But how can they have an initiative like this unless all the FBI agents investigating this stuff are themselves "clean" of all this stuff? Will they fire anyone who they somehow discover has a fetish, even if they never act upon it? Will the FBI investigator's job application say on it "have you ever jacked it to horses, half-man half-horses, men who kinda look like horses, or any bodily fluid"?
I mean, no matter how draconian the administration becomes, the people who run it are still human. Do the investigators themselves agree with this bar none, or are they afraid to speak up for fear of losing their job? Hell, should I be afraid to post this here? Is/. going to become a kind of cyber Chestnut Tree cafe?
This occurs to me pretty often--do the folks who enforce this agree with it? I thought I heard somewhere that there was some water-cooler talk to the contrary. I wish I could remember where I read it--I think it was the Washington Post--but they reported that the agents were making comments to the effect of some of those we've seen here: "well, it's nice to know we've won the war on terror," and all that.
It's still going to be cleaner than fission--the less fuel used the better. That aside, if you've got a lot of neutrons running around making isotopes, I think you're pretty much going to have _something_ to bury at the end of the day (life cycle).
Uh, well, the bang is where the deuterium came from, ultimately. Everything else, too. Your heavy metals, for instance, came from stars later on. Think of any heavy nuclear decay chain starting point (I don't have my chart of decays handy), and you have the same problem--where did it come from? The wiki probably wants to say that there's no known process occuring right now that's generating more--water autoionizes, but it doesn't "autoisotopize."
There's one thing that the individuals/groups who break copy protection are funded with in abundance, something that the entire music industry can never have, and that they can never beat...
Love.
(No, I'm not a Hollywood writer, I'm serious. Love for what they do, not for the Female Lead. Time and time again, we see how love outmatches the almighty dollar. Screw movies! Real life can teach us everything we need to know, like how fire hurts.)
I was at the same time _afraid_ and _compelled_ to level up.
I was scared of leveling up, because that meant the whole entire game was going to get harder from there on out. I had to wonder if there wasn't some point I would reach where I was too high in level without the corresponding support of good junctions, weapons, and items, and so wouldn't be able to proceed without a whole lot of backtracking or searching for stuff. Having a limited supply of Gil didn't help matters, because I was afraid to buy anything I didn't absolutely need.
Of course, I was compelled to level up because, well, I sorta enjoyed the random battles. Yes, I know, I'm one of those FF fanboys who likes a backwards and retarded system, but sometimes it's enjoyable for me to run around for a few minutes and beat some things up. Besides that, I never seriously considered trying one of those "low XP" games which are more possible in FFVIII than any other FF game, I imagine. That, and level progress is just one of those things that you expect from an RPG, especially one where you traditionally want to be a high level character.
How can that be, when we go to places that have _numbers_ right in the name?
I mean, which sounds more scientific: "Engineering Building," or "Building 34/35"? The answer is, of course, neither, because they're both engineering buildings.
Which, I guess, makes them engineerific. Or is it enginific? It can't be that, otherwise we'd say "scienteer."
I imagine the reason for this clause is to destroy biological (and possibly chemical) threats quickly and easily--relatively speaking. A small warhead would do it; you just need lots of heat, and most things wither up and die (chemical bonds break and such--I think they burn off Vx over in Newport). Using a nuke ensures that you get it all.
Not that I support the idea. Let's all just assume that this means that Iran has isolated a biological organism from some sort of "scoop" satellite, and nobody at the Pentagon has read "The Andromeda Strain."
... as they dash from shelter to shelter to retrieve the charred scraps of their history texts and get to the canteen before the Mutant Bullies beat them up.
The last "grind" I had to face in an FF game was the entirety of FFVIII, since I had a compulsive need to stock 100 of each new magic for everyone.
I can't remember the last time I had to grind solely for Gil or XP, and I've just finished up FFVI, FFVII, and (almost) FFIV Hard-type--admittedly, the latter's getting hard now that I'm on the Moon... but, hey, that's what "fast forward" is for.
The FF grinds I've seen tend to be for rare items or Blue Magic. I guess FFIX's "do this 1000 times to get a more powerful skill" gimmick counts, but I only did that for Freya, and it was only 100 dragons (and I was most of the way there by the time I needed Dragon's Crest to do major damage).
Hm. I don't know if I trust Apple to design a cell phone all by themselves. It might only have one button.
Hey, wait. They could use their IPod's scroll wheel like a rotary phone. You'd have the world's first touch-sensitive _rotary_ cell phone! That might be cool. It'd be like something out of Back to the Future IV: Marty Screws Up the Future Again.
(Cue the smarm with a link to some clever hacker's rotary cell phone. Come on, I know you're out there, waiting to make me look stupid. This is Slashdot, after all.)
Uh, I'm viewing this in FireFox 1.0.6, and I see the effect of the (strong) tag, but what's the second tag supposed to be? The page source just has a blank space.
If I remember my chemistry, NaOH sucks CO2 out of the air to produce sodium carbonate, a solid. You basically end up with a chunk of stuff in which CO2 is bound.
You'd basically need to expose a bunch of air to a bunch of NaOH, and somehow extract the CO2 to recycle the NaOH. I think there's been a sorta-serious proposal for this sort of thing as a solution, but I can't find any good literature--I mean, I think I found a science fair report, and little else.
It needs the streamlined shape to make it all the way out there and back in just 354 (Earth) days, not to mention all the hard work it does on the 24th itself.
It probably evolved into its current shape through some sort of intelligent gravity process.
I remember working in our optics lab at Rose, where we had a piece of equipment that kept giving really poor data--obviously a noise problem. I can't remember if it was the spectrum analyzer or what, but we just couldn't figure out where all this noise was coming from.
Naturally, we blamed it on the EE _power lab_ that was right above us, but I think someone eventually suggested that it might be the ballasts in the fluorescent lights in the room. I just wish I could remember what we were trying to measure.
That's a very good point. I guess I'm picking up more on the use of "sonic laser" in the title. At least the editors had the forethought to put laser in quotes.
I've heard of phonons, but never really understood them, especially since we never really discussed them in detail in either of my semiconductor courses, the closest thing I've taken to solid state. I'm tempted to think that, like you said, they aren't defined outside of a crystal lattice, but if these are the longitudinal-wave equivalent of photons, it's difficult for me to find a reason why they should require special properties of their medium in order to exist. Maybe the correlation isn't as one-to-one as I'd like to make it seem. To create an "acoustic laser," one would think that you could create an analogous situation to that found in an optical laser--more or less to stimulate atoms to emit photons with the same character as the stimulating photons. I don't know if phonons can cause this sort of behavior in atoms, and I have to think that there's something about the nature of a phonon that answers this question. Again, I don't know.
One thing I found interesting while thinking about this is a little memory of mine: once a friend and I came up with the idea for a rudimentary mass laser. We called it a "laser," meaning "Lapine Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Rabbits." Essentially, you put a bunch of rabbits in a box with an electrified floor and a small, one-way door and the end of the box. Assuming that the rabbits have time enough to breed between pulses of the floor--which itself stimulates their movement via a shock--you could eventually get a sort of resonance going that would have some of the properties of a laser: lots of bunnies out, all with (eventually) similar genetic properties. When I think of the article's acoustic laser, I think that the term "laser" is being used in the same rather loose way. However, the difference is that while the Lapine Laser was, basically, for laughs (and to ease the study of the diffractive properties of bunnies through a small lit), this "acoustic laser" is being seriously pitched as a solution to a real-world problem.
I guess I'm hard-wired to think in "photonics" mode, hence the stupid "amplifying atoms" comment. Being optics-oriented will do that to you.
It appears that that "acoustic laser" does accomplish energy amplification, but I'm still stuck on the coherency issue. What about spatial coherence across the emission area of that acoustic laser? I also don't really see how this counts as a stimulated emission of energy. The heating element contributes heat energy, which helps create a pressure gradient, but that seems to be about it. It's still not stimulated emission, so it's not a laser in the sense that I understand it.
I'll admit that I was completely wrong in my interferometry remark. I'd come to the conclusion that most practical applications of the science were optical--acoustics wasn't emphasized in my curriculum. However, I maintain that the laser did bring the science of optical interferometry into the realm of practicality.
Yes, monochromatic was a stupid thing to say about an acoustic wave--again, I'm a photonics-oriented thinker. I'm going to stand by this one, though, since the wavelength spread in a laser is limited more by the properties of the gain medium than by the properties of some idealized driver.
I also stand by my buzzword comment. Just because something has been known for a long time doesn't mean that it's been practical for that long, or has been a "pet" for so long. Now that lasers are becoming practical (I should say weaponized, actually) for mounting on vehicles and aircraft, you're staring to hear more and more about them. The public is only starting to really see weaponized lasers becoming practical in recent years, so I feel justified in calling it a fancy new buzzword since, in the original context, it was being used as such--"sonic laser" sounds better than "loudspeaker." Maybe the generals have been _talking_ about using lasers since SDI or before, but only in recent years is the possibility coming into the realm of reality.
My hangup is that this device--as described by the article--is as different from that acoustic laser as a searchlight is from a visible laser. I guess what I really fail to understand is how a disparate array of magnets vibrating a membrane can produce sound waves that have a coherence length of a mile. Maybe I shouldn't try to frame this thing in terms of optics, but that's what I know.
Again, I should say that my real point is that the abuse of this kind of scientific terminology for non-scientific (i.e. political or military ends) is harmful to the overall scientific knowledge of the public, especially in cases where that terminology is misapplied. It's an easily-avoidable mistake, one that is sometimes intentionally made to get more and better press, without thinking of the other effects.pedagogue
Like those people who know exactly where and when an em dash should be used, indeed like any pedant, I believe firmly that the incomplete understanding of my tiny field of expertise by the general public will result in widespread stupidity, disease, famine, and, eventually, a plague of zombies and the downfall of civilization. In other words, I understand that this is petty of me to harp upon, but I still believe that it's a symptom of a greater malaise from which our society is suffering.
Hey, don't laugh. Heat up the air enough with a big damn IR laser, and who knows what kind of countercurrent you could create? Sure, it might take the entire energy output of the US to do it, or some other really big number, but, hey, we're America! If we can conquer the weather using the power of inefficient light generation then who's to stop us?
Slashdot Mirror
But how can they have an initiative like this unless all the FBI agents investigating this stuff are themselves "clean" of all this stuff? Will they fire anyone who they somehow discover has a fetish, even if they never act upon it? Will the FBI investigator's job application say on it "have you ever jacked it to horses, half-man half-horses, men who kinda look like horses, or any bodily fluid"?
/. going to become a kind of cyber Chestnut Tree cafe?
I mean, no matter how draconian the administration becomes, the people who run it are still human. Do the investigators themselves agree with this bar none, or are they afraid to speak up for fear of losing their job? Hell, should I be afraid to post this here? Is
This occurs to me pretty often--do the folks who enforce this agree with it? I thought I heard somewhere that there was some water-cooler talk to the contrary. I wish I could remember where I read it--I think it was the Washington Post--but they reported that the agents were making comments to the effect of some of those we've seen here: "well, it's nice to know we've won the war on terror," and all that.
Unless you own that submarine (and even if you do), I think the FBI wants to talk to you now.
It's still going to be cleaner than fission--the less fuel used the better. That aside, if you've got a lot of neutrons running around making isotopes, I think you're pretty much going to have _something_ to bury at the end of the day (life cycle).
Uh, well, the bang is where the deuterium came from, ultimately. Everything else, too. Your heavy metals, for instance, came from stars later on. Think of any heavy nuclear decay chain starting point (I don't have my chart of decays handy), and you have the same problem--where did it come from? The wiki probably wants to say that there's no known process occuring right now that's generating more--water autoionizes, but it doesn't "autoisotopize."
Yeah, really. I just read the shapes. Come on: "Triangle Circle 65F" is _so_ intuitive.
There's one thing that the individuals/groups who break copy protection are funded with in abundance, something that the entire music industry can never have, and that they can never beat...
Love.
(No, I'm not a Hollywood writer, I'm serious. Love for what they do, not for the Female Lead. Time and time again, we see how love outmatches the almighty dollar. Screw movies! Real life can teach us everything we need to know, like how fire hurts.)
I'm a _huge_ FF dork (figuratively), and even I'm smart enough not to comment on this one. It's a war waiting to happen.
Having just said that: FFIX had Freya Crescent, ergo it wins.
So I guess I have a celebrity birthday. To celebrate, I'm posting on Slashdot. What a crazy life I lead.
Oh, hell. I never finished FFVIII. I got to Disc 4 and put it down because of that Time Compression nonsense.
I was at the same time _afraid_ and _compelled_ to level up.
I was scared of leveling up, because that meant the whole entire game was going to get harder from there on out. I had to wonder if there wasn't some point I would reach where I was too high in level without the corresponding support of good junctions, weapons, and items, and so wouldn't be able to proceed without a whole lot of backtracking or searching for stuff. Having a limited supply of Gil didn't help matters, because I was afraid to buy anything I didn't absolutely need.
Of course, I was compelled to level up because, well, I sorta enjoyed the random battles. Yes, I know, I'm one of those FF fanboys who likes a backwards and retarded system, but sometimes it's enjoyable for me to run around for a few minutes and beat some things up. Besides that, I never seriously considered trying one of those "low XP" games which are more possible in FFVIII than any other FF game, I imagine. That, and level progress is just one of those things that you expect from an RPG, especially one where you traditionally want to be a high level character.
How can that be, when we go to places that have _numbers_ right in the name?
I mean, which sounds more scientific: "Engineering Building," or "Building 34/35"? The answer is, of course, neither, because they're both engineering buildings.
Which, I guess, makes them engineerific. Or is it enginific? It can't be that, otherwise we'd say "scienteer."
I imagine the reason for this clause is to destroy biological (and possibly chemical) threats quickly and easily--relatively speaking. A small warhead would do it; you just need lots of heat, and most things wither up and die (chemical bonds break and such--I think they burn off Vx over in Newport). Using a nuke ensures that you get it all.
Not that I support the idea. Let's all just assume that this means that Iran has isolated a biological organism from some sort of "scoop" satellite, and nobody at the Pentagon has read "The Andromeda Strain."
... as they dash from shelter to shelter to retrieve the charred scraps of their history texts and get to the canteen before the Mutant Bullies beat them up.
The last "grind" I had to face in an FF game was the entirety of FFVIII, since I had a compulsive need to stock 100 of each new magic for everyone.
I can't remember the last time I had to grind solely for Gil or XP, and I've just finished up FFVI, FFVII, and (almost) FFIV Hard-type--admittedly, the latter's getting hard now that I'm on the Moon... but, hey, that's what "fast forward" is for.
The FF grinds I've seen tend to be for rare items or Blue Magic. I guess FFIX's "do this 1000 times to get a more powerful skill" gimmick counts, but I only did that for Freya, and it was only 100 dragons (and I was most of the way there by the time I needed Dragon's Crest to do major damage).
Unless, of course, you mean the original FF.
Hm. I don't know if I trust Apple to design a cell phone all by themselves. It might only have one button.
Hey, wait. They could use their IPod's scroll wheel like a rotary phone. You'd have the world's first touch-sensitive _rotary_ cell phone! That might be cool. It'd be like something out of Back to the Future IV: Marty Screws Up the Future Again.
(Cue the smarm with a link to some clever hacker's rotary cell phone. Come on, I know you're out there, waiting to make me look stupid. This is Slashdot, after all.)
When you win: "The geography that I stands compares you superior." Clearly, the geography of this meme stands compares you superior.
Uh, I'm viewing this in FireFox 1.0.6, and I see the effect of the (strong) tag, but what's the second tag supposed to be? The page source just has a blank space.
If I remember my chemistry, NaOH sucks CO2 out of the air to produce sodium carbonate, a solid. You basically end up with a chunk of stuff in which CO2 is bound. You'd basically need to expose a bunch of air to a bunch of NaOH, and somehow extract the CO2 to recycle the NaOH. I think there's been a sorta-serious proposal for this sort of thing as a solution, but I can't find any good literature--I mean, I think I found a science fair report, and little else.
It needs the streamlined shape to make it all the way out there and back in just 354 (Earth) days, not to mention all the hard work it does on the 24th itself.
It probably evolved into its current shape through some sort of intelligent gravity process.
I don't have anything useful to say, I just think the phrase "science instruments" is really, really funny.
I remember working in our optics lab at Rose, where we had a piece of equipment that kept giving really poor data--obviously a noise problem. I can't remember if it was the spectrum analyzer or what, but we just couldn't figure out where all this noise was coming from.
Naturally, we blamed it on the EE _power lab_ that was right above us, but I think someone eventually suggested that it might be the ballasts in the fluorescent lights in the room. I just wish I could remember what we were trying to measure.
That's a very good point. I guess I'm picking up more on the use of "sonic laser" in the title. At least the editors had the forethought to put laser in quotes.
I've heard of phonons, but never really understood them, especially since we never really discussed them in detail in either of my semiconductor courses, the closest thing I've taken to solid state. I'm tempted to think that, like you said, they aren't defined outside of a crystal lattice, but if these are the longitudinal-wave equivalent of photons, it's difficult for me to find a reason why they should require special properties of their medium in order to exist. Maybe the correlation isn't as one-to-one as I'd like to make it seem. To create an "acoustic laser," one would think that you could create an analogous situation to that found in an optical laser--more or less to stimulate atoms to emit photons with the same character as the stimulating photons. I don't know if phonons can cause this sort of behavior in atoms, and I have to think that there's something about the nature of a phonon that answers this question. Again, I don't know.
One thing I found interesting while thinking about this is a little memory of mine: once a friend and I came up with the idea for a rudimentary mass laser. We called it a "laser," meaning "Lapine Amplification through Stimulated Emission of Rabbits." Essentially, you put a bunch of rabbits in a box with an electrified floor and a small, one-way door and the end of the box. Assuming that the rabbits have time enough to breed between pulses of the floor--which itself stimulates their movement via a shock--you could eventually get a sort of resonance going that would have some of the properties of a laser: lots of bunnies out, all with (eventually) similar genetic properties. When I think of the article's acoustic laser, I think that the term "laser" is being used in the same rather loose way. However, the difference is that while the Lapine Laser was, basically, for laughs (and to ease the study of the diffractive properties of bunnies through a small lit), this "acoustic laser" is being seriously pitched as a solution to a real-world problem.
I guess I'm hard-wired to think in "photonics" mode, hence the stupid "amplifying atoms" comment. Being optics-oriented will do that to you.
It appears that that "acoustic laser" does accomplish energy amplification, but I'm still stuck on the coherency issue. What about spatial coherence across the emission area of that acoustic laser? I also don't really see how this counts as a stimulated emission of energy. The heating element contributes heat energy, which helps create a pressure gradient, but that seems to be about it. It's still not stimulated emission, so it's not a laser in the sense that I understand it.
I'll admit that I was completely wrong in my interferometry remark. I'd come to the conclusion that most practical applications of the science were optical--acoustics wasn't emphasized in my curriculum. However, I maintain that the laser did bring the science of optical interferometry into the realm of practicality.
Yes, monochromatic was a stupid thing to say about an acoustic wave--again, I'm a photonics-oriented thinker. I'm going to stand by this one, though, since the wavelength spread in a laser is limited more by the properties of the gain medium than by the properties of some idealized driver.
I also stand by my buzzword comment. Just because something has been known for a long time doesn't mean that it's been practical for that long, or has been a "pet" for so long. Now that lasers are becoming practical (I should say weaponized, actually) for mounting on vehicles and aircraft, you're staring to hear more and more about them. The public is only starting to really see weaponized lasers becoming practical in recent years, so I feel justified in calling it a fancy new buzzword since, in the original context, it was being used as such--"sonic laser" sounds better than "loudspeaker." Maybe the generals have been _talking_ about using lasers since SDI or before, but only in recent years is the possibility coming into the realm of reality.
My hangup is that this device--as described by the article--is as different from that acoustic laser as a searchlight is from a visible laser. I guess what I really fail to understand is how a disparate array of magnets vibrating a membrane can produce sound waves that have a coherence length of a mile. Maybe I shouldn't try to frame this thing in terms of optics, but that's what I know.
Again, I should say that my real point is that the abuse of this kind of scientific terminology for non-scientific (i.e. political or military ends) is harmful to the overall scientific knowledge of the public, especially in cases where that terminology is misapplied. It's an easily-avoidable mistake, one that is sometimes intentionally made to get more and better press, without thinking of the other effects.pedagogue Like those people who know exactly where and when an em dash should be used, indeed like any pedant, I believe firmly that the incomplete understanding of my tiny field of expertise by the general public will result in widespread stupidity, disease, famine, and, eventually, a plague of zombies and the downfall of civilization. In other words, I understand that this is petty of me to harp upon, but I still believe that it's a symptom of a greater malaise from which our society is suffering.
Hey, don't laugh. Heat up the air enough with a big damn IR laser, and who knows what kind of countercurrent you could create? Sure, it might take the entire energy output of the US to do it, or some other really big number, but, hey, we're America! If we can conquer the weather using the power of inefficient light generation then who's to stop us?