Seriously! I never did understand the reasoning for the Anti-Trust suit. Apple bundles with Safari. KDE uses Konqueror. GNOME comes with Epiphany. ChromeOS doesn't have a browser, because it literally is a browser. Why is Microsoft the only company not allowed to bundle their own HTML rendering tools?
Net neutrality doesn't return to reply squat, because it doesn't care to protect illegal content. Net neutrality exists to ensure equal transmission for content that may be undesirable, for reasons such as being less profitable, or competing with one of their services.
Again, this has nothing to do with the argument I was making. Ignore BT, and the whole court order to block them. This particular thread was about whether or not what Newzbin does can be considered illegal.
DVRs are fundamentally flawed. With a DVR I have to decide I want to watch something before it runs.
Then you don't grasp the real capability of a DVR, and are stuck back thinking about the glorified VCRs the cable company provides. Find a show you think might be interesting? Record it. Have a certain genre you enjoy? Record all of it. Broadcast season starting back up again and you don't want to read through reviews and make choices? Simply record every new show.
If you find yourself with insufficient tuners to do so, then you bought a cheap DVR. Buy one with more tuners. Buy one that can link in with other units for additional tuners. Buy one with more hard drive space so you can store all this stuff.
Say you have dinner with a friend and they ask you if you watched some show you didn't know exists and them recommends it when they find out you know nothing about it. How does a DVR help you there?
Any of the network shows are going to spend some amount of time on Hulu or their own streaming service. The cable shows all get repeated several times over the course of a year to pick up missed episodes. Premium channels generally come with an on demand service for any of their series. After that, you can always wait for it to get picked up by Netflix or Amazon, or come out on DVD.
Because the very top post that this whole thread is based on was...
So offering XML-files, which are useless on their own, is illegal now, check.
The Newzbin site was ruled illegal, and BT was ordered to block access to it. That post was claiming that there is nothing wrong with just pointing at where you should go to take part in illegal activities. It comes down to an issue of intent, and the operators of Newzbin very clearly intended to facilitate such illegal activities.
Well then you're in the wrong place. This is the discussion forum for the story "BT Ordered To Block Usenet Binaries Index". BT users are still allowed to access Usenet services all they want. They are just now blocked from the Newzbin site that indexes and provides search capability for illegal content shared through the Usenet system.
Where did BT factor into any of this? They're just the service provider, contractually obligated to pass through whatever part of the internet their user requests. No, this discussion started with the claim that Newzbin simply generating XML indexes and serving them to clients is perfectly fine, under the guise that they're not actually providing any illegal content, they're merely pointing to it. Elbart up there was search that Newzbin's search algorithm, specifically designed to sort though Usenet groups for files following a pattern only used by such illegal content, was no different from what any other search provider offered.
If Siri pulls out important key words, and performs a blind context search over a generic database, then they are no different from Google. Let's say an extremely advanced web spider stumbles across from police document that shouldn't have been released, containing a table of suspected dealers, product, location of business, and phone numbers, it may cross reference your chosen poison with your GPS location, and give you directions while offering to call the number. If no one ever programmed it to know certain keywords are bad and such queries should be refused, it would have done so completely innocently.
If instead, someone specifically programmed Siri to index such information and respond appropriately, they could be held liable. However the further detached you get from the offender, the harder it becomes to prove intent and accountability. Consider the alternate, some security researcher publishes proof-of-concept code for a security flaw that is subsequently used to break into some company.
Say you stay in an upscale hotel. You want some drugs, so you hunt down the concierge, pass him a tip, and discretely ask him where to get <insert favorite narcotic slag>. The concierge points you to some dealer working out of a van down by the river, and you get your fix. The concierge hasn't sold any drugs, and let's say hes not getting a kickback from the dealer. According to the law, he has still willfully aided in a felony.
Now you can't earnestly state that use of tags like "CAM", "screener", or "telesync" suggest anything other than an illegal distribution of copyrighted movies (yet the operators of Newzbin did just that, under oath, in court). Searching out and intentionally categorizing those files means you knew exactly what they were for. Writing an application to streamline downloads from Usenet groups using index files, constructing such index files that point to copyrighted content, and telling people they are just there to show what not to download, is being disingenuous. It's like that concierge telling you that if you don't want to find yourself in a drug transaction, don't go to the van down by the river, and don't tell anyone there that he sent you.
newzbin creates a specific index of Usenet binaries, which are mostly used for piracy.
Mostly? When you can get free file hosting for legitimate content in any number of places, does anything besides pirated media, viruses, cracking tools, and the like get passed through Usenet? As another communications medium, it's great. As a file distribution tool, is there any remaining worth to it?
It's not chest high, because neither the transmitter nor receiver has much directionality in the vertical direction. The synthetic aperture only provides beam-forming in the horizontal direction. It scans the whole room, top to bottom, and returns a single data point for that column. It may even go through the floor and ceiling a pick up a slight return from someone on another level.
It was a linear phased array. It literally can't tell up from down. If you wanted to make it sense in 3-D, you would have to make the array 2-D. Stack a couple of these units, throw in a couple more GPUs for processing, re-tweak the algorithm for an additional dimension, they could probably have a 3D model working in a couple weeks.
The issue is that 3D really doesn't get you much. With the current 2D system, you can tell where someone is in a room, but its not like you can see any identifying features. All 3D would get you is a very rough estimate of height.
With a 20cm signal, you can't tell a human from an amorphous blob. The only thing you could get from attitude control is a very rough estimate of height. Besides, if they wanted such a capability, it would be better to just stack four of these, with a commensurate increase in hardware and processing power.
The wall already shines conspicuously in the radar beam. They had to put an analog filter into the receiving equipment to block out the massive return they get from the wall itself so it doesn't overpower their A/D. At most, you would be able to tell "there might be something of interest behind this wall... or maybe its just a sheet of metal...".
Re:hmmmm coming soon to an airport near you...
on
Seeing Through Walls
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· Score: 1
A roentgen is a unit of measurement for ionizing radiation. Since these do not output any, they cannot be described as such.
Re:hmmmm coming soon to an airport near you...
on
Seeing Through Walls
·
· Score: 1
About the same as a heat lamp.
Re:So what if your standing IN FRONT of the wall?
on
Seeing Through Walls
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· Score: 3, Informative
Eh? As you said, it's non-ionizing. The heat is the radiation damage.
Water itself is technically not toxic. The problem is that too much water will dilute concentrations of electrolytes and other chemicals your body needs below safe limits. Endurance athletes often carry salt tablets to replenish these when consuming large amounts of water.
I would think that somebody that has pornographic pictures of children nude or engaged in sexual acts is a reasonable indicator that... at some point, [they] will attempt to bring their own fantasies to life.
Absolutely not. Limiting myself to fantasies I had today at work, I can think of three - running my boss over with a car, having sex with the married hottie, and taking an axe to a certain server - that I would never act upon. I can't bring myself to believe that people who fantasize about children are somehow the only ones who must, without fail, act on their every dark desire.
But that's not the reason why it should be illegal. The problem isn't specifically with looking at child porn, or that by doing so they might be motivated to act on their desires, but that they are maintaining the industry. Someone, somewhere had to produce the images, and that does cause a very real harm to someone. By eliminating the consumers at the bottom, you at least in part eliminate the need for the producers at the top.
It's the same reason for why buying body parts is illegal. You getting the part to save your life isn't a problem. The problem is that it fosters an industry of organic chop shops, kidnapping people and parting them out, in order to have a supply of fresh organs to sell you.
Does this mean we're allowed to tap into NRO spy satellites and military communication satellites? After all, we paid for them. We should be able to use them as a public service!
Launch flexibility is the only thing air-launch systems have going for them. Systems like Pegasus can launch from anywhere in the world, at any time, in nearly any conditions. Their low cost per-launch means a lot of smaller projects can afford to be the primary payload on a launch, and get priority orbit selection, rather than get stuck on whatever orbit inclination someone else wants to use. That said, it is one of the most costly launches per unit mass in existence, and as you stated, balloons lose many of these advantages.
For systems like the Space Shuttle which burn all the way from takeoff to orbit, difference in external pressure is a big problem. That was the entire purpose of the aerospike and VentureStar project in the 80s and 90s. For a traditional staged rocket, it's simply not that big of an issue. Your first stage typically does not last much higher than 30km anyway. There are systems to compensate for this. Supersonic jets use adjustable petals to vary their expansion ratio. You can blow high pressure gas into the nozzle to choke the flow and increase expansion ratio. You can even just have a hydraulic skirt that drops in over top the primary nozzle bell, extending it for higher altitude. The simple fact is these systems cost too much weight and expense to bother messing with.
A mothership or balloon does allow you to get through the bulk of the atmosphere, but just like the nozzles, it's really not that big of a problem. You only have to suffer through that drag for about a minute and a half, and your velocities to that point really aren't that great. An average launch may only hit Mach 2.5-3 by the time it passes 30km. "Max Q", or the point of maximum aerodynamic drag and structural stress, generally hits between 10-15km, at maybe half that speed. In exchange, for bypassing that drag, which may account for a few hundred meters per second at the most, you end up with a launch system that even with our largest aircraft, would not be able to exceed the payload of the low end of medium lift launch systems.
Slashdot Mirror
In space, nobody can hear the whoosh.
Seriously! I never did understand the reasoning for the Anti-Trust suit. Apple bundles with Safari. KDE uses Konqueror. GNOME comes with Epiphany. ChromeOS doesn't have a browser, because it literally is a browser. Why is Microsoft the only company not allowed to bundle their own HTML rendering tools?
Net neutrality doesn't return to reply squat, because it doesn't care to protect illegal content. Net neutrality exists to ensure equal transmission for content that may be undesirable, for reasons such as being less profitable, or competing with one of their services.
Again, this has nothing to do with the argument I was making. Ignore BT, and the whole court order to block them. This particular thread was about whether or not what Newzbin does can be considered illegal.
DVRs are fundamentally flawed. With a DVR I have to decide I want to watch something before it runs.
Then you don't grasp the real capability of a DVR, and are stuck back thinking about the glorified VCRs the cable company provides. Find a show you think might be interesting? Record it. Have a certain genre you enjoy? Record all of it. Broadcast season starting back up again and you don't want to read through reviews and make choices? Simply record every new show.
If you find yourself with insufficient tuners to do so, then you bought a cheap DVR. Buy one with more tuners. Buy one that can link in with other units for additional tuners. Buy one with more hard drive space so you can store all this stuff.
Say you have dinner with a friend and they ask you if you watched some show you didn't know exists and them recommends it when they find out you know nothing about it. How does a DVR help you there?
Any of the network shows are going to spend some amount of time on Hulu or their own streaming service. The cable shows all get repeated several times over the course of a year to pick up missed episodes. Premium channels generally come with an on demand service for any of their series. After that, you can always wait for it to get picked up by Netflix or Amazon, or come out on DVD.
So offering XML-files, which are useless on their own, is illegal now, check.
The Newzbin site was ruled illegal, and BT was ordered to block access to it. That post was claiming that there is nothing wrong with just pointing at where you should go to take part in illegal activities. It comes down to an issue of intent, and the operators of Newzbin very clearly intended to facilitate such illegal activities.
Well then you're in the wrong place. This is the discussion forum for the story "BT Ordered To Block Usenet Binaries Index". BT users are still allowed to access Usenet services all they want. They are just now blocked from the Newzbin site that indexes and provides search capability for illegal content shared through the Usenet system.
Where did BT factor into any of this? They're just the service provider, contractually obligated to pass through whatever part of the internet their user requests. No, this discussion started with the claim that Newzbin simply generating XML indexes and serving them to clients is perfectly fine, under the guise that they're not actually providing any illegal content, they're merely pointing to it. Elbart up there was search that Newzbin's search algorithm, specifically designed to sort though Usenet groups for files following a pattern only used by such illegal content, was no different from what any other search provider offered.
If Siri pulls out important key words, and performs a blind context search over a generic database, then they are no different from Google. Let's say an extremely advanced web spider stumbles across from police document that shouldn't have been released, containing a table of suspected dealers, product, location of business, and phone numbers, it may cross reference your chosen poison with your GPS location, and give you directions while offering to call the number. If no one ever programmed it to know certain keywords are bad and such queries should be refused, it would have done so completely innocently.
If instead, someone specifically programmed Siri to index such information and respond appropriately, they could be held liable. However the further detached you get from the offender, the harder it becomes to prove intent and accountability. Consider the alternate, some security researcher publishes proof-of-concept code for a security flaw that is subsequently used to break into some company.
You're making the assumption that people aren't buying the content for no reason other than they can't afford it.
Say you stay in an upscale hotel. You want some drugs, so you hunt down the concierge, pass him a tip, and discretely ask him where to get <insert favorite narcotic slag>. The concierge points you to some dealer working out of a van down by the river, and you get your fix. The concierge hasn't sold any drugs, and let's say hes not getting a kickback from the dealer. According to the law, he has still willfully aided in a felony.
Now you can't earnestly state that use of tags like "CAM", "screener", or "telesync" suggest anything other than an illegal distribution of copyrighted movies (yet the operators of Newzbin did just that, under oath, in court). Searching out and intentionally categorizing those files means you knew exactly what they were for. Writing an application to streamline downloads from Usenet groups using index files, constructing such index files that point to copyrighted content, and telling people they are just there to show what not to download, is being disingenuous. It's like that concierge telling you that if you don't want to find yourself in a drug transaction, don't go to the van down by the river, and don't tell anyone there that he sent you.
Either the comments get deleted by moderators for being garbage spam, or the forum is abandoned and no one is around to care that it gets shut down.
newzbin creates a specific index of Usenet binaries, which are mostly used for piracy.
Mostly? When you can get free file hosting for legitimate content in any number of places, does anything besides pirated media, viruses, cracking tools, and the like get passed through Usenet? As another communications medium, it's great. As a file distribution tool, is there any remaining worth to it?
It's not chest high, because neither the transmitter nor receiver has much directionality in the vertical direction. The synthetic aperture only provides beam-forming in the horizontal direction. It scans the whole room, top to bottom, and returns a single data point for that column. It may even go through the floor and ceiling a pick up a slight return from someone on another level.
It was a linear phased array. It literally can't tell up from down. If you wanted to make it sense in 3-D, you would have to make the array 2-D. Stack a couple of these units, throw in a couple more GPUs for processing, re-tweak the algorithm for an additional dimension, they could probably have a 3D model working in a couple weeks.
The issue is that 3D really doesn't get you much. With the current 2D system, you can tell where someone is in a room, but its not like you can see any identifying features. All 3D would get you is a very rough estimate of height.
With a 20cm signal, you can't tell a human from an amorphous blob. The only thing you could get from attitude control is a very rough estimate of height. Besides, if they wanted such a capability, it would be better to just stack four of these, with a commensurate increase in hardware and processing power.
The wall already shines conspicuously in the radar beam. They had to put an analog filter into the receiving equipment to block out the massive return they get from the wall itself so it doesn't overpower their A/D. At most, you would be able to tell "there might be something of interest behind this wall... or maybe its just a sheet of metal...".
A roentgen is a unit of measurement for ionizing radiation. Since these do not output any, they cannot be described as such.
About the same as a heat lamp.
Eh? As you said, it's non-ionizing. The heat is the radiation damage.
Brilliant!
Water itself is technically not toxic. The problem is that too much water will dilute concentrations of electrolytes and other chemicals your body needs below safe limits. Endurance athletes often carry salt tablets to replenish these when consuming large amounts of water.
I would think that somebody that has pornographic pictures of children nude or engaged in sexual acts is a reasonable indicator that ... at some point, [they] will attempt to bring their own fantasies to life.
Absolutely not. Limiting myself to fantasies I had today at work, I can think of three - running my boss over with a car, having sex with the married hottie, and taking an axe to a certain server - that I would never act upon. I can't bring myself to believe that people who fantasize about children are somehow the only ones who must, without fail, act on their every dark desire.
But that's not the reason why it should be illegal. The problem isn't specifically with looking at child porn, or that by doing so they might be motivated to act on their desires, but that they are maintaining the industry. Someone, somewhere had to produce the images, and that does cause a very real harm to someone. By eliminating the consumers at the bottom, you at least in part eliminate the need for the producers at the top.
It's the same reason for why buying body parts is illegal. You getting the part to save your life isn't a problem. The problem is that it fosters an industry of organic chop shops, kidnapping people and parting them out, in order to have a supply of fresh organs to sell you.
Does this mean we're allowed to tap into NRO spy satellites and military communication satellites? After all, we paid for them. We should be able to use them as a public service!
Play nice... don't HARM the jammers!
Launch flexibility is the only thing air-launch systems have going for them. Systems like Pegasus can launch from anywhere in the world, at any time, in nearly any conditions. Their low cost per-launch means a lot of smaller projects can afford to be the primary payload on a launch, and get priority orbit selection, rather than get stuck on whatever orbit inclination someone else wants to use. That said, it is one of the most costly launches per unit mass in existence, and as you stated, balloons lose many of these advantages.
For systems like the Space Shuttle which burn all the way from takeoff to orbit, difference in external pressure is a big problem. That was the entire purpose of the aerospike and VentureStar project in the 80s and 90s. For a traditional staged rocket, it's simply not that big of an issue. Your first stage typically does not last much higher than 30km anyway. There are systems to compensate for this. Supersonic jets use adjustable petals to vary their expansion ratio. You can blow high pressure gas into the nozzle to choke the flow and increase expansion ratio. You can even just have a hydraulic skirt that drops in over top the primary nozzle bell, extending it for higher altitude. The simple fact is these systems cost too much weight and expense to bother messing with.
A mothership or balloon does allow you to get through the bulk of the atmosphere, but just like the nozzles, it's really not that big of a problem. You only have to suffer through that drag for about a minute and a half, and your velocities to that point really aren't that great. An average launch may only hit Mach 2.5-3 by the time it passes 30km. "Max Q", or the point of maximum aerodynamic drag and structural stress, generally hits between 10-15km, at maybe half that speed. In exchange, for bypassing that drag, which may account for a few hundred meters per second at the most, you end up with a launch system that even with our largest aircraft, would not be able to exceed the payload of the low end of medium lift launch systems.