How are we going to transmit the power along the tether?
...was reading just the other day about this company that proposes to put up solar panels in orbit and beam the energy down via microwaves. Now there was an image of an antenna farm on the earth below, implying you need a large collector area for this to work. However, the energy could be tight-beamed via a maser to a small antenna, perhaps - a small, light antenna mounted on the climber.
I heard they have adopted a new name for the Microsoft cloud computing service because "Azure" just wasn't catching on - it didn't describe the service. The new name has gone from one extreme to the other though - very descriptive, but kind'a dull: "Secure Universal Computer Kernel". Since it is totally an internet related service, as an added bonus they get the right put an "i" in front of it - Apple style - just to show how cool they are...
Thanks for taking the time to explain that. Makes a lot of sense, this idea of "Network Virtualization". So what they are building is a tool that in itself is ethics-agnostic - a tool that in the right hands can be something that greatly enriches our lives and our precious democracy, but in the wrong hands can become an instrument of oppression. I guess that latter possibility is what everybody is worried about. I think the whole point of my blog is that Stanford should take some social responsibility for this powerful, potentially socially-transformative technology they are releasing into the world and think about how it can be abused. Perhaps there is nothing they could do, even if they could imagine scenarios like, for example, China employing technology developed in the Clean Slate Program to greatly enhance its totalitarian control over its population. I would suggest, however, that there would be considerable social value in anticipating such scenarios and considering how they may be mitigated. Beyond that, I would argue that establishing Stanford as a centre of research into the social implications and political ramifications of this powerful technology may make a lot of sense.
This topic has been discussed on slashdot several times before. It seems to me there is a growing consensus that this is not a good thing.
Stanford University's Clean-Slate Program was originally conceived as a long term inquiry into two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?" and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?". I was quite surprised that TFA implies that by the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country.
Stanford University's Clean-Slate agenda appears to be entirely driven by big business - their seven corporate sponsors. Though they emphasise an inter-disciplinary approach, it turns out that the disciplines involved in this program are all technical or business and management oriented. They have not included disciplines appropriate to investigate social and political issues. Stanford's Clean Slate Design for a New Internet has no soul or social conscience.
A new internet architecture such as proposed will open vast new markets and endless business opportunities - in short - a potential gold mine for the seven industrial sponsors. The fear is that the Stanford research program will trade off attention to social and political issues for expediency in the impetus to get the new infrastructure up and running sooner. I was so moved as to do some personal research into Stanford University's Clean-Slate Program a couple of years ago. See my blog The Internet is Broken!. Here as well you will find links to Stanfords site and the original proposal.
If you compare the lower sketch with an image of today's full moon, it seems it has rotated clockwise about 30 degrees since the sketch was made by Thomas Harriot.
Compare the sketch with this moon map (scroll down, mouse-over) and locate Mare Crisium on both - a crater on the extreme right at between 2 and 3 o'clock on the map, but between 3 and 4 o'clock on the sketch. A more dramatic difference can be seen if you imagine a humanoid figure created by Mare Serenitatis as the head, Mare Traquillitatis as the thorax, Mare Nectaris as the left leg, and Mare Fecunditatis as the right leg. In the sketch, the impression of an armless figure is stronger. Comparing this figurene in the sketch with same on today's moon shows the "rotation" far more dramatically. When I compared the sketch to some other images of the modern moon I got the impression of a rotation approaching 60 degrees. I don't think we can attribute this apparent descrepancy to the optics, which I can't imagine would be able to rotate an image like that. We could easily imagine an error in sketching which may be accounted by his notebook being somewhat askew at the time he made the sketch. The last possibility is that perhaps the moon has shifted a bit in the past 400 years?
"David Webster, Microsoft general manager of brand and marketing strategy, says Microsoft had "to take back the PC brand and tell the truth about it." referring to Microsoft's latest ad that hits back at the Apple commercials.
Like -- they own the PC brand now? OK -- We can admire someone who stands up for himself succinctly when picked on. Apple will never be able to use the "I'm a PC" line again now. However, in this ad Microsoft tries to appropriate the commons with a sinister attempt to hijack the PC. They want to confuse general public into thinking -- if it doesn't have Windows, it's not a PC. Is there an appropriate way to inform the public that the PC is an open platform that can run many other operating systems?
Crome browser string
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I just installed Crome. It's cool, but for now I'm continuing with Firefox as I have it all set up with the extensions I like. Meanwhile, I checked out my own web site to see how it displays in Chrome - no problem - looks great. I thought you may be interested in seeing the browser string that Crome sent to my web site...
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13".
It's not phishing, which is old news, but the security flaws of a proprietary and closed source application. There's no way Adobe can secure Flash without taking it to open source and getting the resulting peer review.
No - it is phishing - the social engineering kind, and it has nothing to do with the security of Adobe Flash. It just fools the user into thinking he is going to download a new Flash player, but he ends up with a virus. I suppose you didn't RTFA.
More specifically, the judge found SCO guilty of Breach of Fiduciary Duty, Conversion, and Unjust Enrichment.
Section 8.1 of the 2003 Sun Agreement lifts the confidentiality provisions with respect to 30 versions of SVRX technology granted to Sun under its 1994 Buy-out Agreement with Novell, specifically stating that it "amends and restates" Sun's 1994 SVRX buy-out agreement with Novell. SCO had no authority to enter such an agreement.
Section B of Amendment No. 2 to the APA provides that before entering into any potential transaction with an SVRX licensee which "concerns" a buy-out of any such licensee's royalty obligations, SCO must obtain Novell's consent. This provision requires either party who even "become[s] aware of any such potential transaction" to immediately notify the other in writing. The provision further requires that any negotiations with the licensee be attended by both parties, and that both parties consent to any such transaction. There are no exceptions to this provision. SCO had an obligation to keep Novell apprised of the facts concerning SVRX Licenses and failed to do so. Novell repeatedly demanded audits and accounting of the 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements.
The Court declared that SCO was without authority to enter into the 2003 Sun Agreement under Amendment 2, Section B, of the APA. The Court concluded that SCO breached its fiduciary duties to Novell by failing to notify Novell and account for and remit the revenue it received from Sun as a result of modifying the confidentiality provisions of Sun's SVRX buy-out agreement with Novell. The Court concluded that SCO was unjustly enriched by retaining the revenues Sun agreed to pay to relax and amend the confidentiality provisions of the 1994 Agreement and Novell is entitled to restitution. The Court concluded that SCO wrongfully exercised dominion Novell's personal property, and that SCO's failure to pass through to Novell the SVRX Royalties due under the Sun Agreement was a wrongful act inconsistent with Novell's rights. The Court concludes that Novell has established SCO's conversion of the revenues due under the 2003 Sun Agreement.
This looks pretty serious to me. Could criminal charges be brought to bare on the the officers responsible for this?
All this misdirected energy aimed at shutting down file sharing. Don't we have any more serious problems to go after, like for example bot nets spreading spam and viruses and all the real criminal activity on the Net in general? Come on politicians - get things into perspective! Billions of dollars siphoned off to criminal gangs, and don't forget the threats to national security!
I think it is incredible that entire political bodies will spend hours discussing how to prevent music piracy when we have so much more serious issues that nobody seems to want to do anything about.
It is a complete farce. This morning, for example, as I do every morning - I went through the spam list sent me daily by my ISP to see if there was perhaps a false positive - something that happens maybe once a month. Because of the rare chance of a false positive, I have to read through this long nauseating list of subject lines of the email identified as spam each morning. What a way to start your day! It is just so disgusting to read through that, I feel I need to wash my hands after.
These people in the shady underground world of the internet are making fools of us all. When perhaps over 90% of the email traffic on the entire internet is spam, I'd say we have lost control of the situation. Why can't they pass a law making ISPs responsible for allowing spam onto the internet? It won't stop the spam that is coming from countries that permit it but it is a start at fighting back.
Banning P2P is going to do absolutely nothing to resolve the real problems, or make the internet a better or safer place!
If we could find a way to compress the vacuum to a tiny fraction of its normal size, we could put it in little containers to power a vacuum cleaner. Imagine then - a "green" vacuum cleaner that runs on cans of this compressed vacuum instead of electricity! Instead of plugging in your vacuum cleaner, you just stick in a new can of highly compressed vacuum before you begin to clean the house.
Oceans cover 70 percent of Earth's surface. We have barely begun to tap the resources that lie on the bottom of the sea.
The ocean beds are rich in countless minerals. About 20% is thought to be covered by manganese nodules, which can contain as much as 2.5% copper, 2% nickel, 0.2% cobalt and 35% manganese, as well as titanium, aluminium, potassium, molybdenum, lead, strontium and other substances. The greatest unexploited mineral resources on earth are on the deep-sea floor, including manganese nodules; cobalt-rich manganese crusts that contain nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese; and hydrothermal deposits that contain copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver. Deep-sea mineral resources are found in specific areas. Manganese nodules are half-buried in comparatively flat deep-sea sediment at a depth of 4,000-6,000 meters. Cobalt-rich manganese crusts cover the slope or top of seamounts like asphalt at a depth of 800-2,400 meters.
I believe that in the future we will routinely mine the ocean and it will become a huge industry. We will have great machines that will work around the clock mining the sea floor.
Re:idle comment section - rendering
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
I have exactly the same problem with Firefox 2.0.0.14 (current version) running on WinXP Pro
Just threw a graph up on my web site of the family of curves the code generates
Slopes and curves
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1, Informative
I loved the video! What a coincidence - just spent the last couple of days with similar problems, trying to develop a curve for an audio compression algorithm. I began with logarithmic curves, but in the end, chose quadratic curves in place of the logarithmic curves because they provide a very smooth transition from linear slope to curved. Though the logarithmic curves did as well provide a nice smooth curve, they had an abrupt transition at the point where that curve joined the linear slope. In the end, after algebraically factoring my Quadratic Bezier, I ended up with an incredibly simple formula: y = (x - (x*x)/coefficient). The problem is that the term (x*x)/coefficient can never be allowed to grow larger than x, and in fact, is limited to coefficient = 0.5. On the other side, as you approach a large value for 'coefficient', you essentially end up with y = x.
Only one problem - in the end, to get any compression beyond a few dBs I needed to employ recursion - not the best solution...
void Recurve(double *pX, int recursionLevel, int *pCount)
...When dormant/docile, these tentacles are rooted into the ground and are used to draw nutrients, as with a normal plant. When active... use[s] these tentacles to propel themselves along at a moderate walking pace
Mod parent up +5 Insightful! - and read his post. He has even properly linked his authoritative source.
Well of course. I was reading the other day that the body consumes up to a hundred watts at rest, and the brain - about 15% of that. While I appreciated the mods, I was really trying to be funny. Began the setup by stating the obvious, moved on to the ridiculous, then finished off with an easily identifiable Slashdot archetype. I guess my presentation was a little too dry for the humour to come across. I'll have to work on that:-)
says that in the future, they may even be able to get human cells to produce energy through photosynthesis.
I don't think that photosynthesis is efficient enough to provide us with any significant amount of energy. Plants have to increase potentially energy-absorbing surface area by putting our branches to support many leaves. Even so, that still doesn't give them enough energy to even walk around the block, let alone commute to work. When is the last time you saw a plant walking by? Perhaps if you live a very sedentary life style - like maybe a programmer living in his mother's basement - but then again, this type rarely sees the sun anyhow.
Thanks! I found the answer, and read some very interesting discussion in the links you provided. Interesting that though I have been reading about physics and astronomy for many years, I have never run into this kind of discussion before...
"The electromagnetic force is so strong that if the universe had even a slight net charge, electric and magnetic fields should dominate the structure of our universe. But it doesn't -- gravity does. And gravity, believe it or not, is a very weak force.
There are other effects that electric and magnetic fields would have on light, and we simply do not see these effects."
"If a gas in ionized it simply means that some electrons have separated from the constituent atoms (or molecules) that make up the gas leaving positively charged atoms/molecules and negatively charged electron. However they are still mixed together in the same gas, the 'separation' that you assume does not exist. The positive and negative charges still mingle in the same space. Even if you took a very small volume (the size of a grain of sand) of an ionized gas the overall charge is still neutral."
I've got a question for a physics graduate or anybody who can answer it. After reading for the thousandth time about all the ionized gasses in space, I suddenly began to wonder how many electrons were created in the Big Bang? Like - are there enough electrons for every atomic nucleus to fill it's shells - if they weren't ionized? Now, that seems improbable, because an enormous amount of matter was created after the Big Bang - created in stars and super novae. Then this matter that was created - were electrons created at the same time in proportion?...and in the balance of things - how many electrons are there in the Universe and how many protons are there?...and how much do all these electrons weigh?...and all these electrons that were striped from interstellar matter to leave behind ionized gasses - where did they go? Well I would guess they are zinging along some magnetic field lines someplace, quite happy to be alive, but is there some place where they collect in huge clouds? I don't suppose that is too likely, because electrons are antisocial among themselves and stay as far apart as possible, but on the other hand, protons are like that too among their own kind, yet somehow manage to form clouds. So then you think about these huge clouds of hydrogen and helium nuclei, all longing for the company of electrons, but there are none to be found in the region - such huge imbalances must exist. Makes you wonder when matter finally conglomerates into planets and such that somehow there is suddenly just the right number of electrons available so that every single atom can fill is orbital shells. How does this come about?
I think the noise refers to the many black dots found on the page itself.
I think the statement "Frank Shoemaker would call this noise" may actually be self-referential ie: It adds nothing to the main message, it is only a misdirection.
I cannot wait to have even more infested Windows computers connected on-line, which could do damage
The US Air Force is in on this together with Microsoft and the NSA. Where do you suppose they plan on getting that offensive botnet they want on "any and all operating systems"? Think of the power this will give them - these OLPC all have cameras - they represent potentially millions of remote spys! - and costs them nothing. Kids are everywhere... nobody would notice some kid walking by with with his little toy laptop.
I propose a Turing Test for monitors. Have a monitor, and a window opening onto some chosen view, side by side. Through the window one could view a street with cars and people passing by, while on the monitor is a real time video of exactly the same scene. To be fair, maybe the person judging would have his head secured in some kind of harness to prevent head movement. It would be interesting to see when a monitor would pass such a test, where the majority of viewers couldn't tell the difference. Any predictions?
Of course it is just as much a test of the camera as it is of the monitor - a test of the entire system. Something that hasn't been mention much in the discussion of these hi bit depth monitors - are the cameras capable of delivering the greater pixel depth?
Slashdot Mirror
...was reading just the other day about this company that proposes to put up solar panels in orbit and beam the energy down via microwaves. Now there was an image of an antenna farm on the earth below, implying you need a large collector area for this to work. However, the energy could be tight-beamed via a maser to a small antenna, perhaps - a small, light antenna mounted on the climber.
I heard they have adopted a new name for the Microsoft cloud computing service because "Azure" just wasn't catching on - it didn't describe the service. The new name has gone from one extreme to the other though - very descriptive, but kind'a dull: "Secure Universal Computer Kernel". Since it is totally an internet related service, as an added bonus they get the right put an "i" in front of it - Apple style - just to show how cool they are...
Thanks for taking the time to explain that. Makes a lot of sense, this idea of "Network Virtualization". So what they are building is a tool that in itself is ethics-agnostic - a tool that in the right hands can be something that greatly enriches our lives and our precious democracy, but in the wrong hands can become an instrument of oppression. I guess that latter possibility is what everybody is worried about. I think the whole point of my blog is that Stanford should take some social responsibility for this powerful, potentially socially-transformative technology they are releasing into the world and think about how it can be abused. Perhaps there is nothing they could do, even if they could imagine scenarios like, for example, China employing technology developed in the Clean Slate Program to greatly enhance its totalitarian control over its population. I would suggest, however, that there would be considerable social value in anticipating such scenarios and considering how they may be mitigated. Beyond that, I would argue that establishing Stanford as a centre of research into the social implications and political ramifications of this powerful technology may make a lot of sense.
This topic has been discussed on slashdot several times before. It seems to me there is a growing consensus that this is not a good thing. Stanford University's Clean-Slate Program was originally conceived as a long term inquiry into two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?" and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?". I was quite surprised that TFA implies that by the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country. Stanford University's Clean-Slate agenda appears to be entirely driven by big business - their seven corporate sponsors. Though they emphasise an inter-disciplinary approach, it turns out that the disciplines involved in this program are all technical or business and management oriented. They have not included disciplines appropriate to investigate social and political issues. Stanford's Clean Slate Design for a New Internet has no soul or social conscience. A new internet architecture such as proposed will open vast new markets and endless business opportunities - in short - a potential gold mine for the seven industrial sponsors. The fear is that the Stanford research program will trade off attention to social and political issues for expediency in the impetus to get the new infrastructure up and running sooner. I was so moved as to do some personal research into Stanford University's Clean-Slate Program a couple of years ago. See my blog The Internet is Broken!. Here as well you will find links to Stanfords site and the original proposal.
If you compare the lower sketch with an image of today's full moon, it seems it has rotated clockwise about 30 degrees since the sketch was made by Thomas Harriot. Compare the sketch with this moon map (scroll down, mouse-over) and locate Mare Crisium on both - a crater on the extreme right at between 2 and 3 o'clock on the map, but between 3 and 4 o'clock on the sketch. A more dramatic difference can be seen if you imagine a humanoid figure created by Mare Serenitatis as the head, Mare Traquillitatis as the thorax, Mare Nectaris as the left leg, and Mare Fecunditatis as the right leg. In the sketch, the impression of an armless figure is stronger. Comparing this figurene in the sketch with same on today's moon shows the "rotation" far more dramatically. When I compared the sketch to some other images of the modern moon I got the impression of a rotation approaching 60 degrees. I don't think we can attribute this apparent descrepancy to the optics, which I can't imagine would be able to rotate an image like that. We could easily imagine an error in sketching which may be accounted by his notebook being somewhat askew at the time he made the sketch. The last possibility is that perhaps the moon has shifted a bit in the past 400 years?
"David Webster, Microsoft general manager of brand and marketing strategy, says Microsoft had "to take back the PC brand and tell the truth about it." referring to Microsoft's latest ad that hits back at the Apple commercials. Like -- they own the PC brand now? OK -- We can admire someone who stands up for himself succinctly when picked on. Apple will never be able to use the "I'm a PC" line again now. However, in this ad Microsoft tries to appropriate the commons with a sinister attempt to hijack the PC. They want to confuse general public into thinking -- if it doesn't have Windows, it's not a PC. Is there an appropriate way to inform the public that the PC is an open platform that can run many other operating systems?
I just installed Crome. It's cool, but for now I'm continuing with Firefox as I have it all set up with the extensions I like. Meanwhile, I checked out my own web site to see how it displays in Chrome - no problem - looks great. I thought you may be interested in seeing the browser string that Crome sent to my web site...
:-)
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13".
It doesn't seem to be too sure what it is
I think that's spam email accounts anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of all email traffic, not all net traffic.
No - it is phishing - the social engineering kind, and it has nothing to do with the security of Adobe Flash. It just fools the user into thinking he is going to download a new Flash player, but he ends up with a virus. I suppose you didn't RTFA.
More specifically, the judge found SCO guilty of Breach of Fiduciary Duty, Conversion, and Unjust Enrichment.
Section 8.1 of the 2003 Sun Agreement lifts the confidentiality provisions with respect to 30 versions of SVRX technology granted to Sun under its 1994 Buy-out Agreement with Novell, specifically stating that it "amends and restates" Sun's 1994 SVRX buy-out agreement with Novell. SCO had no authority to enter such an agreement.
Section B of Amendment No. 2 to the APA provides that before entering into any potential transaction with an SVRX licensee which "concerns" a buy-out of any such licensee's royalty obligations, SCO must obtain Novell's consent. This provision requires either party who even "become[s] aware of any such potential transaction" to immediately notify the other in writing. The provision further requires that any negotiations with the licensee be attended by both parties, and that both parties consent to any such transaction. There are no exceptions to this provision. SCO had an obligation to keep Novell apprised of the facts concerning SVRX Licenses and failed to do so. Novell repeatedly demanded audits and accounting of the 2003 Sun and Microsoft Agreements.
The Court declared that SCO was without authority to enter into the 2003 Sun Agreement under Amendment 2, Section B, of the APA. The Court concluded that SCO breached its fiduciary duties to Novell by failing to notify Novell and account for and remit the revenue it received from Sun as a result of modifying the confidentiality provisions of Sun's SVRX buy-out agreement with Novell. The Court concluded that SCO was unjustly enriched by retaining the revenues Sun agreed to pay to relax and amend the confidentiality provisions of the 1994 Agreement and Novell is entitled to restitution. The Court concluded that SCO wrongfully exercised dominion Novell's personal property, and that SCO's failure to pass through to Novell the SVRX Royalties due under the Sun Agreement was a wrongful act inconsistent with Novell's rights. The Court concludes that Novell has established SCO's conversion of the revenues due under the 2003 Sun Agreement.
This looks pretty serious to me. Could criminal charges be brought to bare on the the officers responsible for this?
All this misdirected energy aimed at shutting down file sharing. Don't we have any more serious problems to go after, like for example bot nets spreading spam and viruses and all the real criminal activity on the Net in general? Come on politicians - get things into perspective! Billions of dollars siphoned off to criminal gangs, and don't forget the threats to national security!
I think it is incredible that entire political bodies will spend hours discussing how to prevent music piracy when we have so much more serious issues that nobody seems to want to do anything about.
It is a complete farce. This morning, for example, as I do every morning - I went through the spam list sent me daily by my ISP to see if there was perhaps a false positive - something that happens maybe once a month. Because of the rare chance of a false positive, I have to read through this long nauseating list of subject lines of the email identified as spam each morning. What a way to start your day! It is just so disgusting to read through that, I feel I need to wash my hands after.
These people in the shady underground world of the internet are making fools of us all. When perhaps over 90% of the email traffic on the entire internet is spam, I'd say we have lost control of the situation. Why can't they pass a law making ISPs responsible for allowing spam onto the internet? It won't stop the spam that is coming from countries that permit it but it is a start at fighting back.
Banning P2P is going to do absolutely nothing to resolve the real problems, or make the internet a better or safer place!
If we could find a way to compress the vacuum to a tiny fraction of its normal size, we could put it in little containers to power a vacuum cleaner. Imagine then - a "green" vacuum cleaner that runs on cans of this compressed vacuum instead of electricity! Instead of plugging in your vacuum cleaner, you just stick in a new can of highly compressed vacuum before you begin to clean the house.
Oceans cover 70 percent of Earth's surface. We have barely begun to tap the resources that lie on the bottom of the sea. The ocean beds are rich in countless minerals. About 20% is thought to be covered by manganese nodules, which can contain as much as 2.5% copper, 2% nickel, 0.2% cobalt and 35% manganese, as well as titanium, aluminium, potassium, molybdenum, lead, strontium and other substances. The greatest unexploited mineral resources on earth are on the deep-sea floor, including manganese nodules; cobalt-rich manganese crusts that contain nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese; and hydrothermal deposits that contain copper, lead, zinc, gold and silver. Deep-sea mineral resources are found in specific areas. Manganese nodules are half-buried in comparatively flat deep-sea sediment at a depth of 4,000-6,000 meters. Cobalt-rich manganese crusts cover the slope or top of seamounts like asphalt at a depth of 800-2,400 meters.
I believe that in the future we will routinely mine the ocean and it will become a huge industry. We will have great machines that will work around the clock mining the sea floor.
I have exactly the same problem with Firefox 2.0.0.14 (current version) running on WinXP Pro
Just threw a graph up on my web site of the family of curves the code generates
I loved the video! What a coincidence - just spent the last couple of days with similar problems, trying to develop a curve for an audio compression algorithm. I began with logarithmic curves, but in the end, chose quadratic curves in place of the logarithmic curves because they provide a very smooth transition from linear slope to curved. Though the logarithmic curves did as well provide a nice smooth curve, they had an abrupt transition at the point where that curve joined the linear slope. In the end, after algebraically factoring my Quadratic Bezier, I ended up with an incredibly simple formula: y = (x - (x*x)/coefficient). The problem is that the term (x*x)/coefficient can never be allowed to grow larger than x, and in fact, is limited to coefficient = 0.5. On the other side, as you approach a large value for 'coefficient', you essentially end up with y = x.
Only one problem - in the end, to get any compression beyond a few dBs I needed to employ recursion - not the best solution...
void Recurve(double *pX, int recursionLevel, int *pCount)
{
if((*pCount)++ == recursionLevel)return;
*pX = *pX - (*pX * *pX)/2.0;
Recurve(pX, recursionLevel, pCount);
}
Anybody got any experience with this?
Mod parent up +5 Insightful! - and read his post. He has even properly linked his authoritative source.
Well of course. I was reading the other day that the body consumes up to a hundred watts at rest, and the brain - about 15% of that. While I appreciated the mods, I was really trying to be funny. Began the setup by stating the obvious, moved on to the ridiculous, then finished off with an easily identifiable Slashdot archetype. I guess my presentation was a little too dry for the humour to come across. I'll have to work on that :-)
says that in the future, they may even be able to get human cells to produce energy through photosynthesis.
I don't think that photosynthesis is efficient enough to provide us with any significant amount of energy. Plants have to increase potentially energy-absorbing surface area by putting our branches to support many leaves. Even so, that still doesn't give them enough energy to even walk around the block, let alone commute to work. When is the last time you saw a plant walking by? Perhaps if you live a very sedentary life style - like maybe a programmer living in his mother's basement - but then again, this type rarely sees the sun anyhow.
Thanks! I found the answer, and read some very interesting discussion in the links you provided. Interesting that though I have been reading about physics and astronomy for many years, I have never run into this kind of discussion before...
"The electromagnetic force is so strong that if the universe had even a slight net charge, electric and magnetic fields should dominate the structure of our universe. But it doesn't -- gravity does. And gravity, believe it or not, is a very weak force. There are other effects that electric and magnetic fields would have on light, and we simply do not see these effects."
"If a gas in ionized it simply means that some electrons have separated from the constituent atoms (or molecules) that make up the gas leaving positively charged atoms/molecules and negatively charged electron. However they are still mixed together in the same gas, the 'separation' that you assume does not exist. The positive and negative charges still mingle in the same space. Even if you took a very small volume (the size of a grain of sand) of an ionized gas the overall charge is still neutral."
I've got a question for a physics graduate or anybody who can answer it. After reading for the thousandth time about all the ionized gasses in space, I suddenly began to wonder how many electrons were created in the Big Bang? Like - are there enough electrons for every atomic nucleus to fill it's shells - if they weren't ionized? Now, that seems improbable, because an enormous amount of matter was created after the Big Bang - created in stars and super novae. Then this matter that was created - were electrons created at the same time in proportion? ...and in the balance of things - how many electrons are there in the Universe and how many protons are there? ...and how much do all these electrons weigh? ...and all these electrons that were striped from interstellar matter to leave behind ionized gasses - where did they go? Well I would guess they are zinging along some magnetic field lines someplace, quite happy to be alive, but is there some place where they collect in huge clouds? I don't suppose that is too likely, because electrons are antisocial among themselves and stay as far apart as possible, but on the other hand, protons are like that too among their own kind, yet somehow manage to form clouds. So then you think about these huge clouds of hydrogen and helium nuclei, all longing for the company of electrons, but there are none to be found in the region - such huge imbalances must exist. Makes you wonder when matter finally conglomerates into planets and such that somehow there is suddenly just the right number of electrons available so that every single atom can fill is orbital shells. How does this come about?
I think the noise refers to the many black dots found on the page itself.
I think the statement "Frank Shoemaker would call this noise" may actually be self-referential ie: It adds nothing to the main message, it is only a misdirection.
Next they will be selling X-Ray glasses made with this to kids with ads in comic books...
I cannot wait to have even more infested Windows computers connected on-line, which could do damage
The US Air Force is in on this together with Microsoft and the NSA. Where do you suppose they plan on getting that offensive botnet they want on "any and all operating systems"? Think of the power this will give them - these OLPC all have cameras - they represent potentially millions of remote spys! - and costs them nothing. Kids are everywhere... nobody would notice some kid walking by with with his little toy laptop.
I propose a Turing Test for monitors. Have a monitor, and a window opening onto some chosen view, side by side. Through the window one could view a street with cars and people passing by, while on the monitor is a real time video of exactly the same scene. To be fair, maybe the person judging would have his head secured in some kind of harness to prevent head movement. It would be interesting to see when a monitor would pass such a test, where the majority of viewers couldn't tell the difference. Any predictions?
Of course it is just as much a test of the camera as it is of the monitor - a test of the entire system. Something that hasn't been mention much in the discussion of these hi bit depth monitors - are the cameras capable of delivering the greater pixel depth?