I agree with the other reply to this post--Greenpeace is worse than nothing. Their raving lunacy makes the oil industry look like the sensible ones. There are ways to promote environmental issues in a calm, reasonable manner, but this has been made nearly impossible, because you'll just get lumped in with Greenpeace.
As for "it's of course easy to sit on your ass and comment on/. about how stupid Greenpeace is", you don't know me or the projects I've researched and undertaken along these lines.
In the mind of the industry, DRM (or whatever they want to call it) allows them to sell a rented version that won't work after a certain amount of time or number of uses. In this sense, this gives the consumer the choice to either buy or rent.
Naturally, this ignores the fact that if you knock most of the cost of manufacturing and distribution off the price, you should be able to sell it cheep enough that a rental market is unnecessary. The industry would rather pretend that theses costs are still there so they can sell movies for the same price as DVDs are now, and thus pad their margins. This is exactly what happened in the switchover from CDs to tapes (CDs are significantly cheaper to produce once retooling costs are covered, but still cost more than tapes).
The study breaks energy usage down by cost. It reports, for instance, that the dust-to-dust per-mile cost of the Prius is $3.25, while the H3 is $2.00. Therefore, switching the load to heavy industry energy usage has not been a win.
Two different cars with the same weight, gearing, speed, and road conditions need to put out exactly the same power. If the gas engine puts out 37 kW (~50 hp) to maintain 30mph, the electric motors on the hybrid need to put out 37 kW, too. Cruising for an hour means both cars have put out 37 kWh.
To get that 50 hp for an hour, the hybrid's engine needs to generate 37 kWh (since the electric motors can't use more energy than the engine put out), which could be done by running the engine at 50hp for an hour (which would be no better than the gas car), run it at 100hp for 30 minutes, or 200hp for 15 minutes (assuming 100% efficient batteries). The advantage comes in those higher hp numbers. You can tune the gas engine for a specific high-range RPM and only run it less than that while its starting to rev up. The cam profile can be set for that point, and turbo lag is mostly irrelevant. You never have the engine idling, and you don't need efficiency-losing mechanisms like the flywheel/clutch/transmission system.
'
So what happens if you put this "intelligent" system in a hybrid? Not much, really, because the "intelligence" is built-in. If the gas car is coasting under "intelligence", then so is the hybrid's engine, since it's probably running on stored energy. The hybrid can still theoretically come out ahead with regenerative braking.
Lastly, when considering the complete energy usage of a car from manufacturing to disposal, hybrids are often worse than SUVs. The mechanisms for this "intelligence" system are likely cheaper to manufacture than complex hybrid systems, so it's a big win there.
There's a famous account of bacteria surviving on an unmanned probe on the moon. They didn't have to survive reentry, of course, but it demonstrates that bacteria can be surprisingly resilient. On Earth, bacteria can be found thriving in the harshest conditions where the most minuscule traces of liquid water can be found. If the rockets do manage to find a planet with liquid water, I wouldn't bet against the bacteria.
But it's extremely unlikely they'll find one. More likely, they'll go into stable orbit around some object, fall into a star, fall into a gas giant, or float in deep space until the universe dies.
However, some of the code remains 'encumbered'; that is, Sun doesn't have sufficient rights to release it under GPLv2, and the company is requesting the open-source community's help in resolving these issues.
Mozilla had the same issue when Netscape first released it. It's probably the single biggest reason why Mozilla development was held up for years. That may not happen here, but I find it worrisome.
I'm going to give them a benefit of a doubt and consider that there may be good technical reasons I don't know about that explains why a standards body can't slap something together in a few weeks that says "block sizes are now 4096 bytes instead of 512". There must be. Otherwise, I think we have a new benchmark for bureaucratic inefficiency.
Why are you quoting it? WinFS was dropped from Longhorn development a long time ago. Which is unfortunate, as I found it one of the potentially more interesting bits of the system (for reasons besides user search).
The '07 MINI Cooper'S has a 4 cylinder 1.6 liter direct-injected twin-turbocharged engine - and since most fuel in the US now contains 10% ethanol, I'd say the "experimental" technology these guys are pushing is already out there in at least one production car
As the article notes, direct injection has been around for a while (since the '50s). Turbochargers are older than that. The idea here uses direct injection in a novel way.
. . . just about all modern cars have an anti-knock sensor that can richen the mixture if it detects signs of knocking - but with high octane gasoline - it only very rarely has to actually do that - so the "problem" of knocking isn't really there.
The problem isn't stopping current engines from knocking. The problem is to increase compression ratios or boost of an engine without introducing knocking. Increasing the amount of gas in the mixture only makes your fuel efficiency worse.
The key to this new idea is that the ethanol is injected separately from the regular gas (specifically, during the compression phase). Naturally, you'll need a separate tank of ethanol, which the article claims would need to be replenished about as often as a oil change.
As we know from thermodynamics, matter going through a phase change from liquid to vapor will suck away a lot energy. Ethanol has the nice quality that it will go through a phase change at a lower temperature compared to water.
Thermodynamics also tells us that as pressure increases, so does temperature. In a normal engine, the piston will compress the fuel/air mixture, thus increasing the temperature of the mixture. If the temperature gets too high, the mixture will ignite on its own. This is more likely if your engine has too high of a compression ratio or you're using some kind of boost system (turbo or superchargers). This is why cars with turbos often have intercoolers.
What they're doing here is increasing the compression ratio and/or adding a turbo. You can choose to slap on an intercooler if you wish. As the piston goes through the compression stroke, the fuel/air mixture gets hotter as before, but then some ethanol is injected, which vaporizes, thus cooling the mixture. The mixture is then ignited by a spark plug normally. Brilliant.
Want to bet? Technology doesn't guarantee victory on the battlefield, sorry.
In a straight-up war, American military dominance has more than proven itself in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and both Iraq wars. Friendly fire is a bigger danger to American troops than the actual enemy. It's not just technology, but also the know-how to use that technology effectively in a regular war.
As shown in Vietnam and the current Iraq situation, America has great difficulty in fighting a loosely-organized resistance. All the high-tech toys given to troops on the ground often don't work and often don't have a real use, anyway. Eventually, the reports of what works and what doesn't will work its way up the DoD bureaucracy and something useful might come out. For now, the insurgents have an edge because they can quickly adapt makeshift technology (like using the timer on a cell phone for bombs).
Me thinks they could crash our economy if they have half a mind too.
They'd crash their own economy at the same time if they tried it.
The GP is correct. Excepting a few ICBMs, China currently lacks the ability to project power outside its boarders. That may change over the next 10 years, but that's how it is right now. America, OTOH, is the undisputed king of power projection.
The new player experience isn't really what I was getting at, though it is an important point, too. Rather, I'm saying that new players (and by "new" I mean "haven't experianced more than a few aspects of the game") often don't understand that their playstyle affects others. A nerf to one ship is a boost to another. Enhancing mission payouts could cause inflation to the game economy. Adding bigger ships that are only accessible to large alliances (motherships/titans) leave smaller groups behind.
I may well generate a flamewar here for saying it, but a significant chunk of the Caldari playerbase doesn't understand their own major weapon system, missiles, and often make bad suggestions because of it.
Because of all this, bad suggestions are constantly generated, with complaining from the originator when it doesn't happen. This tends to make more intelligent members of the community either leave the main forums or the game as a whole.
As a community grows, it tends to attract more diverse viewpoints, not all of which are healthy for things such as game design. This can be seen on the Eve-O forums after nearly every dev blog about an upcoming change, the recent nano blog being a prime example. Almost immediately, you get a hundred posts of someone suggesting a completely contrary solution, and threaten to leave the game if their demands aren't made.
Over time, this tends to draw away some of the smarter members of the community to other boards, such as Scrapheap Challenge.
Given that no company in its right mind would ask to have fewer customers, how do you handle being able to keep new subscribers coming in while also keeping existing ones happy?
Burning hydrogen creates water vaper, which doesn't sound that bad, and it might not be depending on where you get it. H2O is a greenhouse gas that's much worse than CO2, but it's not a problem if you're "hydrogen-neutral", e.g. taking hydrogen that was already present a part of the water cycle. For instance, taking water from a lake, extracting the hydrogen, and running that through a fuel cell wouldn't be a problem. Taking hydrogen that was buried in arctic ice is a different matter.
The DS took a while before it showed its full potential. The PSP took the initial lead, but the DS has pulled far ahead now. IMHO, the breakthrough game was "Kirby: Canvas Curse", which showed off the real potential for the touchscreen, followed by Nintendogs.
I suspect the Wii will go the same way. It already has quite a few games that show its potential. There are also a fair number of games that were hyped, but were rushed out the door to meet a Christmas release and had a poor control scheme (like Red Steel). As more games start piling up, the Wii should get a solid position in this round of console wars.
Remember, too, you aren't necessarily defending against just the Doom9 people (regardless of their actual intelligence level), but against many other potentially smarter opponents with resources far beyond what a typical home user would have.
What makes you claim this?
My example of the engineering student. Colleges often have equipment laying around that students are free to use during off-hours. Not just scanning electron microscopes, but other advanced equipment that wouldn't be available on the consumer market, some of which may even be prototypes built by professors and their research assistants.
In practice, this means that your hardware implementation guidelines can't assume an attacker will just have off-the-shelf electronic analysis equipment, like logic probes and oscilloscopes. You'll have to be at least partially resistant to equipment that you may not know exists. That's a tough problem to design against.
Further, it only takes one slip-up in one software or hardware implementation to break everything.
I don't see how that would be the case. Please elaborate on what kind of slip-up would "break everything".
As examples, a software player which doesn't obfuscate the key locations (which is what happened here), or a hardware player where the title keys are easily sniffed while passing through the traces.
DeCSS was built because of a poor implementation of one software player (Xing), which broke the entire system. IMHO, AACS is sophisticated enough that we probably won't see such a fundamental breakdown, but that sophistication also means there are more places to attack. In practice, this may have the same effect as breaking it completely.
I'll admit I haven't looked into the AACS specs enough to see how exactly the processing key works, but I seriously doubt this would be true. AACS is well-designed, and very much built around the possiblity that keys will be broken in mind. Even if changing it would break playback, I was under the impression that only software players use the processing key, and they are already equipped to be able to quickly update keys (as their keys are supposed to be revoked every six months even if they are not compromised), so updating them for this (if it is actually necessary) is trivial.
Looking over the AACS Introduction and Common Cryptographic Elements (PDF link), section 3.2.4, the processing key is important for the generation of the media key, which would need to work with either software or hardware players.
Revoking AACS keys isn't a technical problem, but a public relations problem.
Look, if you want me to be convinced, give specific examples. I've given some possibilities above and reason why they're impractical and unlikely to stop an attacker. Remember, too, you aren't necessarily defending against just the Doom9 people (regardless of their actual intelligence level), but against many other potentially smarter opponents with resources far beyond what a typical home user would have. Further, it only takes one slip-up in one software or hardware implementation to break everything.
Truth is, any attempt to use a new processing key would invalidate all existing players, and would likely cause a public relations backlash that would kill the new formats in their infancy. For all practical purposes, AACS is broken.
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I agree with the other reply to this post--Greenpeace is worse than nothing. Their raving lunacy makes the oil industry look like the sensible ones. There are ways to promote environmental issues in a calm, reasonable manner, but this has been made nearly impossible, because you'll just get lumped in with Greenpeace.
As for "it's of course easy to sit on your ass and comment on /. about how stupid Greenpeace is", you don't know me or the projects I've researched and undertaken along these lines.
Great idea. Hold up Dell and HP for what they plan to do, while villifying Apple for already doing those things years ago.
The environment is an incredibly important issue that doesn't deserve the nitwits at Greenpeace.
You need to setup IPv6 on your machine and send the bits to the special server at 09:F9:11:02:9D:74:E3:5B:D8:41:56:C5:63:56:88:C0, duh.
In the mind of the industry, DRM (or whatever they want to call it) allows them to sell a rented version that won't work after a certain amount of time or number of uses. In this sense, this gives the consumer the choice to either buy or rent.
Naturally, this ignores the fact that if you knock most of the cost of manufacturing and distribution off the price, you should be able to sell it cheep enough that a rental market is unnecessary. The industry would rather pretend that theses costs are still there so they can sell movies for the same price as DVDs are now, and thus pad their margins. This is exactly what happened in the switchover from CDs to tapes (CDs are significantly cheaper to produce once retooling costs are covered, but still cost more than tapes).
The study breaks energy usage down by cost. It reports, for instance, that the dust-to-dust per-mile cost of the Prius is $3.25, while the H3 is $2.00. Therefore, switching the load to heavy industry energy usage has not been a win.
I will refer you to a study on this subject, which shows hybrids getting significantly worse dust-to-dust energy ratings than a Hummer H3.
Don't forget recycling costs, too. Traditional cars are mostly metal, and easily scrapped, while the batteries in a hybrid are a much tougher problem.
Two different cars with the same weight, gearing, speed, and road conditions need to put out exactly the same power. If the gas engine puts out 37 kW (~50 hp) to maintain 30mph, the electric motors on the hybrid need to put out 37 kW, too. Cruising for an hour means both cars have put out 37 kWh.
To get that 50 hp for an hour, the hybrid's engine needs to generate 37 kWh (since the electric motors can't use more energy than the engine put out), which could be done by running the engine at 50hp for an hour (which would be no better than the gas car), run it at 100hp for 30 minutes, or 200hp for 15 minutes (assuming 100% efficient batteries). The advantage comes in those higher hp numbers. You can tune the gas engine for a specific high-range RPM and only run it less than that while its starting to rev up. The cam profile can be set for that point, and turbo lag is mostly irrelevant. You never have the engine idling, and you don't need efficiency-losing mechanisms like the flywheel/clutch/transmission system.
'So what happens if you put this "intelligent" system in a hybrid? Not much, really, because the "intelligence" is built-in. If the gas car is coasting under "intelligence", then so is the hybrid's engine, since it's probably running on stored energy. The hybrid can still theoretically come out ahead with regenerative braking.
Lastly, when considering the complete energy usage of a car from manufacturing to disposal, hybrids are often worse than SUVs. The mechanisms for this "intelligence" system are likely cheaper to manufacture than complex hybrid systems, so it's a big win there.
There's a famous account of bacteria surviving on an unmanned probe on the moon. They didn't have to survive reentry, of course, but it demonstrates that bacteria can be surprisingly resilient. On Earth, bacteria can be found thriving in the harshest conditions where the most minuscule traces of liquid water can be found. If the rockets do manage to find a planet with liquid water, I wouldn't bet against the bacteria.
But it's extremely unlikely they'll find one. More likely, they'll go into stable orbit around some object, fall into a star, fall into a gas giant, or float in deep space until the universe dies.
However, some of the code remains 'encumbered'; that is, Sun doesn't have sufficient rights to release it under GPLv2, and the company is requesting the open-source community's help in resolving these issues.
Mozilla had the same issue when Netscape first released it. It's probably the single biggest reason why Mozilla development was held up for years. That may not happen here, but I find it worrisome.
I'm going to give them a benefit of a doubt and consider that there may be good technical reasons I don't know about that explains why a standards body can't slap something together in a few weeks that says "block sizes are now 4096 bytes instead of 512". There must be. Otherwise, I think we have a new benchmark for bureaucratic inefficiency.
It should be easy enough to prove me wrong.
You're right, it should be easy, but most people can't, because they didn't take enough math to learn that it can teach them to think logically.
Why are you quoting it? WinFS was dropped from Longhorn development a long time ago. Which is unfortunate, as I found it one of the potentially more interesting bits of the system (for reasons besides user search).
Great, another industry being propped up by government revenue. Because that worked so well for the telecommunications industry.
Read my other reply. No car on the market, even if it's labled "turbocharged" and "direct injected", has anything like what these guys are doing.
The '07 MINI Cooper'S has a 4 cylinder 1.6 liter direct-injected twin-turbocharged engine - and since most fuel in the US now contains 10% ethanol, I'd say the "experimental" technology these guys are pushing is already out there in at least one production car
As the article notes, direct injection has been around for a while (since the '50s). Turbochargers are older than that. The idea here uses direct injection in a novel way.
. . . just about all modern cars have an anti-knock sensor that can richen the mixture if it detects signs of knocking - but with high octane gasoline - it only very rarely has to actually do that - so the "problem" of knocking isn't really there.
The problem isn't stopping current engines from knocking. The problem is to increase compression ratios or boost of an engine without introducing knocking. Increasing the amount of gas in the mixture only makes your fuel efficiency worse.
The key to this new idea is that the ethanol is injected separately from the regular gas (specifically, during the compression phase). Naturally, you'll need a separate tank of ethanol, which the article claims would need to be replenished about as often as a oil change.
As we know from thermodynamics, matter going through a phase change from liquid to vapor will suck away a lot energy. Ethanol has the nice quality that it will go through a phase change at a lower temperature compared to water.
Thermodynamics also tells us that as pressure increases, so does temperature. In a normal engine, the piston will compress the fuel/air mixture, thus increasing the temperature of the mixture. If the temperature gets too high, the mixture will ignite on its own. This is more likely if your engine has too high of a compression ratio or you're using some kind of boost system (turbo or superchargers). This is why cars with turbos often have intercoolers.
What they're doing here is increasing the compression ratio and/or adding a turbo. You can choose to slap on an intercooler if you wish. As the piston goes through the compression stroke, the fuel/air mixture gets hotter as before, but then some ethanol is injected, which vaporizes, thus cooling the mixture. The mixture is then ignited by a spark plug normally. Brilliant.
Want to bet? Technology doesn't guarantee victory on the battlefield, sorry.
In a straight-up war, American military dominance has more than proven itself in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and both Iraq wars. Friendly fire is a bigger danger to American troops than the actual enemy. It's not just technology, but also the know-how to use that technology effectively in a regular war.
As shown in Vietnam and the current Iraq situation, America has great difficulty in fighting a loosely-organized resistance. All the high-tech toys given to troops on the ground often don't work and often don't have a real use, anyway. Eventually, the reports of what works and what doesn't will work its way up the DoD bureaucracy and something useful might come out. For now, the insurgents have an edge because they can quickly adapt makeshift technology (like using the timer on a cell phone for bombs).
Me thinks they could crash our economy if they have half a mind too.
They'd crash their own economy at the same time if they tried it.
The GP is correct. Excepting a few ICBMs, China currently lacks the ability to project power outside its boarders. That may change over the next 10 years, but that's how it is right now. America, OTOH, is the undisputed king of power projection.
The new player experience isn't really what I was getting at, though it is an important point, too. Rather, I'm saying that new players (and by "new" I mean "haven't experianced more than a few aspects of the game") often don't understand that their playstyle affects others. A nerf to one ship is a boost to another. Enhancing mission payouts could cause inflation to the game economy. Adding bigger ships that are only accessible to large alliances (motherships/titans) leave smaller groups behind.
I may well generate a flamewar here for saying it, but a significant chunk of the Caldari playerbase doesn't understand their own major weapon system, missiles, and often make bad suggestions because of it.
Because of all this, bad suggestions are constantly generated, with complaining from the originator when it doesn't happen. This tends to make more intelligent members of the community either leave the main forums or the game as a whole.
As a community grows, it tends to attract more diverse viewpoints, not all of which are healthy for things such as game design. This can be seen on the Eve-O forums after nearly every dev blog about an upcoming change, the recent nano blog being a prime example. Almost immediately, you get a hundred posts of someone suggesting a completely contrary solution, and threaten to leave the game if their demands aren't made.
Over time, this tends to draw away some of the smarter members of the community to other boards, such as Scrapheap Challenge.
Given that no company in its right mind would ask to have fewer customers, how do you handle being able to keep new subscribers coming in while also keeping existing ones happy?
Burning hydrogen creates water vaper, which doesn't sound that bad, and it might not be depending on where you get it. H2O is a greenhouse gas that's much worse than CO2, but it's not a problem if you're "hydrogen-neutral", e.g. taking hydrogen that was already present a part of the water cycle. For instance, taking water from a lake, extracting the hydrogen, and running that through a fuel cell wouldn't be a problem. Taking hydrogen that was buried in arctic ice is a different matter.
Both moon and mars programs have high potential for mining metals, including some that are very useful but rare in the Earth's crust (like platinum).
I personally think manned moon and mars missions would be interesting without such a direct practical benefit, but if you want one, there you go.
The DS took a while before it showed its full potential. The PSP took the initial lead, but the DS has pulled far ahead now. IMHO, the breakthrough game was "Kirby: Canvas Curse", which showed off the real potential for the touchscreen, followed by Nintendogs.
I suspect the Wii will go the same way. It already has quite a few games that show its potential. There are also a fair number of games that were hyped, but were rushed out the door to meet a Christmas release and had a poor control scheme (like Red Steel). As more games start piling up, the Wii should get a solid position in this round of console wars.
That's great. A fantastic new cancer treatment, and the "BREAKING NEWS" on MSNBC is about Anna Nicole Smith.
Remember, too, you aren't necessarily defending against just the Doom9 people (regardless of their actual intelligence level), but against many other potentially smarter opponents with resources far beyond what a typical home user would have.
What makes you claim this?
My example of the engineering student. Colleges often have equipment laying around that students are free to use during off-hours. Not just scanning electron microscopes, but other advanced equipment that wouldn't be available on the consumer market, some of which may even be prototypes built by professors and their research assistants.
In practice, this means that your hardware implementation guidelines can't assume an attacker will just have off-the-shelf electronic analysis equipment, like logic probes and oscilloscopes. You'll have to be at least partially resistant to equipment that you may not know exists. That's a tough problem to design against.
Further, it only takes one slip-up in one software or hardware implementation to break everything.
I don't see how that would be the case. Please elaborate on what kind of slip-up would "break everything".
As examples, a software player which doesn't obfuscate the key locations (which is what happened here), or a hardware player where the title keys are easily sniffed while passing through the traces.
DeCSS was built because of a poor implementation of one software player (Xing), which broke the entire system. IMHO, AACS is sophisticated enough that we probably won't see such a fundamental breakdown, but that sophistication also means there are more places to attack. In practice, this may have the same effect as breaking it completely.
I'll admit I haven't looked into the AACS specs enough to see how exactly the processing key works, but I seriously doubt this would be true. AACS is well-designed, and very much built around the possiblity that keys will be broken in mind. Even if changing it would break playback, I was under the impression that only software players use the processing key, and they are already equipped to be able to quickly update keys (as their keys are supposed to be revoked every six months even if they are not compromised), so updating them for this (if it is actually necessary) is trivial.
Looking over the AACS Introduction and Common Cryptographic Elements (PDF link), section 3.2.4, the processing key is important for the generation of the media key, which would need to work with either software or hardware players.
Revoking AACS keys isn't a technical problem, but a public relations problem.
Look, if you want me to be convinced, give specific examples. I've given some possibilities above and reason why they're impractical and unlikely to stop an attacker. Remember, too, you aren't necessarily defending against just the Doom9 people (regardless of their actual intelligence level), but against many other potentially smarter opponents with resources far beyond what a typical home user would have. Further, it only takes one slip-up in one software or hardware implementation to break everything.
Truth is, any attempt to use a new processing key would invalidate all existing players, and would likely cause a public relations backlash that would kill the new formats in their infancy. For all practical purposes, AACS is broken.