somebody exploits a hole, they can still tell it to do whatever they want. An attacker can still use your key to sign or decode anything they want, even if they can't read it from the TPM hardware.
But, for the sake of argument, say that this is still a step up. You still don't need a TPM chip for that; you can build crypto hardware with a write-only keyspace, and throw in user-controlled tripwire services on boot, without adding a manufacturer-fixed unique identity key in a tamper-resistant chip. The only practical use for that is the kind of ubiquitous DRM games that TPM was designed to deliver in the first place.
The only way I'd buy hardware with security features like this is if the user (with physical access to the hardware) was able to completely scrub all identity information from it, and generate a new identity key -- tabula rasa. Of course this means that the whole thing could be simulated in software, and nobody else could be certain you were running a particular piece of hardware with hardware-enforced constraints on the software configuration. Which, of course, is the entire goddamn point.
Google can't possibly corner the market on communications. It makes more sense as a defense against the breakdown of network neutrality -- the whole point of killing network neutrality is so that big teleco's can extort money from big network players like Google; the little guys aren't worth billing...
If Google owns it's own pipes, they have a level of immunity.
Back in the early 20th century, Edison was the Bill Gates of the technology world. And, like Gates, he wasn't above stealing his "innovations" from the actual innovators. And, one of the things he "invented" was movie technology -- cameras, projectors, etc.
So, that's interesting enough, but the IP aspect is: once Edison, by hook or by crook, managed to get the US patents for the movies, he formed the Motion Picture Patents trust, and tried to leverage this to a monopoly on movie production, distribution, and performance...
Ultimately, this effort failed, but one of the consequences was that the companies that actually made it big in the movie biz set themselves up all the way out in California, because that made it harder for them to evade the MPP peoples' attempts to enforce their legal IP rights.
In other words, the same organizations that are trying to crack down on filesharing are the ones that made it big by ignoring the intellectual property of others...
It sucks the moisture out of the air, then you heat it up and evaporate the water, leaving the salts behind to be reused.
The great thing about is, all you need is a heat source. You can either burn fuel, or use waste heat coming off a turbine, or even use solar energy -- you need temperatures above boiling, but not too much higher.
This is the same stuff they use for solar-powered heat pumps, except there they use a closed loop system, and evaporate the water at low pressure to get air conditioning.
In general, any "nanotechnology" that isn't encapsulated will have this problem; a very large specific surface area can make things hazardous even if the substance is otherwise chemically inert.
And I'll second parent's assertion that it's not actually nanotechnology; it's friggin' chemistry. When you can program it, or it can reproduce, *then* you can call it genuine nanotech; not before.
... a complementary do-it-yourself catheter kit!
They actually use 4 projectors mounted around the equator. So, the "typical setup" still has a problem at the poles (like a 3-projector setup would). However, presumably most people will be standing around looking at the equator, so that might not be such a practical problem.
I'm actually a little surprised they didn't use more. I'd be interested to know how they keep the projectors in focus over the whole surface...
Such as, release useful information on SMB. Publically, not under NDA. Or, release the specs to their current office suite format, without "licenses" that make it useless to anyone who wants to actually use it. Or, if they actually ported one of their applications to, y'know, operate under Linux.
Plus, I'm a little unclear on what this "truce" entails from the open source side. Are we supposed to stop taking their market share? Swear off the desktop? Honestly, I ordered the Free Software commandos to back off last week; the MS OSS interoperability team can now resume operations.
I suppose it's possible this guy isn't a shill. We've all met somebody with that self-righteous fundie attitude, right? Gravitating that kind of crap to a religion is more common, but there are other things to attach it to -- the point is to feel superior to everyone else...
So, I'm tempted to say vulgar things about sock puppets, but on the off chance that this guy is for real (and since on the internet nobody knows you're a dog), I'll reply on that basis:
Basically, shell programming sucks. And I say this as someone who has to do a lot of it, for a living. You can work with it, but it's awkward, and error-prone, and fragile because everything has to be passed as an friggin' untyped text stream. Yes, text streams are simple, and to their credit, they do allow Unix tools to work together, kinda. And everyone knows that suckage is relative; you're brilliant as long as everything else sucks worse.
But, the *right* way to pipe data is to pass streams of objects; if you have a set of tools can do that, they will suck less. It is of course unfortunate that Monad is tied to such a proprietary platform...
Unfortunately, self-clocked design (like the reported ARM uses) is also sometimes called "asynchronous" logic design; however, this is a completely different kind of thing than the "asynchronous" combinatorial logic used in clock-based design. Self-clocked design also does combinatorial logic in latched stages, but uses a self-timed asynchronous protocol to run the latches instead of a synchronous clock. Basically, the combinatorial logic figures out when it's finished, and tells both the next stage ("data's ready, latch it") and the input latch from the previous stage ("I'm done; gimme some more data").
To close the loop, each stage can wait until there's new data ready at its inputs, and space to put the output data. Thus, in absence of some bottleneck, your chip will simply run as fast as it can.
To overclock a self-timed design, you simply increase the voltage. No need to screw around with clock multipliers; as long as your oxide holds up, your traces don't migrate, and the chip doesn't melt...
Also, charging *more* than a paperback is ridiculous. Not only have they cut out the entire physical distribution system (which is the main cost for print books anyway), they don't even have to print the damn things. If it's not cheaper and more convenient for me than going to a bookstore (or a library...) then why should I bother?
What's with this loaded "holding me back" BS, anyway? Didn't your mommy tell you "if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" You have the additional problem that very few people seem to want to jump off the cliff in the first place...
I often read large PDF, PS, html, and text files offline on my laptop. If that counts as E-books, I'm an avid user already.
Well, you could also have an automated cutoff for nonessential load (like 3 of 4 fluorescent lights or something). Or, you could use a battery UPS instead. But the flywheel is cooler...
random link
On top of that, the amount of electrical energy you get out of OTEC is very small compared to the total amount of heat transferred. 40F to 80F is a pretty thin heat gradient compared to nuclear or fossil fuels, so the basic laws of thermodynamics dictate a much lower thermal efficiency. On top of that, you're dealing with low pressures and low pressure gradients, so the practical inefficiencies are going to be worse than conventional fossil fuels too.
So you can expect an OTEC plant to be a much worse CO2 producer than even the worst coal-burning plants.