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Because there's a critical distance away from the black hole below which matter cannot orbit because the orbital speed would be greater than the speed of light. So anything orbiting that reaches the critical orbital radius (which depends on the black hole's mass) will be sucked in.

In that sense, it shows how differently General Relativity is compared to Newtonian Mechanics.

See this site for a visual demonstration and an explanation.

By the way, I've no idea where "the 200,000 years to hit the event horizon" comes from. According to GR, from our frame of reference it would take an infinite amount of time to hit the event horizon.

I sure loved them when I was a kid. Who knows if they'll hold up. I kinda doubt they will.

You can even download them here

I'd like to see someone explain the process that created a cosmic ray (reference) with energy (51 Joules) comparable to a brick being dropped on your foot.

They take their Autodesk money, move to Switzerland, and write stuff for the public domain.

Because they like it!!!

He wrote an essay in 2003, The Digital Imprimatur which reads like a (both technical and social) roadmap for upcoming DRM and Internet surveillance technology.

Well, with Andy's "access" and privilege to publish, I must assume he's getting a bit edgy about his future footing... but, the position he's championing is dangerously close to this: The Digital Imprimitur

Just send someone an OTP DVD generated by hotbits and keep a copy for yourself. Use the DVD only for key exchange and use AES for the data stream. No one can crack a one-time pad unless you make a mistake. This won't work for e-commerce, but it works wonderfully for terrorist and spies. For the extra paranoid, use the OTP data for encryption, but you'll eventually need a new one (re-using OTP data renders it crackable).

Given your post, you may be interested in John Walker's papers on AutoDesk.

For those of you asking about Open Source-friendly CAD software, check out:

www.varicad.de

Also, check out:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/subsubsection 2_85_0_5_10.html

where they state on their page:

"AutoCAD as an open system
    With the re-architecting of the internals of AutoCAD anticipated for Release 12 (the OOPS project), Autodesk will be in a position to take a bold step which, if successful, may ensure the preeminence of AutoCAD for the next quarter century, greatly accelerate the pace of AutoCAD development, and establish a new paradigm for the relationship between a PC software vendor and its customers which our competitors will find difficult to emulate.

I'm talking about making the source code for AutoCAD available, and before you stop reading, let me explain the reasons for such a move as well as the means I've come up with for testing the concept without incurring any substantial risk."

See:

http://www.defcar.es/

(Click on English, if you can't read Espan~ol)

As for shipbuilding, check out Defcar. Some of their software still runs on Win95. If that is so, then how hard can it be to just run the stuff in WINE, CrossOver, or something else?

For those using SolidWorks, and are worried about staying within license counts, see:

http://www.solidworks.com/pages/partners/PartnerDe tails.html?ID=488&ProductID=317

But, if major corporations (and, in their free time, aspiring Linux sysadmins) actually take VariCAD for a spin and add it to their portfolios or resumes, then maybe hiring managers will be keen to hire people who actually have user experience with VariCAD. Hopefully VariCAD gets enough activity and paying customers to enable them to add those few extra enticing pieces people don't see in VariCAD.

I am sure VariCAD can integrate with Star Office and OpenOffice.org, and maybe even other word processing suites/apps.

But, to expect AutoCAD to weaken ms' posterior probiscus is probably folly. Maybe AutoCAD LIKES the pelvic torsion and gyration?

DS

And yet, we have not detected a coherent signal of gravitational wave from local sources. This science is that hard. And that's why this is so fascinating.

That is the really weird part. The people at fourmilab have a video of a basement torsion bar experiment that demonstrates that objects create their own space-time curvature.

But there's no way of demonstrating that such curvature will ripple across space-time.

You know, I'm still very interested to read exactly how the government intends to perform the actual conversion. There have to be so many documents, no doubt they intend to have someone script something together that will read each .DOC and .PDF and convert that into an OpenDocument format, but who reliable will that be? We all know saving .DOC's in OpenOffice can (occasionally) be precarious, sometimes even exporting a file to a non-standard format in MS Office leads to unexpected results. What they will have to do is run their scripts and then have a team look at each document side-by-side to ensure the conversion was successful, but even if 99% of all conversions do work according to plan, you're still looking at an enourmous task.
But, of course, we're well aware of the long-term benefits, so I suppose a three-month project of doing the actual conversion will ultimately help our grandchildren when they have to convert that into their preferred format of the day.

It won't be as close as it was in 2003, but it will be more visible to more of the earth's population This is the closest it will be until 2018 Hubble will be snapping party photos of it for posterity's sake.

It turns out this technique was not used with AutoDesk/AutoCAD. I've spent the last hour or so running through John Walkers book on the company and it looks like the AutoDesk was having quite a focus problem around the time( 1992 ) that the MS Windows version was announced.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_100. html

I've not found where it's mentioned how the remaining versions were cancelled but I'm still looking. One thing is for sure though, that is AutoCAD was cross platform originally and built/developed on UNIX workstations. Also, John Walker saw how poorly Windows was done but also saw how the marketing of it created a huge install base which AutoDesk needed to sell into. He wanted AutoDesk to become THE graphics company for the new PC era.

LoB

Your post sounds very optimistic to me, I hope you're at least partly right. However, consider such documents as The Digital Imprimatur, which I believe, are now more on-topic than ever.

NASA have needed a heavy lifter

Actually, I've heard about studies stating that the main driver for launch cost is neither the total payload nor the technology but the launch rate. That is, for the same payload weight, a light booster that flies a hundred times a year will probably be cheaper than a heavy lifter that flies only a few times a year. It doesn't really matter if they are expendable, reusable, cryogenic or whatever.

See for example this 1994 study ("This indicates a potential paradox in the commercial space transportation market. High flight rates appear to be necessary to reduce the price per flight. However, reduced prices per flight reduces the revenue per flight, and consequently the cash flow available for investment payback.") or A Rocket a Day Keeps the High Costs Away.

Sure, a lower payload capacity means more orbital assembly required, more modular systems, which will make them heavier. But they will be more versatile, possibly cheaper, and the lower launch cost will offset the added weight.

OTOH, developing a heavy lifter starts from the opposite premise: a launch has to be expensive, so their number has to be minimized, with more payload per launch. This makes low flight rate a self-fulfilling prophecy and almost calls for a high cost.

The funny thing is that NASA arbitrarily set the CEV weight at 25 tonnes, just above the LEO capability of the heaviest rocket currently available (Delta 4 Heavy). Almost as if they wanted to need a new launcher, which then could be developed from Shuttle parts, keeping the existing workforce with a job, maybe even the very same job...

eno2001 wrote: "The guy who wrote Speach Freely took it offline BECAUSE of national security. He knew that his program cold be used by terror cells and is even publically quoted as having regretted ever inventing cryptography in the first place."

Did anybody tell you this bunch of crap, or did you make it up yourself? The creator of SpeakFreely (not "Speach Freely"), John Walker, just discontinued its development, did NOT "take it offline"; he did so for reasons (http://www.fourmilab.ch/netfone/ ) that have nothing to do with the "National Security" routinely invoked by the idiots who can't even protect their citizens from a hurricane; and he did not "invent cryptography", much less regretted having invented it (perhaps your confused mind is mixing up this story with the ALLEGED (and denied: http://slashdot.org/interviews/01/09/24/162236.sht ml ) regrets by Phil Zimmerman about PGP.

Enzo

"The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety." -- Henry Louis Mencken

I know damn well that there is no functionality extended to IE that is unavailable to Any Other Browser. (Microsoft Trolls and Flamers, give it a break this post and keep your stupidity to yourself, no one falls for it anymore!) So we might as well call this what it is: techno-harassment! The unreasonable and gratuitious bigotry and stigma perpetrated against users for not using the "mainstream" choices, i.e. requiring Microsoft Word to submit a resume, requiring one brand of browser, etc.

We need to launch a full-scale counter-offensive, in which we hack code into our systems that fools the world into thinking it's whatever it is "supposed" to be. I would be interested in a "cloaking device" for Firefox that tells the nosey, busybody web server that it *is* Internet Exploiter, a "Moronizer" mode on Emacs (friendly companion to this: http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/ ) which inserts the garbage ASCII characters necessary to fool the recieving party into believing it's a Microslop We^|d document, and generally the equivalent hacks for every application that could be affected.

Like with my internet provider who sternly insisted that they support only Microsoft and Macintosh, so I hacked a script file in and *voila*, best internet connection to a Linux box ever, and I offered to share my "secret" for getting their service to work with Linux so they could start supporting that platform too, and was ignored. Maybe because my sentences are too long?

Anyway, we already have emulators to run Windows-only software in Linux. It's time we took that idea all the way through, and also made some Very Noisy Protests against Government and Corporate techno-harassment!

Talking about 'stage 2' or 'stage 3' gets dissmissed as tinfoil hat nonsense if you don't get across 'stage 1' first. I often have enough trouble getting people to accept that Trusted Network Connect is a legitimate threat.

BTW, have you read The Digital Imprimatur?

-

Implementing a program that encrypts with an OTP is a no-brainer. Any program capable of doing a bitwise XOR can do it (basically because the algoriths IS a XOR).

There are two BIG problems with OTP:

1) You need a lot of random bits (the good stuff, like this, not your cheap pseudo random numbers). You need exactly as many as your plaintext.

2) You need to securely send a copy to the intended receiver, and make sure the pads are destroyed once used.

Basically, no one does it because it's a real bitch to implement correctly (pad creation) and it's not worth the effort (unless you're using them in a hotline from Washington to Moscow or something like that).

You probably don't want a OTP. If you want something to encrypt your files and recover them with a password, you CERTAINLY don't want a OTP (in fact, you can't have one because the pad is not random, it's pseudo random, generated from the password and thus lacks the important properties of an OTP).

And very important: most companies that sell "One time pad" software usually sell snake oil, so be very careful.

And if you think you can get away with a pseudo random pad, the soviets spent some big time making pads for diplomatic and espionage messages, and made the little mistake of using the pads more than once, you can see the results here.

Demoroniser is, in the author's own man pages words:

A Perl script which corrects incompatible HTML generated by Microsoft applications.

You can get it from the link in the same page. I must confess that I've not used it myself (don't use Office/Frontpage) but if it does what it says on the tin it should sort you out.

I use a homebrew version of demoronizer with accumulated patches that I added to the script along the years + tidy to sort everything up

(Perl script)demoroniser - correct moronic and gratuitously incompatible HTML generated by Microsoft applications

http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/

a standalone Perl script, I use daily is demoronizer.

It has the useful purpose of being a place to go and stay. Getting up to LEO requires a lot of thrust and equipment, but take note of this highly recommended article: A rocket a day keeps the high costs away. If you can haul up large amounts of stuff, for a cheap price to LEO and the ISS, then everything else has already been solved, practically. I see the ISS as a solution to a problem that will come eventually.

Read John Walker and take note of his figures, he is the guy that wrote autocad. http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html/

The time it took the article to hit my red Digital Imprimatur button? A few seconds.

Modifier: the time it takes till I get to the bottom of it? Uh, ... lots of work.

John Walker's wonderful Earth & Moon Viewer has been around for as long as I can remember. See this page for a catalogue of formations, landing sites and other points of interest.

John Walker's wonderful Earth & Moon Viewer has been around for as long as I can remember. See this page for a catalogue of formations, landing sites and other points of interest.

"It is in the interest of broadband providers to prevent home users from setting up servers which might consume substantial upstream bandwidth. By enforcing an 'outbound only' restriction on home users, they are blocked from setting up servers, and must use hosting services if, for example, they wish to create a personal home page. (With consolidation among Internet companies, the access supplier may also own a hosting service, creating a direct economic incentive to encourage customers to use it.)"

"In addition, it is probable that basic broadband service will be restricted to the set of Internet services used by consumers: Web, FTP, E-mail, instant messages, streaming video, etc., just as firewalls are configured today to limit access to a list of explicitly permitted services. Users will, certainly, be able to obtain "premium" service at additional cost which will eliminate these restrictions ... but the Internet access market has historically been strongly price sensitive, so it is reasonable to expect that over the next few years the majority of users connected to the Internet will have consumer-grade access, which will limit their use to those services deemed appropriate for their market segment."

> If this guy is the worlds biggest hacker, then the solution is easy:

> Just put him on a diet

Preferably The Hacker's Diet! :)

MS HTML is much much worse than just lack of styles... First, the HTML is just plain broken. Check out http://www.fourmilab.ch/webtools/demoroniser/ which was written to correct some of these basic errors. Even that doesn't fix things like a single-font document where the HTML sets and resets the font for damn near every word, or the way it puts in line breaks at the end of every screen line in a paragraph in a lame attempt to maintain "print" formatting.

There are a number of tools (HTML Tidy) and products (Dreamweaver) that attempt to clean it up. Some do a pretty good job, but nothing can correct all of it's severe brain damage.

I'll tell you why people don't like the brown colour. Because the Earth is not shitty brown coloured. Really! Take a look!

The old green colour was not only more pleasant to the eye, but more *ACCURATE*! Also, why do they have splodges that are darker than than others? I just think that looks terrible.

For example, manually retrieve 10 Mbits from HotBits (takes a few hours), and then expand those by a factor of 50 via Muddle-Square. That's 500 Mbits that are essentially indistinguishable from true random.

It's free, and you get to learn a bit about random numbers from reading Knuth.

See these cool sites:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/

and this:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/satellite.html

Lots of fun playing with that that, hope the MS stuff is even better.

See these cool sites:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/

and this:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/satellite.html

Lots of fun playing with that that, hope the MS stuff is even better.

Also worth reading is the Digital Imprimatur

Reference link on the Doppler Shift for light.

This just isn't true, it's much better to avoid those extra calories in the first place rather than trying to sweat them off.

The average bloke burns ~2500 cals a day just by keeping their body ticking over, which makes a 2 mile run (~200 cals) look trivial.

I lost ~60lb (~4 stone) in a year by counting all my calories and making sure i kept the daily deficit as low as i could.

The hackers diet (loosing weight from an engineering perspective) has some useful info:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html

• The first rule of weight loss is never allow yourself to give up. Your motto should be: failure is not an option. If something doesn't work, change your strategy but don't give up. Don't get frustrated after losing weight, stop your diet / exercise plan, then gain it all back. Your effort will have been wasted. At some point you WILL fail at your weight loss plan. Realize that this will happen and plan for it. The key is to find some way to avoid regaining weight you lost.
• Don't let your scale dictate your level of success. Read The Hacker's Diet. The best thing you'll get out of this is the "eat watch", which is just a way to even out the spikes in your daily weight. Get a tape measure and keep track of some key body measurements. Use the fit of your clothes or photographs of yourself to track your weight loss.
• Our bodies strongly resist changes in weight. Making big changes to your behavior to try to lose weight is very hard. Consider making small changes to lose weight instead of going on some massive diet and exercise program. Remember that a little success is worth more than a big failure.
• If you're drinking non-diet soda, STOP IT! A 2-liter bottle of soda has about 800 kcals. If you drink one a day, that's about 5600 kcal a week. If you stop drinking that soda, and change nothing else, you should lose over a pound a week. Now, it doesn't usually work like this because your body will adjust by making you hungry more often or making you tired more often. But you'll certainly lose weight, and you can keep it off if you follow up with a reasonable diet. Switch to diet soda, tea made with artificial sweetner, or good 'ol water.
• If you eat fast food more than once every week or two, then STOP IT. A big fast food meal is roughly 2000 kcal. That's over half a pound right there. If you eat fast food for lunch a few days at work, you could probably lose a pound or more a week by eating something healthier. (Again, assuming nothing else changes).
• Realize that there's tons of contradictory information about what to eat and how to lose weight. Don't do anything extreme. Try the popular low-fat and low-carb diets if you want, but have a backup plan in case you can't stick to them. Weight loss really does boil down to just eating fewer calories than you use, but if one of these diets works for you then go for it. I personally just try to keep my calorie intake low. That means I can eat what I want to sometimes and not feel like I'm a failure for eating a forbidden food.
• Write down everything you eat. You can then compare your weight loss at certain times with the things you were eating. Try to find out how many calories you ate, and write it down in your food journal. Consider getting one of those small digital scales, and weigh your food. Write that down as well.
• Consider eating packaged meals from your grocery store. They make it easy to keep track of calories and other nutrition information, and they're fast and easy to prepare. Check the freezer section, but don't forget canned food and dried food in boxes or bags.
• Portion control is very important. Eat on small plates. Consider filling up only half your plate. If you must get extra food after you finish your plate, discipline yourself to wait at least 20 minutes before you go back for more.
• Exercise is important for health. It will help you lose weight, but controlling what you put into your mouth is much more important. At the very least, try to add a few small things to your daily activity. Park far away at the store. Try to do some yard work and house cleaning every day. Play with your children. Take the stairs instead of the elevator. Take up a low intensity activity like golf, bowling, archery, or dancing. Go window shoping once a week. Etc.
• If you're NOT overweight, then start monitoring your weight now (with the "eat watch" method). Most people gain weight as they get older, and losing it is very hard once you've gained it. Make the effort now to keep it under control.

Dear Weasel,

We have a foolproof plan to put the internet genie back in the bottle. "Trusted Computing" DRM and the "Secure Internet" are double-plus good; only thieves, spammers, cyber-terrorists and pedophiles disagree.

Sincerely,

Minions of the New World Order
Dept. of "Intellectual Property Ownership Society" Propaganda

It's too bad that the control-freaks actually own much of both the wire & media; they actually have a chance to subvert - "for our own good" - the open end-to-end net with their master/serf model. All part of the plan...

Let me remind you that Einstein's paper about special relativity took only one (or was it two) pages.

Perhaps he's talking about HG Welles. I swear I saw a tripod lumbering down the street this morning.

Here you go. Random number generator.

In 1991 an ultra high energetic particle was observed in Utah. It had so much energy in fact (travelling extremely close to the speed of light) that the particle, a single proton, had as much energy as a brick falling on your toe or a fastball travelling at 55mph.

The called the particle the Oh-My-God particle. Read a fun account on it here

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/ohmygodpart.html

Currently, the combination of Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus do a pretty good job of covering the Sun from all angles. Of course, when the planets line up this won't work so well. But with the pole shifting that happens during conjunction, we'll have much bigger things to worry about anyway. (WHAT?!? There was no pole shift in 2000-2001? Well, it will happen next time.)

The business plan of this decade:
1) Find something that is well known and patent it.
2) Sue some big company for using your patent.

Actually, the business plan for several decades has been:

1. Get a patent of dubious merit.
2. Find lots and lots of companies who are too small to defend themselves, but large enough to pay out a few thousand $$, and send them a demand for royalties.
3. Profit.

See Patent Nonsense for an example of how this happened to Autodesk just before they went public.

Rich.

30 MeV is impressive for a terrestrial thunderstorm, but much faster and more energetic particles and photons arrive from space. One proton (dubbed the "Oh-My-God" particle by the goofy physicists who observed it) was seen striking the upper atmosphere above Utah with a calculated energy of 320000000 TeV or 51 Joules, the energy of a 55 mph baseball.

MD5 from Fourmilab can do both of those jobs. It's fine (AFAIK) for checking downloaded binaries. For cryptographic purposes (like what I proposed), you'll want some crypto knowledge for anything serious, but it should be fine for "toy" usages like claiming /. posts.