What was the problem they are solving? How again it is better than a password, or a X.509 certificate stored in your USB key?
I'd classify this invention as similar to Segway in its utter uselessness. Some laugh at people who ride Segway in a park instead of walking (as humans are built to do); in the same manner some would be laughing at people who are busily wiggling the mouse trying to buy something online, instead of plugging the key (or just their password) into the system.
Again we see an invention that solves a problem that does not exist... could they please find a problem and only then get busy? Is it too much to ask, for example, to develop a wireless mouse that is using forward error correction and checksums, so that it does not "jump around" as most wireless garbage does? That would be something useful.
Without more experience, an automated highway sounds like a risky venture--it might initially seem to be safer, but then a subtle bug might cause something catastrophic to happen after it's been in use for a while.
Autopilot sounded like a risky venture too. Who would trust flying an airplane to a box of hardware? But nowadays it is more reliable than a human (though not as versatile), and one would be a fool not to engage the autopilot at cruise altitude.
Humans are far more dangerous as drivers than as pilots. Cars are separated by just few meters of space, barely enough to stop in time. If the driver is distracted and loses 0.5 second in braking, he is in trouble. Automatic system won't have a problem here. So it is advantageous to use automated systems wherever they offer a benefit; and definitely long stretches of highways are best suited for such automation.
As a general case, if f(m) describes fuel consumption speed depending on current vehicle mass, and M(x) describes vehicle mass as function of distance, then the total amount of fuel would be an integral from 0 to full distance of f(M(x)) dx, where 'x' is the distance between the starting line and the current position of the scooter. It can be easily solved by assuming that the vehicle makes fuel instead of burning it; then the "produced" M at the end of the trip is what you are looking for.
I think the safety and reliability improves as you launch more.
Actually, the reliability does not depend on number of launches. It depends on number of bugs found and fixed. Since this work costs money, it translates into improved reliability after all, as advertised:-)
With rare, risky launches you just take your chances without investing into a more reliable system - and get the same number of failures per tons/persons launched.
In the long run it is beneficial to invest into a reliable vehicle. However "long run" is hard to define, because the vehicle may become obsolete exactly when it reaches its peak (having consumed decades of development and enhancements.) So it can be argued either way.
But indeed, with smaller vehicle your failures will be smaller as well, though more frequent until the system is improved. It's just statistics.
I think that the 'space plane' should seat one person. Not atleast two. Not atleast one. One.
The reason is that that means that they would have to launch much more often to launch the same number of people. This means that for compared with the Space Shuttle that seated 7, the cost is almost halved; just from having to launch more.
However you will suffer four times as many failures, unless you push the reliability of the design further into 9's. But if you do that then the cost rises... See, there is an optimal design which minimizes the cost and risk, given your priorities. And one-seater is not it. Read more detailed analysis of this issue.
Of course seating one person has it's problems- we probably don't have a rocket that small anymore, so you have to build a smaller rocket.
This is not quite correct. The size of the vehicle depends largely on features such as life support, avionics, engines etc. You can not fly to LEO in a telephone booth (unless you are The Doctor:-)
It might be involuntary. Haven't you seen some dialogs that pop up on top of your work and ask you about this or that? There is a lot of software of this sort that is usually quiet but needs to ask you something on occasion (like your UPS battery desiring a conditioning cycle, or your Norton Antivirus asking if it may phone home and check for new vir^Wantiviruses...) If you were clicking on a word in your wordprocessor but instead hit a "Yes" button in a dialog that wasn't there a moment ago then this click would be entirely involuntary.
In any case, even if you are using only the keyboard, after you press ENTER 17 times it is only likely that you will press ENTER 18th time as well even before you read what it wants from you. Twice as likely if you just want to go through a routine computer setup procedure.
Re:They only forgot one thing - power
on
Spray-On Computers
·
· Score: 1
The electrical current flows between positive and negative contacts. But the body is only one contact, and therefore is not sufficient.
This is the reason why workers can climb on live 500 kV power lines and walk on the wires - there is no "other" contact to kill them (except their own capacitance, which is low.)
Re:They only forgot one thing - power
on
Spray-On Computers
·
· Score: 3, Informative
It is not possible, believe me - I work with RF for a living. You need to have a relatively long antenna to receive any reasonable energy. Briefly, the energy is radiated from a point (a transmitter) and spreads as a sphere. The farther you go, the less energy per square meter you get. A small antenna won't receive anything; a Dyson sphere will receive 100%, as an example. There are other complications too.
There is only one working solution: to etch the antenna on the surface of the chip, and then to point some radar transmitter at it. However it will cook you within seconds:-)
As I said, those guys need to come up with a battery before they can think of anything else. This is especially important if they want to use wireless, since it involves parting with the energy.
They only forgot one thing - power
on
Spray-On Computers
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"In a cubic millimetre, you can have a sensor for heat, pressure, light and so on, but also a computer and wireless technology."
I am afraid this is just another grant hunt. There is no battery that would be suitable for this project.
Where would that secret key be stored? If it is anywhere in the software, then it will be found. The only way to make it kind of secure is to use a booby-trapped hardware dongle with a well thought out, encrypted interface. Something like Palladium.
Generally speaking, *anything* in Windows costs you 10x more LOCs. For example, in Linux a simple concat() call does the job. In Windows you have to use CreateFile() with about 10 parameters, and some of those parameters are mind-boggling structures (like SECURITY_ATTRIBUTES) that must be created and initialized using separate API calls.
So indeed, in Windows you pay for layer upon layer upon layer of cruft. Once you are done, it works - but it takes a rocket scientist to get there.
With regard to video capture, in Linux you can do this: $ cat videodata.raw
and it will give you some sort of raw video frames that you can easily process later. In Windows you first need to learn about 10 layers of software, each totally different, that allow you (in theory) to access the device. DirectX would be your first stop.
But HF transmissions can be quite tricky to transmit
They are tricky if you are sitting in your car and trying to contact someone 5000 miles away with your 10W rig. However if you bother to throw a LW into a tree, and if you only want to reach across a few hundred of miles then it is not tricky at all.
Not so. The translation is literal and means exactly the same thing, and is not any more obscene, than in English. The real reason is probably that 'collapsar' is shorter and does not break the flow of sentence. But I am not an astrophysicist anyway; and both variants are commonly used in SciFi literature.
Security by obscurity does not work. A well organized organlegging ring would have no problem to find out if someone is a donor - just get a mole in the donor registration department, or plant a bug into one of their computers.
A doctor does not need to ask in writing or to receive a response over a bullhorn. It is next to impossible to prove that "he knew". For example, if he receives a piece of spam email with a certain pattern, he can learn that patient number 12345 is a donor. A prosecutor would die of old age before he can prove this.
The phone is heavy, buggy and runs out of power in a day if left unused. If you talk a lot you need to carry spare batteries!
The phone is badly designed, has tons of defects, and generally suffers from being the first.
The audio quality is as bad as always (probably due to standard G.7xx codecs.)
The 3G network has poor coverage.
There is little to no content on the network.
Video calls require handsfree kit and a head vice.
The phone is no more useful than any other phone. Actually, it has worse coverage than AMPS.
So here is the question: who needs this phone and this 3G network? Am I alone in rejecting Web browsing on a tiny LCD, often paying per minute? Am I alone in treating this 3G propaganda as pure marketing that doesn't satisfy any real need that people have?
An RCC panel is lightweight and heat-resistant. But if you have one broken, you don't have to replace it with exactly the same one! You can have a replacement kit that is larger, heavier and otherwise worse as a permanent solution, but it would save the day in emergency.
Slashdot Mirror
Their jobs, of course.
Too many 3rd party applications don't run on Win2K3 Server.
I'd classify this invention as similar to Segway in its utter uselessness. Some laugh at people who ride Segway in a park instead of walking (as humans are built to do); in the same manner some would be laughing at people who are busily wiggling the mouse trying to buy something online, instead of plugging the key (or just their password) into the system.
Again we see an invention that solves a problem that does not exist... could they please find a problem and only then get busy? Is it too much to ask, for example, to develop a wireless mouse that is using forward error correction and checksums, so that it does not "jump around" as most wireless garbage does? That would be something useful.
Autopilot sounded like a risky venture too. Who would trust flying an airplane to a box of hardware? But nowadays it is more reliable than a human (though not as versatile), and one would be a fool not to engage the autopilot at cruise altitude.
Humans are far more dangerous as drivers than as pilots. Cars are separated by just few meters of space, barely enough to stop in time. If the driver is distracted and loses 0.5 second in braking, he is in trouble. Automatic system won't have a problem here. So it is advantageous to use automated systems wherever they offer a benefit; and definitely long stretches of highways are best suited for such automation.
As a general case, if f(m) describes fuel consumption speed depending on current vehicle mass, and M(x) describes vehicle mass as function of distance, then the total amount of fuel would be an integral from 0 to full distance of f(M(x)) dx, where 'x' is the distance between the starting line and the current position of the scooter. It can be easily solved by assuming that the vehicle makes fuel instead of burning it; then the "produced" M at the end of the trip is what you are looking for.
Nautical miles make sense, especially considering water landing :-)
I think the safety and reliability improves as you launch more.
Actually, the reliability does not depend on number of launches. It depends on number of bugs found and fixed. Since this work costs money, it translates into improved reliability after all, as advertised :-)
With rare, risky launches you just take your chances without investing into a more reliable system - and get the same number of failures per tons/persons launched.
In the long run it is beneficial to invest into a reliable vehicle. However "long run" is hard to define, because the vehicle may become obsolete exactly when it reaches its peak (having consumed decades of development and enhancements.) So it can be argued either way.
But indeed, with smaller vehicle your failures will be smaller as well, though more frequent until the system is improved. It's just statistics.
Rockets, man, rockets. That's what most satellites are launched on, all over the world, reliably and safely.
However you will suffer four times as many failures, unless you push the reliability of the design further into 9's. But if you do that then the cost rises... See, there is an optimal design which minimizes the cost and risk, given your priorities. And one-seater is not it. Read more detailed analysis of this issue.
Of course seating one person has it's problems- we probably don't have a rocket that small anymore, so you have to build a smaller rocket.
This is not quite correct. The size of the vehicle depends largely on features such as life support, avionics, engines etc. You can not fly to LEO in a telephone booth (unless you are The Doctor :-)
Read this to find out what knowledgeable people think about the "Smaller Shuttle" idea.
It will cost NASA $10 million just to file the paperwork :-(
In any case, even if you are using only the keyboard, after you press ENTER 17 times it is only likely that you will press ENTER 18th time as well even before you read what it wants from you. Twice as likely if you just want to go through a routine computer setup procedure.
This is the reason why workers can climb on live 500 kV power lines and walk on the wires - there is no "other" contact to kill them (except their own capacitance, which is low.)
There is only one working solution: to etch the antenna on the surface of the chip, and then to point some radar transmitter at it. However it will cook you within seconds :-)
As I said, those guys need to come up with a battery before they can think of anything else. This is especially important if they want to use wireless, since it involves parting with the energy.
I am afraid this is just another grant hunt. There is no battery that would be suitable for this project.
Where would that secret key be stored? If it is anywhere in the software, then it will be found. The only way to make it kind of secure is to use a booby-trapped hardware dongle with a well thought out, encrypted interface. Something like Palladium.
I just wonder why I typed open() and it became concat() after preview... either Slashcode or the latest Firebird are to be blamed.
So indeed, in Windows you pay for layer upon layer upon layer of cruft. Once you are done, it works - but it takes a rocket scientist to get there.
With regard to video capture, in Linux you can do this:
$ cat videodata.raw
and it will give you some sort of raw video frames that you can easily process later. In Windows you first need to learn about 10 layers of software, each totally different, that allow you (in theory) to access the device. DirectX would be your first stop.
They are tricky if you are sitting in your car and trying to contact someone 5000 miles away with your 10W rig. However if you bother to throw a LW into a tree, and if you only want to reach across a few hundred of miles then it is not tricky at all.
Not so. The translation is literal and means exactly the same thing, and is not any more obscene, than in English. The real reason is probably that 'collapsar' is shorter and does not break the flow of sentence. But I am not an astrophysicist anyway; and both variants are commonly used in SciFi literature.
A doctor does not need to ask in writing or to receive a response over a bullhorn. It is next to impossible to prove that "he knew". For example, if he receives a piece of spam email with a certain pattern, he can learn that patient number 12345 is a donor. A prosecutor would die of old age before he can prove this.
So here is the question: who needs this phone and this 3G network? Am I alone in rejecting Web browsing on a tiny LCD, often paying per minute? Am I alone in treating this 3G propaganda as pure marketing that doesn't satisfy any real need that people have?
An RCC panel is lightweight and heat-resistant. But if you have one broken, you don't have to replace it with exactly the same one! You can have a replacement kit that is larger, heavier and otherwise worse as a permanent solution, but it would save the day in emergency.
Welding was tried in space (on Mir), using an electron beam instead of flame.
I take it that you'd want to fly on Atlantis with that panel still installed, right?