There are just shy of a dozen companies which try to offer satellite Internet via LEO or MEO constellations. Of course, you can get satellite Internet today already, using geostationary satellites, but the latency is high.
As much as Elon Musk likes to make big announcements with dubious time schedules, SpaceX has really delivered in 2017. Copying from FutureMartian97:
18 Falcon 9 launches 100% Primary mission success 100% First Stage landing success The first reflight of a Falcon 9 first stage The first reflight of a Dragon Capsule Reflying 5 first stages Reflying 2 Dragon Capsules
And Falcon Heavy is going to launch very soon, currently scheduled for January.
My take on the blooper reel, as funny as it is, is that it's supposed to lower expectations for Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy was originally supposed to launch in 2013, but the date has been pushed back multiple times in the recent years. Part of the reason is that it never was the top priority -- the Falcon 9 upgrades meant that more payloads could be launched using a single booster instead of three. And SpaceX has to keep NASA happy and fulfill their Commercial Resupply Missions to the ISS & the upcoming Dragon flights (first manned flights).
But part of the reason why Falcon Heavy was delayed so much is because it is hugely complex. You can just stick two boosters to the side of a core booster and keep it together with some struts, like in Kerbal Space Program. The structural loads are all different and must be accounted for.
So, I think the timing of the video so close to the scheduled launch of Falcon Heavy in November of this year is supposed to carefully counter the high expectations that the public has, given SpaceX's recent successes. Rocket science is hard, and failures are to be expected. But if you work on the problem for long enough, you eventually get it right. That's the message of the video.
The obvious problem with this is that sending bits is not what costs ISPs money. What costs money is having a high-enough bandwidth connection to the backbone during *peak traffic* time. Your ISP is and should be much happier if you download at 4am.
Ideally, you would pay for a certain small guaranteed bandwidth, which you get at all times, including during peak loads (this is kinda far in the future, but ISPs could use SIBRA bandwidth reservations or similar systems). Additionally, you get "up to X" amount of bandwidth at off-peak times. Your ISP should publish how high this "up to X" is on average during each hour of the day, so that you get a realistic idea of what to expect. To make the most efficient use of the infrastructure, during low use time, X should only be limited by the physical limitations of the network -- i.e. if you have a 1 GBit/s connection, they should give you 1 GBit/s even if your peak load guarantee is only for 20 MBit/s.
That's the most efficient way to utilize the network.
Here are some really cool videos of SpaceX landing the first stage of their rockets (on land and on sea). They've done it 11 times by now, and have already re-flown one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (sped up barge landing) https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (real-time land landing)
Why not use autonomous ships on the dangerous passage instead? Autonomous ships are expected in the next few years, even before autonomous cars. Granted, this would not solve the problem of transporting passengers safely, but it would mean much less concern for cargo shipments.
That being said, a ship tunnel sounds like a cool idea.
Interestingly, this also has an effect on the moon. The reason why the earth's rotation is slowing are the tidal forces. Part of the energy lost from the Earth's momentum goes into the Moon's own orbit. As a result, the moon is actually getting further and further away from us, at a rate of 38 mm (1.5 in) per year. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the Moon actually gets slower that way, despite the energy put in is in the prograde direction, i.e. increases its velocity. The reason is the higher orbit. Sources: Tidal effects on the Moon Earth's rotation
Before someone comments that we don't need humans on Mars if robots can do the same cheaper: that's beside the point. I mean, robots are no where near performing on the same level as humans when it comes to ingenuity and ability to come up with and implement ad hoc fixes to problems that no one could even imagine before launch of the mission. But putting that question aside, the problem with robotic missions is that they will never get the same sort of funding as human missions. A human mission automatically has to have a certain size, e.g. has to develop capabilities to land payloads in the ballpark of 10 tons or more on Mars. Once we have this capability, we can easily send lots of robotic and scientific payload along with humans -- it amounts to simply using the same payload delivery system that we are developing for humans anyway.
On the other side, if there is no ambition to fly humans to Mars, then no one will develop these capabilities. There is simply no funding for a system that delivers 10 tons of cargo onto the surface of Mars, unless it can also deliver humans, and bring them back safely. So we cannot send big robotic missions to Mars.
Human missions generate lots of excitement, lots of excitement leads to lots of funding. Robotic missions can never be on par with human missions in terms of how much excitement, and thus funding they can raise.
It's worth looking at HORNET, which is at this point not much more than a research paper, but it could point in the right direction. Instead of having anonymity for very few people (because of disadvantages to using anonymity tools, e.g. speed and latency), increase the anonymity pool by making anonymous communication less disadvantagous. With HORNET high throughput is achieved by providing Tor-like routing at the network layer (something which is currently not possible in the internet, but it might come with SCION, a BGP replacement that's in the works). I'm not saying that this will be ready anytime soon, but I think it's certainly an interesting idea. [full disclosure: I'm a researcher working on SCION]
I also think that Tor still is the best thing we have. The rumors about Tor's death are greatly exaggerated.
Physical distance is not as important as congestion on the routes. So it might very well be that your data takes a much longer path that what you'd think, simply because it uses the fastest way, not the shortest.
Angela Merkel's approach is pretty idiotic, and it cannot fix the problems. First of all, most emails are routed through the US either because the sender or the recipient has an American email provider (Germans love Gmail, too). Secondly, even if that is not the case, can you be sure that the NSA doesn't spy on traffic in Frankfurt? It wouldn't surprise me.
Only true end-to-end encryption can be a solution. The government in Germany is currently pushing for DE-Mail, which relies on transport encryption only. So that means that your email provider can still snoop and so can the German government, which is probably the reason why they designed it like that in the first place. End-to-end encryption would have been possible, especially since the German government is spending much money rolling out their own PKI, with keys for every citizen right on their new national ID card.
There's a presentation about DE-Mail from last December's Chaos Communication Congress, it's worth watching (video also has an audio track with English translations).
I submitted a photo where I wear a pasta strainer for my official electronic health insurance card in Germany -- and it got accepted, no questions asked! Always good to get some laughs when I have to go to a doctor.
Head coverings were not allowed, but religious ones were exempt. Oddly enough however, a friend of mine got a photo accepted where he poses with a beer mug (Maßkrug, you know, the typtical bavarian 1l mugs). Maybe because that's a religious symbol as well?
Your calculations are wrong, it's 0.87 hectares of land per person or roughly the size of a football field. Still a shockingly small area. If every person in the world had a western meat-rich diet, you'd need a whole lot of earths to feed them.
I think lab-grown meat is the future. For quite a lot of people, meat is just too tasty to be given up completely. At the same time, it is an environmental disaster, with the United Nations estimating that animal farming has a greater effect on climate change than ALL of the worlds transportation (that is, cars, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes) combined. Some even say it's responsible for 51% of greenhouse gases emissions. Additionally, factory farming causes billions of animals to suffer, which is highly unethical. Lab-grown meat avoids both problems.
Until we can buy lab-grown meat, we should still go Veg, but once lab-grown meat is available, the abolishment of the mass factory farming is much more realistic.
Freedom of speech is not dead in Germany. The constitution just put a different (higher) weight on personality rights.
In this case, googleing the name "Bettina Wulff" of the first lady would autocomplete to things like "escort" and "prostitute", because some people wrongfully tried to make a past life as a prostitute stick to her public image (which has been shown is just nonsense).
Now, I would agree that it is perfectly reasonable to put a higher weight on the right of free speech. But personality rights, and the right to be protected from libel are also important. Those are two legally protected values that have to be carefully balanced.
According to this report, the movie depicts an area of 45 x 25 nanometers. I use the body of the stickman to approximate pixels, which gives me about 30 pixels in height. Which translates to 3 * 10^7 DPI. Which will be in your iPhone 71's über-retina display (assuming dpi grows exponentially). Although it's really debatable if your eye is capable of making use of such a high resolution.
Let me quote from a blog post that paints an even darker picture than the original story I submitted on/.
DCRI summoned a Wikipedia volunteer in their offices on April 4th. This volunteer, which was one of those having access to the tools that allow the deletion of pages, was forced to delete the article while in the DCRI offices, on the understanding that he would have been held in custody and prosecuted if he did not comply. Under pressure, he had no other choice than to delete the article, despite explaining to the DCRI this is not how Wikipedia works. [...]
This volunteer had no link with that article, having never edited it and not even knowing of its existence before entering the DCRI offices. He was chosen and summoned because he was easily identifiable [...]
Can you imagine the pressure they put this volunteer through? Threatening him with five years of prison if he does not immediately comply and delete the article in the intelligence agency's offices? You think that doesn't matter?
In this case the problem was not that Wikipedia was centralized. The Wikimedia Foundation in the US did not comply with the agency's demands.
The problem was that the administrator's real name was publicly known (he's a public figure and it's his username) so that they were able to find someone under French jurisdiction. Most admins and non-admins use pseudonyms and are thus immune to real-life pressure.
All in all, I'd say the system worked. The admin had to give in to the immense pressure, but he was sensible enough to publicly announce what he did, thus enabling foreign users to reinstate the article. Now, the really threatening cases are those with gag orders, such as given by US intelligence agencies.
As a student, a large part of my work involves remembering. I have found that I need 8 hours of sleep – if I sleep less than that, I'm useless all day: I have trouble concentrating and usually don't get any studying done.
Others however, seem to be off fine sleeping only 3 or 4 hours a day. Sure, they are tired, but it doesn't impact their ability to concentrate in the same way. Any biologist / neuroscientists here who can explain this?
I think they do replicate DBs to Florida (the former main data center), because they wrote it's a hot failover. The other data centers are just caches, because that's most of the requests.
Virginia has had 90% of all requests anyway already, they are serving bits.wikimedia.org (JS, CSS,...), upload.wikimedia.org (images and media) and I guess also Squid+Varnish. The "only" thing missing is the actual mediawiki software, databases and things like memcached. Here's the checklist
While probably somewhat known among Slashdotters, I think it is worthwhile to remind people of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician, WWII code breaker and father of computer science (as well as being a victim of cruel injustice by the state).
He's unfortunately by far less recognized than people like Steve Jobs (probably because turing machines don't have rounded corners by design). It's a bit like the story of Tesla vs. Edison. One was a genius scientist, the other one an asshat making lots of money, without contributing nearly as much to the field, but still being more famous and celebrated.
Slashdot Mirror
Or didn't you ever wonder what the "A" in NASA stands for?
I thought it was "Administration".
Is this to avoid antitrust rulings such as we've seen recently against Google? If so, great. Looks like the pressure was working.
There are just shy of a dozen companies which try to offer satellite Internet via LEO or MEO constellations. Of course, you can get satellite Internet today already, using geostationary satellites, but the latency is high.
As much as Elon Musk likes to make big announcements with dubious time schedules, SpaceX has really delivered in 2017. Copying from FutureMartian97:
18 Falcon 9 launches
100% Primary mission success
100% First Stage landing success
The first reflight of a Falcon 9 first stage
The first reflight of a Dragon Capsule
Reflying 5 first stages
Reflying 2 Dragon Capsules
And Falcon Heavy is going to launch very soon, currently scheduled for January.
If Data is the New Oil, then Data Privacy is the New Ecology Movement.
My take on the blooper reel, as funny as it is, is that it's supposed to lower expectations for Falcon Heavy. Falcon Heavy was originally supposed to launch in 2013, but the date has been pushed back multiple times in the recent years. Part of the reason is that it never was the top priority -- the Falcon 9 upgrades meant that more payloads could be launched using a single booster instead of three. And SpaceX has to keep NASA happy and fulfill their Commercial Resupply Missions to the ISS & the upcoming Dragon flights (first manned flights).
But part of the reason why Falcon Heavy was delayed so much is because it is hugely complex. You can just stick two boosters to the side of a core booster and keep it together with some struts, like in Kerbal Space Program. The structural loads are all different and must be accounted for.
So, I think the timing of the video so close to the scheduled launch of Falcon Heavy in November of this year is supposed to carefully counter the high expectations that the public has, given SpaceX's recent successes. Rocket science is hard, and failures are to be expected. But if you work on the problem for long enough, you eventually get it right. That's the message of the video.
The obvious problem with this is that sending bits is not what costs ISPs money. What costs money is having a high-enough bandwidth connection to the backbone during *peak traffic* time. Your ISP is and should be much happier if you download at 4am.
Ideally, you would pay for a certain small guaranteed bandwidth, which you get at all times, including during peak loads (this is kinda far in the future, but ISPs could use SIBRA bandwidth reservations or similar systems). Additionally, you get "up to X" amount of bandwidth at off-peak times. Your ISP should publish how high this "up to X" is on average during each hour of the day, so that you get a realistic idea of what to expect. To make the most efficient use of the infrastructure, during low use time, X should only be limited by the physical limitations of the network -- i.e. if you have a 1 GBit/s connection, they should give you 1 GBit/s even if your peak load guarantee is only for 20 MBit/s.
That's the most efficient way to utilize the network.
Here are some really cool videos of SpaceX landing the first stage of their rockets (on land and on sea). They've done it 11 times by now, and have already re-flown one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (sped up barge landing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (real-time land landing)
Why not use autonomous ships on the dangerous passage instead? Autonomous ships are expected in the next few years, even before autonomous cars. Granted, this would not solve the problem of transporting passengers safely, but it would mean much less concern for cargo shipments.
That being said, a ship tunnel sounds like a cool idea.
Interestingly, this also has an effect on the moon. The reason why the earth's rotation is slowing are the tidal forces. Part of the energy lost from the Earth's momentum goes into the Moon's own orbit. As a result, the moon is actually getting further and further away from us, at a rate of 38 mm (1.5 in) per year. Somewhat counter-intuitively, the Moon actually gets slower that way, despite the energy put in is in the prograde direction, i.e. increases its velocity. The reason is the higher orbit. Sources:
Tidal effects on the Moon
Earth's rotation
Before someone comments that we don't need humans on Mars if robots can do the same cheaper: that's beside the point. I mean, robots are no where near performing on the same level as humans when it comes to ingenuity and ability to come up with and implement ad hoc fixes to problems that no one could even imagine before launch of the mission. But putting that question aside, the problem with robotic missions is that they will never get the same sort of funding as human missions. A human mission automatically has to have a certain size, e.g. has to develop capabilities to land payloads in the ballpark of 10 tons or more on Mars. Once we have this capability, we can easily send lots of robotic and scientific payload along with humans -- it amounts to simply using the same payload delivery system that we are developing for humans anyway.
On the other side, if there is no ambition to fly humans to Mars, then no one will develop these capabilities. There is simply no funding for a system that delivers 10 tons of cargo onto the surface of Mars, unless it can also deliver humans, and bring them back safely. So we cannot send big robotic missions to Mars.
Human missions generate lots of excitement, lots of excitement leads to lots of funding. Robotic missions can never be on par with human missions in terms of how much excitement, and thus funding they can raise.
It's worth looking at HORNET, which is at this point not much more than a research paper, but it could point in the right direction. Instead of having anonymity for very few people (because of disadvantages to using anonymity tools, e.g. speed and latency), increase the anonymity pool by making anonymous communication less disadvantagous. With HORNET high throughput is achieved by providing Tor-like routing at the network layer (something which is currently not possible in the internet, but it might come with SCION, a BGP replacement that's in the works). I'm not saying that this will be ready anytime soon, but I think it's certainly an interesting idea. [full disclosure: I'm a researcher working on SCION]
I also think that Tor still is the best thing we have. The rumors about Tor's death are greatly exaggerated.
Here's a video of the actual thing, not just an animation.
You mean if one were to send an email from Munich to Paris, it'd cross the Atlantic and come back?
NSA aside, that's a pretty sucky setup.
It's how the Internet works. To quote directly from the experts: A target's phone call, e-mail or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path.
Physical distance is not as important as congestion on the routes. So it might very well be that your data takes a much longer path that what you'd think, simply because it uses the fastest way, not the shortest.
Angela Merkel's approach is pretty idiotic, and it cannot fix the problems. First of all, most emails are routed through the US either because the sender or the recipient has an American email provider (Germans love Gmail, too). Secondly, even if that is not the case, can you be sure that the NSA doesn't spy on traffic in Frankfurt? It wouldn't surprise me.
Only true end-to-end encryption can be a solution. The government in Germany is currently pushing for DE-Mail, which relies on transport encryption only. So that means that your email provider can still snoop and so can the German government, which is probably the reason why they designed it like that in the first place. End-to-end encryption would have been possible, especially since the German government is spending much money rolling out their own PKI, with keys for every citizen right on their new national ID card.
There's a presentation about DE-Mail from last December's Chaos Communication Congress, it's worth watching (video also has an audio track with English translations).
The ICE runs at a speed of 198 mph in some locations and back in 1988 it even set a new world record with 253 mph. Only problem: It's a train.
I submitted a photo where I wear a pasta strainer for my official electronic health insurance card in Germany -- and it got accepted, no questions asked! Always good to get some laughs when I have to go to a doctor.
Head coverings were not allowed, but religious ones were exempt. Oddly enough however, a friend of mine got a photo accepted where he poses with a beer mug (Maßkrug, you know, the typtical bavarian 1l mugs). Maybe because that's a religious symbol as well?
Your calculations are wrong, it's 0.87 hectares of land per person or roughly the size of a football field. Still a shockingly small area. If every person in the world had a western meat-rich diet, you'd need a whole lot of earths to feed them.
I think lab-grown meat is the future. For quite a lot of people, meat is just too tasty to be given up completely. At the same time, it is an environmental disaster, with the United Nations estimating that animal farming has a greater effect on climate change than ALL of the worlds transportation (that is, cars, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes) combined. Some even say it's responsible for 51% of greenhouse gases emissions. Additionally, factory farming causes billions of animals to suffer, which is highly unethical. Lab-grown meat avoids both problems.
Until we can buy lab-grown meat, we should still go Veg, but once lab-grown meat is available, the abolishment of the mass factory farming is much more realistic.
Freedom of speech is not dead in Germany. The constitution just put a different (higher) weight on personality rights.
In this case, googleing the name "Bettina Wulff" of the first lady would autocomplete to things like "escort" and "prostitute", because some people wrongfully tried to make a past life as a prostitute stick to her public image (which has been shown is just nonsense).
Now, I would agree that it is perfectly reasonable to put a higher weight on the right of free speech. But personality rights, and the right to be protected from libel are also important. Those are two legally protected values that have to be carefully balanced.
How does that translate into DPI???
According to this report, the movie depicts an area of 45 x 25 nanometers. I use the body of the stickman to approximate pixels, which gives me about 30 pixels in height. Which translates to 3 * 10^7 DPI. Which will be in your iPhone 71's über-retina display (assuming dpi grows exponentially). Although it's really debatable if your eye is capable of making use of such a high resolution.
Let me quote from a blog post that paints an even darker picture than the original story I submitted on /.
DCRI summoned a Wikipedia volunteer in their offices on April 4th. This volunteer, which was one of those having access to the tools that allow the deletion of pages, was forced to delete the article while in the DCRI offices, on the understanding that he would have been held in custody and prosecuted if he did not comply. Under pressure, he had no other choice than to delete the article, despite explaining to the DCRI this is not how Wikipedia works. [...]
This volunteer had no link with that article, having never edited it and not even knowing of its existence before entering the DCRI offices. He was chosen and summoned because he was easily identifiable [...]
Can you imagine the pressure they put this volunteer through? Threatening him with five years of prison if he does not immediately comply and delete the article in the intelligence agency's offices? You think that doesn't matter?
In this case the problem was not that Wikipedia was centralized. The Wikimedia Foundation in the US did not comply with the agency's demands.
The problem was that the administrator's real name was publicly known (he's a public figure and it's his username) so that they were able to find someone under French jurisdiction. Most admins and non-admins use pseudonyms and are thus immune to real-life pressure.
All in all, I'd say the system worked. The admin had to give in to the immense pressure, but he was sensible enough to publicly announce what he did, thus enabling foreign users to reinstate the article. Now, the really threatening cases are those with gag orders, such as given by US intelligence agencies.
As a student, a large part of my work involves remembering. I have found that I need 8 hours of sleep – if I sleep less than that, I'm useless all day: I have trouble concentrating and usually don't get any studying done.
Others however, seem to be off fine sleeping only 3 or 4 hours a day. Sure, they are tired, but it doesn't impact their ability to concentrate in the same way. Any biologist / neuroscientists here who can explain this?
I think they do replicate DBs to Florida (the former main data center), because they wrote it's a hot failover. The other data centers are just caches, because that's most of the requests.
Virginia has had 90% of all requests anyway already, they are serving bits.wikimedia.org (JS, CSS, ...), upload.wikimedia.org (images and media) and I guess also Squid+Varnish. The "only" thing missing is the actual mediawiki software, databases and things like memcached. Here's the checklist
While probably somewhat known among Slashdotters, I think it is worthwhile to remind people of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician, WWII code breaker and father of computer science (as well as being a victim of cruel injustice by the state).
He's unfortunately by far less recognized than people like Steve Jobs (probably because turing machines don't have rounded corners by design). It's a bit like the story of Tesla vs. Edison. One was a genius scientist, the other one an asshat making lots of money, without contributing nearly as much to the field, but still being more famous and celebrated.