Nobody is going to die from cutting their CO2 emissions in Canada, and your 2nd paragraph is simply ridiculous. By far and away, Alberta's high emissions come from its huge oil industry and its SUV-happy gas guzzling and rich population.
Regarding China - their argument is that developed countries like Canada, US, European countries etc. became developed through massive industrialization in this and preview centuries, causing enormous CO2 emissions. Is it really fair for us, now that we have burned our way to the top of the heap, to turn around to countries below us and say - "sorry, you have to stop industrializing now". While I don't necessarily agree with their argument, you have to admit it is convincing.
I'm pretty sure that also makes it impossible to burn with a standard DVD burner, because if the CD is spinning the same way, but the head is moving from out to in rather than in to out, then the spiral is the wrong way... think about it.
I'm fairly sure that most burners only like to burn things in the conventional spiral direction, thus, writing the binary data backwards will not solve the problem.
I agree that both musicians and programmers deserve to be paid for their efforts. With music CDs, however, the amount of money that goes to the artist per CD is 10 to 50 cents, as stated in the Salon article. The rest, minus miniscule production costs, goes to the big friendly mega music companies we all know and hate. With a game, at least a higher percentage of the price is going to the actual creators.
If more of the cost of a CD were to go to the artist, I wouldn't complain. If the price of CDs was reduced, I wouldn't complain. If both, I would be happy.
Regarding the price difference between music and software, the reason is obvious - you need way more programmers for a game then musicians for an album. In the end, the amount of money per software CD per programmer is also around 10 cents (I'm guessing).
Interestingly enough, however, Buffet's company Berkshire Hathaway, valued today at about $75,000 per share ($19 in 1965), has never issued a dividend, and doesn't seem to have plans to do so. (I'm not positive about that statement... can't seem to find proof in the Internet. Oh well.)
Regardless of what the law says, I believe (and I'm sure I'm not alone) that the rapist DOES deserve to be shot. Not everybody shares your particularly kind set of values.
You are correct that glass stops light at the frequency they are using, which causes another problem: there are no viable materials to make lenses out of at this wavelength - which is why all the opticts is done reflectively, using extremely finely ground parabolic mirrors, etc. etc. etc. The problem with using reflective processes instead of refractive ones is that with a reflective process, sequential errors in each unit are multiplied, whereas in lens work, they are added.
Just as a follow up to my theory, I looked at the actual paper (available here: http://pubs.acs.org/journals/nalefd/asap/pdf/nl015 606f.pdf ), and though I don't have the patience to actually read it, one of the diagrams shows the nanotobe in the order of 50 nm, about a hundred times bigger than the yahoo's "1/100,000 of a human hair". Damn sensationalists.
A hair is usually about 40 microns is diameter (that would be 40 millionths of a meter). I doubt validity of the claim that the inverter is 1/100,000th of this width.1/100,000 of 40 microns is 4 angstroms (4 E -10 meters). An average atom's radius is about 1 angstrom. Are they claiming that the inverter is 4 atoms wide?
I doubt that in the extreme. 40 atoms I might believe - perhaps some journalist made a typo / miscaluation / misquote and added an extra zero to 10,000.
As the saying goes, "Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you read."
In fact, you are wrong on the second point. According to the CTV (Canadian network) news report yesterday, Dubya has already told his big brass to have at least a partially functional system IN PLACE by 2004, the next election.
The Economist may not be a technical journal, but it generally has much better technical articles than the "hand-waving" of Time, CNN, etc, and is just as good as quick fast-food crap "techie" news like wired and slashdot.
The system you point out, and everything you say is totally correct. The problem with your system is: How is Joe Blow, a home computer user who wants to buy a electronic cat from amazon.com, supposed to get a perfectly secret "keydisk" for communication with amazon.com. Both sides have to know the key, and nobody else can. He can ask for one in the mail, but how does he know that the CD he receives was sent by amazon and not by the credit card theif next door?
With PGP, however, the public key can be known by everybody, and it's all that Joe Blow needs to know to communicate securely with amazon.com. Furthermore, public keys can be endoresed by trused corporations - "CA's" - in such a way that Joe Blow knows definitively that the amazon.com public key he has it truly genuine.
The communication pretty much has to travel between the same 2 parties as the key generation. If not, the system requires that the agreed-upon key be sent elsewhere to be used by other parties, and this transmission must be completely secure otherwise the whole point of quantum key generation is lost.
The article, short by the standards of any respectable news source, contains no information about how this data was gathered. To draw such wild conclusions one would expect to see some pretty clear (and massive) data, none of which is shown or even more than lightly alluded to.
Here's the real reason the link is unrelated, I found this at Freshmeat.net
Tuesday, Jan 2
LinuxToday editors, incessed at their low readership compared to the more popular Linux news source - Slashdot - pulled a little prank today. Posting a story about a big company sueing a free software product (the perfect bait for a slashdot editor) and submitting a link to the story to slashdot, they pulled the story from their database completely and redirected the old link to an unrelated story as soon as the bait was bitten.
The Basic 2 Stamp is just a PIC microcontroller with a nice serial interface and a Basic interpreter slapped on. Cost (for 1) about $100 or so (obviously this company gets it cheap in bulk).
Cost of just the PIC without the less useful attachments about $8.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody is going to die from cutting their CO2 emissions in Canada, and your 2nd paragraph is simply ridiculous. By far and away, Alberta's high emissions come from its huge oil industry and its SUV-happy gas guzzling and rich population.
Regarding China - their argument is that developed countries like Canada, US, European countries etc. became developed through massive industrialization in this and preview centuries, causing enormous CO2 emissions. Is it really fair for us, now that we have burned our way to the top of the heap, to turn around to countries below us and say - "sorry, you have to stop industrializing now". While I don't necessarily agree with their argument, you have to admit it is convincing.
I'm pretty sure that also makes it impossible to burn with a standard DVD burner, because if the CD is spinning the same way, but the head is moving from out to in rather than in to out, then the spiral is the wrong way... think about it.
I'm fairly sure that most burners only like to burn things in the conventional spiral direction, thus, writing the binary data backwards will not solve the problem.
I agree that both musicians and programmers deserve to be paid for their efforts. With music CDs, however, the amount of money that goes to the artist per CD is 10 to 50 cents, as stated in the Salon article. The rest, minus miniscule production costs, goes to the big friendly mega music companies we all know and hate. With a game, at least a higher percentage of the price is going to the actual creators.
If more of the cost of a CD were to go to the artist, I wouldn't complain. If the price of CDs was reduced, I wouldn't complain. If both, I would be happy.
Regarding the price difference between music and software, the reason is obvious - you need way more programmers for a game then musicians for an album. In the end, the amount of money per software CD per programmer is also around 10 cents (I'm guessing).
Interestingly enough, however, Buffet's company Berkshire Hathaway, valued today at about $75,000 per share ($19 in 1965), has never issued a dividend, and doesn't seem to have plans to do so. (I'm not positive about that statement... can't seem to find proof in the Internet. Oh well.)
Exec #1: We have a problem! People prefer pirating music over buying our CDs. What shall we do?
Exec #2: Idea! Let's sell them less-functional CDs for the same price!!!
42... I bet they stopped once they got there intentionally as an allusion to the late great Adams.
Can be found here (in PDF form), for all those who like reading physicists physics.
Not everybody deserves life.
You are correct that glass stops light at the frequency they are using, which causes another problem: there are no viable materials to make lenses out of at this wavelength - which is why all the opticts is done reflectively, using extremely finely ground parabolic mirrors, etc. etc. etc. The problem with using reflective processes instead of refractive ones is that with a reflective process, sequential errors in each unit are multiplied, whereas in lens work, they are added.
Just as a follow up to my theory, I looked at the actual paper (available here: http://pubs.acs.org/journals/nalefd/asap/pdf/nl015 606f.pdf ), and though I don't have the patience to actually read it, one of the diagrams shows the nanotobe in the order of 50 nm, about a hundred times bigger than the yahoo's "1/100,000 of a human hair". Damn sensationalists.
I doubt that in the extreme. 40 atoms I might believe - perhaps some journalist made a typo / miscaluation / misquote and added an extra zero to 10,000.
As the saying goes, "Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you read."
In fact, you are wrong on the second point. According to the CTV (Canadian network) news report yesterday, Dubya has already told his big brass to have at least a partially functional system IN PLACE by 2004, the next election.
My thoughts precisely. It's like "doublespeak" from Orwell's 1984.
The Economist may not be a technical journal, but it generally has much better technical articles than the "hand-waving" of Time, CNN, etc, and is just as good as quick fast-food crap "techie" news like wired and slashdot.
With PGP, however, the public key can be known by everybody, and it's all that Joe Blow needs to know to communicate securely with amazon.com. Furthermore, public keys can be endoresed by trused corporations - "CA's" - in such a way that Joe Blow knows definitively that the amazon.com public key he has it truly genuine.
Be a sceptic!
Yeah... isn't it hilarious when people correct other people and are still fundamentally wrong?
Here is a non-caps sentence.
Here's the real reason the link is unrelated, I found this at Freshmeat.net Tuesday, Jan 2 LinuxToday editors, incessed at their low readership compared to the more popular Linux news source - Slashdot - pulled a little prank today. Posting a story about a big company sueing a free software product (the perfect bait for a slashdot editor) and submitting a link to the story to slashdot, they pulled the story from their database completely and redirected the old link to an unrelated story as soon as the bait was bitten.
Couldn't resist. Slap my wrists now.
The Basic 2 Stamp is just a PIC microcontroller with a nice serial interface and a Basic interpreter slapped on. Cost (for 1) about $100 or so (obviously this company gets it cheap in bulk).
Cost of just the PIC without the less useful attachments about $8.
Prefered Linux Distribution is not Linux? Woah... contradiction.
I think they expected that to happen. But Red Hat is %50 (last time I checked).
Surely none of the problems are large enough that they require more than a bit of hacking to surmount though.