I don't know... The only comments ever to have been taken down from Slashdot's archives were related to IP that the COS holds... It is to date, the only organization to have succeeded in doing so.
That doesn't even make sense. How did Verizon present that?
Basically they called her repeatedly trying to get her to pay 300 dollars for charges that she did not owe: eventually they cleared her account of those charges after about two weeks of fighting with them. It looks like they were trying to bully her into keeping her account open under the assumption that she was a complete moron.
I think either you're lying, your friend is lying, or you're an idiot (or all of the above).
I don't care what you think about the matter. You won't even attach your name to what you say. If I really was a liar or an idiot etc. I probably wouldn't attach my name to this now would I? The fact of the matter is that someone at Verizon fraked up big time and tried to screw my friend. They are rat basturds in a multitude of ways that go beyond what has been said on Slashdot.
I was thinking of something along the line of giving people a choice to have some of what they pay in taxes go toward NASA or what not. Those who want to fund it can and those who don't could choose not to contribute.
I wouldn't mind paying my taxes toward space missions like this; it's all the other frivilous crap like bailouts, corporate welfare, corn subsidies and unnecessary wars that are really disgusting uses of tax dollars.
It never ceases to amaze me what we'll spend money on.
It's certainly a better use for 400M than bailing out a bunch of banks...
What exactly is the point of this $400M venture, other than it would be "really cool" to sail the seas of ass gas?
Furthering human knowledge and exploration of our solar system.
Oh, wait, I forgot. We have no debts on Earth to worry about right now, financial or otherwise for the human race. Nevermind. It's all good, obviously.
Sitting here on Earth for perpetuity won't solve our problems. Most of the problems we have here on Earth that are able to be addressed at all are largely the result of a poorly structured economic system in one form or another.
I'm sure they've thought of this. The engine is rated at 140W and presumably is tested for the conditions it will endure especially vacuum operation. Then again they did have errors in the burn calculations of that one probe that was destroyed in the Martian atmosphere. Trivialities like forgetting to convert standard to metric...
One question I can immediately see an answer to is whether the ASRG [wikipedia.org] generates as much power in vacuum as it will on the surface of Titan. My assumption is that having a weaker heat sink will reduce power output but I can't confirm that.
On the contrary, a vacuum makes a very poor heat sink. If anything, being immersed in an atmosphere that is as cold as Titan's may lower the effective Tc due to the higher thermal conductivity of the surrounding atmosphere. The lower the Tc, the higher the Carnot efficiency although any effect either way probably won't amount to much in terms of an efficiency difference.
Verizon's guilty of a lot more than merely doubling their early termination fees. They've also tried to pin about 300$ in botgus charges to a friend of mine's account when she tried to leave them. I hope the FTC nails them to the nearest cross.
I cannot believe that google extracts are in any way damaging book sales, and therefore causing harm to the authors or publishers.
So what are they complaining about?
I would imagine that an only exception to this would be if the book wasn't worth buying in the first place. In that case, an excerpt may very well dissuade someone from buying the book.
Sometimes patents like this one can serve the public interest merely by reducing the likelihood of bad ideas like this one from being put into general use through fines and legal action.
A game would have to be pretty compelling otherwise to make the risk of being banned for poor health do anything other than dissuade larger gamers from playing all together.
Linking one's gaming avatar to one's physique, explains Microsoft, will produce healthy and virtuous behaviors in individuals.
Most likely it will reduce the number of people playing any game with this technology in favor of competitor's games and as such is pretty much doomed to fail.
Geologically, Sulfate is most likely as far as oxidizers are concerned. NOw in so far as reacting the two together, you'd have to have a very well insulated system that uses the reaction its self to bring the reactants to a high enoug htemperature that chemical reactions can take place efficiently. Then there's the problme of mining the materials: THe reaction probably doesn't give out enough energy to make mining Sulfate as an oxidizer energy efficient.
And something thrusting continuously is going to be a lot lot more visible.
There's no friction in space; why would you need a continuous burn? The beginning and end of the trajectory the ship is on are the only times where a burn is absolutely required; it can coast the rest of the way. Of course it's possible to just do a drive by with particle beam weapons or RKV's. No engine signature to detect. Liquid Hydrogen/Helium could be used to cool the craft for a reasonable period of time with heat rejection occuring at the rear of the craft with the IR signarute pointed away from any defenses.
I don't believe filtering for the sun is that difficult, amateur telescopes have filters for looking at the sun. Any object obscuring the sun should then stand out. I think you can apply the techniques used for observing sun spots...
Think about the problem for a moment: you're searching for an object only a handful of meters across several hundred thousand kilometers away that is intentionally hiding its IR signature and is coming from the direction of an extremely high intensity IR source. There's a reason it is very very difficult to image extrasolar planets and it is for this exact reason.
Quite possibly. It is also possible to use a magnetic field to divert the plasma created during re-entry or use a spacecraft encompassing plasma window to protect the spacecraft.
I believe that you've misunderstood my point: if DRM prevents you from actually using your legally bought media and pirated media has no such restriction, it makes sense not to use the DRMed copy. Buy the media legally and pirate a copy that isn't locked down. All DRM does is make actually using legally bought media a pain in the arse. It can not and does not stop piracy so why make it hard on those who actually bothered to buy a copy instead of grab one off the net?
and yet the battle still rages on for weeks, months, maybe even years.
At such distances, why would anyone bother to attack someone else? The time and resources required to even bother would be immense. Even in ancient times, information traveled to the battlefield in less than a month or two let alone years. Then there's the problem that sending a space fleet on a several year voyage carries the risk that by the time it got there, the enemy would have made several years of advancements in terms of technology to defend aainst the attack.
Simple. Take a radar stealth aircraft and fly it from the sun-ward side of the target. You don't need to have IR stealth, just use the sun to blind any sensors that are designed to detect IR. Better yet, cool the craft to the temperature of the ambient environment and the IR signal from the craft its self becomes extremely hard to detect.
The key supplier, by the name Deluxe, was apparently unable to provide a sufficient number of valid keys in time.
The problem is that even if they did pay the proper royalties, the key generation system still wasn't capable of providing the needed keys. It highlights the issue with DRM that it in no way benefits legal movie patrons. At no point does anyone other than the greedy MPAA/RIAA scum benefit from it. Perhaps even in this case, showing that DRM doesn't even benefit the content companies either.
we'll be able to tell exactly what trajectories our enemies could take between planets: the launch window.
That assumes that there aren't technological advances that allow spacecraft to brute force the problem. Launch delays in terms of orbits mostly occur because of energy and fuel requirements. If you've got propulsion licked, you can pretty well launch when you wish.
to point high-power radar-reflection surveillance satellites at certain empty reaches of space
That isn't going to work for stealth spacecraft which are a trivial engineering problem next to propulsion. Space is huge, you're going to need very very powerful sensors to find anything the size of a ship.
Second, there are only a few ways to maneuver the attitude of a spacecraft around – to point it in a new direction. The fast ways to do that are to fire an off-center thruster or to tilt a gyroscope around to generate a torque. Attitude maneuvers would be critical to point the main engine of a space fighter to set up for a burn, or to point the weapons systems at an enemy. Either way, concealing the attitude maneuvers of the space fighter would be important to gain a tactical advantage. So I think gyroscopes ("CMGs," in the spacecraft lingo) would be a better way to go
Correct. Burning fuel just to change the ships' direction is a waste. Utilising conservation of angualar momentum with a gyroscope is efficient and technologically feasible. Sapcecraft that are large and non-sperical are going to be very difficult to manoeuvre. Concentrating most of the ships mass in tight near the center is the way to mitigate this problem.
A kinetic impactor is basically just a slug that goes really fast and hits the enemy fighter, tearing through the hull, damaging delicate systems with vibrations, throwing gyroscopes out of alignment so that they spin into their enclosures and explode into shards
I don't think kinetic impactors are the way to go here. A high energy neutral particle beam is demonstrated to work effectively and doesn't spread out too much over a vast difference. (not more than a few cm over 1000 km) There is no hope of stopping it either. A few GEV beam of particles shows no mercy and can punch through several meters of shielding.
lets just go with a tool that we already use to cut sheet metal on Earth: lasers. In space, laser light will travel almost forever without dissipating from diffraction
Lasers ablate material off the hull which obscures the target. Not quite the most effective weapon.
Deflector shields like those in fiction are not possible at present, but it would still make sense to armor combat spacecraft to a limited extent.
modified plasma window technology can function as a shield in a sense. Thick armor on the hull impedes the ship's ability to rotate.
What do we do to hit them on the ground? Well, strategic weapons from space are easy: kinetic impactors again.
Ammo is a problem. How many impactors can you have on an orbital defense platform? Just use particle beam technology to wipe out the ground force.
So, I think the small fighter craft would be nearly spherical, with a single main engine and a few guns or missiles facing generally forward.
Only if you don't plan on re-entry as a sphere is non-optimal for utilising the effect that shaceship one was supposed to use; that is using a flat surface to force a ubble of air to pool in front of the craft and buffer against the heat.
Most of the comments that I've seen that get modded into the ground are ones that tend to e inflammatory or off topic etc. There are exceptions to this which is why Slashdot archives all comments; even those modded to -1 for people to view. The system isn't perfect; no system is, but it tends to elevate comments which are reasonably insightful, informative, funny etc. which does help keep the discussions rather civil. Even fairly unpopular viewpoints in a post can be elevated to +5 if you have the writing skill to do so. Honestly, it isn't terribly different than everywhere else you voice an opinion- everyone here can there's just not a guarantee that anyone will listen.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know... The only comments ever to have been taken down from Slashdot's archives were related to IP that the COS holds... It is to date, the only organization to have succeeded in doing so.
Basically they called her repeatedly trying to get her to pay 300 dollars for charges that she did not owe: eventually they cleared her account of those charges after about two weeks of fighting with them.
It looks like they were trying to bully her into keeping her account open under the assumption that she was a complete moron.
I don't care what you think about the matter. You won't even attach your name to what you say. If I really was a liar or an idiot etc. I probably wouldn't attach my name to this now would I? The fact of the matter is that someone at Verizon fraked up big time and tried to screw my friend. They are rat basturds in a multitude of ways that go beyond what has been said on Slashdot.
I was thinking of something along the line of giving people a choice to have some of what they pay in taxes go toward NASA or what not. Those who want to fund it can and those who don't could choose not to contribute.
I wouldn't mind paying my taxes toward space missions like this; it's all the other frivilous crap like bailouts, corporate welfare, corn subsidies and unnecessary wars that are really disgusting uses of tax dollars.
It's certainly a better use for 400M than bailing out a bunch of banks...
Furthering human knowledge and exploration of our solar system.
Sitting here on Earth for perpetuity won't solve our problems. Most of the problems we have here on Earth that are able to be addressed at all are largely the result of a poorly structured economic system in one form or another.
I'm sure they've thought of this. The engine is rated at 140W and presumably is tested for the conditions it will endure especially vacuum operation. Then again they did have errors in the burn calculations of that one probe that was destroyed in the Martian atmosphere. Trivialities like forgetting to convert standard to metric...
That "boat ride" is about .01% of the federal budget or what we spent on Iraq in less than 10 hours.
On the contrary, a vacuum makes a very poor heat sink. If anything, being immersed in an atmosphere that is as cold as Titan's may lower the effective Tc due to the higher thermal conductivity of the surrounding atmosphere. The lower the Tc, the higher the Carnot efficiency although any effect either way probably won't amount to much in terms of an efficiency difference.
Their own records showed that she owed nothing. It took two weeks to get the basturds to acknowledge it.
Verizon's guilty of a lot more than merely doubling their early termination fees. They've also tried to pin about 300$ in botgus charges to a friend of mine's account when she tried to leave them. I hope the FTC nails them to the nearest cross.
I would imagine that an only exception to this would be if the book wasn't worth buying in the first place. In that case, an excerpt may very well dissuade someone from buying the book.
Sometimes patents like this one can serve the public interest merely by reducing the likelihood of bad ideas like this one from being put into general use through fines and legal action.
A game would have to be pretty compelling otherwise to make the risk of being banned for poor health do anything other than dissuade larger gamers from playing all together.
Most likely it will reduce the number of people playing any game with this technology in favor of competitor's games and as such is pretty much doomed to fail.
Considering that all but the first paragraph of the article was the religious message its self, I'd say that it is pretty clear what the goal was.
Geologically, Sulfate is most likely as far as oxidizers are concerned. NOw in so far as reacting the two together, you'd have to have a very well insulated system that uses the reaction its self to bring the reactants to a high enoug htemperature that chemical reactions can take place efficiently. Then there's the problme of mining the materials: THe reaction probably doesn't give out enough energy to make mining Sulfate as an oxidizer energy efficient.
There's no friction in space; why would you need a continuous burn? The beginning and end of the trajectory the ship is on are the only times where a burn is absolutely required; it can coast the rest of the way. Of course it's possible to just do a drive by with particle beam weapons or RKV's. No engine signature to detect. Liquid Hydrogen/Helium could be used to cool the craft for a reasonable period of time with heat rejection occuring at the rear of the craft with the IR signarute pointed away from any defenses.
Think about the problem for a moment: you're searching for an object only a handful of meters across several hundred thousand kilometers away that is intentionally hiding its IR signature and is coming from the direction of an extremely high intensity IR source. There's a reason it is very very difficult to image extrasolar planets and it is for this exact reason.
Quite possibly. It is also possible to use a magnetic field to divert the plasma created during re-entry or use a spacecraft encompassing plasma window to protect the spacecraft.
I believe that you've misunderstood my point: if DRM prevents you from actually using your legally bought media and pirated media has no such restriction, it makes sense not to use the DRMed copy. Buy the media legally and pirate a copy that isn't locked down. All DRM does is make actually using legally bought media a pain in the arse. It can not and does not stop piracy so why make it hard on those who actually bothered to buy a copy instead of grab one off the net?
At such distances, why would anyone bother to attack someone else? The time and resources required to even bother would be immense. Even in ancient times, information traveled to the battlefield in less than a month or two let alone years. Then there's the problem that sending a space fleet on a several year voyage carries the risk that by the time it got there, the enemy would have made several years of advancements in terms of technology to defend aainst the attack.
Simple. Take a radar stealth aircraft and fly it from the sun-ward side of the target. You don't need to have IR stealth, just use the sun to blind any sensors that are designed to detect IR. Better yet, cool the craft to the temperature of the ambient environment and the IR signal from the craft its self becomes extremely hard to detect.
DRM creates un-necessary barriers that make pirating unlocked media even more appealing.
The problem is that even if they did pay the proper royalties, the key generation system still wasn't capable of providing the needed keys. It highlights the issue with DRM that it in no way benefits legal movie patrons. At no point does anyone other than the greedy MPAA/RIAA scum benefit from it. Perhaps even in this case, showing that DRM doesn't even benefit the content companies either.
That assumes that there aren't technological advances that allow spacecraft to brute force the problem. Launch delays in terms of orbits mostly occur because of energy and fuel requirements. If you've got propulsion licked, you can pretty well launch when you wish.
That isn't going to work for stealth spacecraft which are a trivial engineering problem next to propulsion. Space is huge, you're going to need very very powerful sensors to find anything the size of a ship.
Correct. Burning fuel just to change the ships' direction is a waste. Utilising conservation of angualar momentum with a gyroscope is efficient and technologically feasible. Sapcecraft that are large and non-sperical are going to be very difficult to manoeuvre. Concentrating most of the ships mass in tight near the center is the way to mitigate this problem.
I don't think kinetic impactors are the way to go here. A high energy neutral particle beam is demonstrated to work effectively and doesn't spread out too much over a vast difference. (not more than a few cm over 1000 km) There is no hope of stopping it either. A few GEV beam of particles shows no mercy and can punch through several meters of shielding.
Lasers ablate material off the hull which obscures the target. Not quite the most effective weapon.
modified plasma window technology can function as a shield in a sense. Thick armor on the hull impedes the ship's ability to rotate.
Ammo is a problem. How many impactors can you have on an orbital defense platform? Just use particle beam technology to wipe out the ground force.
Only if you don't plan on re-entry as a sphere is non-optimal for utilising the effect that shaceship one was supposed to use; that is using a flat surface to force a ubble of air to pool in front of the craft and buffer against the heat.
Most of the comments that I've seen that get modded into the ground are ones that tend to e inflammatory or off topic etc. There are exceptions to this which is why Slashdot archives all comments; even those modded to -1 for people to view. The system isn't perfect; no system is, but it tends to elevate comments which are reasonably insightful, informative, funny etc. which does help keep the discussions rather civil. Even fairly unpopular viewpoints in a post can be elevated to +5 if you have the writing skill to do so. Honestly, it isn't terribly different than everywhere else you voice an opinion- everyone here can there's just not a guarantee that anyone will listen.