"An increase in transmission bandwidth capacity of 8 times, obtained by using the new KHD compression system - which works on top of, and in addition to all existing compression techniques. The effect is to compress the binary code itself by a factor of eight." (my emphasis) and "An increase in processor speeds of up to 8 times when processing data streams due to the effects of the KHD binary compression system - a 1.5 GHz chip emulates the output of a 12 GHz chip."
That sounds like they're saying they can take previously compressed data and squeeze it down still further by a factor of 8 (oh really? I think not), and all this "an xMHz chip emulates an 8xMHz one" sounds like purest undiluted nonsense.
"this violates the first Amendment". No it doesn't. Does the fact that no-one will grant you a.edu or.gov or.ac.uk domain violate your freedom of expression? Hardly.
"just give it the seal and the right to use the trademarked gif". Oh yeah, that would work perfectly. No way whatsoever anyone could just copy the "WHO Approved" seal onto their own site.
Presumably this would work a bit like.gov at the moment, where you only get granted a domain if you really are a government agency. You'd only be allowed to register intestines.health if you are a reputable source, like a hospital or a published researcher. It sounds like a good idea, as it should at least provide some level of assurance that the site hasn't been posted by a total quack.
260 people in the UK? Last time I looked it was nearer 56 million. Anyway, that aside, what I reckon would work best is a dead simple voter-facing system (pencil. paper. tick the box) and a mechanical count with proper quality control. Routinely manually recount batches of machine-counted voting papers, and perform more than one machine count, so the machines are checked by each other and human inspectors.
Lets see how complicated a simple procedure can be made... should we add machines with levers to pull and switches to set, votomatic machines which you put the card in, then punch through the circle the little arrow points to? Too many things to break down or confuse people in my opinion. Pencil and paper offers a couple of big advantages: people are used to using these devices, and there's no hidden machinery going wrong in the background. Adding more technology (whether computers or mechanical machines) at the moment of voting seems like asking for trouble.
...the final votecount in Florida to be absolutely dead even for Bush and Gore. Not a single vote in it. Then they'll have to wheel out some faintly comical tiebreaking procedure such as
The toss of a coin
A clam-eating contest
A boxing match
Alligator wrestling: the guy who gets eaten first loses
...Yourdon's web site, all about software development process, software project management and other "software issues", gives me an "Error: do you wish to debug?" message when it loads. If a guru can't get things right then what hope is there for mere mortals?
Re:I'd like to believe this, but I don't.
on
Air-Powered Cars
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· Score: 1
1 cubic metre is 1000 litres. 300 litres is 0.3 cubic metres.
Re:I'd like to believe this, but I don't.
on
Air-Powered Cars
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· Score: 1
According to the company itself they're using 300 litres of air at 300 bar to carry 5 people 200km. I just don't see how they can possibly do that on compressed air alone.
I'd like to believe this, but I don't.
on
Air-Powered Cars
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· Score: 5
Well I'm skeptical. It comes down, as always, to the dull and tedious issue of energy density. My back-of-envelope scribblings tell me a cubic metre of air at 300 bar stores about 30 megajoules. That's only 8 kWh. I don't see that little energy lasting any longer than about half an hour: nowhere near the endurance figures mentioned in the article.
According to the press release, they embed them in the print media. Oh, hold on, that's just fancy-speak for "printed". Darn. 100 megadollars well spent.
In the same way as the phone company must provide a 'back door' to their service if you get your phone tapped, and the Post Office must provide a 'back door' to their service if you get your olde-worlde mail intercepted. I don't see why ISPs are any different.
The RIP bill requiring ISPs to fit the often-mentioned "black boxes" is, I'm afraid, a myth. The bit of bill which has been taken as requiring black boxes (section 12.1) reads "The Secretary of State may by order provide for the imposition by him... of such obligations as it appears to him reasonable to impose for the purpose of securing that it is and remains practicable for requirements to provide assistance in relation to interception warrants to be imposed and complied with." Apart from the fact that this is in appallingly bad English, it seems to say that if the police need an ISP to help them tap someone's traffic then the ISP must comply. Is it really that shocking? Okay the wording "measures which appear reasonable to the Secretary of State" is a bit open-ended, but it only applies to the execution of particular warrants. I dislike the bill very much, I have written to my MP to protest about it, it is flawed in a thousand different ways, but it does not require the installation of any "black boxes" to copy all net traffic to GCHQ.
...there's a big US/European trade fight at the moment, and one of the casualties is French cheese which the US is slapping with big import duties. So, I suppose, Jose objects to a big foreign company being able to open up in his home town when he can't send his fine cheese in the other direction.
I have sympathy for him but can't condone his methods: vandalism's vandalism.
They roam wild in many parts of France and can be hunted (la chasse aux fromages) or caught in traps baited with crusty white bread. Intensively farmed cheeses are cheaper but lack the flavour and health-giving properties of the wild cheese.
In their legal action, the RIAA are using (amongst other things) this study by Soundscan, which claims CD sales have dropped around colleges with fast internet connections, whereas they have risen nationwide. So, the reasoning goes, this drop in sales is due to Napster. But if you look at the numbers on the 8th page of the report you see that CD sales have fallen around colleges where Napster use is banned just as much as they have around well connected colleges. Even if CD sales fell only around well-connected colleges this could hardly be blamed on Napster. Maybe the students who would previously have been buying CDs from shops have been getting them from CD-Universe or Amazon instead. Maybe they find playing Quake or watching corn grow in Iowa more interesting than spending time in record shops. The RIAA also has another report, which is based on interviews with students, but it's so difficult to read (looks like a third generation fax that's been badly scanned) I've not bothered with it. In any case, they seem a little preoccupied with students using Napster, as if nobody in the rest of the world uses it (I don't personally).
They do seem to be going to ever-greater lengths to stop people from copying music and videos, with more and more protective layers being wrapped around the media on the customer's machine. I wonder how long it would take from the launch of a system like this for a workaround to appear? Cue a repeat of DeCSS. There's a nice little article in the Cryptogram about how this sort of trusted client-side software always seems to come unstuck.
Here's a quick extract which pretty much sums it up... "Against all of these systems -- disappearing e-mail, rights management for music and videos, fair game playing -- there are two types of attackers: the average user and the skilled attacker. Against the average user anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker nothing works. And even worse, most systems need to be secure against the smartest attacker. If one person hacks Quake (or Intertrust or DisappearingInc), he can write a point-and-click software tool that anyone can use. Suddenly a security system that is secure against almost everyone can now be compromised by everyone." An extract from the Crypto-Gram Newsletter, ladies and gentlemen. A fine publication.
Here we all are, burning coal for all these years when we could have just been using N-1 Homopolar Generators to tap the Pre-Existent Primordial Field of the Universe instead. Maybe every home should be fitted with one of these machines.
"This would cut unnecessary energy consumption almost by half". Sorry, but no. It would halve the power lost as heat in domestic wiring only. That has got to be a tiny tiny tiny fraction of total power wastage. The transmission from the power plant to your local area is done at huge voltages (high enough to cut down the transmission loss, low enough not to cause lightning strikes from the power lines). Then once it gets into the home, consider the various big wastages: the inefficient fridge, the incandescent lightbulbs creating more heat than light, the air con set a degree or two chillier than you need it. Far more than than what gets lost in resistance in your domestic ring main. There's another thread about this somewhere else.
Say 250 million people, each with a computer (or one operating somewhere on their behalf) drawing 100 Watts, makes a total of 25 Gigawatts. That's a lot, though I'm sure it's nowhere near "17% of the total output". Probably about 20 biggish power stations. Time to put power management into devices other than laptops, maybe?
Slashdot Mirror
Tread carefully. I think that business model has already been patented, so you could find yourself being sued.
As wild as any other guess.
"An increase in transmission bandwidth capacity of 8 times, obtained by using the new KHD compression system - which works on top of, and in addition to all existing compression techniques. The effect is to compress the binary code itself by a factor of eight." (my emphasis) and
"An increase in processor speeds of up to 8 times when processing data streams due to the effects of the KHD binary compression system - a 1.5 GHz chip emulates the output of a 12 GHz chip."
That sounds like they're saying they can take previously compressed data and squeeze it down still further by a factor of 8 (oh really? I think not), and all this "an xMHz chip emulates an 8xMHz one" sounds like purest undiluted nonsense.
"just give it the seal and the right to use the trademarked gif". Oh yeah, that would work perfectly. No way whatsoever anyone could just copy the "WHO Approved" seal onto their own site.
Presumably this would work a bit like .gov at the moment, where you only get granted a domain if you really are a government agency. You'd only be allowed to register intestines.health if you are a reputable source, like a hospital or a published researcher. It sounds like a good idea, as it should at least provide some level of assurance that the site hasn't been posted by a total quack.
260 people in the UK? Last time I looked it was nearer 56 million. Anyway, that aside, what I reckon would work best is a dead simple voter-facing system (pencil. paper. tick the box) and a mechanical count with proper quality control. Routinely manually recount batches of machine-counted voting papers, and perform more than one machine count, so the machines are checked by each other and human inspectors.
Lets see how complicated a simple procedure can be made... should we add machines with levers to pull and switches to set, votomatic machines which you put the card in, then punch through the circle the little arrow points to? Too many things to break down or confuse people in my opinion. Pencil and paper offers a couple of big advantages: people are used to using these devices, and there's no hidden machinery going wrong in the background. Adding more technology (whether computers or mechanical machines) at the moment of voting seems like asking for trouble.
...Yourdon's web site, all about software development process, software project management and other "software issues", gives me an "Error: do you wish to debug?" message when it loads. If a guru can't get things right then what hope is there for mere mortals?
1 cubic metre is 1000 litres.
300 litres is 0.3 cubic metres.
According to the company itself they're using 300 litres of air at 300 bar to carry 5 people 200km. I just don't see how they can possibly do that on compressed air alone.
Well I'm skeptical. It comes down, as always, to the dull and tedious issue of energy density. My back-of-envelope scribblings tell me a cubic metre of air at 300 bar stores about 30 megajoules. That's only 8 kWh. I don't see that little energy lasting any longer than about half an hour: nowhere near the endurance figures mentioned in the article.
According to the press release, they embed them in the print media. Oh, hold on, that's just fancy-speak for "printed". Darn. 100 megadollars well spent.
"Get some books about Linux... You'll need several!" Oh how true.
In the same way as the phone company must provide a 'back door' to their service if you get your phone tapped, and the Post Office must provide a 'back door' to their service if you get your olde-worlde mail intercepted. I don't see why ISPs are any different.
Ummm...the Home Secretary? Find out more about the exciting Home Office ministerial structure by going here (and no, it's not really exciting).
The RIP bill requiring ISPs to fit the often-mentioned "black boxes" is, I'm afraid, a myth. The bit of bill which has been taken as requiring black boxes (section 12.1) reads "The Secretary of State may by order provide for the imposition by him ... of such obligations as it appears to him reasonable to impose for the purpose of securing that it is and remains practicable for requirements to provide assistance in relation to interception warrants to be imposed and complied with."
Apart from the fact that this is in appallingly bad English, it seems to say that if the police need an ISP to help them tap someone's traffic then the ISP must comply. Is it really that shocking? Okay the wording "measures which appear reasonable to the Secretary of State" is a bit open-ended, but it only applies to the execution of particular warrants. I dislike the bill very much, I have written to my MP to protest about it, it is flawed in a thousand different ways, but it does not require the installation of any "black boxes" to copy all net traffic to GCHQ.
Find out all about cheese.
I have sympathy for him but can't condone his methods: vandalism's vandalism.
They roam wild in many parts of France and can be hunted (la chasse aux fromages) or caught in traps baited with crusty white bread. Intensively farmed cheeses are cheaper but lack the flavour and health-giving properties of the wild cheese.
In their legal action, the RIAA are using (amongst other things) this study by Soundscan, which claims CD sales have dropped around colleges with fast internet connections, whereas they have risen nationwide. So, the reasoning goes, this drop in sales is due to Napster. But if you look at the numbers on the 8th page of the report you see that CD sales have fallen around colleges where Napster use is banned just as much as they have around well connected colleges. Even if CD sales fell only around well-connected colleges this could hardly be blamed on Napster. Maybe the students who would previously have been buying CDs from shops have been getting them from CD-Universe or Amazon instead. Maybe they find playing Quake or watching corn grow in Iowa more interesting than spending time in record shops. The RIAA also has another report, which is based on interviews with students, but it's so difficult to read (looks like a third generation fax that's been badly scanned) I've not bothered with it. In any case, they seem a little preoccupied with students using Napster, as if nobody in the rest of the world uses it (I don't personally).
Here's a quick extract which pretty much sums it up... "Against all of these systems -- disappearing e-mail, rights management for music and videos, fair game playing -- there are two types of attackers: the average user and the skilled attacker. Against the average user anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker nothing works. And even worse, most systems need to be secure against the smartest attacker. If one person hacks Quake (or Intertrust or DisappearingInc), he can write a point-and-click software tool that anyone can use. Suddenly a security system that is secure against almost everyone can now be compromised by everyone."
An extract from the Crypto-Gram Newsletter, ladies and gentlemen. A fine publication.
Maybe every home should be fitted with one of these machines.
The potatoes sound like a much better bet.
"This would cut unnecessary energy consumption almost by half". Sorry, but no. It would halve the power lost as heat in domestic wiring only. That has got to be a tiny tiny tiny fraction of total power wastage. The transmission from the power plant to your local area is done at huge voltages (high enough to cut down the transmission loss, low enough not to cause lightning strikes from the power lines). Then once it gets into the home, consider the various big wastages: the inefficient fridge, the incandescent lightbulbs creating more heat than light, the air con set a degree or two chillier than you need it. Far more than than what gets lost in resistance in your domestic ring main. There's another thread about this somewhere else.
Say 250 million people, each with a computer (or one operating somewhere on their behalf) drawing 100 Watts, makes a total of 25 Gigawatts. That's a lot, though I'm sure it's nowhere near "17% of the total output". Probably about 20 biggish power stations. Time to put power management into devices other than laptops, maybe?