This is the first tape hardware that has actually seemed interesting to me as a consumer. Finally, the capacity is large enough that it won't take two tapes just to back up a single off-the-shelf 1TB or 1.5TB hard drive.
Now if this were available today with the drive costing $300 and the tapes at $20 apiece, it would be the perfect backup medium. Unfortunately, knowing the way the industry works, it will hit the market in 8-10 years, by which time 30 TB hard drives will be routine, and it will cost $2000 for the drive plus $200 per tape when a 30 TB hard drive costs around $100.
The capacity of tape drives isn't why they are dinosaurs. It's the absurd cost-to-benefit ratio coupled with the bad capacity. Even in an enterprise environment, you'd be hard pressed to explain why a dozen off-site RAID arrays isn't a better choice than tape, IMHO. Until it's significantly cheaper to back up to tape than to back up to a dozen hard drives in alternation, as far as I'm concerned, tape is dead.
We've already had many of our fundamental rights stripped away. Your alternative solutions might have worked fifty years ago. It's way too late for that now. The rich have the power, and there's no way to take back that power without first preventing them from wielding it.
Yeah. It's nice to know that the companies paying less than 1% interest on savings accounts while charging 30% interest on credit card debts can get their side of the story out. I can see it now.
ANNOUNCER: These banking CEOs are hurting. You may not see it, but they are hurting inside. Bill had to give up his luxury cruise liner for a smaller luxury yacht. Frank can only fly his corporate jet to business meetings and has to pay his own way to Cancun every weekend. Phil's $500 million bonus was reduced to only $300 million, so he can't afford to have a communist dictator overthrown and replaced by his puppet as he originally planned.
Cry me a f*cking river. The banks aren't the target of a smear campaign. They've been smearing themselves so badly that nothing the White House could possibly do could make the public's opinion of these dirtbag billionaires any worse. They've wrecked our economy while getting rich at our expense. They've skimmed billions of dollars off the top while laying off their own staff, taking people's homes away, repossessing people's cars with their kids inside, etc. At some point, you simply have to view a corporation as too big, and by its very nature, a threat to public safety. Thus, like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire, the company's freedom is trumped by other concerns.
Besides, companies do not inherently have a right to free speech. They are already governed by many, may laws regarding false advertising, etc. As soon as speech becomes commercial in nature---and regardless of how political it might be, any speech from a corporation is inherently commercial in nature, IMHO---it has the least protection of any form of speech. That is very much intentional, and that is how it has always been in this country. Corporations inherently have disproportionately more power than normal people, and thus their speech must be limited to prevent them from hopelessly impeding everyone else's freedom of speech.
According to the story I read, they upheld the portion of the law that required disclosing the sources of funding with an 8-1 margin. Only Clarence Thomas voted to allow corporations (including PACs) to hide their funding sources....
True, but name one election not involving an incumbent or a permanently single-party district in which the winner spent a tiny fraction of what the loser spent.
Also, you're not thinking maliciously enough. A sufficiently powerful corporation could easily buy up all the free ad time, making it nearly impossible for any other position to be heard at all. In the absence of dissenting voices, how is the public supposed to be influenced by anything else other than the view that is getting all the air time?
As Lenin is reported to have said, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth."
Voting with your wallets only works if you actually have a choice in who you do business with and if you are fully aware of those companies' supply chains. In practice, outside of very narrow situations, neither of these is ever really true.
Let's say you want to buy a computer. Whether you buy it from Apple, Dell, HP, or some fly-by-night computer builder working out of his parents' basement, your processor comes from AMD or Intel... maybe VIA. It doesn't take much imagination to think of positions that two or three companies in a similar industry would support. For that matter, it's safe to assume that in any given industry, odds are good that most companies (if not all) will generally have similar political positions on any issue that impacts them. Therefore, more often than not, your only real option when a company supports a position you don't like is to not only refuse to buy from that company, but to also refuse to buy from any other company in that entire industry. This quickly becomes impractical.
And you're also forgetting about collateral damage. Let's say that UPS supports somebody you don't like. Any product you buy assembled outside the U.S. has a good chance of having been shipped by UPS or a subsidiary thereof at some point. Any product you buy that was assembled in the U.S. has about a 100% chance of having some component in it that was shipped by UPS or a subsidiary at some point. So it does no good to say "I'll only ship FedEx from now on" because you're supporting UPS anyway.
Finally, I'll go one step further. I buy a carrot from my grocery store. If the farmer worked for a corporation that supported someone I don't like, I can probably tell by the label. If my grocery supported someone I don't like, I can tell by the grocery store sign. But what about:
the seed company that provided the seeds for the carrots
the herbicide/pesticide company that the farmer bought products from (I know, I know, buy organic)
the local store through which the farmer bought the herbicide/pesticide/seeds
the regional distributors that provided the herbicide/pesticide/seeds to the farmer's local store
the manufacturer of the farmer's tractor, truck, harvester, etc.
the manufacturers of parts that went into that equipment
the tire manufacturer for the farmer's tractor, truck, etc.
the company that made the air compressor that the farmer used to top up those tires
the trucking company that the farmer used to deliver the finished goods to a distributor
the distributor itself
the company that manufactured the labels that the farmer stuck on the produce
the gasoline companies who sold fuel for the farmer's tractor, the trucking companies, etc.
the power companies that sold power to the equipment manufacturers, the distributors, the trucking companies, the gasoline companies, the seed company, the herbicide/pesticide companies, etc.
The number of companies involved basically increases exponentially the farther out you look. Each company gets support from multiple other companies, which get support from multiple other companies, and so on.
And that's just a couple of hops away from the original "manufacturer" for something as simple as a carrot. When you consider how many dozens or even hundreds of companies are directly involved in the manufacture and distribution of a more complex product like a computer or a cell phone, you should easily understand why avoiding doing business with a company who supports people you don't like is completely and totally infeasible unless you quite literally dedicate every minute of your life to the task, and probably not even then.
Quite simply, there is only one way to not support a company you don't like, and that is to refuse to give any money to any corporation. Short of living an entirely self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle without the use of modern tools or equipment (we're talking about using an ox an
For point-to-point, that's massive overkill. Just use AIM or Jabber video chat. They're built-into iChat on Mac OS X, supported by AIM on Windows, supported by pidgin on LInux, etc.
This isn't about campaign contributions. Companies are still banned from doing that; the court upheld that provision. The Supreme Court overturned the part of the law that made it illegal for companies to spend money for their own political ads similar to what PACs do.
So basically, the court said that corporations run by a handful of individuals can spend arbitrary amounts of money on advertisements. The problem with this is that it is almost impossible for any legitimate political organization to achieve the same level of political influence as a result. Groups like PACs are nonprofit organizations. Therefore, they cannot feasibly raise money on the same scale as a public corporation can. Thus, this decision gives the people in charge of corporations the power to spend money on a scale that completely overwhelms the spending that any group of people dedicated to any cause can possibly hope to achieve no matter how well organized, no matter how many people join the group, etc. And because it is almost impossible to pierce the corporate veil, no matter how sleazy, unethical, etc. the ads become, the corporate leaders who put them together cannot be held personally accountable, unlike actual groups of individuals working together for a common cause.
In effect, this change puts control of the government firmly in the hands of the wealthiest individuals with no oversight whatsoever. It's sobering to realize that after years of Congress and the White House wiping their backsides with the Constitution, we now have a judicial branch that is willing to do the same.
Hundreds? Try tens of thousands. The cheapest launch vehicle that can put a satellite in orbit that I could find costs $12 million per launch. For that price, I can buy almost 22,000 Kyocera solar panels that produce 205 watts apiece. That's at retail with the only discount being from buying them in 20-packs. That's approximately 4.5 megawatts of power generating capacity that could be paid for just by the cost of the launch. Even if you could get 100% efficiency in your transfer (impossible), this would still mean that your bird would have to provide over 4,000 panels in orbit, for a total of almost 70,000 square feet just to provide as much power as the panels you could have put up on the ground for that amount of money, not counting the cost of the the panels in space and the satellite itself. That's roughly the total panel square footage for the entire set of ISS panels. I don't think you could launch anywhere near that much mass on the $12M launch platform.
But wait, there's more. Solar panels designed for use on Earth are rigid. This allows you to build in efficiency that probably cannot be achieved in a space-style roll-out set of panels. Instead of generating just shy of 4.5 MW, the ISS's panels only generate 120 kW. Admittedly, that's in LEO and not at a full geostationary orbit, but even factoring in 24 hours of light per day instead of about 8-10 hours of full-sun-equivalent light, and even if there were a factor of 2 or 3 difference in efficiency between LEO and geosynchronous orbit, you'd still barely break even per square foot compared with panels down on the surface. So even if the satellite were free, it would not be possible to even cover the launch costs of the cheapest, smallest delivery vehicle with a satellite that's so big that it would require the largest delivery vehicle to get it into space.
And it just keeps getting worse. Even if you could magically get launch costs down and could find a way to use deploy newer, higher-efficiency panels in space, you still have the problem of solar winds. The larger your solar panel array in true outer space, the more you are affected by solar winds. ISS gets away with having such large panels because it is in LEO and is thus protected by the amount of atmosphere present. Unfortunately, because LEO is inherently not geostationary, such an orbit would be unusable as a source for power on the ground. At geostationary orbital altitudes, that much square footage would be a serious problem. A typical satellite has mere hundreds of square feet of panels, or about three orders of magnitude less than what would be required to break even.
To put it in perspective, there have been solar sail spacecraft with proposed total sail area of high single digit thousands of square feet. Realistically speaking, we're probably talking about several hundred thousand square feet of panels (10+ football fields) to achieve any useful profit in space.
I am not a physicist, so these numbers could be completely wrong. That said, my quick back-of-the-napkin (err... Google) math says that you wouldn't even get it completely unfolded before you would be so far out of orbit that the satellite would be useless. If you had... say 80% of the ~4570 mPa of radiation pressure reflected (solar panels being 20% efficient or thereabouts), you'd be talking about almost 3700 mPa of pressure, which multiplied by a 70,000 square feet area gives me about 24,000 Newtons, or over 5,300 pounds of force. Now granted if your orbit is stable enough, this will be balanced out by pushing you closer to Earth while you're between it and the sun, but even if it's as heavy as ISS, you're talking about over.06 m/s^2 acceleration, or almost 2,800 meters per second after a 12 hour half orbit. If you could stay in orbit at all, I don't think you'd even approach being geostationary....
As they say, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. I firmly believe that the whole "solar power in space" thing is just a giant pump-and-dump scam.
You're close. It's far easier to just make sure the head of accounting's computer has a little... eh... mishap every once in a while, then miraculously save the company from a SOX audit at the very last minute with lots of overtime. This should be good for at least five years or until you get a new head of accounting, whichever comes first. Repeat as needed.
Alternatively, I suppose one could simply hire the BOFH....
My answer to that would be "lots", but not because I am doing anything wrong or expect to do something wrong in the future.
One of the problems with DNA is that it is circumstantial evidence by nature, but the juries are often too clueless to understand that. The fact of the matter is, odds are almost 100% that at some point in my lifetime, my DNA will be present at or near the scene of a crime. Likewise for every person on this earth. You leave your DNA and fingerprints when you sit on a seat on the bus, when you rest your hands on the counter at Target, when you eat at a restaurant, etc. Given how broadly your DNA gets spread and given the rate of crime in the world, if the DNA of non-criminals were in a national database, the odds of being tied incorrectly to a crime approaches 100% fairly rapidly.
Now if DNA were only allowed in very narrow circumstances, that might be different---if the only use were in rape trials, and only DNA obtained from bodily fluids, the risk of false positives would be much smaller. Even then, though, the risk that the rules would change to allow DNA to be used in a broader range of cases would be looming overhead.
That's not even counting the risk of false positive "matches", which given current testing methodologies is staggeringly high.
So what do I have to hide? Simple. My ordinary, irrelevant daily activities that under normal circumstances would not tie me to any crime because of a lack of any connection to that crime sufficient to result in a DNA search but that in the presence of a national database might easily lead to a conviction on purely circumstantial evidence resulting out of those ordinary, innocent activities.
Passing ethernet is rather pointless, but passing USB is smart. Passing FireWire would be smart for the same reason. Your computer, chances are, is under your desk. Your monitor is on top of your desk. Your devices are (mostly) on top of your desk. Having all your USB and FireWire ports under the desk with the computer is clumsy.
That said, you're fundamentally misunderstanding how DP works. The graphics card vendors wouldn't need to add any USB silicon on the graphics card, and there's no way a cable could combine the signals. We're not talking about separate USB wires here. With DP, the video cable is just another packet bus. In its stream of packets, it can contain video data for multiple monitors, and it has extra bandwidth reserved for other things. Your operating system encapsulates USB packets and hands them off to the video driver, which passes them along the wire in extra time slots, interspersed among the video data.
The first DP spec included a small amount of sideband areas for USB packets at USB 1.x speeds. In this version, because the bandwidth is greater, there's more room for other stuff, so the packet stream can contain high speed USB, Ethernet, etc. With either version, any USB silicon would be in your monitor, not in the graphics card. The monitor's silicon would recognize the USB data, and if it had USB ports, would decapsulate the packets and send them out the USB ports as USB packets.
No. Chrome frame is only active if a page specifically codes for it. Otherwise, it does nothing. An attack page would not typically include code for a workaround.
The only way to get fourth amendment protection in the cloud is to protect your rights yourself. If you don't want the government reading everything you put in the cloud, use military-grade encryption. Remember: you only have rights if you are willing to defend those rights. Otherwise, they're just words on toilet paper.
Ha, I've been modded Troll after commenting on the pertinence of my own post!
Yeah, a lot of posts are getting modded Troll lately. I can only conclude that the last batch of mod points went to a bunch of people who haven't been around long enough to know the meaning of the word.
Hint to mods: real trolls include one or more of the following:
Astroturfing by Microsoft.
Unsolicited commercial advertising.
Some mention of the GNAA.
Description of a sexual encounter with the fecal matter of a prominent public figure.
Links to "Goatse" picture.
Links to "Tubgirl" picture.
ASCII art depiction of one of the aforementioned images.
ASCII art depiction of private parts of the human body.
None of which are part of the mainstream media, though. Blogs definitely count as a restart of the industry. They work on a completely different scale.
I worked in a cave set once that was not much bigger than the shuttle cabin (a little taller) or a handicapped stall. And utter pain doesn't begin to cover it. No disagreement there. I didn't say it would be pleasant, just that it is possible.:-)
In every way that matters. The word you're looking for is intent. Calling up a talk radio station, you are clearly taking a deliberate action to make the world hear your message. With Twitter, although it might be available to the whole world, it
is typically read only by people who know you, with few exceptions. Thus, most people don't think of Twitter or Facebook as intent to broadcast the information to the world.
Just to pick nits, he never said he was going to kill anyone. He could just as easily have rented a Ryder truck, loaded it up with explosives, gotten somebody to drive a getaway car, pulled it up to the front door of the airport at three in the morning (assuming that the airport shuts down at night), gotten in the car, and triggered it with a phone call once at a safe distance. It would completely shut down the airport with no real chance of killing anybody.
Further, it would not qualify as terrorism because:
No humans were targetted.
No innocent third parties were attacked (the airport was not an arbitrary target, but rather the source of the anger).
It is not intended to create fear, but rather to exact revenge.
Regarding focus pulling, when you can't get more than about three or four feet away, you'll be using such a wide angle lens for even a simple two shot that I'd expect your depth of field to be almost infinite no matter what you do....
Your director, PD people, etc. can be physically outside the shuttle watching the feeds on a monitor. Think of it as being much like shooting a scene in a restroom stall. All the people are watching it on a screen because the camera operator is blocking the view of the entire set.:-)
You're also not going to have much room for lighting in that space, as you alluded to earlier. You could try using natural lighting for authenticity, though you'd probably get some pretty high contrast images that way.... You'd probably end up hanging a couple of LED panel lights in appropriate places with velcro or something---you know, the ones that are half an inch thick and wouldn't hurt much if they fell down on your head. Either way, it's an entirely different kind of lighting, and it's going to pretty much have to be "set it and forget it". By the time the camera person walks in the room, the lighting people would have to be out. It can be done, though.
Makeup people? Again, off the set. Actors walk out the airlock, makeup people work on them in the cargo bay.
In short, all the problems are solvable if you don't mind your entire cast and crew hating you for all eternity. It would lend itself best to a much smaller than normal crew, e.g. three people---the director/camera/lighting engineer, the audio/lighting engineer, and the makeup person. Or at the very least, lighting people who don't have a cow when the camera operator moves the LED panel three inches lower to get rid of a shadow for one shot.
When was the last time you read an article that included a direct quote? Or asked someone a pertinent question? Or hell, even showed any knowledge of the subject material?
The 1995 Presidential election season, give or take.
The problem with journalism is that it is in a death spiral:
The papers can't afford to pay people well because they are losing money. Most smart people won't work for peanuts, so the best and brightest tend towards other fields. The result has been a gradual decline in the average quality of journalists. (Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very bright people out there, but the average is definitely on the decline.) This same pattern is happening in radio and TV journalism as well.
The consolidation of media outlets compounded the problem, pushing the actual journalists farther and farther away from the communities they cover, resulting in a lower quality product that fewer people are willing to pay for.
The rise of the Internet added more distractions, and thus ad views became nearly worthless in that medium. This, in turn, made it important to have more ads, which made them more distracting, which reduced their value further. Coupled with a reduction in ad sales staff because of the consolidation of ad sales through third-party sites like Google Ads that skim a percentage off the top, and the Internet as an ad-supported medium became a dismal failure.
And so on. There's probably no good fix for any of this except to let things burn out and start over from scratch.
The shuttle's front windows are removable for servicing. You'd probably just trunk power in through that. For scenes up front, you'd trunk it in through the airlock. And it has its own air system that ducts (among other places) into the cargo bay to support the extended duration orbiter pallet, so I think it should be possible to duct HVAC in through that. So although it might be easier if you cut the top open like a can opener, it's not strictly necessary. That said, if a movie studio bought one, I'd immediately invest in Canon and other lens manufacturers in the expectation of a bunch of custom orders for large format fisheye lenses with insane levels of distortion correction.
The same can be said for capitalism. Indeed, all economic systems inherently favor those who exploit flaws in the system to gain power and money or goods. Even the barter system. Short of having so much abundance that everyone's needs are fully met, there will always be people who are willing to abuse the system for personal gain. It's not even clear that this would go away even with such abundance.
Power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible. All economic systems require someone to have power to maintain order the system, whether it's the judges in a tribal barter system, the leaders of Russia's communist party, the heads of corporations, etc. Therefore, abuse of any economic system is guaranteed, given sufficient time.
The funny thing is that I don't have an arrogant bone in my body. I do, however, defend myself when attacked as the GGP post did. And it's safe to say that if a work environment made me regularly feel like I was being personally attacked, I'd leave faster than a tree in autumn. That's an unhealthy work environment.
You wouldn't happen to have a small penis, would you? That would explain a lot.
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This is the first tape hardware that has actually seemed interesting to me as a consumer. Finally, the capacity is large enough that it won't take two tapes just to back up a single off-the-shelf 1TB or 1.5TB hard drive.
Now if this were available today with the drive costing $300 and the tapes at $20 apiece, it would be the perfect backup medium. Unfortunately, knowing the way the industry works, it will hit the market in 8-10 years, by which time 30 TB hard drives will be routine, and it will cost $2000 for the drive plus $200 per tape when a 30 TB hard drive costs around $100.
The capacity of tape drives isn't why they are dinosaurs. It's the absurd cost-to-benefit ratio coupled with the bad capacity. Even in an enterprise environment, you'd be hard pressed to explain why a dozen off-site RAID arrays isn't a better choice than tape, IMHO. Until it's significantly cheaper to back up to tape than to back up to a dozen hard drives in alternation, as far as I'm concerned, tape is dead.
We've already had many of our fundamental rights stripped away. Your alternative solutions might have worked fifty years ago. It's way too late for that now. The rich have the power, and there's no way to take back that power without first preventing them from wielding it.
Yeah. It's nice to know that the companies paying less than 1% interest on savings accounts while charging 30% interest on credit card debts can get their side of the story out. I can see it now.
ANNOUNCER: These banking CEOs are hurting. You may not see it, but they are hurting inside. Bill had to give up his luxury cruise liner for a smaller luxury yacht. Frank can only fly his corporate jet to business meetings and has to pay his own way to Cancun every weekend. Phil's $500 million bonus was reduced to only $300 million, so he can't afford to have a communist dictator overthrown and replaced by his puppet as he originally planned.
Cry me a f*cking river. The banks aren't the target of a smear campaign. They've been smearing themselves so badly that nothing the White House could possibly do could make the public's opinion of these dirtbag billionaires any worse. They've wrecked our economy while getting rich at our expense. They've skimmed billions of dollars off the top while laying off their own staff, taking people's homes away, repossessing people's cars with their kids inside, etc. At some point, you simply have to view a corporation as too big, and by its very nature, a threat to public safety. Thus, like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire, the company's freedom is trumped by other concerns.
Besides, companies do not inherently have a right to free speech. They are already governed by many, may laws regarding false advertising, etc. As soon as speech becomes commercial in nature---and regardless of how political it might be, any speech from a corporation is inherently commercial in nature, IMHO---it has the least protection of any form of speech. That is very much intentional, and that is how it has always been in this country. Corporations inherently have disproportionately more power than normal people, and thus their speech must be limited to prevent them from hopelessly impeding everyone else's freedom of speech.
According to the story I read, they upheld the portion of the law that required disclosing the sources of funding with an 8-1 margin. Only Clarence Thomas voted to allow corporations (including PACs) to hide their funding sources....
True, but name one election not involving an incumbent or a permanently single-party district in which the winner spent a tiny fraction of what the loser spent.
Also, you're not thinking maliciously enough. A sufficiently powerful corporation could easily buy up all the free ad time, making it nearly impossible for any other position to be heard at all. In the absence of dissenting voices, how is the public supposed to be influenced by anything else other than the view that is getting all the air time?
As Lenin is reported to have said, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth."
Voting with your wallets only works if you actually have a choice in who you do business with and if you are fully aware of those companies' supply chains. In practice, outside of very narrow situations, neither of these is ever really true.
Let's say you want to buy a computer. Whether you buy it from Apple, Dell, HP, or some fly-by-night computer builder working out of his parents' basement, your processor comes from AMD or Intel... maybe VIA. It doesn't take much imagination to think of positions that two or three companies in a similar industry would support. For that matter, it's safe to assume that in any given industry, odds are good that most companies (if not all) will generally have similar political positions on any issue that impacts them. Therefore, more often than not, your only real option when a company supports a position you don't like is to not only refuse to buy from that company, but to also refuse to buy from any other company in that entire industry. This quickly becomes impractical.
And you're also forgetting about collateral damage. Let's say that UPS supports somebody you don't like. Any product you buy assembled outside the U.S. has a good chance of having been shipped by UPS or a subsidiary thereof at some point. Any product you buy that was assembled in the U.S. has about a 100% chance of having some component in it that was shipped by UPS or a subsidiary at some point. So it does no good to say "I'll only ship FedEx from now on" because you're supporting UPS anyway.
Finally, I'll go one step further. I buy a carrot from my grocery store. If the farmer worked for a corporation that supported someone I don't like, I can probably tell by the label. If my grocery supported someone I don't like, I can tell by the grocery store sign. But what about:
The number of companies involved basically increases exponentially the farther out you look. Each company gets support from multiple other companies, which get support from multiple other companies, and so on.
And that's just a couple of hops away from the original "manufacturer" for something as simple as a carrot. When you consider how many dozens or even hundreds of companies are directly involved in the manufacture and distribution of a more complex product like a computer or a cell phone, you should easily understand why avoiding doing business with a company who supports people you don't like is completely and totally infeasible unless you quite literally dedicate every minute of your life to the task, and probably not even then.
Quite simply, there is only one way to not support a company you don't like, and that is to refuse to give any money to any corporation. Short of living an entirely self-sufficient agrarian lifestyle without the use of modern tools or equipment (we're talking about using an ox an
For point-to-point, that's massive overkill. Just use AIM or Jabber video chat. They're built-into iChat on Mac OS X, supported by AIM on Windows, supported by pidgin on LInux, etc.
This isn't about campaign contributions. Companies are still banned from doing that; the court upheld that provision. The Supreme Court overturned the part of the law that made it illegal for companies to spend money for their own political ads similar to what PACs do.
So basically, the court said that corporations run by a handful of individuals can spend arbitrary amounts of money on advertisements. The problem with this is that it is almost impossible for any legitimate political organization to achieve the same level of political influence as a result. Groups like PACs are nonprofit organizations. Therefore, they cannot feasibly raise money on the same scale as a public corporation can. Thus, this decision gives the people in charge of corporations the power to spend money on a scale that completely overwhelms the spending that any group of people dedicated to any cause can possibly hope to achieve no matter how well organized, no matter how many people join the group, etc. And because it is almost impossible to pierce the corporate veil, no matter how sleazy, unethical, etc. the ads become, the corporate leaders who put them together cannot be held personally accountable, unlike actual groups of individuals working together for a common cause.
In effect, this change puts control of the government firmly in the hands of the wealthiest individuals with no oversight whatsoever. It's sobering to realize that after years of Congress and the White House wiping their backsides with the Constitution, we now have a judicial branch that is willing to do the same.
Hundreds? Try tens of thousands. The cheapest launch vehicle that can put a satellite in orbit that I could find costs $12 million per launch. For that price, I can buy almost 22,000 Kyocera solar panels that produce 205 watts apiece. That's at retail with the only discount being from buying them in 20-packs. That's approximately 4.5 megawatts of power generating capacity that could be paid for just by the cost of the launch. Even if you could get 100% efficiency in your transfer (impossible), this would still mean that your bird would have to provide over 4,000 panels in orbit, for a total of almost 70,000 square feet just to provide as much power as the panels you could have put up on the ground for that amount of money, not counting the cost of the the panels in space and the satellite itself. That's roughly the total panel square footage for the entire set of ISS panels. I don't think you could launch anywhere near that much mass on the $12M launch platform.
But wait, there's more. Solar panels designed for use on Earth are rigid. This allows you to build in efficiency that probably cannot be achieved in a space-style roll-out set of panels. Instead of generating just shy of 4.5 MW, the ISS's panels only generate 120 kW. Admittedly, that's in LEO and not at a full geostationary orbit, but even factoring in 24 hours of light per day instead of about 8-10 hours of full-sun-equivalent light, and even if there were a factor of 2 or 3 difference in efficiency between LEO and geosynchronous orbit, you'd still barely break even per square foot compared with panels down on the surface. So even if the satellite were free, it would not be possible to even cover the launch costs of the cheapest, smallest delivery vehicle with a satellite that's so big that it would require the largest delivery vehicle to get it into space.
And it just keeps getting worse. Even if you could magically get launch costs down and could find a way to use deploy newer, higher-efficiency panels in space, you still have the problem of solar winds. The larger your solar panel array in true outer space, the more you are affected by solar winds. ISS gets away with having such large panels because it is in LEO and is thus protected by the amount of atmosphere present. Unfortunately, because LEO is inherently not geostationary, such an orbit would be unusable as a source for power on the ground. At geostationary orbital altitudes, that much square footage would be a serious problem. A typical satellite has mere hundreds of square feet of panels, or about three orders of magnitude less than what would be required to break even.
To put it in perspective, there have been solar sail spacecraft with proposed total sail area of high single digit thousands of square feet. Realistically speaking, we're probably talking about several hundred thousand square feet of panels (10+ football fields) to achieve any useful profit in space.
I am not a physicist, so these numbers could be completely wrong. That said, my quick back-of-the-napkin (err... Google) math says that you wouldn't even get it completely unfolded before you would be so far out of orbit that the satellite would be useless. If you had... say 80% of the ~4570 mPa of radiation pressure reflected (solar panels being 20% efficient or thereabouts), you'd be talking about almost 3700 mPa of pressure, which multiplied by a 70,000 square feet area gives me about 24,000 Newtons, or over 5,300 pounds of force. Now granted if your orbit is stable enough, this will be balanced out by pushing you closer to Earth while you're between it and the sun, but even if it's as heavy as ISS, you're talking about over .06 m/s^2 acceleration, or almost 2,800 meters per second after a 12 hour half orbit. If you could stay in orbit at all, I don't think you'd even approach being geostationary....
As they say, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. I firmly believe that the whole "solar power in space" thing is just a giant pump-and-dump scam.
Reminds me of this failed Microsoft demo....
Yikes.
You're close. It's far easier to just make sure the head of accounting's computer has a little... eh... mishap every once in a while, then miraculously save the company from a SOX audit at the very last minute with lots of overtime. This should be good for at least five years or until you get a new head of accounting, whichever comes first. Repeat as needed.
Alternatively, I suppose one could simply hire the BOFH....
My answer to that would be "lots", but not because I am doing anything wrong or expect to do something wrong in the future.
One of the problems with DNA is that it is circumstantial evidence by nature, but the juries are often too clueless to understand that. The fact of the matter is, odds are almost 100% that at some point in my lifetime, my DNA will be present at or near the scene of a crime. Likewise for every person on this earth. You leave your DNA and fingerprints when you sit on a seat on the bus, when you rest your hands on the counter at Target, when you eat at a restaurant, etc. Given how broadly your DNA gets spread and given the rate of crime in the world, if the DNA of non-criminals were in a national database, the odds of being tied incorrectly to a crime approaches 100% fairly rapidly.
Now if DNA were only allowed in very narrow circumstances, that might be different---if the only use were in rape trials, and only DNA obtained from bodily fluids, the risk of false positives would be much smaller. Even then, though, the risk that the rules would change to allow DNA to be used in a broader range of cases would be looming overhead.
That's not even counting the risk of false positive "matches", which given current testing methodologies is staggeringly high.
So what do I have to hide? Simple. My ordinary, irrelevant daily activities that under normal circumstances would not tie me to any crime because of a lack of any connection to that crime sufficient to result in a DNA search but that in the presence of a national database might easily lead to a conviction on purely circumstantial evidence resulting out of those ordinary, innocent activities.
Urgh. "Amount of areas." Too many rewrites to that sentence. I meant to say, "The first DP spec included a small amount of sideband space...".
Passing ethernet is rather pointless, but passing USB is smart. Passing FireWire would be smart for the same reason. Your computer, chances are, is under your desk. Your monitor is on top of your desk. Your devices are (mostly) on top of your desk. Having all your USB and FireWire ports under the desk with the computer is clumsy.
That said, you're fundamentally misunderstanding how DP works. The graphics card vendors wouldn't need to add any USB silicon on the graphics card, and there's no way a cable could combine the signals. We're not talking about separate USB wires here. With DP, the video cable is just another packet bus. In its stream of packets, it can contain video data for multiple monitors, and it has extra bandwidth reserved for other things. Your operating system encapsulates USB packets and hands them off to the video driver, which passes them along the wire in extra time slots, interspersed among the video data.
The first DP spec included a small amount of sideband areas for USB packets at USB 1.x speeds. In this version, because the bandwidth is greater, there's more room for other stuff, so the packet stream can contain high speed USB, Ethernet, etc. With either version, any USB silicon would be in your monitor, not in the graphics card. The monitor's silicon would recognize the USB data, and if it had USB ports, would decapsulate the packets and send them out the USB ports as USB packets.
No. Chrome frame is only active if a page specifically codes for it. Otherwise, it does nothing. An attack page would not typically include code for a workaround.
The only way to get fourth amendment protection in the cloud is to protect your rights yourself. If you don't want the government reading everything you put in the cloud, use military-grade encryption. Remember: you only have rights if you are willing to defend those rights. Otherwise, they're just words on toilet paper.
Yeah, a lot of posts are getting modded Troll lately. I can only conclude that the last batch of mod points went to a bunch of people who haven't been around long enough to know the meaning of the word.
Hint to mods: real trolls include one or more of the following:
Did I miss anything?
None of which are part of the mainstream media, though. Blogs definitely count as a restart of the industry. They work on a completely different scale.
I worked in a cave set once that was not much bigger than the shuttle cabin (a little taller) or a handicapped stall. And utter pain doesn't begin to cover it. No disagreement there. I didn't say it would be pleasant, just that it is possible. :-)
In every way that matters. The word you're looking for is intent. Calling up a talk radio station, you are clearly taking a deliberate action to make the world hear your message. With Twitter, although it might be available to the whole world, it is typically read only by people who know you, with few exceptions. Thus, most people don't think of Twitter or Facebook as intent to broadcast the information to the world.
Just to pick nits, he never said he was going to kill anyone. He could just as easily have rented a Ryder truck, loaded it up with explosives, gotten somebody to drive a getaway car, pulled it up to the front door of the airport at three in the morning (assuming that the airport shuts down at night), gotten in the car, and triggered it with a phone call once at a safe distance. It would completely shut down the airport with no real chance of killing anybody.
Further, it would not qualify as terrorism because:
Regarding focus pulling, when you can't get more than about three or four feet away, you'll be using such a wide angle lens for even a simple two shot that I'd expect your depth of field to be almost infinite no matter what you do....
Your director, PD people, etc. can be physically outside the shuttle watching the feeds on a monitor. Think of it as being much like shooting a scene in a restroom stall. All the people are watching it on a screen because the camera operator is blocking the view of the entire set. :-)
You're also not going to have much room for lighting in that space, as you alluded to earlier. You could try using natural lighting for authenticity, though you'd probably get some pretty high contrast images that way.... You'd probably end up hanging a couple of LED panel lights in appropriate places with velcro or something---you know, the ones that are half an inch thick and wouldn't hurt much if they fell down on your head. Either way, it's an entirely different kind of lighting, and it's going to pretty much have to be "set it and forget it". By the time the camera person walks in the room, the lighting people would have to be out. It can be done, though.
Makeup people? Again, off the set. Actors walk out the airlock, makeup people work on them in the cargo bay.
In short, all the problems are solvable if you don't mind your entire cast and crew hating you for all eternity. It would lend itself best to a much smaller than normal crew, e.g. three people---the director/camera/lighting engineer, the audio/lighting engineer, and the makeup person. Or at the very least, lighting people who don't have a cow when the camera operator moves the LED panel three inches lower to get rid of a shadow for one shot.
The 1995 Presidential election season, give or take.
The problem with journalism is that it is in a death spiral:
And so on. There's probably no good fix for any of this except to let things burn out and start over from scratch.
The shuttle's front windows are removable for servicing. You'd probably just trunk power in through that. For scenes up front, you'd trunk it in through the airlock. And it has its own air system that ducts (among other places) into the cargo bay to support the extended duration orbiter pallet, so I think it should be possible to duct HVAC in through that. So although it might be easier if you cut the top open like a can opener, it's not strictly necessary. That said, if a movie studio bought one, I'd immediately invest in Canon and other lens manufacturers in the expectation of a bunch of custom orders for large format fisheye lenses with insane levels of distortion correction.
The same can be said for capitalism. Indeed, all economic systems inherently favor those who exploit flaws in the system to gain power and money or goods. Even the barter system. Short of having so much abundance that everyone's needs are fully met, there will always be people who are willing to abuse the system for personal gain. It's not even clear that this would go away even with such abundance.
Power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible. All economic systems require someone to have power to maintain order the system, whether it's the judges in a tribal barter system, the leaders of Russia's communist party, the heads of corporations, etc. Therefore, abuse of any economic system is guaranteed, given sufficient time.
The funny thing is that I don't have an arrogant bone in my body. I do, however, defend myself when attacked as the GGP post did. And it's safe to say that if a work environment made me regularly feel like I was being personally attacked, I'd leave faster than a tree in autumn. That's an unhealthy work environment.
You wouldn't happen to have a small penis, would you? That would explain a lot.