Yeah... instead of this being a story about "Google addicted to cheap electricity", Google's PR people could have used the same info to write one called "Google saves society's Megawatts", saying that Google was so committed to energy-efficiency and reduced carbon emissions that that they were placing their datacentres near generating plant to reduce the amount of power wasted by long-distance transmission over the grid, and were also being good neighbours by not overloading the exiting transmission grid.
I'm all for criticising big corporations when they've done something wrong, but putting their datacentres next to power plants is a good idea. Sure, it'd be better if they could find a way to reuse the waste heat, or use more energy-efficient PCs, but even if they did those things, having their datacentres near the generators makes sense.
If this means that they get the electricity metered slightly cheaper, based on the fact that they're only paying for what they use, not the additional 7% that's wasted in long-range transmission, then fine. As long as they're not being given too much of a discount, or having their datacentre subsidised, I don't see the problem.
I don't mind them firing attorneys, as long as they are honest about it.
I don't even mind them firing attorneys hired to serve "at the President's pleasure" for purely political reasons, as long as they are honest about it and are prepared to take the flak from politicial commentators.
No, what I mind is them firing attorneys on purely political grounds, and then organising what basically appeared to be a criminal conspiracy to falsely discredit anything that those attorneys might subsequently say, by getting the Department of Justice to invent and spread lies about them and the reasons why they were sacked, putting out a press statement saying that the attorneys had been fired for gross misbehaviour and/or incompetence.
The government acted like a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare... the sacked attorneys heard themselves being publicly discredited by the DoJ's disinformation on the evening news.
...
The good news is that the President has publicly agreed that these actions were indefensible, and has given his personal pledge that all the White House's emails that might be considered relevant will be handed over of investigation. He's promised complete openness. Nothing will be hidden. An open book.
Of course, he famously doesn't use emails himself, because he says that the problem is that people can use them against you later, but his admin people would have left an email trail, that can be checked for evidence of criminal conspiracies involving the DoJ and the lawyers.
Except it seems that his team have been deliberately using party email addresses for their communications (rather than the proper White House systems), specifically to avoid leaving a trail that could be checked later by investigators. That's how they caught Ollie North and his guys, after all.
No problem, we can check the party activist server that the staff were using instead.
Oh, the party server admins have gone and deleted all the old emails? And they say that they can't get them back? What a pity. No, we won't impound the servers to check, we'll just take their word for it.
Still, we can check the White House emails that/do/ still exist, that went through the usual security systems, and use these to reassure ourselves that it doesn't seem as if there was any overt, systemic, wholesale illegality going on. That's something, at least. Nothing can go wrong there, it's White House data, and the President/promises/ that there will be no obstruction, and has instructed everyone concerned to comply fully with the investigation.
So lets ask for the emails... what's that, Skippy? You're saying that the White House IT people seem to have been unlawfully and systematically reformatting backup data storage tapes with all that correspondence on? And nobody told them that this might be a BAD thing to do if you are in charge of data storage?
Hey, these things happen, it's only the White House, it's not like it's a high-powered office dealing with any sort of important or valuable information, where people would be expected to be given proper training. After all, it's not like any of this information might be valuable. I'm sure that nobody asked for this information to be illegally deleted, because that itself would be criminal destruction of government property. Data-crime.
It's easy enough to check, all we need to do is look up the memo requesting the recycling of tapes containing emails, and find who asked for this policy change and when.
What's that? Nobody knows who ordered the tapes to be wiped? Surely, we can just look up the email records, and... oh, I see the problem. By ordering that tapes be continuously reused, the person giving the order ensured that their own orders... were also erased. Hmm.
But the people who gave and received the order must remember, surely? Oh, they don't remember. Someo
Does Yahoo's "Terms of Service" contract still include a clause saying that users aren't allowed to use the service to say bad things about Yahoo or good things about their competition?
If News International took over, would that clause (or its replacement) mean that Yahoo users weren't allowed to criticise NI or their dealings on Yahoo forums, on pain of having their membership (and email, etc.) shut down?
p
And would "NI Yahoo" be allowed to transfer user details and histories and emails to its newly-affiliated NI divisions?
By buying Yahoo, or forming a partnership with them, would NI be buying the right to use any Yahoo user-data for their own ends, without breaking any laws? If Yahoo Mail really is the most-used mail service on the web (as claimed), then that could be an invaluable data-mining resource for a news organisation that likes to cultivate influence with politicians.
I think a QM guy would usually tend to say that the escaping and infalling particles both have positive energy, but that there's also a two-particle energy deficit created in the region when the pair is produced. You might normally expect the two particles to immediately mutually annihilate again to pay back the deficit, but the difference in gravitational attraction at their two locations ("tidal forces") wrenches them apart so that this doesn't happen. So the hole's region loses two particlesworth of massenergy, and the infalling particle pays one back. Bottom line, one particle leaves the hole's region, the hole's region loses one particlesworth of massenergy, and the hole's horizon has to shrink to fit.
This isn't the only way of visualising Hawking radiation, but its probably the most popular one. One can also construct arguments to do with the infalling particle carrying negative information, but those are likely to be more controversial.
While I know nothing about Hawking radiation, it seems like gravity must be somehow involved, and this experiment is all about electromagnetic forces.
AFAIK, William Unruh seems to have been the first person to point out the apparent statistical similarity of the results of Hawking radiation through a gravitational event horizon to those of more conventional conventional indirect radiation through an acoustic horizon.
W.G. Unruh, "Experimental black hole evaporation" Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 (1981), 1351-1353
Since GR1915 doesn't support "indirect radiation" effects, the similarity tends to be presented as something that can be used as an efficient analogy or toy model for the QM effect acting across a gravitational horizon, rather than as a literal description.
But since the real gravitational situation isn't exactly testable, theoretical physicists studying Hawking radiation will be very glad for a verification of any version of the effect. Otherwise, they're trying to base their initial arguments for a theory of quantum gravity on the assumed reality of effects that haven't yet been demonstrated to be real.
The experiment is cool, but as far as I can tell, this is nothing like a black hole in the cosmological sense. Simply reproducing one superficial property of black hole ("light cannot escape") does not make it a gravitational singularity with an event horizon and its associated properties.
The press release's title was a bit exaggerated (they aren't actually creating a GR1915 black hole), but the press release's explanatory introduction was reasonable "a team... claims to have simulated a black hole's event horizon in the lab".
For example, I seriously doubt electron-positron conversions in their light cavity would behave at all like said conversions at a real event horizon since the charged particles would be subject to very different kinds of forces from those near a real black hole.
Actually, the situation seems to be analogous.
Also, Hawking radiation is related to black hole evaporation.
Yep
This would not occur with the lasers in an analogous way because the mechanics of this light bubble "evaporation" is totally different.
Nope.
The analogies work pretty well across a situations in range of different subjects. For instance, the idea of Hawking radiation seems ot have been partly inspired by the slightly earlier idea that a spinning charged metal sphere should throw off radiation, and so (by analogy) a Kerr (rotating) black hole ought to radiate too (even though the hole's relevant "charge" was gravitational rather than electric). From the rotational case we could then deduce that even a non-rotating gravitational black hole ought to radiate.
While the "obvious" mechanics may be different, the statistical mechanics (and the usefulness of QM-style arguments to model the situations) can have striking similarities. For instance, we might expect the acoustic analogue of Hawking radiation to occur across a supersonic jet's shockwave, and we can try modelling this as the result of an apparent "phonon" pair-production process.
It sounds to me like a case of one subfield (photonics) sexing up their lingo by adopting the lingo of another subfield (general relativity) to get press. IAAP, but not a cosmologists/GR expert, so I'm willing to stand corrected.
It's probably valid research. The quantum gravity guys have spent the last few years trying to persuade physicists to work towards experiments that can study optical horizons in the lab, to try to get a result that might hopefully show analogous Hawking radiation effects for real (in a non-gravitational context).
Once we're more familiar with these non-gravitational versions of the effect, we'll be more confident that our efforts to try to write a theory of quantum gravity that includes them is modelling them in the right way.
The relevant review paper on the counterparts of Hawking radiation in non-gravitational contexts is
"Analogue Gravity" Barcelo, Liberati & Visser.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0505065
Scan through the references section at the end and you'll get a feel for the wide range of analogous situations that are being studied, form non-linear optics to signal propagation in Bose-Einstein condensates.
Pff.
This is a guy who attends antiterrorism conferences, and he regards it as "abusive" to even have his hand-luggage looked through before he gets on a plane?
Jeez.
I think that it's important that the people who make laws that impinge on the liberties of the rest of us should have to put up with the same restrictions themselves, so that they understand what it's like. There shouldn't be one set of laws for them and another for us.
...
And another thing... I'd love to have seen the security officer's face when this guy explained why he was in the country.
"Work or pleasure? A bit of both. Terrorism actually. Oh, yes, I'm attending a conference on terrorism, with a load of Muslim groups that feel that they have a strong personal stake in antiterrorism legislation. We all want to get together in Washington and shoot the breeze and exchange ideas about terrorism and the factors that encourage it. Yes, it's all arranged and scheduled, we're all converging on Washington at the same time, on different planes. And some important people from Homeland Security will be there, which'll be fun.
Yes, I know a lot of the other guys there. I work for a foreign power, as their minister for foreign aid, so I do a lot of foreign travel, and have lots of contacts in countries where terrorists are recruited. Yes, I'm considered quite an expert in these sorts of issues. Yes, I'm known to the FBI, they reckon that I know so much about this stuff that I'm actually going to give a keynote speech on it."
"What's that? You'd like to take a look inside my hand-luggage? Nooooo! This is an infringement of my human rights!"
I mean, seriously, I think that a lot of this airport security stuff is stupid and OTT and overly intrusive, but in this particular case it'd probably be negligent if they didn't at least want to check his reaction when they asked to go through his hand-luggage.
If he seriously thought that working for a foreign government meant that he was immune to standard security checks, and reacted badly to the suggestion that they look in his bag, then that's all the more reason to check him. I mean, if there were 500 people in an airport lounge of various colours and religious persuasions, and you could only check one of them for possible terrorist devices or components, then it'd be him, wouldn't it?
And you'd also tend to think, well, if this guy's going to a conference on terrorism, if anyone's going to be understanding about being searched, it should be this guy. And you can't have him addressing a meeting on Homeland security and telling them how he'd just sailed through security without being given the most basic searches, just by making a fuss.
No, you'd have to check him. It'd look bad if you didn't.
It partly depends on whether the information was generated in-house by the company itself, or whether (as seems to be happening more often nowadays) they "bought in" details of a potential exploit through a brokerage firm, and paid for exclusivity to that information.
The second situation is much more dodgy.
It's paying for exclusivity that tips the situation over the edge into possible criminal conspiracy if a major exploit subsequently happens. If your house gets looted because you forgot to lock a door, and your neighbours say afterwards that that they saw your door open but didn't get around to telling you, you might be a little disgruntled about it, but they can say that they were acting in good faith. After all, they aren't responsible for your house, and it's not up to them to tell you how to run your own affairs.
But if you find out that your neighbours had seen your door open, and had then decided to cash in by selling that information to a dodgy local private security firm just before you got burgled, you might have a few questions. If, after the burglary, your neighbours explain that they weren't allowed to tell you, because the security firm had paid them specifically not to tell you about your house's vulnerabilities, then you may get rather upset and conclude that the security firm are probably a bunch of crooks, and that neighbour is a nasty two-faced criminal piece of shit.
If someone decides to be a good neighbour, that's great. If they decide not to be a good neighbour, that's usually their decision. If they decide only to help you out if you pay them, that's also often understandable.
But if people don't help you out because they're specifically being paid not to be neighbourly to you, and not to help you even for money, because a company that wants to sell you a service is paying folk not to do anything that might undermine their exclusivity, so that they can charge higher prices... then that's something potentially very different.
a blockbuster low-budget movie called "My big fat greek wedding" has, to date, not turned a profit. Now, I could see a bad movie not turning a profit, but that movie was and still is INSANELY popular.... That's how shady Hollywood accounting is.
Yeah, it's like when record companies say that albums don't make a profit... the accounting is designed specifically to make sure that they don't show a profit if at all possible.
Ditto with newspapers. Murdoch's trick when he took over the (profitable) HK&S Times was apparently to sell the artistic rights to the paper's masthead to a shell company that he owned, located in an offshore tax haven. Then, whatever profits the paper was going to make in a given year mysteriously turned out to correspond almost exactly to the licensing fee that year for the right to use the masthead.
One of the Hollywood studio's latest tricks is supposed to be aggregation. If a hit film is supposed to pay the actors, director, producer or writer a percentage of the profits, what the studio will do is unilaterally decide to bundle that film with a group of big loss-makers, and treat that group as a single accounting entity. At the studio's discretion, the hit film is then deemed not to have gone into profit until it's paid back the studio for all the losses that they made on the other films in the bundle. The really bent thing about this, of course, is that the decision as to which films are going to be "grouped" for accounting reasons can be deferred until the studio has spreadsheeted combinations are going to save them the most in contracted percentage fees.
.. or give it simple motors, so that the recorded actions can be replayed.
The motors wouldn't have to be calibrated, the controller software could compare positions and adjust until the stick-figure's position matched that of the computer model.
Hmm. That could be a really creepy toy. Especially if you had two of them linked over the net. I bend Sticky's arms here, and somewhere in a room half a planet away, Sticky's twin comes aliiive...
You've got a lot of information, but you've got it wrong. The Bricks of cash on palets, mentioned here, among other places, were supposed to pay civilian contractors aiding in the reconstruction efforts. Accounting practices bordering on criminal have allowed some sickening war profiteering, and certainly some of that money ended up in Iraqi hands, but since the Iraqis are the actual workers, I'm not too concerned.
Actually, the cash I was referring to was oil revenue money owed by the US to the Iraqi government. When the accountancy guys were asked what had happened to this Iraqi money, they said that they'd done their job by handing it all over to the Iraqis, and that's where their obligations stopped. Congress took a different line, and said that the US was supposed to have a duty of care during the transitional period in making sure that the money went where it was supposed to (e.g. to pay the wages of Iraqi civil servants and allow government departments to get functioning again). The accountancy guys disagreed and said that their only duty was to make sure that the money was all present and correct when it was handed over to... someone. This particular dispute wasn't anything to do with civilian contractors. That missing money is another subject.:(
New IED's Made in Iran. These are currently the most feared and effective weapons in the Iraq and Afghanistan theatres.
Yeah, maybe. I remember when this story first broke, and a line of politicians were ready to demand action, until some interviewer brought up the subject of that old Vietnam incident where the "intercepted" ship stocked with Russian arms with authentic serial numbers turned out to have been a CIA setup... people turned a funny colour, and wouldn't give any more quotes, and suddenly none of the politicians wanted to be associated with the "compelling evidence" after all.
The IEDs with their Iranian serial numbered parts may well turn out to be genuine, but once the politicians remembered that the CIA actually had a department for mocking up these sorts of things, they didn't seem to want to be associated with the story any more.
Having said all that, yeah, I'm sure that Iranian forces are covertly operating inside Iraq. It'd be strange if they weren't, considering that everybody else seems to be there. But I don't think many people outside the US take what the White House and the US military and the US tv news say too seriously any more.
Terrorist training camps, In Iran. Remember we went to war in Afghanistan over this one.
I checked your link for this story, and it connects to a slightly odd site called IranFocus.
So I googled "IranFocus", and (strangely enough) it turns out that the website is supposed to be one of the media fronts of an organisation called the "People's Mujahedin of Iran" (PMOI/MKO), which has an armed wing, and its own guerrilla training camps, and is dedicated to the overthrow of the current Iranian government. The MKO had links with a few US congressmen (including John Ashcroft) and are currently designated by the US as a terrorist organisation... the MKO argue that this characterisation isn't fair, and that they aren't terrorists because they only attack military targets.
The PMOI are supposed to have thousands of armed fighters based in Iraq - from Iran's POV, it's Iraq & US that's providing a haven for terrorist training camps, from which recruits hope to attack Iran.
So-o... while this doesn't necessarily mean that the "IranFocus" info isn't true, it'd be nice to hear it given editorial credibility by an independent news organisation that isn't actively campaigning for the US to overthrow the Iranian government by force, so that the website's parent organisation can take control of the country.
Where, exactly, do you believe insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan are getting arms from?
From everywhere - Europe, the US, China, Russia... anywhere that has arms dealers. At one point the US ordered a couple of hundred thousand Kalashnikovs for Iraq, and the supply chain they used was so convoluted that they lost them. When it comes to funding, they also lost track of a few billion dollars in US currency (shrinkwrapped, on pallettes) that was owed to Iraq as oil revenue. We handed it over to somebody, but what happened after that we don't know. The US also lost rather a large quantity of explosives in Iraq, some of which has probably been used to build IUDs to blow up US soldiers.
Have security service factions in Iran been supplying weapons to groups inside Iraq that are pro-Iran?
Of course they have. Iran is looking at how Iraq is going to be after the US pulls out. They're the major country that borders Iraq, that had war declared on them by Iraq not so many years ago, and they're the guys who'll be left with this mess on their borders when the US leaves. Iran wants to make sure that the Iraqi militias friendly to them are at least as well armed as the Iraqi militias unfriendly to them. How strongly those militias also oppose the US forces inside Iraq is of secondary interest.
Is it upsetting that some supplies passing through the Iraq/Iran border are being used by anti-US groups to attack occupying US soldiers? Of course it is. Is it outrageous that these Iranian intelligence factions felt entitled to supply arms to Iran-friendly groups and meddled in internal Iraqi affairs? Well, considering that the US felt that US national security justified not just meddling but a full-scale invasion of Iraq (on more nebulous grounds than Iran's concerns) I think that it's difficult for Americans to take the moral high ground here.
If you're mentioning Afghanistan, the most serious weaponry that the Mujaheddin had was probably the Stinger missiles originally supplied by the US in the hope that they'd be used to shoot down Soviet aircraft.
We helped to create these situations, and to start pointing the finger of blame at everyone else when we get caught in the blowback is just dumb. We need to try to learn these lessons otherwise ten years from now we'll be doing it all again.
For instance: to help us to gain control of Iraq, we've just help set up and massively fund the creation of Blackwater, which is now an international mercenaries-for-hire corporation with no especial loyalty to the US, and which can call on the cream of intelligence and special forces knowhow and technology from the US, Russia, Irael, France, Britain, and just about any other country worth considering.
When Iraq is over, Blackwater will be looking for new business opportunities. They can start a war for anyone who pays, and they have inside knowledge of almost every major military organisation. They know US security, protocols and politics, and if Bin Laden or some far-right US group decides to secretly pay a foreign-based corporate division within Blackwater a few billion to take out a major US city, or to start assassinating US politicians in order to engineer a US state of emergency, how the hell are you going to stop them?
If a White House think tank reckons that they need a terrorist outrage on US soil to grab power indefinitely, and a Blackwater division reckons that if such an outrage happened, they'd suddenly get billions in new US contracts to help police the US population, then you start to have a convergence of motives and opportunities. Sure, Al-Q are a threat, but the relationship between Blackwater and some of the people in Washington arguably poses a more immediate threat to national security and the future of democracy in the US.
How long do you think it will take from the time Iran develops nuclear weapons to the time they end up in the hands of extremists?
Yep, Smoke detectors, Carbon Monoxide detectors and Butane Gas detectors would all seem to be covered.
Look at the example given, of school groups who might want to monitor air quality around their schools for the benefit of kids with asthma, where Falkenrath replied that, yes this would be illegal without a permit, and that although they had no interest in regulating people's use of air-quality sensors around schools, this sort of activity had to be included in the legislation, because if you allowed parental group to test air quality without a licence it'd be the thin end of a dangerous wedge.
"It becomes a very slippery slope, and it would then be possible for many other entities to sort of drive things through that loophole."
That's for a group or organisation. If you are an individual parent and your kid has breathing problems, will you only get a permit for an air tester if you can provide documentary evidence that your kid has asthma?
What they are going to do now is try to drive it through again, but this time they'll try to put in clauses to placate the larger and more persuasive pressure groups. If you're an individual, forget it.
On the plus side, it'll mean that if a business is illegally faking their emissions data and polluting the air that you or your kids are breathing, it'll be against the law for you to test the air without a permit and catch them out. Local company illegally burning toxic waste or trucking exposed asbestos through the city? You verified it with an unauthorised air check? Off to prison you go, and your data is inadmissable because it's illegally obtained. It'll be good for certain NY businesses that have historical connections to the waste disposal business and who like contributing to NY politicians election funds (hello Mr. Anthony Soprano).
Send those annoying environmentalists and whistleblowers, with their pesky science and evidence and measuring equipment, off to jail. NYC air quality below official levels? If you're in possession of the equipment to prove it, they'll be able to lock you up for breaching antiterrorist legislation.
For reference, look at the size of the shuttle payload bay -- that's supposed to be the size of the KH-11.
In fact, the conspiracy theory about the whole shuttle project was that it was designed all along to launch, service and retrieve KH11s. Hence the shuttle's expensive wings, landing gear, etc. You don't need all that hardware to launch stuff, and you only need a little reentry pod to bring people back. We could have put a simple disposable aluminium tube onto the Shuttle's tank and boosters, along with an engine pod and a personnel pod, and it'd have done pretty much the same job (designs exist). The only way that the shuttle's design makes sense is if it's designed to bring large objects safely back to Earth, and the only things that we can think of that the shuttle can reach that are expensive enough to be worth bringing back are KH11s. Hence the large bay doors, and hence the retrieval arm
Why would you want to retrieve a KH11?
Well, they are damned expensive (estimates vary between 600m and a billion dollars each, depending on inflation), and KH11s have a different mission profile to most satellites, in that they're expected to be able to get real close to specific locations at specific times, so they can't just sit passively in a general-purpose orbit. If you get a tip-off about something funny happening in some Russian shipyard right now, and you want hi-res satellite pics before "whatever it is" moves on, then you need a satellite to be able to manoeuvre into position to be able to sweep down and take those pics, at that location, ASAP. So the last third of a KH11 is supposed to be a hydrazine-based propulsion system.
Snag is, when that propulsion system runs out of gas your KH11 loses its reason for living, so we wanted some way of refuelling or servicing the things in orbit, or perhaps even bringing them back for servicing and relaunch (hell-llo Mr Space Shuttle).
As for any superficial external similarities between Hubble and a KH11, well, the common factor is going to be the dimensions of the Shuttle cargo bay, so yes, it'd be surprising if they didn't have the same basic body dimensions. You want to make best use of the space available.
Yeah, a child-sized robot with a white skull with black eyesockets watching you and following you around and asking "Are you lost? Are you lost?" isn't creepy at all. Especially if you're a kid. Or a grown-up who's just lost a child.
Brrr. People make horror movies with scenes like this.
On the plus side, it probably keeps the druggies away. They'll be the people you see running out of the store at 2am with their arms above their heads, screaming. On the minus side, kids having nightmares.
So the answer as to what else could they do is simple: they could drop IE!
Wow! What a smart answer!
The MS marketing people could present the all-new standards-compliant browser as "the new web standard for the new century", and people who had websites written for IE (and only IE) wouldn't be able to bitch that their sites no longer worked with IE, because they would. You'd just have a high-profile button and hotkey combination on the new browser for "Launch in Internet Explorer".
And of course you're right, they almost certainly won't do it, it's much too sensible and forward-thinking...
Yep, I'd assumed that MS's sudden interest in nominal support for open standards was down to the European Union considering whether to declare that good government practice involves using open formats for all documentation.
If every EU government department was instructed to consider migrating to open standards, and MS couldn't say that they supported open standards, then that'd potentially mean MS government sales for a whole continent being wiped out. The EU wouldn't care that this meant a US company losing zillions of sales. And if EU IT people started spreading the perception that it was "unprofessional" to use MS Office, and that perception filtered down to IT buyers for the universities and schools...
MS had to be able to say that they could "tick the box" for open standards support under new versions of Office. Support didn't have to be useful or helpful or interoperative with other companies' products in any useful way, but it had to be nominally there.
As far as has been reported, there won't even be an attempt to track the actual landing...
New Scientist:
Suzuki says he would like to develop an ultra small tracking device to attach to the plane.
If you can track it, you can learn stuff about the reentry characteristics of ultra-light probes.
Now, think about the consequences of that for a moment. Most existing reentry vehicles are reentry vihicles designed to return personnel and equipment and data to ground level, but when you explore other planets the data flow goes the other way. There's also a lot of data that doesn't have to be collected from the ground. So, instead of an orbiter chucking two or three big chunky armored landers which attempt to survive crashing into the surface, and then trying to get a rover to crawl out of the lander and chug for miles to get somewhere interesting (without falling down a hole), why not release a cloud of ultralites and have them beam back picture info and data as they they drift earthwards? If you could insert an ultralite robotic aircraft into the atmosphere (of the type they currently use for weather sensing), it wouldn't have to land, and some of these designs might be able to stay aloft for years. Couple that with a microsatellite relay network and you potentially have a good system.
Alternatively you could go down the balloon path... instead of a conventional balloon carrying a heavy heavy metal box with electronics in... instead, stick your CCD chips to the balloon, print additional circuitry and perhaps solar cells directly onto the surface, perhaps use the upper and lower surfaces as charge carriers to avoid batteries, or have the lower surface metallised and the upper transparent, and use it as a solar collector.
With a whole bunch of these balloons drifting about in the upper atmosphere, you have an ad-hoc signal relay system. Hell, give em internet protocols. You won't be able to steer them, and you'd always be losing contact with a few, but a mission could carry along hundreds of them. The transponders would only have to be comparatively short-range, maybe you could even beam power from the orbiter. If you want random mapping plus a study of the atmosphere, bung 'em into a low orbit and wait for them to decay.
Perhaps a future Venus mission might well involve an orbiter repeatedly chucking a series of fifty cheap, disposable, "smart" transponder-equipped paper planes into the Venusian atmosphere and relaying that data back to Earth.
The first step is developing and testing materials. The second is using a tracking system to see how well they cope with reentry. The third is embedding smarter electronics.
Something like "Computer: Lights off" will reduce the chance that some random sentences from the TV will trigger the command. Unless you're watching Star Treck ofcourse.
And long as you never have any conversations about computers within earshot of the 'puter.
"What'd you install that crappy voice recognition software on this computer for, Matt? See? Everything I say is coming up on the screen as syllables..."
(computer voice) "For-Mat-See. Formatting in progress..."
This idea isn't so much about getting rid of the wires, it's about getting rid of the plugs.
If you have a PDA, mobile phone or rechargable camera, or some other mobile device, the two big compatibility headaches are power connectors and data connectors. It's not such a problem with "weeny" MP3 players (because they can usually plug directly into a USB port), but with other devices its a pain. If you want to interface with your device at multiple locations, the pocketful of custom connector leads can take up more space than the device itself.
With PDAs and mobile phones, manufacturers often like the idea of a combined connector that allows the device to connect (and perhaps sync) automatically when it's dropped into a cradle, and which can also used as a way of connecting peripherals.
Snag is, different manufacturers use different connectors, and sometimes connectors are incompatible even with a single manufacturer. You're unlikely to get a recent Sony or Siemens phone, or a recent Sony PDA, to work with an older Sony or Siemens cradle or data cable, and the custom connectors and cables can be a real PITA on Sony gadgets. It also makes spare cables and cradles difficult (and expensive) to get hold of.
The obvious solution might seem to be for everyone to standardise on the "mini USB" connectors (this seems to be happening with digital cameras), but this still means that manufacturers can't build future-proof docking stations, because the location and orientation of the USB port will be different on different devices and models. Mini-USB also isn't a good choice for docking stations, since the small size of the connector means that alignment is more difficult, and forcing a slightly misaligned device can result in gouge-marks on the casing, and/or damage to the device terminals. To get around this, PDAs and other "dockable" devices tend to have customised large, wide, shallow docking connectors with large-surface-area terminals, to allow the device to naturally seat itself and make a good connection when it is casually dropped into place. Unfortunately these connections tend to pick up dirt and finger-grease and chocolate crumbs and whatever else you have in your pocket.
So the idea of this wireless interface isn't so much to get rid of the wires, as the range of incompatible docking connectors. Once you have devices that support this system, you have a docking location... a USB "docking tray" by your keyboard (probably connected to your 'puter by a conventional USB cable), and any device you want to connect to gets dropped onto the tray. No worries about missing interface leads, or dirty connectors due to pocket-gunk, or accidentally damaging the socket on your expensive camera. Lots of people now carry data around on USB keyfobs, with this system you could lose the USB connector, shrink the device and make it any shape, and when people wanted to access it they could just drop their housekeys onto the tray.
A few specialised devices might have these trays built-in... you can imagine a stand-alone Kodak photo printer aimed at the home market having a tray on the top surface to place your mobile phone or camera. It might also sell to offices as a security device, with an employee only being logged in when their device in in the tray. You grab your key from the tray when you go for a coffee and nobody can play with your terminal under your ID when you're gone. Same thing at home... your kids drop their tokens onto the tray to log in. There's nothing here that you couldn't theoretically do here with wired USB, but to be continually plugging and unplugging connectors is a hassle, and risks damaging the the connectors.
This still leaves the problem of how you get external power into the device, but techhies are already planning inductive-coil solutions to that, so I imagine the Sony guys are visualising an all-in-one device, a USB tray that could double as a recharging tray... or you could hav
Okay, everybody... next time any of us has anything to do with someone who works at Google, bring this subject up, and ask whether they think that it's right that Google should avoiding paying their fair share of US taxes, and that Ireland should get the tax revenue simply by undercutting the US.
If they get embarrassed enough over it, they may change back. Keep poking them until they do.
And while we're at it, is there a centralised page that lists offending companies that we can refer to and cite?
Try to turn this into an issue for would-be presidential candidates: "What do you think we should do about US companies that send their profits offshore to avoid paying their share?". Hopefully we should be able to poke some of these guys into saying that any such companies should be roasted. Then we can start to compare the list of offending companies against the list of companies contributing to candidates' election funds...
Turn it into an election issue. If candidates have to start distancing themselves from businesses that have been publicly named and shamed as "dodgy", and embarrassed into handing back donations, then those companies will have less control in future over how law is made and implemented.
This sort of opportunity only comes around once every four years. Use it.
The bigger issue is how movies are transferred to PAL -- standard transfer is to speed them up 6% to translate 24fps to 25fps. Up until very recently, that altered the pitch of the sound!
Yeah, similar issues with transfers for UK rebroadcast. Some years back I used to have some music gear in the same room as my tv, and would sometimes tootle along with the music on the telly. But at some point they seemed to change the transfer method, and suddenly the tunings on TV programmes recorded in the US were way off. You'd have the same audio track on a UK-authored TV programme, and on a US-authored one, and the tuning would be off by about a semitone. If the difference had been a perfect semitone, things wouldn't have been so bad, but it wasn't. 'Twas really annoying.
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I'm all for criticising big corporations when they've done something wrong, but putting their datacentres next to power plants is a good idea. Sure, it'd be better if they could find a way to reuse the waste heat, or use more energy-efficient PCs, but even if they did those things, having their datacentres near the generators makes sense.
If this means that they get the electricity metered slightly cheaper, based on the fact that they're only paying for what they use, not the additional 7% that's wasted in long-range transmission, then fine. As long as they're not being given too much of a discount, or having their datacentre subsidised, I don't see the problem.
No, what I mind is them firing attorneys on purely political grounds, and then organising what basically appeared to be a criminal conspiracy to falsely discredit anything that those attorneys might subsequently say, by getting the Department of Justice to invent and spread lies about them and the reasons why they were sacked, putting out a press statement saying that the attorneys had been fired for gross misbehaviour and/or incompetence.
The government acted like a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare ... the sacked attorneys heard themselves being publicly discredited by the DoJ's disinformation on the evening news.
The good news is that the President has publicly agreed that these actions were indefensible, and has given his personal pledge that all the White House's emails that might be considered relevant will be handed over of investigation. He's promised complete openness. Nothing will be hidden. An open book.
Of course, he famously doesn't use emails himself, because he says that the problem is that people can use them against you later, but his admin people would have left an email trail, that can be checked for evidence of criminal conspiracies involving the DoJ and the lawyers.
Except it seems that his team have been deliberately using party email addresses for their communications (rather than the proper White House systems), specifically to avoid leaving a trail that could be checked later by investigators. That's how they caught Ollie North and his guys, after all.
No problem, we can check the party activist server that the staff were using instead.
Oh, the party server admins have gone and deleted all the old emails? And they say that they can't get them back? What a pity. No, we won't impound the servers to check, we'll just take their word for it.
Still, we can check the White House emails that /do/ still exist, that went through the usual security systems, and use these to reassure ourselves that it doesn't seem as if there was any overt, systemic, wholesale illegality going on. That's something, at least. Nothing can go wrong there, it's White House data, and the President /promises/ that there will be no obstruction, and has instructed everyone concerned to comply fully with the investigation. ... what's that, Skippy? You're saying that the White House IT people seem to have been unlawfully and systematically reformatting backup data storage tapes with all that correspondence on? And nobody told them that this might be a BAD thing to do if you are in charge of data storage?
So lets ask for the emails
Hey, these things happen, it's only the White House, it's not like it's a high-powered office dealing with any sort of important or valuable information, where people would be expected to be given proper training. After all, it's not like any of this information might be valuable. I'm sure that nobody asked for this information to be illegally deleted, because that itself would be criminal destruction of government property. Data-crime.
It's easy enough to check, all we need to do is look up the memo requesting the recycling of tapes containing emails, and find who asked for this policy change and when.
What's that? Nobody knows who ordered the tapes to be wiped? Surely, we can just look up the email records, and ... oh, I see the problem. By ordering that tapes be continuously reused, the person giving the order ensured that their own orders ... were also erased. Hmm.
But the people who gave and received the order must remember, surely? Oh, they don't remember. Someo
If News International took over, would that clause (or its replacement) mean that Yahoo users weren't allowed to criticise NI or their dealings on Yahoo forums, on pain of having their membership (and email, etc.) shut down? p And would "NI Yahoo" be allowed to transfer user details and histories and emails to its newly-affiliated NI divisions?
By buying Yahoo, or forming a partnership with them, would NI be buying the right to use any Yahoo user-data for their own ends, without breaking any laws? If Yahoo Mail really is the most-used mail service on the web (as claimed), then that could be an invaluable data-mining resource for a news organisation that likes to cultivate influence with politicians.
This isn't the only way of visualising Hawking radiation, but its probably the most popular one. One can also construct arguments to do with the infalling particle carrying negative information, but those are likely to be more controversial.
W.G. Unruh, "Experimental black hole evaporation" Phys. Rev. Lett. 46 (1981), 1351-1353
Since GR1915 doesn't support "indirect radiation" effects, the similarity tends to be presented as something that can be used as an efficient analogy or toy model for the QM effect acting across a gravitational horizon, rather than as a literal description.
But since the real gravitational situation isn't exactly testable, theoretical physicists studying Hawking radiation will be very glad for a verification of any version of the effect. Otherwise, they're trying to base their initial arguments for a theory of quantum gravity on the assumed reality of effects that haven't yet been demonstrated to be real.
The analogies work pretty well across a situations in range of different subjects. For instance, the idea of Hawking radiation seems ot have been partly inspired by the slightly earlier idea that a spinning charged metal sphere should throw off radiation, and so (by analogy) a Kerr (rotating) black hole ought to radiate too (even though the hole's relevant "charge" was gravitational rather than electric). From the rotational case we could then deduce that even a non-rotating gravitational black hole ought to radiate.
While the "obvious" mechanics may be different, the statistical mechanics (and the usefulness of QM-style arguments to model the situations) can have striking similarities. For instance, we might expect the acoustic analogue of Hawking radiation to occur across a supersonic jet's shockwave, and we can try modelling this as the result of an apparent "phonon" pair-production process.
It's probably valid research. The quantum gravity guys have spent the last few years trying to persuade physicists to work towards experiments that can study optical horizons in the lab, to try to get a result that might hopefully show analogous Hawking radiation effects for real (in a non-gravitational context).Once we're more familiar with these non-gravitational versions of the effect, we'll be more confident that our efforts to try to write a theory of quantum gravity that includes them is modelling them in the right way.
The relevant review paper on the counterparts of Hawking radiation in non-gravitational contexts is
"Analogue Gravity" Barcelo, Liberati & Visser. http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0505065
Scan through the references section at the end and you'll get a feel for the wide range of analogous situations that are being studied, form non-linear optics to signal propagation in Bose-Einstein condensates.
If you're new to the subject, you might want to first limber up with the Wikipedia page on acoustic metrics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_metric
This is a guy who attends antiterrorism conferences, and he regards it as "abusive" to even have his hand-luggage looked through before he gets on a plane?
Jeez.
I think that it's important that the people who make laws that impinge on the liberties of the rest of us should have to put up with the same restrictions themselves, so that they understand what it's like. There shouldn't be one set of laws for them and another for us.
And another thing ... I'd love to have seen the security officer's face when this guy explained why he was in the country.
I mean, seriously, I think that a lot of this airport security stuff is stupid and OTT and overly intrusive, but in this particular case it'd probably be negligent if they didn't at least want to check his reaction when they asked to go through his hand-luggage.
If he seriously thought that working for a foreign government meant that he was immune to standard security checks, and reacted badly to the suggestion that they look in his bag, then that's all the more reason to check him. I mean, if there were 500 people in an airport lounge of various colours and religious persuasions, and you could only check one of them for possible terrorist devices or components, then it'd be him, wouldn't it?
And you'd also tend to think, well, if this guy's going to a conference on terrorism, if anyone's going to be understanding about being searched, it should be this guy. And you can't have him addressing a meeting on Homeland security and telling them how he'd just sailed through security without being given the most basic searches, just by making a fuss. No, you'd have to check him. It'd look bad if you didn't.
The second situation is much more dodgy.
It's paying for exclusivity that tips the situation over the edge into possible criminal conspiracy if a major exploit subsequently happens. If your house gets looted because you forgot to lock a door, and your neighbours say afterwards that that they saw your door open but didn't get around to telling you, you might be a little disgruntled about it, but they can say that they were acting in good faith. After all, they aren't responsible for your house, and it's not up to them to tell you how to run your own affairs.
But if you find out that your neighbours had seen your door open, and had then decided to cash in by selling that information to a dodgy local private security firm just before you got burgled, you might have a few questions. If, after the burglary, your neighbours explain that they weren't allowed to tell you, because the security firm had paid them specifically not to tell you about your house's vulnerabilities, then you may get rather upset and conclude that the security firm are probably a bunch of crooks, and that neighbour is a nasty two-faced criminal piece of shit.
If someone decides to be a good neighbour, that's great. If they decide not to be a good neighbour, that's usually their decision. If they decide only to help you out if you pay them, that's also often understandable.
But if people don't help you out because they're specifically being paid not to be neighbourly to you, and not to help you even for money, because a company that wants to sell you a service is paying folk not to do anything that might undermine their exclusivity, so that they can charge higher prices ... then that's something potentially very different.
or use it as a lining for sports shoes! :)
Ditto with newspapers. Murdoch's trick when he took over the (profitable) HK&S Times was apparently to sell the artistic rights to the paper's masthead to a shell company that he owned, located in an offshore tax haven. Then, whatever profits the paper was going to make in a given year mysteriously turned out to correspond almost exactly to the licensing fee that year for the right to use the masthead.
One of the Hollywood studio's latest tricks is supposed to be aggregation. If a hit film is supposed to pay the actors, director, producer or writer a percentage of the profits, what the studio will do is unilaterally decide to bundle that film with a group of big loss-makers, and treat that group as a single accounting entity. At the studio's discretion, the hit film is then deemed not to have gone into profit until it's paid back the studio for all the losses that they made on the other films in the bundle. The really bent thing about this, of course, is that the decision as to which films are going to be "grouped" for accounting reasons can be deferred until the studio has spreadsheeted combinations are going to save them the most in contracted percentage fees.
You mean, the mythological AppleGoo?
The motors wouldn't have to be calibrated, the controller software could compare positions and adjust until the stick-figure's position matched that of the computer model.
Hmm. That could be a really creepy toy. Especially if you had two of them linked over the net. I bend Sticky's arms here, and somewhere in a room half a planet away, Sticky's twin comes aliiive ...
Actually, the cash I was referring to was oil revenue money owed by the US to the Iraqi government. When the accountancy guys were asked what had happened to this Iraqi money, they said that they'd done their job by handing it all over to the Iraqis, and that's where their obligations stopped. Congress took a different line, and said that the US was supposed to have a duty of care during the transitional period in making sure that the money went where it was supposed to (e.g. to pay the wages of Iraqi civil servants and allow government departments to get functioning again). The accountancy guys disagreed and said that their only duty was to make sure that the money was all present and correct when it was handed over to ... someone. This particular dispute wasn't anything to do with civilian contractors. That missing money is another subject. :(
Yeah, maybe. I remember when this story first broke, and a line of politicians were ready to demand action, until some interviewer brought up the subject of that old Vietnam incident where the "intercepted" ship stocked with Russian arms with authentic serial numbers turned out to have been a CIA setup ... people turned a funny colour, and wouldn't give any more quotes, and suddenly none of the politicians wanted to be associated with the "compelling evidence" after all.
The IEDs with their Iranian serial numbered parts may well turn out to be genuine, but once the politicians remembered that the CIA actually had a department for mocking up these sorts of things, they didn't seem to want to be associated with the story any more.
Having said all that, yeah, I'm sure that Iranian forces are covertly operating inside Iraq. It'd be strange if they weren't, considering that everybody else seems to be there. But I don't think many people outside the US take what the White House and the US military and the US tv news say too seriously any more.
I checked your link for this story, and it connects to a slightly odd site called IranFocus. ... the MKO argue that this characterisation isn't fair, and that they aren't terrorists because they only attack military targets.
The PMOI are supposed to have thousands of armed fighters based in Iraq - from Iran's POV, it's Iraq & US that's providing a haven for terrorist training camps, from which recruits hope to attack Iran.
So I googled "IranFocus", and (strangely enough) it turns out that the website is supposed to be one of the media fronts of an organisation called the "People's Mujahedin of Iran" (PMOI/MKO), which has an armed wing, and its own guerrilla training camps, and is dedicated to the overthrow of the current Iranian government. The MKO had links with a few US congressmen (including John Ashcroft) and are currently designated by the US as a terrorist organisation
So-o ... while this doesn't necessarily mean that the "IranFocus" info isn't true, it'd be nice to hear it given editorial credibility by an independent news organisation that isn't actively campaigning for the US to overthrow the Iranian government by force, so that the website's parent organisation can take control of the country.
Sure, the MK
From everywhere - Europe, the US, China, Russia ... anywhere that has arms dealers. At one point the US ordered a couple of hundred thousand Kalashnikovs for Iraq, and the supply chain they used was so convoluted that they lost them. When it comes to funding, they also lost track of a few billion dollars in US currency (shrinkwrapped, on pallettes) that was owed to Iraq as oil revenue. We handed it over to somebody, but what happened after that we don't know. The US also lost rather a large quantity of explosives in Iraq, some of which has probably been used to build IUDs to blow up US soldiers.
Have security service factions in Iran been supplying weapons to groups inside Iraq that are pro-Iran? Of course they have. Iran is looking at how Iraq is going to be after the US pulls out. They're the major country that borders Iraq, that had war declared on them by Iraq not so many years ago, and they're the guys who'll be left with this mess on their borders when the US leaves. Iran wants to make sure that the Iraqi militias friendly to them are at least as well armed as the Iraqi militias unfriendly to them. How strongly those militias also oppose the US forces inside Iraq is of secondary interest.
Is it upsetting that some supplies passing through the Iraq/Iran border are being used by anti-US groups to attack occupying US soldiers? Of course it is. Is it outrageous that these Iranian intelligence factions felt entitled to supply arms to Iran-friendly groups and meddled in internal Iraqi affairs? Well, considering that the US felt that US national security justified not just meddling but a full-scale invasion of Iraq (on more nebulous grounds than Iran's concerns) I think that it's difficult for Americans to take the moral high ground here.
If you're mentioning Afghanistan, the most serious weaponry that the Mujaheddin had was probably the Stinger missiles originally supplied by the US in the hope that they'd be used to shoot down Soviet aircraft.
We helped to create these situations, and to start pointing the finger of blame at everyone else when we get caught in the blowback is just dumb. We need to try to learn these lessons otherwise ten years from now we'll be doing it all again.
For instance: to help us to gain control of Iraq, we've just help set up and massively fund the creation of Blackwater, which is now an international mercenaries-for-hire corporation with no especial loyalty to the US, and which can call on the cream of intelligence and special forces knowhow and technology from the US, Russia, Irael, France, Britain, and just about any other country worth considering.
When Iraq is over, Blackwater will be looking for new business opportunities. They can start a war for anyone who pays, and they have inside knowledge of almost every major military organisation. They know US security, protocols and politics, and if Bin Laden or some far-right US group decides to secretly pay a foreign-based corporate division within Blackwater a few billion to take out a major US city, or to start assassinating US politicians in order to engineer a US state of emergency, how the hell are you going to stop them?
If a White House think tank reckons that they need a terrorist outrage on US soil to grab power indefinitely, and a Blackwater division reckons that if such an outrage happened, they'd suddenly get billions in new US contracts to help police the US population, then you start to have a convergence of motives and opportunities. Sure, Al-Q are a threat, but the relationship between Blackwater and some of the people in Washington arguably poses a more immediate threat to national security and the future of democracy in the US.
Your main worry r
Look at the example given, of school groups who might want to monitor air quality around their schools for the benefit of kids with asthma, where Falkenrath replied that, yes this would be illegal without a permit, and that although they had no interest in regulating people's use of air-quality sensors around schools, this sort of activity had to be included in the legislation, because if you allowed parental group to test air quality without a licence it'd be the thin end of a dangerous wedge.
That's for a group or organisation. If you are an individual parent and your kid has breathing problems, will you only get a permit for an air tester if you can provide documentary evidence that your kid has asthma?
What they are going to do now is try to drive it through again, but this time they'll try to put in clauses to placate the larger and more persuasive pressure groups. If you're an individual, forget it.
On the plus side, it'll mean that if a business is illegally faking their emissions data and polluting the air that you or your kids are breathing, it'll be against the law for you to test the air without a permit and catch them out. Local company illegally burning toxic waste or trucking exposed asbestos through the city? You verified it with an unauthorised air check? Off to prison you go, and your data is inadmissable because it's illegally obtained. It'll be good for certain NY businesses that have historical connections to the waste disposal business and who like contributing to NY politicians election funds (hello Mr. Anthony Soprano).
Send those annoying environmentalists and whistleblowers, with their pesky science and evidence and measuring equipment, off to jail. NYC air quality below official levels? If you're in possession of the equipment to prove it, they'll be able to lock you up for breaching antiterrorist legislation.
In fact, the conspiracy theory about the whole shuttle project was that it was designed all along to launch, service and retrieve KH11s. Hence the shuttle's expensive wings, landing gear, etc. You don't need all that hardware to launch stuff, and you only need a little reentry pod to bring people back. We could have put a simple disposable aluminium tube onto the Shuttle's tank and boosters, along with an engine pod and a personnel pod, and it'd have done pretty much the same job (designs exist). The only way that the shuttle's design makes sense is if it's designed to bring large objects safely back to Earth, and the only things that we can think of that the shuttle can reach that are expensive enough to be worth bringing back are KH11s. Hence the large bay doors, and hence the retrieval arm
Why would you want to retrieve a KH11?
Well, they are damned expensive (estimates vary between 600m and a billion dollars each, depending on inflation), and KH11s have a different mission profile to most satellites, in that they're expected to be able to get real close to specific locations at specific times, so they can't just sit passively in a general-purpose orbit. If you get a tip-off about something funny happening in some Russian shipyard right now, and you want hi-res satellite pics before "whatever it is" moves on, then you need a satellite to be able to manoeuvre into position to be able to sweep down and take those pics, at that location, ASAP. So the last third of a KH11 is supposed to be a hydrazine-based propulsion system.
Snag is, when that propulsion system runs out of gas your KH11 loses its reason for living, so we wanted some way of refuelling or servicing the things in orbit, or perhaps even bringing them back for servicing and relaunch (hell-llo Mr Space Shuttle).
As for any superficial external similarities between Hubble and a KH11, well, the common factor is going to be the dimensions of the Shuttle cargo bay, so yes, it'd be surprising if they didn't have the same basic body dimensions. You want to make best use of the space available.
Brrr. People make horror movies with scenes like this.
On the plus side, it probably keeps the druggies away. They'll be the people you see running out of the store at 2am with their arms above their heads, screaming. On the minus side, kids having nightmares.
The MS marketing people could present the all-new standards-compliant browser as "the new web standard for the new century", and people who had websites written for IE (and only IE) wouldn't be able to bitch that their sites no longer worked with IE, because they would. You'd just have a high-profile button and hotkey combination on the new browser for "Launch in Internet Explorer".
And of course you're right, they almost certainly won't do it, it's much too sensible and forward-thinking ...
If every EU government department was instructed to consider migrating to open standards, and MS couldn't say that they supported open standards, then that'd potentially mean MS government sales for a whole continent being wiped out. The EU wouldn't care that this meant a US company losing zillions of sales. And if EU IT people started spreading the perception that it was "unprofessional" to use MS Office, and that perception filtered down to IT buyers for the universities and schools ...
MS had to be able to say that they could "tick the box" for open standards support under new versions of Office. Support didn't have to be useful or helpful or interoperative with other companies' products in any useful way, but it had to be nominally there.
If you can track it, you can learn stuff about the reentry characteristics of ultra-light probes.
Now, think about the consequences of that for a moment. Most existing reentry vehicles are reentry vihicles designed to return personnel and equipment and data to ground level, but when you explore other planets the data flow goes the other way. There's also a lot of data that doesn't have to be collected from the ground. So, instead of an orbiter chucking two or three big chunky armored landers which attempt to survive crashing into the surface, and then trying to get a rover to crawl out of the lander and chug for miles to get somewhere interesting (without falling down a hole), why not release a cloud of ultralites and have them beam back picture info and data as they they drift earthwards? If you could insert an ultralite robotic aircraft into the atmosphere (of the type they currently use for weather sensing), it wouldn't have to land, and some of these designs might be able to stay aloft for years. Couple that with a microsatellite relay network and you potentially have a good system.
Alternatively you could go down the balloon path ... instead of a conventional balloon carrying a heavy heavy metal box with electronics in ... instead, stick your CCD chips to the balloon, print additional circuitry and perhaps solar cells directly onto the surface, perhaps use the upper and lower surfaces as charge carriers to avoid batteries, or have the lower surface metallised and the upper transparent, and use it as a solar collector.
With a whole bunch of these balloons drifting about in the upper atmosphere, you have an ad-hoc signal relay system. Hell, give em internet protocols. You won't be able to steer them, and you'd always be losing contact with a few, but a mission could carry along hundreds of them. The transponders would only have to be comparatively short-range, maybe you could even beam power from the orbiter. If you want random mapping plus a study of the atmosphere, bung 'em into a low orbit and wait for them to decay.
Perhaps a future Venus mission might well involve an orbiter repeatedly chucking a series of fifty cheap, disposable, "smart" transponder-equipped paper planes into the Venusian atmosphere and relaying that data back to Earth.
The first step is developing and testing materials. The second is using a tracking system to see how well they cope with reentry. The third is embedding smarter electronics.
"What'd you install that crappy voice recognition software on this computer for, Matt? See? Everything I say is coming up on the screen as syllables
(computer voice) "For-Mat-See. Formatting in progress ..."
Wasn't Cloverfield the evil DisneyCorp-esque corporation in "Who Killed Roger Rabbit"?
If you have a PDA, mobile phone or rechargable camera, or some other mobile device, the two big compatibility headaches are power connectors and data connectors. It's not such a problem with "weeny" MP3 players (because they can usually plug directly into a USB port), but with other devices its a pain. If you want to interface with your device at multiple locations, the pocketful of custom connector leads can take up more space than the device itself.
With PDAs and mobile phones, manufacturers often like the idea of a combined connector that allows the device to connect (and perhaps sync) automatically when it's dropped into a cradle, and which can also used as a way of connecting peripherals.
Snag is, different manufacturers use different connectors, and sometimes connectors are incompatible even with a single manufacturer. You're unlikely to get a recent Sony or Siemens phone, or a recent Sony PDA, to work with an older Sony or Siemens cradle or data cable, and the custom connectors and cables can be a real PITA on Sony gadgets. It also makes spare cables and cradles difficult (and expensive) to get hold of.
The obvious solution might seem to be for everyone to standardise on the "mini USB" connectors (this seems to be happening with digital cameras), but this still means that manufacturers can't build future-proof docking stations, because the location and orientation of the USB port will be different on different devices and models. Mini-USB also isn't a good choice for docking stations, since the small size of the connector means that alignment is more difficult, and forcing a slightly misaligned device can result in gouge-marks on the casing, and/or damage to the device terminals. To get around this, PDAs and other "dockable" devices tend to have customised large, wide, shallow docking connectors with large-surface-area terminals, to allow the device to naturally seat itself and make a good connection when it is casually dropped into place. Unfortunately these connections tend to pick up dirt and finger-grease and chocolate crumbs and whatever else you have in your pocket.
So the idea of this wireless interface isn't so much to get rid of the wires, as the range of incompatible docking connectors. Once you have devices that support this system, you have a docking location ... a USB "docking tray" by your keyboard (probably connected to your 'puter by a conventional USB cable), and any device you want to connect to gets dropped onto the tray. No worries about missing interface leads, or dirty connectors due to pocket-gunk, or accidentally damaging the socket on your expensive camera. Lots of people now carry data around on USB keyfobs, with this system you could lose the USB connector, shrink the device and make it any shape, and when people wanted to access it they could just drop their housekeys onto the tray. ... you can imagine a stand-alone Kodak photo printer aimed at the home market having a tray on the top surface to place your mobile phone or camera. It might also sell to offices as a security device, with an employee only being logged in when their device in in the tray. You grab your key from the tray when you go for a coffee and nobody can play with your terminal under your ID when you're gone. Same thing at home ... your kids drop their tokens onto the tray to log in. There's nothing here that you couldn't theoretically do here with wired USB, but to be continually plugging and unplugging connectors is a hassle, and risks damaging the the connectors.
A few specialised devices might have these trays built-in
This still leaves the problem of how you get external power into the device, but techhies are already planning inductive-coil solutions to that, so I imagine the Sony guys are visualising an all-in-one device, a USB tray that could double as a recharging tray ... or you could hav
If they get embarrassed enough over it, they may change back. Keep poking them until they do.
And while we're at it, is there a centralised page that lists offending companies that we can refer to and cite? ...
Try to turn this into an issue for would-be presidential candidates: "What do you think we should do about US companies that send their profits offshore to avoid paying their share?". Hopefully we should be able to poke some of these guys into saying that any such companies should be roasted. Then we can start to compare the list of offending companies against the list of companies contributing to candidates' election funds
Turn it into an election issue. If candidates have to start distancing themselves from businesses that have been publicly named and shamed as "dodgy", and embarrassed into handing back donations, then those companies will have less control in future over how law is made and implemented.
This sort of opportunity only comes around once every four years. Use it.