What?

Yes, but this isn't as simple as that, the nanorods have been designed to respond to a few specific frequencies, optical fibers are inherently transparent to a wide band of continuous frequencies.

I understand what polarisation is.. do you understand what linear independence is?

No doubt. I think their choice to label colour and polorisation as continuous dimensions is a little bit misleading though.

Yes, but not as carefully as i should have it seems..

So yes you're right about how they are labeling dimensions, but what I was saying about there only being two usable polarisations and a small number of frequencies is still true - it's not really continuous because it's limited by the materials.

I'm not sure what you're saying nope to.. I was just using horizontal and vertical dimensions as an analogy because that's the one people are most likely to be comfortable with.

For polorisation you're mistaken - if you are adding light in 45 degree polorisation increments you won't be adding another dimension because it won't be independent of the horizontal/vertical polorisations you are already using - light can't be both horizontally and diagonally polorised without being automatically verticularly polorised. Length width and depth aren't dimesions of this system either.

They can add more dimensions by adding more colours, but it's not unlimited. There are only so many colours that the materials they are using can store independently. You could think of it in terms of each of the colours being a harmonic of vibration of the gold nano wires they are using, so like the harmonics of a string usable frequencies are going to run out pretty fast.

Yes - the dimension of the system is just the number of independent variables, the 3 wavelengths and the 2 polorisations.

Think about it in terms of a 1D line vs a 2D plane. In the case of the line there is the less than 0 and greater than 0 regions. When you move up to a plane there are two new greater than 0 and less than 0s (in the y plane as opposed to the x plane of the 1D line, say). So you have 4 possible combinations (or quadrants in the plane) in 2 dimensions.

Also - note that light which is circularly polarised is both vertically polarised *and* horizontally polarised, so you can have unpolarised red light; vertically polarised red light; horizontally polarised red light and vertically and horizontally polarised red light.

(Similar to: just red light; red light and blue light; red light and green light and red light blue light and green light)

Flaws? Well, for a start there's the fact that it's completely ridiculous...

Any fuel to be used for refueling would have to be launched with the craft - it all has to come from earth anyway so there's no benefit to be gained. It doesn't make any sense, it's just adding in an unnecessary layer of complication.

Even apart from that, a docking at the L2 point in order for the refueling would be a ridiculously complicated process - some kind of automatic system could be designed to do it, but (unless the craft's final destination is the lagrange point, in which case it obviously isn't going to need refueling) that would waste a lot of fuel in order to stop the craft so that it could dock with the tanker.

And the orbit of the craft to be refueled would have to pass through the lagrange point which in almost all cases would waste more fuel than could possibly be gained by the refueling (this is assuming that a transfer orbit through the lagrange point is even possible).

Oh, I don't know.. maybe it could have meant the ability to survive a single point of failure?

Survivability.. so maybe

(note that I'm quoting canajin here in case there is any confusion)

What makes you think survivability implies the ability to survive nuclear war? The fact that you've heard as much parroted anecdotally countless times in the past?

What? How can a compliant be "invalid"?

The amount of work that's gone into the development is completly irrelevant, so there's no need for your snide remarks about 'some guy who plays the latest console releases - the fact of the matter is that this shooter isn't a patch on commercial games from 10 years ago, as is the case for most open source games.

Now, excuse me while I go for a game of tux racer.

OMFGZREALLY??!

Creationism fundamentally conflicts with scientific thought, there is no light to be shed - creationism isn't a field of science with discoveries to be made, it is one theory with absolutely no supporting evidence.

your sig is kinda apt..

Something the summariser seems to have missed.. This kind of problem comes up in a lot of different places.

One example would be brain tumor treatment using lasers.

Slashdot is maintaining it's journalistic integrity, even with the threat faster moving and more distracting spam filled sites like digg and reddit.

Seriously, it's refreshing to know that at least when an article does get published on slashdot it will be newsworthy.

I'm the same, I've got Xubuntu and compiz running and it's perfect, get some minimal window decorations and you're sorted.

Just do a standard installation, then head over to http://www.array.org/ and follow the instructions to install the kernel which will get your wireless and hotkeys working.

http://www.eeeuser.com/ is an excellent forum if you have any more questions. There are a few threads there that have step by step guides to installing and configuring Xubuntu, but there really isn't much to it beyond getting a custom kernel.