"4. Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers."
But it's horribly broken, and there are any number of browser extensions that one can load which allow you to extract the raw video and save it.
That's not what is actually going on. Flash supports encryption through RTMPe. Only Hulu and a couple other sites actually use this to protect content. If you remember a year or so ago, there was a big stink over rtmpdump which was able to access and decrypt this streamed content. It was formerly used by Boxee to access Hulu content directly, before they lost their semi-official access and started embedding a flash player in the program.
The majority of websites that support flash video are just doing direct file downloads. If you open up the page source, you can often see a direct link to the content which you can download yourself. At most, they provide some obfuscated form of the link that gets decoded by activescript in their player. All these browser extensions you are referring to do is decode that link on their own, and present it to the user.
Also keep in mind that during an emergency (earthquake, hurricane, terror attack) when you really need up-to-date information, the radio will likely still work while the cell-phone system will be overloaded or reserved for emergency workers.
Be serious. If that's what they were going for, CB transceivers would be far more useful than FM radio.
I don't see how these would be any different than their existing aerial photography. All of the high resolution stuff they have is from planes with cameras at a few thousand feet. I'm guessing they want to integrate this into their existing street view runs. As the van drives around, they launch one or more of these up to refresh their overhead images. After 45 minutes or so, they run low on battery, and fly back to the van for replacement and download. You make the route planning automated, the drivers spend a couple minutes every hour doing maintenance, and now everything Google uses is owned by them rather than licensed from some 3rd party.
The reason these lawsuits exist is because there is no penalty for filing such frivolous lawsuits. The defendant is almost assured a win if it goes to court, however doing so will cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs. It's cheaper for them to settle out of court for some tens to hundreds of thousands. Companies don't think long term enough to stand up against and squash that industry outright. If instead you make the plaintiff culpable for something if they lose, it won't be worth the risk to file such suits.
Of course the counter-argument can be made in the event of a valid suit. If the plaintiff lost because the defendant was able to spend more on a legal team, the plaintiff will just end up getting screwed twice. There is a very fine line trying to curtail this sort of behavior, without making things even worse.
I seem to recall that was one they confirmed. The crash only occurred because of a combination of the two. The flammable paint is what allowed the fire to easily spread to other gas bags. Had they used helium gas, or a non-flammable paint, the airship would have been able to make a safe, controlled landing.
It's pretty pathetic that despite 50 years of space experience, we still have to worry about mere grams of fuel. I suspect humans will never develop the ability to travel further than our own solar system - it would be too expensive (in terms of fuel).
Travel in space is simple. Ion drives and other forms of electric propulsion have the potential for incredible velocities. Gravitation sling-shotting gives you plenty more velocity for free. The problem is that first 9km/s needed for low earth orbit. You have atmospheric drag to contend with, so you need to get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible.
Consider one of the space shuttle SRBs for example. At full throttle, each is pumping out some 5400kg/s at 2450m/s. That's roughly 16GW, or several times the power output of a large power plant. The only means we have of generating that kind of power is chemical or nuclear, and the general public doesn't much like nuclear powered rockets.
1000 years from now we'll be in pathetic shape, with all our oil, uranium, and other resources drained dry, and just barely surviving.
I'm not sure where you pulled that value from. We've got enough uranium to power us for a hundred thousand years, and enough thorium to run several times beyond that.
There are no astronauts, there are no robots, there is nothing extra being launched into orbit to intercept existing satellites. This is a small, couple kilogram, briefcase sized package that will be attached to new satellites at launch, so at the end of their life, the balloon will be deployed, and the satellite will de-orbit in a matter of weeks.
They should have designed these satellites to be self-killing - i.e. Burn a rocket, deorbit, and burn rather than just throw stuff all over the place & forget about it.
Satellites generally are designed to be self killing. All satellites have some sort of moderate delta-v rocket meant for station keeping and orbital maintenance. A significant amount of the fuel for this rocket is held in reserve, in order to de-orbit the satellite at the end of its life. Geosynchronous and other high orbit satellites cannot afford to re-enter, so instead they rise up to a 'graveyard' orbit, in order to keep the useful orbits clean. The purpose of this balloon is to replace the reserve fuel for low earth satellites. It is significantly lighter than the required fuel, so it will allow a higher payload fraction for the satellite.
Right from your link, the original Honda Insight got high 40s to low 50s using normal driving habits. Pre-charging your batteries, drafting excessively close, over-inflating your tires, swapping your tires for spares, disengaging the transmission and costing for extended periods - none of these or other methods used by 'hypermilers' count when you're measuring fuel economy.
Solar pressure at Earth's orbital distance is around 4.6 Pa for absorption, or double for reflection. While the force will certainly build up over time, you're not going to be using it for direct attitude control. You would use momentum wheels or CMGs, and then use solar pressure to bleed off energy and prevent saturation.
They're not buying the $100 2TB bargain special, they're buying the $300 300GB 15K SAS drive. They don't care how much storage they have, they just want the IOPS.
What about things like gamepads versus steering wheels in racing games. Surely the 1080 on a wheel gives a huge competitive advantage to the inch or so of traverse on a mini-analog. Should those be dis-allowed on games that support time trials and head-to-head racing? What about online flight sims and people using full size joysticks or HOTAS setups?
You can toss a couple gas turbine generators in the hanger bay, and hook them up to the fuel lines. 100MW of generation capacity per shipping container.
The problem wasn't one storage, but one of transmission. If you search far enough, there is always somewhere available that can accept the power. If you reach out far enough, there will always be peak load plants you can throttle down. The issue was that the transmission lines from that region were never designed to accept the 2GW of capacity the wind farms were outputting. They couldn't get the power to where it could be used.
At the highway exit I use to go to work, there are frequently people who exit northbound, drive under the overpass, and get right back on southbound. There are a LOT of vehicles doing this. Far more than the occasional person who missed their exit could account for. The only thing I've ever been able to come up with is that it's a result of some funky SatNav routing. An exit three miles south, there is no simple way to continue west. It must have decided that was the best way to minimize distance traveled on surface streets.
Aerobreaking and aerocapture have been used on several occasions as a mechanism for altering or entering orbit using a reduced amount of fuel. The version you are referring to is specifically called a 'skip renetry' and has been used on a handful of Russian orbital missions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_reentry
If such cooling systems were prone to failure, we would have airliners regularly falling out of the sky. Jet engines use this same exact technique to protect their combustors and turbines. Were the film to fail, you would have maybe 30 seconds before that whole section of the engine completely melted away.
The nitrogen gas is not used as a heatsink, it is used to produce a protective film against the surface of the reentry craft. The film prevents the high temperature plasma from touching the craft, and is much more effective at keeping the craft cool then simply using it as a mechanism to dump the heat overboard.
Slashdot Mirror
"4. Flash's content protection/DRM appeals to content producers."
But it's horribly broken, and there are any number of browser extensions that one can load which allow you to extract the raw video and save it.
That's not what is actually going on. Flash supports encryption through RTMPe. Only Hulu and a couple other sites actually use this to protect content. If you remember a year or so ago, there was a big stink over rtmpdump which was able to access and decrypt this streamed content. It was formerly used by Boxee to access Hulu content directly, before they lost their semi-official access and started embedding a flash player in the program.
The majority of websites that support flash video are just doing direct file downloads. If you open up the page source, you can often see a direct link to the content which you can download yourself. At most, they provide some obfuscated form of the link that gets decoded by activescript in their player. All these browser extensions you are referring to do is decode that link on their own, and present it to the user.
Also keep in mind that during an emergency (earthquake, hurricane, terror attack) when you really need up-to-date information, the radio will likely still work while the cell-phone system will be overloaded or reserved for emergency workers.
Be serious. If that's what they were going for, CB transceivers would be far more useful than FM radio.
It would be more interesting to turn off the school's WiFi, not tell anyone, and see if the symptoms go away.
They still have overdue college loans from 1968.
I don't see how these would be any different than their existing aerial photography. All of the high resolution stuff they have is from planes with cameras at a few thousand feet. I'm guessing they want to integrate this into their existing street view runs. As the van drives around, they launch one or more of these up to refresh their overhead images. After 45 minutes or so, they run low on battery, and fly back to the van for replacement and download. You make the route planning automated, the drivers spend a couple minutes every hour doing maintenance, and now everything Google uses is owned by them rather than licensed from some 3rd party.
Yes, but you can still hunt them down and beat them up in the parking lot when they make jokes.
The reason these lawsuits exist is because there is no penalty for filing such frivolous lawsuits. The defendant is almost assured a win if it goes to court, however doing so will cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in court costs. It's cheaper for them to settle out of court for some tens to hundreds of thousands. Companies don't think long term enough to stand up against and squash that industry outright. If instead you make the plaintiff culpable for something if they lose, it won't be worth the risk to file such suits.
Of course the counter-argument can be made in the event of a valid suit. If the plaintiff lost because the defendant was able to spend more on a legal team, the plaintiff will just end up getting screwed twice. There is a very fine line trying to curtail this sort of behavior, without making things even worse.
I seem to recall that was one they confirmed. The crash only occurred because of a combination of the two. The flammable paint is what allowed the fire to easily spread to other gas bags. Had they used helium gas, or a non-flammable paint, the airship would have been able to make a safe, controlled landing.
Gasoline burns hotter than hydrogen, but thanks to the Hindenburg crash video, we don't have hydrogen cars either.
Actually, no. Storing hydrogen at the 10ksi needed to make it volumetrically competitive with modern battery technology makes it very dangerous.
I'm planning on floating in circles over the lake at a few hundred feet.
That would make for some awesome fishing.
It's pretty pathetic that despite 50 years of space experience, we still have to worry about mere grams of fuel. I suspect humans will never develop the ability to travel further than our own solar system - it would be too expensive (in terms of fuel).
Travel in space is simple. Ion drives and other forms of electric propulsion have the potential for incredible velocities. Gravitation sling-shotting gives you plenty more velocity for free. The problem is that first 9km/s needed for low earth orbit. You have atmospheric drag to contend with, so you need to get out of the atmosphere as soon as possible.
Consider one of the space shuttle SRBs for example. At full throttle, each is pumping out some 5400kg/s at 2450m/s. That's roughly 16GW, or several times the power output of a large power plant. The only means we have of generating that kind of power is chemical or nuclear, and the general public doesn't much like nuclear powered rockets.
1000 years from now we'll be in pathetic shape, with all our oil, uranium, and other resources drained dry, and just barely surviving.
I'm not sure where you pulled that value from. We've got enough uranium to power us for a hundred thousand years, and enough thorium to run several times beyond that.
No. They're talking about attaching it to new satellites as a cheaper de-orbit solution than carrying sufficient reserve fuel.
There are no astronauts, there are no robots, there is nothing extra being launched into orbit to intercept existing satellites. This is a small, couple kilogram, briefcase sized package that will be attached to new satellites at launch, so at the end of their life, the balloon will be deployed, and the satellite will de-orbit in a matter of weeks.
They should have designed these satellites to be self-killing - i.e. Burn a rocket, deorbit, and burn rather than just throw stuff all over the place & forget about it.
Satellites generally are designed to be self killing. All satellites have some sort of moderate delta-v rocket meant for station keeping and orbital maintenance. A significant amount of the fuel for this rocket is held in reserve, in order to de-orbit the satellite at the end of its life. Geosynchronous and other high orbit satellites cannot afford to re-enter, so instead they rise up to a 'graveyard' orbit, in order to keep the useful orbits clean. The purpose of this balloon is to replace the reserve fuel for low earth satellites. It is significantly lighter than the required fuel, so it will allow a higher payload fraction for the satellite.
Right from your link, the original Honda Insight got high 40s to low 50s using normal driving habits. Pre-charging your batteries, drafting excessively close, over-inflating your tires, swapping your tires for spares, disengaging the transmission and costing for extended periods - none of these or other methods used by 'hypermilers' count when you're measuring fuel economy.
What car do you have that gets 80 miles per gallon? The most efficient production vehicles I've seen get low 50s.
Solar pressure at Earth's orbital distance is around 4.6 Pa for absorption, or double for reflection. While the force will certainly build up over time, you're not going to be using it for direct attitude control. You would use momentum wheels or CMGs, and then use solar pressure to bleed off energy and prevent saturation.
They're not buying the $100 2TB bargain special, they're buying the $300 300GB 15K SAS drive. They don't care how much storage they have, they just want the IOPS.
What about things like gamepads versus steering wheels in racing games. Surely the 1080 on a wheel gives a huge competitive advantage to the inch or so of traverse on a mini-analog. Should those be dis-allowed on games that support time trials and head-to-head racing? What about online flight sims and people using full size joysticks or HOTAS setups?
You can toss a couple gas turbine generators in the hanger bay, and hook them up to the fuel lines. 100MW of generation capacity per shipping container.
The problem wasn't one storage, but one of transmission. If you search far enough, there is always somewhere available that can accept the power. If you reach out far enough, there will always be peak load plants you can throttle down. The issue was that the transmission lines from that region were never designed to accept the 2GW of capacity the wind farms were outputting. They couldn't get the power to where it could be used.
Actually, batteries are very efficient, they're just very expensive and with limited storage capacity.
At the highway exit I use to go to work, there are frequently people who exit northbound, drive under the overpass, and get right back on southbound. There are a LOT of vehicles doing this. Far more than the occasional person who missed their exit could account for. The only thing I've ever been able to come up with is that it's a result of some funky SatNav routing. An exit three miles south, there is no simple way to continue west. It must have decided that was the best way to minimize distance traveled on surface streets.
Aerobreaking and aerocapture have been used on several occasions as a mechanism for altering or entering orbit using a reduced amount of fuel. The version you are referring to is specifically called a 'skip renetry' and has been used on a handful of Russian orbital missions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_reentry
If such cooling systems were prone to failure, we would have airliners regularly falling out of the sky. Jet engines use this same exact technique to protect their combustors and turbines. Were the film to fail, you would have maybe 30 seconds before that whole section of the engine completely melted away.
The nitrogen gas is not used as a heatsink, it is used to produce a protective film against the surface of the reentry craft. The film prevents the high temperature plasma from touching the craft, and is much more effective at keeping the craft cool then simply using it as a mechanism to dump the heat overboard.