There was a previous slashdot article (about four months back, I believe) where it was mentioned that the NSA had applied for a patent for a gravitic drive. The patent application itself was so broadly worded that it basically covered every concievable implementation of how such a device could possibly work, even though it was shooting in the dark in every possible direction.
It doesn't matter anyway. If anyone ever came up with a reactionless drive, the USTPO could just issue a secrecy order if they wanted to cover it up badly enough.
BTW, does anyone remember an article here from a long time ago where some researcher developed a super-efficient electric motor? He -claimed- he had a test rig set up where a 9 volt battery was running a household fan with the same work output as a regular AC driven fan. None of my search efforts turned up anything.
This brings up something that's been puzzling me for a while. When recordable CD technologies were first starting to come out, one of the major benefits that was being touted was the longevity of the media. When Tandy Corporation first introduced their THOR CD technology, it supposedly had a lifetime of decades, and it was an immature technology at the time. I remember reading articles about early CD based storage systems that actually boasted a guarenteed lifetime of a hundred years or more. (I don't recall the manufacturers, and it could possibly have been a more unusual system, like magneto-optical.)
Now we have CD rot and all other sorts of failure modes. It would be unwise nowadays to have anything less than two backups on CD or DVD for important data, and it would be smart to check the integrity of the backups on a regular basis and reburn them as necessary.
Perhaps it's just cheap mass production and poor quality control. Premium quality media would stand up better, but it still seems that, at least to me, most CD and DVD recording media is almost engineered to fail.
I vaguely remember a long time ago that Josephson junctions were considered as a contender for logic gates. If I recall correctly, a conductor that carried a current could control a current in another conductor that was perpendicular to the control element via its magnetic field. It had niche aplications, but for processing elements, it was deemed impractical: the devices had to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures, and shearing forces from contraction tended to destroy them. It would be interesting to see if carbon nanotube technology could somehow be a remedy to the problems with using Josephson junctions, or a variant of them in processor applications.
It should be possible to do this. EEPROM's should have a pin called *WE (Write Enable, the asterix indicates it is an active low signal). If this pin is bent outwards while inserting the chip into the socket and tied high by soldering a wire to Vcc on the same chip, this will effectively disable flashing it. On surface mounted devices especially, one would have to be exceedingly confident of their soldering skills to do this, if it is even at all possible. Having a 5-10K resistor between the pins would not be a bad idea, either. Make sure that you don't unseat Vcc while doing this! A double-throw switch could be added to this mod to enable flashing if desired. Nowadays most mobo's have a jumper to disable flashing anyway, so this should only be of interest to hardcore hackers.
The pin configurations for EPROMS/EEPROMS are usually highly standardised, but if you attempt any of this it would be wise to go through great lengths to assure whatever datasheets you are using for a reference are actually describing the same device you intend to assail with your soldering iron. If you have a legacy motherboard that has an actual EPROM (a chip that has a glass window on top, or a standard DIP that the part number identifies it as an EPROM, like 27C1024), this is a non issue - these cannot be reprogrammed at all except by special equipment.
PLEASE NOTE: I'm just a garage/hobby tinkerer, so I don't encourage anyone to risk their hardware. I stress that this should be only done by those who are confident that they know what they are doing, and to ask advice from someone more knowledgeable than I.
Are there any hardware techs out there willing to offer their 2 cents?
GPS can be accurate to centimeter resolutions, even for civilian equipment. I work in the surveying/geomatics field, and the equipment that we use such as Topcon or Sokkia RTK (Real Time Kinematics)GPS systems typically have better than one centimeter resolution horizontal and less than two vertical. I do believe that it's necessary to subscribe to a service to recieve a certain signal, though.
This is a pretty cool hack, even though its usefulness is debatable. Still, that's the spirit of hacking. It kinda reminded me of this guy who made a scanner for his C64 with a photocell and lego blocks...
I wonder if that study should have taken into account at how the absorbed heat is utilised by trees. Is the absorption of sunlight by chlorophyl to synthesize sugars for plant metabolism an endothermic reaction? If it is, then that heat is used to build biomass that has the end result of absorbing atmospheric CO2 and giving off oxygen. I'm willing to bet that higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be a larger problem than forested areas being somewheres they hadn't been before - the effect of them could be damaging, but in a more localised manner.
I'm sure there's logging lobbyist groups creaming themselves over this. But the article seems, at least to me, a statement that nature is an increasingly complex and delicate system that we may never fully understand. But even for those that aren't biologists, even the most base layman can understand that you don't need to be a mechanic to know that if you throw a wrench into a running engine, it will come to a grinding halt.
The last line of the article sums it up the best: "The less we interfere with the system, the more likely we are to have a healthy planet."
Really! Freaking WOW! Banning -all- devices that can encode video? Say goodbye to editing your home movies on anything other than off a firewire or USB camcorder.
I'm trying to imagine the kind of world a movie studio or record industry exec dreams of...
The banning of -all- computers except for corporate use, and the public would only be permitted to own terminals that dealt with only static images and text - no audio. WiFi covering the world, faithfully reporting every show you watch and song you hear on any device you are allowed to own, automatically debiting your bank account for each track or show. Charge extra if you want to watch stuff without ads.
I never would have imagined such an assault on every aspect of a persons freedoms in regards to entertainment. Personally I don't really think it's about lost revenues in the industries - that's just the excuse they wave around, filesharers stealing the food out of the mouths of the poor execs children. It's as if there is an undercurrent of wanting to excercise absolute control over every aspect of what you're allowed to watch and hear, and only if you pay your dues would you be permitted to partake in the privelege of anything other than sound clips and infomercials.
They might as well go for broke. Ban all storage media. You can pay to have some archive store your personal files.
"USA only gets control over USA, and you always have a choice where to live."
Unless the US begins to apply political and economic pressure to adopt laws that are the equivalent to the DMCA. Recently here in Canada, the government turned down a proposal from the US to enact a DMCA type law, and the Bush administration "rejected" our "rejection". It was posted here a few months back.
I wonder where the economic thumbscrews are being turned. Softwood lumber dispute, perhaps?
Even though you may have intended that as humor, that statement blows away Mr. Takeno's horrible oversimplification of what encompasses the concept of self-awareness, and hypes what is somewhat a lackluster experiment as opposed to an earth-shattering development.
While it seems to be successful test of pattern recognition, calling this "self awareness" is really stretching the term and making it sound like something much more than it really is. This is more like "Likelihood of object three meters ahead being a mirror - 99%. Likelihood of visual feedback within object confines being reflection of this unit - 99.9%." If that robot experienced the spontaneous thought of "My hips look fat," or "Why do I look so ugly?", I'd be more inclined to think of this as a staggering achievement that the headline makes it out to be.
I strongly disagree with Mr. Takeno's statement - "In humans, consciousness is basically a state in which the behavior of the self and another is understood," This is a vast over-simplification of consciousness, the entity of a beings "self", or soul, if you'd prefer.
Being a fascination of mine, I remember reading several articles suggesting that consciousness may be the manifestation of quantum effects within protein microtubules within neuronal fibers in biological beings. Here's one reference (www.artsci.wustl.edu) that I came across offhandedly. If someone created a robot that had structures that behaved in a quantum manner as well as circutry that was purely digital, perhaps it would actually be possible to create an artificial being that actually had a "soul". The ramifications of such an achievement would be staggering.
Just as a side note - Do living beings actually have to be conscious? Just a strange thought, since it doesn't seem to be a necessary attribute for living beings to survive and evolve. And if the theorey of quantum effects being responsible for consciousness hold true, there's no way that animals other than humans could be excluded. It would be a sweet, joyous poke in the ribs to the crowd that's been tainting rational science with creationism, ID, and such.
A soul being some random effect that just happens by accident would be the cherry on the cake.:D
Can someone explain why I would have hooked my Blu-Ray player up to the Internet in the first place?
Maybe you wouldn't have to. You'd only have to plug it in to the power outlet...
But seeing how there is major development happening in turning AC power grids into broadband delivery systems as well, it'd be the same thing.
Hell - it's probably going to get to the point of your microwave reporting to a server what brand of RFID tagged popcorn your having at 8:41 PM, Monday.
I wonder if there would be a market for AC line broadband blockers...
Nevermind. They'll probably make that illegal, too.
I doubt that WalMart would want to have people spend less time in the checkout isles. The longer people stand waiting in line, the more likely they will impulse buy the trinkets, batteries, and such displayed there.
It would be interesting to see if the Pentagon and other government agencies could somehow use situations like this to their advantage. TFA stated that unclassified systems were probed. While there wouldn't be any secret information that could be obtained from them, it's possible to get useful data from seemingly useless stuff. An example would be something like common billing information. Someone could come across invoices for a hundred vending machines and catering contracts. That in itself would be useless, but if it was also found out that they were meant for division X in a laser weapons research center, one could probably guess that operations would be expanded there.
A little creative disinformation could be useful (and possibly entertaining). If division X were having their Christmas party and had a hypnotist performing, that could be written on the division budget as a "hypnosis/psychological expert", and if anyone fell for the quit-smoking seminar some of those guys have, someone who was bored could type up a joke report detailing success/failure rates of test subjects being subliminally programmed at said laser research division.
It's a silly example, but something more elaborate could have an effect of diverting and wasting resources from foriegn intelligence agencies and having little busybody spies end up looking foolish.
If someone breaks into someone's house and raids their fridge, noone is going to feel sorry for them if they get food poisoning.
For the video editing, you may also want to check out Cinelerra. It's a powerful non-linear editing suite that is focused towards professional and industrial users, and even though the hardware requirements on the site are severe, it works quite well on more moderate systems. There's also Kino and Lives, which I haven't had time to check out much. Jahshaka, which I've used a bit, seems alright. But I've had stability problems with it a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a previous slashdot article (about four months back, I believe) where it was mentioned that the NSA had applied for a patent for a gravitic drive. The patent application itself was so broadly worded that it basically covered every concievable implementation of how such a device could possibly work, even though it was shooting in the dark in every possible direction.
It doesn't matter anyway. If anyone ever came up with a reactionless drive, the USTPO could just issue a secrecy order if they wanted to cover it up badly enough.
BTW, does anyone remember an article here from a long time ago where some researcher developed a super-efficient electric motor? He -claimed- he had a test rig set up where a 9 volt battery was running a household fan with the same work output as a regular AC driven fan. None of my search efforts turned up anything.
This brings up something that's been puzzling me for a while. When recordable CD technologies were first starting to come out, one of the major benefits that was being touted was the longevity of the media. When Tandy Corporation first introduced their THOR CD technology, it supposedly had a lifetime of decades, and it was an immature technology at the time. I remember reading articles about early CD based storage systems that actually boasted a guarenteed lifetime of a hundred years or more. (I don't recall the manufacturers, and it could possibly have been a more unusual system, like magneto-optical.)
Now we have CD rot and all other sorts of failure modes. It would be unwise nowadays to have anything less than two backups on CD or DVD for important data, and it would be smart to check the integrity of the backups on a regular basis and reburn them as necessary.
Perhaps it's just cheap mass production and poor quality control. Premium quality media would stand up better, but it still seems that, at least to me, most CD and DVD recording media is almost engineered to fail.
I vaguely remember a long time ago that Josephson junctions were considered as a contender for logic gates. If I recall correctly, a conductor that carried a current could control a current in another conductor that was perpendicular to the control element via its magnetic field. It had niche aplications, but for processing elements, it was deemed impractical: the devices had to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures, and shearing forces from contraction tended to destroy them. It would be interesting to see if carbon nanotube technology could somehow be a remedy to the problems with using Josephson junctions, or a variant of them in processor applications.
Just a thought. I'm no physicist.
It should be possible to do this. EEPROM's should have a pin called *WE (Write Enable, the asterix indicates it is an active low signal). If this pin is bent outwards while inserting the chip into the socket and tied high by soldering a wire to Vcc on the same chip, this will effectively disable flashing it. On surface mounted devices especially, one would have to be exceedingly confident of their soldering skills to do this, if it is even at all possible. Having a 5-10K resistor between the pins would not be a bad idea, either. Make sure that you don't unseat Vcc while doing this! A double-throw switch could be added to this mod to enable flashing if desired. Nowadays most mobo's have a jumper to disable flashing anyway, so this should only be of interest to hardcore hackers.
The pin configurations for EPROMS/EEPROMS are usually highly standardised, but if you attempt any of this it would be wise to go through great lengths to assure whatever datasheets you are using for a reference are actually describing the same device you intend to assail with your soldering iron. If you have a legacy motherboard that has an actual EPROM (a chip that has a glass window on top, or a standard DIP that the part number identifies it as an EPROM, like 27C1024), this is a non issue - these cannot be reprogrammed at all except by special equipment.
PLEASE NOTE: I'm just a garage/hobby tinkerer, so I don't encourage anyone to risk their hardware. I stress that this should be only done by those who are confident that they know what they are doing, and to ask advice from someone more knowledgeable than I.
Are there any hardware techs out there willing to offer their 2 cents?
GPS can be accurate to centimeter resolutions, even for civilian equipment. I work in the surveying/geomatics field, and the equipment that we use such as Topcon or Sokkia RTK (Real Time Kinematics)GPS systems typically have better than one centimeter resolution horizontal and less than two vertical. I do believe that it's necessary to subscribe to a service to recieve a certain signal, though.
This is a pretty cool hack, even though its usefulness is debatable. Still, that's the spirit of hacking. It kinda reminded me of this guy who made a scanner for his C64 with a photocell and lego blocks...
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/tech/tech.html
Even today, that's neat. He even turned a scanner into a digital camera.
I wonder if that study should have taken into account at how the absorbed heat is utilised by trees. Is the absorption of sunlight by chlorophyl to synthesize sugars for plant metabolism an endothermic reaction? If it is, then that heat is used to build biomass that has the end result of absorbing atmospheric CO2 and giving off oxygen. I'm willing to bet that higher CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be a larger problem than forested areas being somewheres they hadn't been before - the effect of them could be damaging, but in a more localised manner.
I'm sure there's logging lobbyist groups creaming themselves over this. But the article seems, at least to me, a statement that nature is an increasingly complex and delicate system that we may never fully understand. But even for those that aren't biologists, even the most base layman can understand that you don't need to be a mechanic to know that if you throw a wrench into a running engine, it will come to a grinding halt.
The last line of the article sums it up the best: "The less we interfere with the system, the more likely we are to have a healthy planet."
Really! Freaking WOW! Banning -all- devices that can encode video? Say goodbye to editing your home movies on anything other than off a firewire or USB camcorder. I'm trying to imagine the kind of world a movie studio or record industry exec dreams of... The banning of -all- computers except for corporate use, and the public would only be permitted to own terminals that dealt with only static images and text - no audio. WiFi covering the world, faithfully reporting every show you watch and song you hear on any device you are allowed to own, automatically debiting your bank account for each track or show. Charge extra if you want to watch stuff without ads. I never would have imagined such an assault on every aspect of a persons freedoms in regards to entertainment. Personally I don't really think it's about lost revenues in the industries - that's just the excuse they wave around, filesharers stealing the food out of the mouths of the poor execs children. It's as if there is an undercurrent of wanting to excercise absolute control over every aspect of what you're allowed to watch and hear, and only if you pay your dues would you be permitted to partake in the privelege of anything other than sound clips and infomercials. They might as well go for broke. Ban all storage media. You can pay to have some archive store your personal files.
"USA only gets control over USA, and you always have a choice where to live."
Unless the US begins to apply political and economic pressure to adopt laws that are the equivalent to the DMCA. Recently here in Canada, the government turned down a proposal from the US to enact a DMCA type law, and the Bush administration "rejected" our "rejection". It was posted here a few months back.
I wonder where the economic thumbscrews are being turned. Softwood lumber dispute, perhaps?
Even though you may have intended that as humor, that statement blows away Mr. Takeno's horrible oversimplification of what encompasses the concept of self-awareness, and hypes what is somewhat a lackluster experiment as opposed to an earth-shattering development.
While it seems to be successful test of pattern recognition, calling this "self awareness" is really stretching the term and making it sound like something much more than it really is. This is more like "Likelihood of object three meters ahead being a mirror - 99%. Likelihood of visual feedback within object confines being reflection of this unit - 99.9%." If that robot experienced the spontaneous thought of "My hips look fat," or "Why do I look so ugly?", I'd be more inclined to think of this as a staggering achievement that the headline makes it out to be.
I strongly disagree with Mr. Takeno's statement - "In humans, consciousness is basically a state in which the behavior of the self and another is understood," This is a vast over-simplification of consciousness, the entity of a beings "self", or soul, if you'd prefer.
Being a fascination of mine, I remember reading several articles suggesting that consciousness may be the manifestation of quantum effects within protein microtubules within neuronal fibers in biological beings. Here's one reference (www.artsci.wustl.edu) that I came across offhandedly. If someone created a robot that had structures that behaved in a quantum manner as well as circutry that was purely digital, perhaps it would actually be possible to create an artificial being that actually had a "soul". The ramifications of such an achievement would be staggering.
Just as a side note - Do living beings actually have to be conscious? Just a strange thought, since it doesn't seem to be a necessary attribute for living beings to survive and evolve. And if the theorey of quantum effects being responsible for consciousness hold true, there's no way that animals other than humans could be excluded. It would be a sweet, joyous poke in the ribs to the crowd that's been tainting rational science with creationism, ID, and such.
A soul being some random effect that just happens by accident would be the cherry on the cake. :D
What is the significance of the 500 parts per million figure in the article? Something's leaking.
Can someone explain why I would have hooked my Blu-Ray player up to the Internet in the first place?
Maybe you wouldn't have to. You'd only have to plug it in to the power outlet...
But seeing how there is major development happening in turning AC power grids into broadband delivery systems as well, it'd be the same thing.
Hell - it's probably going to get to the point of your microwave reporting to a server what brand of RFID tagged popcorn your having at 8:41 PM, Monday.
I wonder if there would be a market for AC line broadband blockers...
Nevermind. They'll probably make that illegal, too.
Why didn't the school administrators simply take the laptops away from them the first time they proved to be untrustworthy? Or the second time?
It's obvious that if those kids circumvented the controls the first time around, they'd do it again.
It looks more like the admins wanted an example made, and it blew up in their faces when the police were called in.
I doubt that WalMart would want to have people spend less time in the checkout isles. The longer people stand waiting in line, the more likely they will impulse buy the trinkets, batteries, and such displayed there.
It would be interesting to see if the Pentagon and other government agencies could somehow use situations like this to their advantage. TFA stated that unclassified systems were probed. While there wouldn't be any secret information that could be obtained from them, it's possible to get useful data from seemingly useless stuff. An example would be something like common billing information. Someone could come across invoices for a hundred vending machines and catering contracts. That in itself would be useless, but if it was also found out that they were meant for division X in a laser weapons research center, one could probably guess that operations would be expanded there.
A little creative disinformation could be useful (and possibly entertaining). If division X were having their Christmas party and had a hypnotist performing, that could be written on the division budget as a "hypnosis/psychological expert", and if anyone fell for the quit-smoking seminar some of those guys have, someone who was bored could type up a joke report detailing success/failure rates of test subjects being subliminally programmed at said laser research division.
It's a silly example, but something more elaborate could have an effect of diverting and wasting resources from foriegn intelligence agencies and having little busybody spies end up looking foolish.
If someone breaks into someone's house and raids their fridge, noone is going to feel sorry for them if they get food poisoning.
For the video editing, you may also want to check out Cinelerra. It's a powerful non-linear editing suite that is focused towards professional and industrial users, and even though the hardware requirements on the site are severe, it works quite well on more moderate systems. There's also Kino and Lives, which I haven't had time to check out much. Jahshaka, which I've used a bit, seems alright. But I've had stability problems with it a lot.