They also went to the moon but it seems when they are somewhere they do nothing, a long time passes and then they have to start everything from scratch if they want to return there.
The headline should state that, according to XPrize website, this is the first manned supersonic flight onboard a plane designed by a small private company. That is really impressive and is a great achievement just 100 years after the Wright brothers first flight. Nice birthday present !
100 years ago manned flight was a hot technology, today everybody can jump on a plane (as long as you have the money but its cheaper and cheaper). Today supersonic flight is a hot technology for the masses so it will maybe become commonplace in the years to come...
The biggest point is not the altitude here because 68000 feet is quite 'easy' to reach (although its really impressive too) and going from 68000 to 330000 feet is gonna be way way way more difficult. But everything needs a beginning and that's a very nice one.
Congratulations to the Scaled Composite team for this astonishing result... This plane is a very cool piece of engineering.
This X-Prize is definitely becoming more and more interesting, I have to admit that I never though it was possible for a team to go so far !
I'm sure there is. Actually I'm almost sure there is life on almost every planet/moon of the solar system.
Look at what we found on earth: life in deep oceans, in caves filled with toxic gases and even in Antarctica ice !
Life simply grow everywhere, you can't do anything against that. One of the lunar missions discovered life on a moon probe that was sent 2 or 3 years before and some complex organisms do resist to nuclear explosions.
But first we have to understand that there is no reason life should always be the same than on earth. I believe that some organism don't need water or oxygen. It's just different, but alive.
For me the real question is not 'will we find life?' but rather 'when will we find it?' and 'will we find complex organisms?'.
We are looking at earth like planets outside of the solar system, which is surely really exciting, but anyway I believe we won't be able to reach these planets within the next century. Beside that there's so much to do in our own solar system !
Interesting ideas except that the headline should title 'Reinventing EMail CLIENT'.
I was looking for ideas against SPAM and nothing there, just a new way to organize your messages and Inbox folder. Some ideas are really good though, like the threads.
But for me the email as we know it is slowly dying because of SPAM and lack of authentication features.
I am still waiting for a brand new EMail system and I know that's a huge debate. But if we don't do anything we will slowly die under thousand of spam messages... Too bad.
I still strongly think that we should maybe just 'shut up' instead of sending signals all over the place and trying to contact another planet.
One of these days a civilization will catch one, spot us and they will destroy us just because we could later hurt them if we continue to develop and spread.
Damn we are sending signals since the 30s and even if they are weak, they must be quite far now.
I'm fine with listening but I wouldn't send high power messages like we are doing.
Remember about that guy that used to send his spam in deep space ? It was covered by/.. The aliens will be pissed off if they get a couple million 'grow your penis' messages.
Hu ? I though that lasers were invisible because they are made of photons that all goes in the same direction...
That's why you can use powder or smoke (which is composed of tiny piece of material) to actually see them (by reflection of the photons on the particle).
If it's a real laser can someone tell me why we should see it ?
I know that the atmosphere is polluted, but not THAT much, is it ?
I don't have a bootable CD drive on hand, no Wi fi, no bootable NIC, I don't see how you would boot via Internet??? and the server I have won't boot on a USB drive(where the hell did you see that every computer can boot on a USB drive ? My computer is only one year old and it can't do that).
Instead I have a nice floppy drive in the server. The server had a disk problem : I booted on the floppy. No other solutions I can see without buying a new device.
You see ? You are all saying "No you don't need floppies." But I'm sorry, many people still use them because they have no other choice. And it happens frequently to me, last time was 3 weeks ago.
It's been ten year that I hear this statement continuously. Last time I broke the MBR on a server without a CD drive, I had no other choice than to boot on a floppy.
Then how come they are still being made, bought, and can pay for themselves in 3 years?
Because it's less expensive to pay for a solar cell panel directly plugged into your home than to pay for oil or coal generated energy distributed through the power grid.
Solar cells are not efficient, we all know that. We know that it takes more energy to build them than they will ever produce in their lifetime.
But hey, this can be improved and to improve it researchers need funds. For researchers to get funds they have to make people understand that it's possible and that beautiful things could be achieved with solar cells. That's one of the purposes of this project.
Anyway, I still prefer that guy building an expensive plane in terms of energy than millions of people riding inefficient SUV in towns.
it's no longer necessary to even think about writing low-level code (except as a technical exercise, or to express your inner geek:-)
Obviously, the guy that submitted this story doesn't know about handheld devices and embedded software. We are still writing A LOT of low-level code on this little planet. And it seems we will still need it for a couple decades.
Frameworks are certainly excellent for high level programming (my end of studies memoir is about them) but they are still way too slow, too bug-gy and too bulky for our little devices... And the thing is that we gonna have more and more little devices in the near future.
Also, your framework works on top of what ? Yes, low-level code...
Maybe I'll be a little 'off-topic' but I would like to add some reflexion to this article.
E-Voting and its problems are a clear example of what is happening: we are giving to our computers and networks more and more 'power' over our own lives. This wouldn't be a problem if security was some exact science.
We still have big problems with computer security and while we didn't fix them yet (anyway can we really fix them ?) the overall 'value' of the data that goes through our networks is fast increasing.
This, I think, will be even worse in the near future because the software, systems and networks we use will be more and more complex and it will be harder and harder to maintain a good level of security on them.
You could argue that the problems exposed in the article are not related to security. I would say 'not yet'.
But something really interesting is said: "These machines leave no 'paper trail,' that is, no voter-verifiable record allowing a retrospective audit of the votes recorded as cast for each candidate or ballot proposition.".
Everything in these system is 'virtual'. It makes it easier to loose, to replicate (to steal) or to alter information. I'm quite afraid about that.
Maybe the E-Voting system is not connected to Internet, which increase security of course, but maybe one day it will...
when I try to select text the system thinks I want to go back or forward in history. Inconvenient.
Of course I understand this is just an example of what you can expect but I really think it would be of a better use in an image editor or something like that.
Never tried the feature in Opera or others... I definitively have to see how they did implement that. An excellent idea for sure.
You're not flaming, you're making rational discussion. It would be uncouth of me to flame you back just because we disagree:)
;)
Largely, but thermal radiation plays a bigger part in heating than in cooling as I understand it (and my understanding is far from perfect).
I have to agree because I don't have a real understanding in thermal radiation. But I would also point out that you are not cooling everywhere in the US. I mean Alaska and Montana don't need A/C, do they ?
I've heard something recently on french TV, a guy saying that France is 20 years late in A/C equipment. The disaster we had this summer confirms this. Hopefully this will change in the future but our government helps people who wants to make their housing more insolated financially (tax cuts, etc). Do you have something like that here ?
If you look at it per capita it becomes much more interesting (and looking at it as a raw number is useless... per capita doesn't show the whole picture either though).
Yes I should have done that, my example was irrevelant and per capita is much better. I just did mentally the maths because I know we are 60 millions in France and you are between 280 and 300 millions in USA.
Making stuff takes power.
Agree. So let's say that Americans do use more 'stuff' than needed, is it accurate ? I'm talking about marketing and 'disposable' stuff.
Nifty site BTW. It's broken in some areas (look at Natural Gas consumption stats -- billions of cubic feet is not bigger than trllion [sic] cubic feet), but much easier to use for comparison purposes than the CIA World Factbook.
Yes I like it even if there are some bugs. I don't really trust any data from CIA.
Looking at natural gas consumption, for instance, is deceptive since the US uses it for both heating and electrical generation.
Yes, of course, in France 80% of electrical power comes from nuclear. Oil is so expensive in France that is not a competitive power source. But many Europeans regret that USA didn't accept the Kyoto treaty and that americans are wasting gas on inefficient SUVs.
Ok, I admit, it's maybe jealousy because since I lived in Florida I have to admit that it's actually 'cool' to have a big SUV. Am I American-alized ?
And while there are sporadic power outages all the time, there's really not much you can do against tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters/occurances that cause the power outage.
Redundancy is the key. We had a very bad thunderstorm back in 1999 in France. Thanks to the redundancy of our lines only a few people had an outage lasting more than 1 hour. And believe me it was a very bad thunderstorm. Tens of millions of trees fell at that occasion.
Also the overall 'quality' is better. We have virtually no micro-outage (that really kill computers). I lived in 3 different places here in Florida and I'm not kidding there are plenty of them here. Maybe you are just used to, but I'm certainly not. I think I'm gonna have to buy a power back up.
And the power companies are unwilling to reduce short term profits in order to solve the long term issues.
Yup the point of my post in fact, I'm not sure that monopoly private companies are the best choice for energy management.
Slashdot Mirror
They also went to the moon but it seems when they are somewhere they do nothing, a long time passes and then they have to start everything from scratch if they want to return there.
Appolo ? What a big money-wasting show-off.
The headline should state that, according to XPrize website, this is the first manned supersonic flight onboard a plane designed by a small private company. That is really impressive and is a great achievement just 100 years after the Wright brothers first flight. Nice birthday present !
100 years ago manned flight was a hot technology, today everybody can jump on a plane (as long as you have the money but its cheaper and cheaper). Today supersonic flight is a hot technology for the masses so it will maybe become commonplace in the years to come...
The biggest point is not the altitude here because 68000 feet is quite 'easy' to reach (although its really impressive too) and going from 68000 to 330000 feet is gonna be way way way more difficult. But everything needs a beginning and that's a very nice one.
Congratulations to the Scaled Composite team for this astonishing result... This plane is a very cool piece of engineering.
This X-Prize is definitely becoming more and more interesting, I have to admit that I never though it was possible for a team to go so far !
I'm sure there is. Actually I'm almost sure there is life on almost every planet/moon of the solar system.
Look at what we found on earth: life in deep oceans, in caves filled with toxic gases and even in Antarctica ice !
Life simply grow everywhere, you can't do anything against that. One of the lunar missions discovered life on a moon probe that was sent 2 or 3 years before and some complex organisms do resist to nuclear explosions.
But first we have to understand that there is no reason life should always be the same than on earth. I believe that some organism don't need water or oxygen. It's just different, but alive.
For me the real question is not 'will we find life?' but rather 'when will we find it?' and 'will we find complex organisms?'.
We are looking at earth like planets outside of the solar system, which is surely really exciting, but anyway I believe we won't be able to reach these planets within the next century. Beside that there's so much to do in our own solar system !
"it's just not posible to protect something from millions of hackers..."
!=
"We're talking about DRM"
it's just not posible to protect something from millions of hackers...
Excuse me, it's very possible.
Try to encrypt simething with PGP.
Unless you give your key, I don't know any hacker that would be able to decrypt the data.
Interesting ideas except that the headline should title 'Reinventing EMail CLIENT'.
I was looking for ideas against SPAM and nothing there, just a new way to organize your messages and Inbox folder. Some ideas are really good though, like the threads.
But for me the email as we know it is slowly dying because of SPAM and lack of authentication features.
I am still waiting for a brand new EMail system and I know that's a huge debate. But if we don't do anything we will slowly die under thousand of spam messages... Too bad.
I found it:
Spam in space
I still strongly think that we should maybe just 'shut up' instead of sending signals all over the place and trying to contact another planet.
/.. The aliens will be pissed off if they get a couple million 'grow your penis' messages.
One of these days a civilization will catch one, spot us and they will destroy us just because we could later hurt them if we continue to develop and spread.
Damn we are sending signals since the 30s and even if they are weak, they must be quite far now.
I'm fine with listening but I wouldn't send high power messages like we are doing.
Remember about that guy that used to send his spam in deep space ? It was covered by
They do.
here.
Click on each of the signals.
Thank you for this clear post.
I do have my logical answer now.
Hu ? I though that lasers were invisible because they are made of photons that all goes in the same direction...
That's why you can use powder or smoke (which is composed of tiny piece of material) to actually see them (by reflection of the photons on the particle).
If it's a real laser can someone tell me why we should see it ?
I know that the atmosphere is polluted, but not THAT much, is it ?
Sorry but it still FAR MORE usual to find a machine with a floppy and without a CD drive.
I don't have a bootable CD drive on hand, no Wi fi, no bootable NIC, I don't see how you would boot via Internet??? and the server I have won't boot on a USB drive(where the hell did you see that every computer can boot on a USB drive ? My computer is only one year old and it can't do that).
Instead I have a nice floppy drive in the server. The server had a disk problem : I booted on the floppy. No other solutions I can see without buying a new device.
You see ? You are all saying "No you don't need floppies." But I'm sorry, many people still use them because they have no other choice. And it happens frequently to me, last time was 3 weeks ago.
We are far from the day when the majority of computers will allow Flash USB booting... Mine doesn't allow it, it's only one year old.
... we won't need floppy disks anymore.
It's been ten year that I hear this statement continuously. Last time I broke the MBR on a server without a CD drive, I had no other choice than to boot on a floppy.
Give me a break.
Ask the CIA why they trained Osama and ask them why they let him alone face to angry Russians after they found they didn't need him anymore.
Then you'll go back to Bush and you'll ask him why he lied to the world pretending Irak was full of WMDs.
All Bush can see in Irak is oil. Plenty of it. Nothing else.
Because it's less expensive to pay for a solar cell panel directly plugged into your home than to pay for oil or coal generated energy distributed through the power grid.
Solar cells are not efficient, we all know that. We know that it takes more energy to build them than they will ever produce in their lifetime.
But hey, this can be improved and to improve it researchers need funds. For researchers to get funds they have to make people understand that it's possible and that beautiful things could be achieved with solar cells. That's one of the purposes of this project.
Anyway, I still prefer that guy building an expensive plane in terms of energy than millions of people riding inefficient SUV in towns.
it's no longer necessary to even think about writing low-level code (except as a technical exercise, or to express your inner geek :-)
Obviously, the guy that submitted this story doesn't know about handheld devices and embedded software. We are still writing A LOT of low-level code on this little planet. And it seems we will still need it for a couple decades.
Frameworks are certainly excellent for high level programming (my end of studies memoir is about them) but they are still way too slow, too bug-gy and too bulky for our little devices... And the thing is that we gonna have more and more little devices in the near future.
Also, your framework works on top of what ? Yes, low-level code...
Secrecy is part of the meaning of security.
As I learnt in school:
security = availability + integrity + secrecy
This system could prevent this to happen again.
As I remember in Florida some problems were due to vote cards that were 'incorrectly' filled.
An electronic system would solve this problem.
Maybe I'll be a little 'off-topic' but I would like to add some reflexion to this article.
E-Voting and its problems are a clear example of what is happening: we are giving to our computers and networks more and more 'power' over our own lives. This wouldn't be a problem if security was some exact science.
We still have big problems with computer security and while we didn't fix them yet (anyway can we really fix them ?) the overall 'value' of the data that goes through our networks is fast increasing.
This, I think, will be even worse in the near future because the software, systems and networks we use will be more and more complex and it will be harder and harder to maintain a good level of security on them.
You could argue that the problems exposed in the article are not related to security. I would say 'not yet'.
But something really interesting is said: "These machines leave no 'paper trail,' that is, no voter-verifiable record allowing a retrospective audit of the votes recorded as cast for each candidate or ballot proposition.".
Everything in these system is 'virtual'. It makes it easier to loose, to replicate (to steal) or to alter information. I'm quite afraid about that.
Maybe the E-Voting system is not connected to Internet, which increase security of course, but maybe one day it will...
when I try to select text the system thinks I want to go back or forward in history. Inconvenient.
Of course I understand this is just an example of what you can expect but I really think it would be of a better use in an image editor or something like that.
Never tried the feature in Opera or others... I definitively have to see how they did implement that. An excellent idea for sure.
I have to agree because I don't have a real understanding in thermal radiation. But I would also point out that you are not cooling everywhere in the US. I mean Alaska and Montana don't need A/C, do they ?
I've heard something recently on french TV, a guy saying that France is 20 years late in A/C equipment. The disaster we had this summer confirms this. Hopefully this will change in the future but our government helps people who wants to make their housing more insolated financially (tax cuts, etc). Do you have something like that here ?
Yes I should have done that, my example was irrevelant and per capita is much better. I just did mentally the maths because I know we are 60 millions in France and you are between 280 and 300 millions in USA.
Agree. So let's say that Americans do use more 'stuff' than needed, is it accurate ? I'm talking about marketing and 'disposable' stuff.
Yes I like it even if there are some bugs. I don't really trust any data from CIA.
Yes, of course, in France 80% of electrical power comes from nuclear. Oil is so expensive in France that is not a competitive power source. But many Europeans regret that USA didn't accept the Kyoto treaty and that americans are wasting gas on inefficient SUVs.
Ok, I admit, it's maybe jealousy because since I lived in Florida I have to admit that it's actually 'cool' to have a big SUV. Am I American-alized ?
Redundancy is the key. We had a very bad thunderstorm back in 1999 in France. Thanks to the redundancy of our lines only a few people had an outage lasting more than 1 hour. And believe me it was a very bad thunderstorm. Tens of millions of trees fell at that occasion.
Also the overall 'quality' is better. We have virtually no micro-outage (that really kill computers). I lived in 3 different places here in Florida and I'm not kidding there are plenty of them here. Maybe you are just used to, but I'm certainly not. I think I'm gonna have to buy a power back up.
Yup the point of my post in fact, I'm not sure that monopoly private companies are the best choice for energy management.
Thanks for your answer.
That's another problem but I think you are right.