The LHC is designed with very good fail-safes so that random events like this won't shut down the accelerator for huge amounts of time. It would mean at most a day or two of no beam before things got started again. These kinds of safety trips are to be expected a couple of times a month with a machine as huge and complicated as the LHC.
I would like to see this turned around: because the RIAA's case did not offer any information about the damages done by download these 24 songs in the trial, the court should enforce that the RIAA sell all its tracks at the value assigned to each song by the jury (~$81,000). The court might even take pity of the poor industry and lower that to $40,000 if it assumes some reasonable amount of the fine (50%) was awarded for statutory damages. That way, if the RIAA accepts the ruling, they would immediately go out of business as every CD they sell would be marked up to $500,000.
Why isn't there a Draconian party running for government anywhere?
I'm a man, and I'm seriously considering getting a pink laptop. I mean, I already have a pink DS, and from what I hear, pink things are stolen much less frequently due to this bizarre stigma most men seem to have against it. Besides, a pink laptop would totally compliment my new lip stiCHAINSAW and nail polMOTORCYCLE.
It's a perfectly cromulent defence, but I am deeply concerned about the health of the long-term memories of people when a term invented 24 hours ago is "legendary."
I would have been mortified if nobody had mentioned Kuhn when discussing this sort of thing. This article (and I assume the book mentioned therein) doesn't actually address the same question as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions does. In Kuhn's work, he chooses to ignore the individuals who bring about revolutions in scientific paradigms (changes in the way scientists think about nature), claiming that is more a study in psychology and not scientific history and philosophy, which are Kuhn's areas of study. Kuhn claims that scientific revolutions occur whenever there is a critical mass of scientific anomalies--either experimental data that doesn't fit with theoretical predictions, or theories that have no support through experiment--at which point some genius or group of geniuses come up with a new way of thinking about nature, and slowly everybody in the scientific community either adopts that view or dies away in a sort of attrition warfare against the "old" viewpoint by the champions of the "new" one.
This article, however, seems to focus on the actual genius who comes up with the revolutionary innovations, which (as Kuhn correctly pointed out) cannot avoid a discussion of the psychology of those individuals. The theses of the two still tend to point in the same direction--namely, that innovations or revolutions are not asynchronous events, but are in fact the result of a contextual process of problem solving that is mostly routinized--they just look at different actors involved in that revolutionary process: the article focuses on the inventors, while Kuhn focuses on "everybody else."
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is definitely worth a read as a companion to the book in the article.
Actually, what you've hit upon is something called the "hidden variables" theory of quantum mechanics. For a while after the spookiness of entanglement was figured out, vis. the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, many physicists thought just like you do--that there was some hidden variable within the system that we could not measure, but which determined the state of the system exactly. They figured for instance that, if a certain decay process produced two photons, one left-polarized and one right-polarized, then there was some feature of the decay which determined which othe the photons is left-polarized and which right-polarized, so that our measurement of one did not "change the state" of the other photon, if merely revealed its pre-determined polarization.
It's not intuitive at all, but Bell's argument is sound. Entanglement and action-at-a-distance is real, and not due to the system's state being pre-determined by hidden variables.
This can only lead to bad things. I live in Columbus, Ohio, which has a bus system that spans almost the entire city. Columbus is a large, sprawling city, so this is no minor network we are talking about. Some time ago, when the city was growing very quickly and the bus system had added a large number of new routes, the transportation authority (COTA) hired an outside company to make a professional map of the entire bus system--again, for a city that spans 100 square miles and has 50+ bus routes, this is no trivial task.
The problem is that the company that made the map claimed copyrights on it, and won a long court battle against COTA preventing the city from posting or distributing these maps. So the only way you can get them is in paper form from the map company themselves, and they are not very happy about giving it away for free. It's nearly impossible to find a map of the entire bus system, meaning navigating using bus lines is a real bother. You have to piece together shotty, off-scale, individual route maps, and even then you have to guess which routes take you where. Check http://www.cota.com/ to see what I mean. This is one of the major complaints people have about the bus system, and probably one of the main reason more people don't use it regularly.
Don't be fools, New York. Don't make public transportation a hassle. Don't end up like Columbus. Please.
Come on, Darl, if you want anybody with a scientific or techinical disposition to take your letter seriously, you have to quote your sources and analyze the results! Look:
The initial attraction to Linux was a price tag of zero cost. Yet, they typically charge customers from $349 to $2,499 every single year.
Who is "they?" Why is this "typical?" Where do you get your numbers from?
SCO Has a Superior Kernel
By what metric? What studies show this? The only support you mention is that Linux is younger than UNIX. This is not a metric of quality in the technolgy fronteer, as new technologies superceed old ones continuously.
In a study conducted only seven months ago they found that overall, the most vulnerable operating system for manual hacker attacks was Linux, accounting for 65.64% of all hacker breaches reported.
What percentage of hacker attacks are manual, and what percentage are automated worms? What does a "hacker breach" constitute, and what kind of systems are affected by them? Are we talking about personal web servers hosting one or two files, or CIA databases?
Linux development plans and schedules are generally as unknown as they are unpredictable.
Describe the development process for the reader. How is it different from the SCO model? Is predictability in product evolution something beneficial to the world of technology, or should programmers go with the flow, developing and releasing new software versions as the technology develops?
Linux will likely continue to face challenges about its development methodologies and roadmaps as long as it continues to be a loosely organized set of volunteers who develop what they want, when they want.
What is the organization structure of Linux development? Is it really as loosely organized as you make it out to be? Where does this information come from?
When a new upgrade of Linux is required, software vendors and end users most likely have to upgrade their application as well.
How often is a complete upgrade of the Linux kernel required? What does "most likely" mean? Are there any numbers to back up this claim?
I don't think I have to continue any further. Mr. McBride, you cannot use vague terms like "most likely" and "typical" in an open letter aimed at a technologically savvy audience, and you most certainly cannot make claims without logical arguments to back them. Also, consider revising your letter to include more analysis of the stated statistics.
Surprisingly, astonomers actually "weigh" the planet by measuring either the planet's gravitational pull on the star, or the star's gravitational pull on the planet (by Newton's 3rd, they are equal). The idea is pretty simple:
1) An object travelling in a circular (or eliptical) orbit requires a certain force toward the center of the focus of the orbit, called centripetal force. It is proportional to the product of the mass times the radius of the orbiting body, and inversely proportional to the square of the period of the orbit.
2) Two massive objects will assert an attractive gravitational force on each other, proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects.
All astonomers do is equate one force to another. Astronomers believe that they can calculate the mass of the star by observing the star's apparent brightness, and looking at the star's spectrum to figure out what kind of star it is. Unfortunately, the observed brightness of a star is a function of its distance from Earth, and this measurement has a large degree of error for most stars.
Next, astronomers look at how quickly the star "wobbles" due to the orbit of the planet. This gives a good measure of the period of the planet's rotation.
The final step is to figure out how far the planet is from the star. After entering in all the data, you are left with the mass of the planet being a function of its distance from the star. If you apply some trickery in the form of Kepler's Laws, you can see that the period and radius of an orbit are related.
And that's it! Put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and you have an equation for the mass of the planet. If you are lucky, then the plain of the orbit is end-on when observed from Earth--this allows you to see how much of the star's light is blocked from the eclipsing planet, giving you some measure of the planet's size and composition.
PS- I get similar tingles when one of the Nintendo nuts goes on and on about their magical gameplay. You know, because giving Mario a water cannon revolutionized (apologies) gaming.:)
I can't wait to see what will happen to these kinds of posts in 30 years, when game console designers end up using every word in the English language, so everything becomes a pun.
"I really liked (sorry) the Nintento XZ3000 and their ombudsman (not a plug for Microsoft) because (no pun intended) they tend (no, I don't work for Sony) to focus (apologies to Apple) on developing the software (again, not a M€ plug) and not (Phantom rulez!) overhyping (no, not the 2021 Sega attempt to re-enter the market) the hardware (TM Sears)."
Alright, I'm going to be really generous in my calculations here...
Assume Betelgeuse has a mass of about 15 solar masses (estimates vary between 12 and 17 solar masses), or about 3e31 kg. Now, assume that (and here's the generous part) the star converted 10% of its mass at the time of supernova into photons, and this burts only happened for 1000000 seconds (a week or so, minescule in the grand scheme of things). Taking E=mc^2, like one always should, that's a total power of about 3e41 watts. Fantastic.
Now, assume the diameter of the Earth is about 1.2e7 m, and the distance between earth and Betelgeuse is 425 lightyears, or say... 4e18 m. That means, from Betelgeuse, Earth subtends a whole 4e-24 steradians of the sky. Better put, only about 6e-23 percent of the light from Betelgeuse reaches Earth.
So, some quick math, and that gives us about 1e3 watts per square meter. That's a factor of 10 smaller than what the sun imparts to us on a day-to-day basis, so we really have nothing to worry about. The long and the short of it is, it will be very easy to see at night for about a week, but don't go stocking up on suntan lotion.
The sun is a fusion reactor, which is not remarkable by any means--if you put enough light stuff in a tight space, gravity will crush it into a fusion reactor without any sort of quirks or anomolies. What makes this news is that nature had created a fission reactor--something that doesn't just happen if you have a lot of heavy stuff in a tight space. You need enough of relatively uncommon isotopes of Uranium, something created in very, very tiny amounts in supernovae, with enough neutron inhibitor mixed in to prevent a melt-down, but not so much that is prevents the reaction from happening in the first place. Quite news-worthy, indeed.
EA's NCAA Football games (and I assume other sports games, though I don't have an extensive EA library to test this) have "quick hints" on load screens--these hints are usually poorly written (as if a CS major instead of an English major did the proofing) and none-too-useful for a person who actually RTFM, but is helpful for those who might be picking up the controller for the first time in a round-robin impromptu tournament common at my university.
I would rather they put programming out-takes (similar to those found on the Shrek DVD) and other silly mistakes in load-screens, and then bonus movies or extra, game-altering content when you beat the game. Imagine if Nintendo allowed you to view Super God Technique after beating World 9-4, or perhaps a (translated) board meeting where Shiggy came up with the idea for an Italian plumber from Brooklyn breaking bricks with his skull.
2^128 is about 3.4e38. Now, let's be generous and asume we can control the spin of every electron we come across and incorporate it into a quantum storage device, such that each electron represented a bit of information (either left- or right-spin). Now, because I'm still being generous, I'm going to say the Earth's oceans contain 2e9 km^3, or 2e18 m^3 (compare here) Assuming all this water is liquid, its density is 1000 kg/m^3 (abouts), so we have 2e24 g of water.
2e24 g of water contains about 1e23 moles of water molecules, or about 1e46 individual water molecules. With about 10 electrons per molecule, that's 1e47 electrons. So if we indeed "boil the oceans" in order to harvest the electrons to feed into our massive quantum storage system, we would have 1,000,000,000 spare electrons for things like hydrogen fuel cells.
But this does not exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage, even by a long shot. Bonwick even admits it: You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans. Boiling the oceans is definately an earth-based option for quantum storage, as we wouldn't have to import the materal from space. We also have other ways of harvisting electrons, like boiling humans and evacuating the atmosphere. To give you an idea, there's something like 10^54 electrons on earth, give or take a few hundred trillion. We'd need at least a 192-bit system to approach Earth's quantum (electron-based) limits.
In the future, Bill Gates will have us either 1) memorize all 4.7+ GB of data on every DVD, because we wouldn't want to scratch or lose the silly things, and it will be illegal to view movies outside of movie theatres anyway, or 2) implant every human with proprietary Microsoft RFID chips equiped with 1 XB Flash memory each, so you can carry everything you want to with you, and so that anybody with a transistor radio and some spare time can steal your credit card numbers and pornography.
Wait a minute... 1 XB of porn implanted directly under my skin? Bill might have something going here...
Try not to be too quick to judge a country's "rich" population based on an average hourly service charge, especially in developing, 3rd world nations. Internet access is actually a luxury, comparible to something like a university-level education. While a vast majority of the population of developed nations spend most of their time devising ways to spend the abundance of money they have made, and these are the so called middle- or even low-income households I'm talking about, a vast majority of the population of underdeveloped nations spend most of their time devising ways to survive until tomorrow, not so much caring that their 440 shamrocks-per-month wages are worth less than US$1 a day, and that there's something called the "Internet" where people like us debate the economics of internet cafes.
When there are people who will pay for your services, like the middle- and low-income families of the US, et al., then suppliers compete. But when only 5% of your country has both the money and time to care about something like the Internet, it's not so surprising to see outrageous prices for luxury services.
... in that, unless you are working with extreme closeups or funny lighting, the standard, bounce-the-light-off-the-surface-of-the-skin model works just fine, especially for quick-moving CG characters like Binks or Golum, where their intrinsic flexibility is seen by some directors as a green light for "move as stupidly/unnaturally as possible." This bizarre movement causes them to not remain still on camera for extended periods of time like human actors, and the details in the skin are washed out by the constant motion.
However, I have yet to see really, really realistic hair on human-type CG actors. Eyebrows are usually thick and static, eyelashes either suffer from the same symptoms or are hardly noticable, there is little to no dynamic body hair, and the hair on the CG's heads don't seem to flow or react to the environment as you'd expect it to. Final Fantasy: TSW came pretty close with the head-hair issues, but even there it was still either too fluid or too clumpy instead of strandy.
I understand that rendering each individual hair with the physics of the environmental interactions would take countless generations for some movies like Final Fantasy, but I want to believe there is a happier medium between this and helmet-head than what we have today.
I used <a href="https://www.wavemetrics.com">Igor</a&g t; as an undergrad for most of my data plotting and graphing (physics), but the interface was not intuitive and without knowing the command-line language, navigating the menus took a very long time, even when you knew what you were looking for. Also, the price ($400 for the latest version) kept me away from using it off campus. Now I tend to stick to <a href="http://root.cern.ch/">ROOT</a> simply because its Cint interpreter is ideal for handling the massive (10^6 n-tuples) amount of data I look over, and because it's free. However, making advanced graphs and plots with ROOT requires a whomping manual and a fairly good grasp of C, as there are virtually no point-and-click features to it. I'm really glad another open-source data manipulation program is in the works, and that it can do the things ROOT can as easliy as Igor can without the emense price restrictions.
Astronomers look at the spectrum of the star--the relative intensities of each wavelength of light produced by the star's heat. Assuming the star is a black-body radiator (which isn't totally true, but pretty darn close), using first principles you can solve for the temperature of such and object as a function of the peak wavelength of light radiated. See "Thermal Physics" by C. Kittel and H. Kroemer for a better discussion.
Also, single wavelength filters (like your green sheet of plastic) aren't a natural byproduct of nature, and wouldn't be found between here and the aformentioned star. What would would find, however, is interstellar dust, or clouds of hydrogen, helium, lithium, and other light elements. When the light passes through these clouds, certain frequencies of light are absorbed, and certian frequencies are flouresced, but these frequencies are predictable, and the overall shape (and especially the peak) of the spectrum is not changed beyond recognition. "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by D. Griffiths and "Introduction to Astronomy and Astrophysics" by Zeilik and Gregory should help you out with spectra and spectral lines.
Seems to be that the industry accepts defeat at the hands of Gnutella and is looking for some way to keep control. Perhaps they are tipping their hand a bit too far with this one. Just pray Microsoft doesn't make the plug-in hard-coded into Palladium.
Slashdot Mirror
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v93/i20/e208002
The LHC is designed with very good fail-safes so that random events like this won't shut down the accelerator for huge amounts of time. It would mean at most a day or two of no beam before things got started again. These kinds of safety trips are to be expected a couple of times a month with a machine as huge and complicated as the LHC.
I would like to see this turned around: because the RIAA's case did not offer any information about the damages done by download these 24 songs in the trial, the court should enforce that the RIAA sell all its tracks at the value assigned to each song by the jury (~$81,000). The court might even take pity of the poor industry and lower that to $40,000 if it assumes some reasonable amount of the fine (50%) was awarded for statutory damages. That way, if the RIAA accepts the ruling, they would immediately go out of business as every CD they sell would be marked up to $500,000. Why isn't there a Draconian party running for government anywhere?
I'm a man, and I'm seriously considering getting a pink laptop. I mean, I already have a pink DS, and from what I hear, pink things are stolen much less frequently due to this bizarre stigma most men seem to have against it. Besides, a pink laptop would totally compliment my new lip stiCHAINSAW and nail polMOTORCYCLE.
It's a perfectly cromulent defence, but I am deeply concerned about the health of the long-term memories of people when a term invented 24 hours ago is "legendary."
Ahhh - That's what they tried to do with handguns, and actually did in Massachusetts.
They required that handguns make a "click" sound when you fire them?
I would have been mortified if nobody had mentioned Kuhn when discussing this sort of thing. This article (and I assume the book mentioned therein) doesn't actually address the same question as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions does. In Kuhn's work, he chooses to ignore the individuals who bring about revolutions in scientific paradigms (changes in the way scientists think about nature), claiming that is more a study in psychology and not scientific history and philosophy, which are Kuhn's areas of study. Kuhn claims that scientific revolutions occur whenever there is a critical mass of scientific anomalies--either experimental data that doesn't fit with theoretical predictions, or theories that have no support through experiment--at which point some genius or group of geniuses come up with a new way of thinking about nature, and slowly everybody in the scientific community either adopts that view or dies away in a sort of attrition warfare against the "old" viewpoint by the champions of the "new" one.
This article, however, seems to focus on the actual genius who comes up with the revolutionary innovations, which (as Kuhn correctly pointed out) cannot avoid a discussion of the psychology of those individuals. The theses of the two still tend to point in the same direction--namely, that innovations or revolutions are not asynchronous events, but are in fact the result of a contextual process of problem solving that is mostly routinized--they just look at different actors involved in that revolutionary process: the article focuses on the inventors, while Kuhn focuses on "everybody else."
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is definitely worth a read as a companion to the book in the article.
The hidden variables theory of quantum mechanics was disproven by a physicists named John Bell. In his method, he began by assuming that these "hidden variables" existed, then, using geometric arguments and the postulates of quantum mechanics, derived a set of inequalities which showed no physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.
It's not intuitive at all, but Bell's argument is sound. Entanglement and action-at-a-distance is real, and not due to the system's state being pre-determined by hidden variables.
This can only lead to bad things. I live in Columbus, Ohio, which has a bus system that spans almost the entire city. Columbus is a large, sprawling city, so this is no minor network we are talking about. Some time ago, when the city was growing very quickly and the bus system had added a large number of new routes, the transportation authority (COTA) hired an outside company to make a professional map of the entire bus system--again, for a city that spans 100 square miles and has 50+ bus routes, this is no trivial task.
The problem is that the company that made the map claimed copyrights on it, and won a long court battle against COTA preventing the city from posting or distributing these maps. So the only way you can get them is in paper form from the map company themselves, and they are not very happy about giving it away for free. It's nearly impossible to find a map of the entire bus system, meaning navigating using bus lines is a real bother. You have to piece together shotty, off-scale, individual route maps, and even then you have to guess which routes take you where. Check http://www.cota.com/ to see what I mean. This is one of the major complaints people have about the bus system, and probably one of the main reason more people don't use it regularly.
Don't be fools, New York. Don't make public transportation a hassle. Don't end up like Columbus. Please.
Come on, Darl, if you want anybody with a scientific or techinical disposition to take your letter seriously, you have to quote your sources and analyze the results! Look:
The initial attraction to Linux was a price tag of zero cost. Yet, they typically charge customers from $349 to $2,499 every single year.
Who is "they?" Why is this "typical?" Where do you get your numbers from?
SCO Has a Superior Kernel
By what metric? What studies show this? The only support you mention is that Linux is younger than UNIX. This is not a metric of quality in the technolgy fronteer, as new technologies superceed old ones continuously.
In a study conducted only seven months ago they found that overall, the most vulnerable operating system for manual hacker attacks was Linux, accounting for 65.64% of all hacker breaches reported.
What percentage of hacker attacks are manual, and what percentage are automated worms? What does a "hacker breach" constitute, and what kind of systems are affected by them? Are we talking about personal web servers hosting one or two files, or CIA databases?
Linux development plans and schedules are generally as unknown as they are unpredictable.
Describe the development process for the reader. How is it different from the SCO model? Is predictability in product evolution something beneficial to the world of technology, or should programmers go with the flow, developing and releasing new software versions as the technology develops?
Linux will likely continue to face challenges about its development methodologies and roadmaps as long as it continues to be a loosely organized set of volunteers who develop what they want, when they want.
What is the organization structure of Linux development? Is it really as loosely organized as you make it out to be? Where does this information come from?
When a new upgrade of Linux is required, software vendors and end users most likely have to upgrade their application as well.
How often is a complete upgrade of the Linux kernel required? What does "most likely" mean? Are there any numbers to back up this claim?
I don't think I have to continue any further. Mr. McBride, you cannot use vague terms like "most likely" and "typical" in an open letter aimed at a technologically savvy audience, and you most certainly cannot make claims without logical arguments to back them. Also, consider revising your letter to include more analysis of the stated statistics.
C-
See me after class.
1) An object travelling in a circular (or eliptical) orbit requires a certain force toward the center of the focus of the orbit, called centripetal force. It is proportional to the product of the mass times the radius of the orbiting body, and inversely proportional to the square of the period of the orbit.
2) Two massive objects will assert an attractive gravitational force on each other, proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects.
All astonomers do is equate one force to another. Astronomers believe that they can calculate the mass of the star by observing the star's apparent brightness, and looking at the star's spectrum to figure out what kind of star it is. Unfortunately, the observed brightness of a star is a function of its distance from Earth, and this measurement has a large degree of error for most stars.
Next, astronomers look at how quickly the star "wobbles" due to the orbit of the planet. This gives a good measure of the period of the planet's rotation.
The final step is to figure out how far the planet is from the star. After entering in all the data, you are left with the mass of the planet being a function of its distance from the star. If you apply some trickery in the form of Kepler's Laws, you can see that the period and radius of an orbit are related.
And that's it! Put all the pieces of the puzzle together, and you have an equation for the mass of the planet. If you are lucky, then the plain of the orbit is end-on when observed from Earth--this allows you to see how much of the star's light is blocked from the eclipsing planet, giving you some measure of the planet's size and composition.
I can't wait to see what will happen to these kinds of posts in 30 years, when game console designers end up using every word in the English language, so everything becomes a pun.
"I really liked (sorry) the Nintento XZ3000 and their ombudsman (not a plug for Microsoft) because (no pun intended) they tend (no, I don't work for Sony) to focus (apologies to Apple) on developing the software (again, not a M€ plug) and not (Phantom rulez!) overhyping (no, not the 2021 Sega attempt to re-enter the market) the hardware (TM Sears)."
Alright, I'm going to be really generous in my calculations here...
Assume Betelgeuse has a mass of about 15 solar masses (estimates vary between 12 and 17 solar masses), or about 3e31 kg. Now, assume that (and here's the generous part) the star converted 10% of its mass at the time of supernova into photons, and this burts only happened for 1000000 seconds (a week or so, minescule in the grand scheme of things). Taking E=mc^2, like one always should, that's a total power of about 3e41 watts. Fantastic.
Now, assume the diameter of the Earth is about 1.2e7 m, and the distance between earth and Betelgeuse is 425 lightyears, or say... 4e18 m. That means, from Betelgeuse, Earth subtends a whole 4e-24 steradians of the sky. Better put, only about 6e-23 percent of the light from Betelgeuse reaches Earth.
So, some quick math, and that gives us about 1e3 watts per square meter. That's a factor of 10 smaller than what the sun imparts to us on a day-to-day basis, so we really have nothing to worry about. The long and the short of it is, it will be very easy to see at night for about a week, but don't go stocking up on suntan lotion.
This is true. In Hawai'i, nobody does business or goes to school or attempts to communicate the date to anybody ever.
The sun is a fusion reactor, which is not remarkable by any means--if you put enough light stuff in a tight space, gravity will crush it into a fusion reactor without any sort of quirks or anomolies. What makes this news is that nature had created a fission reactor--something that doesn't just happen if you have a lot of heavy stuff in a tight space. You need enough of relatively uncommon isotopes of Uranium, something created in very, very tiny amounts in supernovae, with enough neutron inhibitor mixed in to prevent a melt-down, but not so much that is prevents the reaction from happening in the first place. Quite news-worthy, indeed.
I would rather they put programming out-takes (similar to those found on the Shrek DVD) and other silly mistakes in load-screens, and then bonus movies or extra, game-altering content when you beat the game. Imagine if Nintendo allowed you to view Super God Technique after beating World 9-4, or perhaps a (translated) board meeting where Shiggy came up with the idea for an Italian plumber from Brooklyn breaking bricks with his skull.
2^128 is about 3.4e38. Now, let's be generous and asume we can control the spin of every electron we come across and incorporate it into a quantum storage device, such that each electron represented a bit of information (either left- or right-spin). Now, because I'm still being generous, I'm going to say the Earth's oceans contain 2e9 km^3, or 2e18 m^3 (compare here) Assuming all this water is liquid, its density is 1000 kg/m^3 (abouts), so we have 2e24 g of water.
2e24 g of water contains about 1e23 moles of water molecules, or about 1e46 individual water molecules. With about 10 electrons per molecule, that's 1e47 electrons. So if we indeed "boil the oceans" in order to harvest the electrons to feed into our massive quantum storage system, we would have 1,000,000,000 spare electrons for things like hydrogen fuel cells.
But this does not exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage, even by a long shot. Bonwick even admits it: You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans. Boiling the oceans is definately an earth-based option for quantum storage, as we wouldn't have to import the materal from space. We also have other ways of harvisting electrons, like boiling humans and evacuating the atmosphere. To give you an idea, there's something like 10^54 electrons on earth, give or take a few hundred trillion. We'd need at least a 192-bit system to approach Earth's quantum (electron-based) limits.
Wait a minute... 1 XB of porn implanted directly under my skin? Bill might have something going here...
When there are people who will pay for your services, like the middle- and low-income families of the US, et al., then suppliers compete. But when only 5% of your country has both the money and time to care about something like the Internet, it's not so surprising to see outrageous prices for luxury services.
I was going to say... 200 millibits per second? That's remarkable in its own right, but I don't think I'll be dropping cable for those rates...
However, I have yet to see really, really realistic hair on human-type CG actors. Eyebrows are usually thick and static, eyelashes either suffer from the same symptoms or are hardly noticable, there is little to no dynamic body hair, and the hair on the CG's heads don't seem to flow or react to the environment as you'd expect it to. Final Fantasy: TSW came pretty close with the head-hair issues, but even there it was still either too fluid or too clumpy instead of strandy.
I understand that rendering each individual hair with the physics of the environmental interactions would take countless generations for some movies like Final Fantasy, but I want to believe there is a happier medium between this and helmet-head than what we have today.
I used <a href="https://www.wavemetrics.com">Igor</a&g t; as an undergrad for most of my data plotting and graphing (physics), but the interface was not intuitive and without knowing the command-line language, navigating the menus took a very long time, even when you knew what you were looking for. Also, the price ($400 for the latest version) kept me away from using it off campus. Now I tend to stick to <a href="http://root.cern.ch/">ROOT</a> simply because its Cint interpreter is ideal for handling the massive (10^6 n-tuples) amount of data I look over, and because it's free. However, making advanced graphs and plots with ROOT requires a whomping manual and a fairly good grasp of C, as there are virtually no point-and-click features to it. I'm really glad another open-source data manipulation program is in the works, and that it can do the things ROOT can as easliy as Igor can without the emense price restrictions.
Astronomers look at the spectrum of the star--the relative intensities of each wavelength of light produced by the star's heat. Assuming the star is a black-body radiator (which isn't totally true, but pretty darn close), using first principles you can solve for the temperature of such and object as a function of the peak wavelength of light radiated. See "Thermal Physics" by C. Kittel and H. Kroemer for a better discussion.
Also, single wavelength filters (like your green sheet of plastic) aren't a natural byproduct of nature, and wouldn't be found between here and the aformentioned star. What would would find, however, is interstellar dust, or clouds of hydrogen, helium, lithium, and other light elements. When the light passes through these clouds, certain frequencies of light are absorbed, and certian frequencies are flouresced, but these frequencies are predictable, and the overall shape (and especially the peak) of the spectrum is not changed beyond recognition. "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics" by D. Griffiths and "Introduction to Astronomy and Astrophysics" by Zeilik and Gregory should help you out with spectra and spectral lines.
Seems to be that the industry accepts defeat at the hands of Gnutella and is looking for some way to keep control. Perhaps they are tipping their hand a bit too far with this one. Just pray Microsoft doesn't make the plug-in hard-coded into Palladium.