Well, I'm not a master cryptanalyst by any stretch of the imagination. At first glance though, this looks more like a code than a cipher; that is, I think that each word and/or sentence are the "units" of the "cryptography" rather than each character. On the other hand, they may be employing steganography, and or some algorithim in which every Nth character/letter is skipped. If I was really interested in solving this, a perl script that could analyze all possible skipping patterns would probably be my first attempt. But neither fame nor $25 bucks at ThinkGeek are enough motivation to zorch my finals. Good luck to the rest of you.
It's funny, the best thing about Jon Katz's stories is the discussion that follows them. Until I started writing this post, I had forgotten that it was in reply to a Katz story.
Cmdr. Taco, Hemos, everybody at Slashdot, could you please try to hire/sign/whatever, more journalists for feature articles? Perhaps someone who's willing to support their arguments with factual information? I think that this would be a step in the right direction for slashdot.
While the suit over the Rio may have determined that MP3 playback devices are not illegal, it is still the opinion of RIAA that under the current law you cannot legally rip copies of your CDs yourself.
OK, so according to the RIAA, I can't rip my own MP3s. The RIAA also says that I can't download MP3s of songs that I already own on CD, cassette, LP, etc from Napster and my.mp3.com. OK, RIAA, how do you suggest I use my Rio, which has been found to be a legal MP3 playback device?
I think that it's about time that we, as citizens do two things: force an investingation of the RIAA (and the MPAA) for anti-trust violations. From where I sit, their stance seems pretty anti-competitve to me. The second thing is to request that the corporate charter of the RIAA be revoked by the Attorney General of the state in which the RIAA is incorporated (probably Delaware).
Since the RIAA is no longer operating in the best interest of the public (i.e. they are trying to shut downall other distribution mechanisms which they do not control.) it's time to exercise our right to dissolve them as a corporate entity. It's gonna be fun to see them on the defensive for once (one last time?)
The aliens in Starship Troopers the movie were called "buggers", too, so they didn't want to duplicate.
If that was the case, maybe he should have thought of that before he even started writing Ender's Game! I read Ender's Game back when I was in high school, along with a lot of Heinlein's novels. After reading Starship Troopers recently, and reflecting with a more mature perspective, large parts of Ender's Game don't seem all that original to me. Card cribbed many of his ideas from Heinlein and Asimov. The "surprise twist" ending was a pale imitation of Asimov's novels; the only difference being that Asimov was the master of suspense and kept you guessing until the very end, whereas I was starting to suspect that the "games" might be real, by the time that they involved action with the Buggers.
I just hope that Hollywood doesn't edit and dilute the plot of Ender's Game as much as they slashed apart Starship Troopers.
This book may discuss some of the topics that you're interested in:
Nano: The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology by Edward Regis and Mark Chimsky (ed.) Little, Brown and Co. copyright 1996 ISBN: 0316738522
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation by K. Eric Drexler John Wiley & Sons, 1992
Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance B.C. Crandall (ed.) MIT Press, 1996
Drexler's name comes up frequently in the field. I recommend going to your local library, or local University library and doing a search there. The purpose of assignments like this on are frequently to encourage students to develop their own research skills. Consider developing these skills, I've found them to be of immense value during the course of my academic career.
It'll probably only set you back ~$100 for a liter.
Liter is a unit of volume, which can just as easily contain vacuum. Which phase it the helium 3 in, liquid? If it's in the gaseous phase, what pressure is it at? Or to make this all really simple, just how many atoms of Helium 3 would I be getting for my money?
While I wouldn't call myself a "veteran" Linux user, I have been running Slackware since the summer of 1996. I'd say, rather than get[ing] away from the assumption that's taken prevalence lately that Linux distros have to come in shrinkwrapped boxes with colored bitmaps on them. that those ofus who have been using un-shrink-wrapped distributions need to do more advocation. Yes, Linux is moving (has moved?) into the realm of the business world, but we shouldn't allow ourselves to forget where it came from.
One of the main reaons that I still run Slackware, and still personally advocate for Slackware, is that installing it and using it everyday reminds me of the many times when I was first exploring *nix and learning the power that it gave to the user/programmer (and especially to the sysadmin;) I like the philosophy of Slackware that you should know how your system works and how you want it to work; Slackware encourages a careful reasoned approach and a deep understanding of Linux.
With regards to FVWM1, why not just pull the source off of one of your old CD-ROMs, install libc5, and recompile it?
While it's true that a lunar base would be very useful as an astronomical observatory (Aitkin crater on the South lunar pole, which is eternally dark, comes to mind) there are many reasons not to make a stop at the moon on the way to Mars. First, the moon is poor in usable resources. It does contain Silicon, Carbon, Oxygen and Iron and _maybe_ trace amounts of water in some of the craters like Aitkin, but lunar rock is mostly undifferentiated, there are no rich ore deposits to mine, like on Earth. In order to get any usable raw materials, you'd have to crush and melt tons of rock, requiring a huge investment in machinery (which can't be manufactured on the moon, initially, for obvious reasons) and energy. Second, if you include the cost of launching supplies, equipment and raw materials from Earth (or LEO, etc.) to the Moon, going to the Moon actually makes the mission _more_ expensive. In order to travel from any planet to any other planet or moon, your spacecraft must first accelerate to at least the escape velocity of the planet it's departing from (e.g. Earth ~10 km/s) and then decelerate below the escape velocity of the destination planet/moon when it arrives. Both Earth and Mars have atmospheres thick enough to allow your spacecraft to decelerate for free (no fuel burned to reduce your velocity) through aerobraking. However, if you're going to stop at the moon (or haul all of your mining equipment, factories and fuel there), you have to carry all of the fuel needed to brake into lunar orbit, soft-land, and take off again. Even if the moon provides the raw materials for enough fuel for your mission, it still doesn't justify a Lunar base as a "gas station" for a mission to Mars. See Robert Zubrin's Case for Mars for the physical arguments. Finally, as far as using the moon as a "training base for Mars," a far cheaper and safer training base would be Antarctica. Both Earth and Mars have atmospheres which allowed liquid water to flow on their surfaces, and were geologically active at some point in the past few tens of million years. As an added bonus, the Martian Day is only about 37 minutes longer than an Earth Day. In contrast, the moon is small, airless and takes about a month to rotate. Plus, it's been geologically inactive for about the last 3.5 to 4 billion years.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not a master cryptanalyst by any stretch of the imagination. At first glance though, this looks more like a code than a cipher; that is, I think that each word and/or sentence are the "units" of the "cryptography" rather than each character.
On the other hand, they may be employing steganography, and or some algorithim in which every Nth character/letter is skipped. If I was really interested in solving this, a perl script that could analyze all possible skipping patterns would probably be my first attempt. But neither fame nor $25 bucks at ThinkGeek are enough motivation to zorch my finals. Good luck to the rest of you.
It's funny, the best thing about Jon Katz's stories is the discussion that follows them. Until I started writing this post, I had forgotten that it was in reply to a Katz story.
Cmdr. Taco, Hemos, everybody at Slashdot, could you please try to hire/sign/whatever, more journalists for feature articles? Perhaps someone who's willing to support their arguments with factual information? I think that this would be a step in the right direction for slashdot.
While the suit over the Rio may have determined that MP3 playback devices are not illegal, it is still the opinion of RIAA that under the current law you cannot legally rip copies of your CDs yourself.
OK, so according to the RIAA, I can't rip my own MP3s. The RIAA also says that I can't download MP3s of songs that I already own on CD, cassette, LP, etc from Napster and my.mp3.com. OK, RIAA, how do you suggest I use my Rio, which has been found to be a legal MP3 playback device?
I think that it's about time that we, as citizens do two things: force an investingation of the RIAA (and the MPAA) for anti-trust violations. From where I sit, their stance seems pretty anti-competitve to me. The second thing is to request that the corporate charter of the RIAA be revoked by the Attorney General of the state in which the RIAA is incorporated (probably Delaware).
Since the RIAA is no longer operating in the best interest of the public (i.e. they are trying to shut down all other distribution mechanisms which they do not control.) it's time to exercise our right to dissolve them as a corporate entity. It's gonna be fun to see them on the defensive for once (one last time?)
If that was the case, maybe he should have thought of that before he even started writing Ender's Game! I read Ender's Game back when I was in high school, along with a lot of Heinlein's novels. After reading Starship Troopers recently, and reflecting with a more mature perspective, large parts of Ender's Game don't seem all that original to me. Card cribbed many of his ideas from Heinlein and Asimov. The "surprise twist" ending was a pale imitation of Asimov's novels; the only difference being that Asimov was the master of suspense and kept you guessing until the very end, whereas I was starting to suspect that the "games" might be real, by the time that they involved action with the Buggers.
I just hope that Hollywood doesn't edit and dilute the plot of Ender's Game as much as they slashed apart Starship Troopers.
This book may discuss some of the topics that you're interested in:
Nano: The Emerging Science of Nanotechnology
by Edward Regis and Mark Chimsky (ed.)
Little, Brown and Co. copyright 1996
ISBN: 0316738522
Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation
by K. Eric Drexler
John Wiley & Sons, 1992
Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance
B.C. Crandall (ed.)
MIT Press, 1996
Drexler's name comes up frequently in the field. I recommend going to your local library, or local University library and doing a search there. The purpose of assignments like this on are frequently to encourage students to develop their own research skills. Consider developing these skills, I've found them to be of immense value during the course of my academic career.
It'll probably only set you back ~$100 for a liter.
Liter is a unit of volume, which can just as easily contain vacuum. Which phase it the helium 3 in, liquid? If it's in the gaseous phase, what pressure is it at? Or to make this all really simple, just how many atoms of Helium 3 would I be getting for my money?
While I wouldn't call myself a "veteran" Linux user, I have been running Slackware since the summer of 1996. I'd say, rather than get[ing] away from the assumption that's taken prevalence lately that Linux distros have to come in shrinkwrapped boxes with colored bitmaps on them. that those ofus who have been using un-shrink-wrapped distributions need to do more advocation. Yes, Linux is moving (has moved?) into the realm of the business world, but we shouldn't allow ourselves to forget where it came from.
One of the main reaons that I still run Slackware, and still personally advocate for Slackware, is that installing it and using it everyday reminds me of the many times when I was first exploring *nix and learning the power that it gave to the user/programmer (and especially to the sysadmin ;) I like the philosophy of Slackware that you should know how your system works and how you want it to work; Slackware encourages a careful reasoned approach and a deep understanding of Linux.
With regards to FVWM1, why not just pull the source off of one of your old CD-ROMs, install libc5, and recompile it?
regards,
niteshad
While it's true that a lunar base would be very useful as an astronomical observatory (Aitkin crater on the South lunar pole, which is eternally dark, comes to mind) there are many reasons not to make a stop at the moon on the way to Mars. First, the moon is poor in usable resources. It does contain Silicon, Carbon, Oxygen and Iron and _maybe_ trace amounts of water in some of the craters like Aitkin, but lunar rock is mostly undifferentiated, there are no rich ore deposits to mine, like on Earth. In order to get any usable raw materials, you'd have to crush and melt tons of rock, requiring a huge investment in machinery (which can't be manufactured on the moon, initially, for obvious reasons) and energy. Second, if you include the cost of launching supplies, equipment and raw materials from Earth (or LEO, etc.) to the Moon, going to the Moon actually makes the mission _more_ expensive. In order to travel from any planet to any other planet or moon, your spacecraft must first accelerate to at least the escape velocity of the planet it's departing from (e.g. Earth ~10 km/s) and then decelerate below the escape velocity of the destination planet/moon when it arrives. Both Earth and Mars have atmospheres thick enough to allow your spacecraft to decelerate for free (no fuel burned to reduce your velocity) through aerobraking. However, if you're going to stop at the moon (or haul all of your mining equipment, factories and fuel there), you have to carry all of the fuel needed to brake into lunar orbit, soft-land, and take off again. Even if the moon provides the raw materials for enough fuel for your mission, it still doesn't justify a Lunar base as a "gas station" for a mission to Mars. See Robert Zubrin's Case for Mars for the physical arguments. Finally, as far as using the moon as a "training base for Mars," a far cheaper and safer training base would be Antarctica. Both Earth and Mars have atmospheres which allowed liquid water to flow on their surfaces, and were geologically active at some point in the past few tens of million years. As an added bonus, the Martian Day is only about 37 minutes longer than an Earth Day. In contrast, the moon is small, airless and takes about a month to rotate. Plus, it's been geologically inactive for about the last 3.5 to 4 billion years.