Wouldn't it be possible to kill key logging if keyboard-to-computer comunication was encrypted via hardward with some form of changing key? Or is this not a good route?
If somebody has the physical access to install a keylogger, they also have enough access to open your keyboard and install a logger somewhere upstream of the encryption process. Barring that, they could place sensors directly on the keys themselves. I've even heard of software that can figure out what keys you're pressing by analyzing the keyboard clicking sounds. In general it's not possible to secure a keyboard without securing its physical surroundings as well.
If the machine is insecure enough to have a keylogger, it's hard to say what other kinds of software may be presesnt on the machine.
We Have The Solution: Announcing the CryptoGoggle 9000. Supported by dozens of popular websites, our technology causes websites to be displayed as a random mash of blended colors. By donning the CryptoGoggle 9000, this incomprehensible mishmash can be magically unscrambled before your very eyes! Take the CryptoGoggle 9000 everywhere you go! Weight 26.4 pounds, shipped weight 34.1 pounds. And as a bonus, you get to look like a special forces secret operative while using it! Only $1,999.99, while supplies last! Order yours today!
The login process an ING would stop keyloggers. Kind of hard to explain, but basically you have to enter a piece of your authentication info using an onscreen keypad. The numbers on the keypad are mapped to keys (the change every time), so you can use a keyboard to enther the info, but the keystrokes would be different everytime.
I have an ING account and I HATE the fact that you are allowed to type the numbers in. It should force you to use mouse clicks. Even better, the entire keypad should be rearranged after EVERY digit entered.
Suppose your pin is 7717. No matter how the letters are chosen, the attacker will be able to tell that the first, second, and fourth digits are the same. That reduces the space of possibilities to a mere 100 instead of 10000. If you click to enter the PIN, the attacker is stuck (well, unless they have some pretty cool AI which can track your mouse movements AND comprehend what's on the screen, but at that point why not just spy on the box using VNC or something?)
Well, if it's a Virtual Private Network, I'd hardly see how it could be unencrypted.
My house is private, but it's not encrypted. My paycheck stubs are private but they're not encrypted either. It's true, I've never heard of an UNencrypted VPN, but I think the "private" is really referring more to the fact that it is a network set up for private use.
Private doesn't mean secret, necessarily. When I'm in the bathroom, I'd really appreciate some privacy, but it's not like nobody knows what I'm doing in there!
Radiowaves are big and they go through just about everything.
They don't go THROUGH anything at all (at least nothing conductive). It would be more accurate to say they go AROUND things, but that's not really correct either. It's really a matter of scattering and interference. And they DO interact with things -- your car's radio antenna is not particularly substantial and yet it picks up radio waves.
In general, a wave will reflect from a conductive surface that is much larger than its wavelength, it will pass by an object much smaller than its wavelength seemingly unchanged, and between these two extremes the behavior is complex and depends on the specific geometries of the situation.
Are you American? Over here, a mute person can write a treatise offensive to the government, get hassled for it by the government, then go to court to have the writing declared "protected speech"?
The actual wording of the First Amendment refers to freedom of speech and of the press. It gives equal footing to spoken and written language but still distinguishes them. You seem unable to comprehend what is actually written in the Constitution.
You are an incredibly narrow-minded and self-absorbed person. You can't see beyond your personal, parochial definitions.
I am expressing my opinion. You apparently like the word "pwned," I do not, therefore you don't like me. I don't really care. You seem to be arguing that if I only believed what you believe, I would not be narrow-minded, self-absorbed, and parochial. So what's that make you?
The context is of knowing just enough to think that you have mastered the subject and of believing that you're capable of speaking with authority on the subject.
It is the capability and right of every person to hold and express an opinion. I never claimed to be any sort of arbiter of language use. I think "pwned" is stupid. I think a lot of people agree with me. I think you're a baby who can't stand a little discord.
I very much agree. At work I use two 19" LCD displays, one of which I use for coding, editor and shell windows, the other display for everything else (browser, VMWare session, email client, etc.) On top of that, KDE lets me flip between 4 virtual desktops, each of which is another two screen's worth of content.
The strongest arguments in the article are that bigger screens let you fit more windows, which makes drag-and-drop easier. This is true, but I think it highlights a weakness of the drag-and-drop data interaction model -- why should the each of use of the interface depend on the dimensions of your display? Ease of use should not depend on real estate on the desktop.
Data objects are not physical, they have no physical "location" in space, and modeling data interaction by dragging icons around, while tremendously useful and elegant in a few isolated cases, is generally a bad way to go, IMHO.
Yes, but not all change is an improvement. You say: "Words like "pwn" appearing in common speech is part of this ongoing process." Common speech? I've never heard anybody, ever, say the word "pwned." It's a dumb, unfunny joke amongst basement dwelling computer geeks. How would you even pronounce it? The word (your word) "speech" means something which is spoken. A typo on a computer screen is not speech.
In fact, that's another example of the language degrading, not improving. When you use words like "speech" to refer to written language you throw away the usefulness of the word -- the means by which it can describe a specific concept. I'm left wondering if you've lost the distinction in your mind as well.
You seem to imply that rejection of the word "pwned" implies that one is against all change in language. I reject "pwned" because it has no utility, the joke it was supposed to be is stupid and not funny, it is unpronouncable, and in general it looks dumb. Give me a new word that is aesthetically pleasing, pronouncable, and helps me say something more elegantly and in fewer words than before, and I'll accept it any day of the week.
Have you considered that possibly the reason that Americans are winning so many prizes is that US funding for the sciences dwarfs that of any other country and that the US university system is the best in the world. Neither of these has changed since 1989.
Throw a billion dollars in a room full of retards and what do you get?
You need a base of smart, curious people to feed into this miraculous educational system. The US culture of glorification of stupidity and ignorance is not producing the sort of potential students we need to take advantage of our base of skilled educators. By all means continue stroking yourself while you sit in awe of our educational system.
The various "injustices" of the prizes awarded for the microwave cosmic background are well known in physics circles. It's old, it's over, it sucks, whatever, get over it.
So all 4 Nobel winners this year so far have been Americans. Brain drain?! Bah!
If you care to READ, you see that the physics research the prize was awarded for was carried out in 1989. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether or not we have a "brain drain" currently.
It is common for prizes to be awarded 20 to 30 years after the research has been conducted. The medical prize was somewhat more recent (1998) but 8 years is still quite a while. Before spouting about how this disproves ongoing "brain drain" try checking a few DATES.
They don't just hand out Nobels for something you did last week.
Upsampling will not put more information in the picture. It just makes it look better.
Sure it puts information in the picture. Anything that isn't just doubling pixels has to, by definition, put some kind of information in the picture. The question is whether that information is "close to" what the REAL information would have been if the video had originally been shot at a higher resolution.
I've played with neural networks that "upsample" an image to double its original resolution, and the results (for a network properly trained on the appropriate types of images) are pretty stunning. It's not a general purpose thing by any means, but it does show how interpolating upsamplers can actually insert information into the image. Does that information come from anywhere "real?" I assert that it does, because images are not entirely random (or even close to it) and extra information can be inferred from relationships in the data (this is why lossy compression works).
Of course, what you really care about isn't the information content, but the subjective quality of the upsampled image. There's no real relationship between "extra bits" and perceived image quality. This is why general case upsampling is a very arcane subject.
There's no "more or less" about it. Mass is conserved. Energy is conserved.
Nope. Mass-energy is conserved. Anywhere you have potential energy, you have mass. Energy and mass warp spacetime precisely the same way, according to the simple relationship E = mc^2. Wherever you have energy E, you have spacetime warping identical to that caused by a mass of E/c^2. The complete equivalence of the two is one of the most core concepts of relativity.
So when you burn a gallon of gas, then cool and weigh the end products (assuming you had an infinitely accurate scale), you'd measure slightly less mass than the original gasoline.
Of course, if you DON'T cool the end products, you'll get the exact same measurement as before, because the heat actually has a mass (twists the mind, doesn't it?)
Actually, you don't lose mass when you burn something. Chemical combustion converts potential chemical energy into heat, but the end products mass as much as the starting ones.
Actually, you always lose relativistic mass when you release potential energy. A gallon of gasoline is more massive than the sum of the masses of its individual atoms (but not by much), due to the electromagnetic potential energy of the chemical bonds. By general relativity, any place in space with a nonzero mass or energy density is warped. Thus, the potential energy (think of it as being contained in the electromagnetic field between the atoms) actually contributes slightly to the effective mass of the system.
The fraction of relativistic mass lost when you burn a gallon of gas is probably so small as to be unmeasurable by any known measurement device, but it's there (at least if GR is correct).
ust as Gates couldn't imagine what anyone would want with more memory than 640KB, we can't imagine what people will do with 80 cores. I'm confident in predicting that they'll find ways to use every bit of that capacity and demand more.
He wasn't asking what 80 cores are good for. He's asking why we need 80 cores on one chip. As opposed to 40 dual-core processors, for example. And it's a good question. I imagine that these 80 cores can communicate extremely fast between their nearest neighbors. This could be amenable to implementing mesh-based parallel algorithms. Maybe toss in a couple hundred K of local RAM for each core, or shared blocks of RAM for every 4 cores, or whatever. Or maybe the core interconnections are arranged in a hypercube... Or imagine a super-hypercube configuration where each node of the hypercube is an 80-core mesh, to develop hybrid mesh/cube algorithms. Cool stuff.
Power requirements for a single, 80 core CPU are probably going to be much less than 40 dual-cores, as well.
The GP seemed to be saying that while you fall, you are in zero gravity, which is not the case.
Not the case in who's reference frame? In the frame of the falling body, it's perfectly physically valid to say that there is no gravity. The perfect equivalence of freefall with zero gravity is at the very core of general relativity itself.
No. When you are free-falling, you are experiencing acceleration due to gravity of 9.81(ish*) m/s^2. What isn't experienced is the upwards force keeping you stationary on the ground. There's a (massive) difference.
Even in space, it is not actually 'weightless', there is still the gravity that holds the celestial bodies in orbit. While the plane may make it more like.01 G instead of.000001 G, it's not as if it's entirely a different thing from being in space (microgravity is the term).
It's not the presence of gravity that matters, it's freefall that matters. When a body is falling freely under only the influence of gravity, it sees no gravitational force (period!) in its own reference frame. Even if the gravitational field is enormous. The plane can simulate this by moving ballistically, and it doesn't even have to do it exactly accurately -- the contents of the plane will "float" around inside, in a perfectly ballistic trajectory. As long as they don't touch the sides of the aircraft, the effect is identical to perfect freefall. It's not 0.01 G, or 0.000001 G, it's 0 G, exactly. (Well, strictly, this ignores the effects of air movement in the cabin of the aircraft, but oh well... You can't simulate everything.)
The only forces to be contended with are tidal gravity, which for an object the size of a human body is so small as to be immeasurable, especially in orbit.
You can figure it out if you're willing to make educated guesses.
Assuming 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour (price in my state), $9 of power is about 145 kilowatt-hours. This energy is delivered in 5 minutes according to the article. 145 KWh / 5 minutes = 1.74 megawatts AVERAGE charging power.
But that's AVERAGE. Because this is a capacitor (albeit an "ultra" one), it charges in an exponential fashion. The peak charging power during the first few seconds of charging is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than 1.74 megawatts. How MUCH higher depends on the impedance of the charging system.
The real value missing here is capacitance. If we knew that, we could work out peak charging currents for given fixed charging voltages, or vice versa. According to Wiki, the "largest capacitance" of an ultra capacitor is 2.6 kilofarads. Using this as a reasonable but arbitrary number, we can set the total energy equal to CV^2 / 2 and figure out the charge voltage: 633 volts.
Okay, so we have a capacitance of 2.6 kilofarads, a charging voltage of 633 volts, and a charging time of 5 minutes. Further, we have to assume some percentage charge on the capacitor -- it never reaches 100% charge because it charges exponentially, so let's say it charges to 99%. We can use that to figure out the impedance of the charging system using the equation for a charging capacitor: 1-exp(-t/RC)=0.99. Let t = 5 minutes, C = 2.6 kilofarads, and we get a charging impedance (value of R) of 0.06 ohms.
Whoo! Now you can compute the peak charging power (at the very beginning of the charge cycle), which is V^2/R = about 6.5 megawatts. That's 10550 amps. And some of that power is lost as heat in the (very large) wires you'll need to do this -- what fraction of the total is lost as heat is left as an exercise for the reader;-) But suffice it to say, that heat loss will be at a MAXIMUM when the wire resistance is equal to half the charging impedance, so it implies that the resistance of the wire has to be a lot less than 0.03 ohms.
Feel free to work through it using your own numbers pulled from your own butt, if you want.
I know I'm replying to this late (I was away for a week). And my God, does Slashdot really have a million users now? Anyway...
The cool thing about PDF is that PDF documents can be cryptographically signed. It would be easy to implement (if not implemented already) a system where JavaScript functionality is only enabled for documents signed by a trusted key. Then, the government (or some other trusted entity) could take advantage of JavaScript in PDF and other untrusted documents could be treated with a higher level of paranoia.
PDF does not contain PostScript. The outward appearance of PDF's high-level data types (like dictionaries), and the PDF graphics language were inspired by PostScript, but it is NOT a stack based language. You can't, for instance, write a PDF which computes Mandelbrot's fractal and displays it (as you could with a PostScript program).
Get the facts straight. Just because a PDF looks "kinda like" a PostScript file in a binary editor doesn't mean it's PostScript.
Yes, but is China overthrowing governments RIGHT NOW? Tibet was what, almost 50 years ago? Now I'm not saying China is perfect by any means, but would you draw the same comparison with the Japanese? Their behavior during WWII (similar amount of time ago) was completely atrocious, yet you didn't pick on them. Why? I wonder if it has to do with your personal biases about the particular styles of government these countries now use.
In contrast, the US invasion of Iraq is a current event, which is still ongoing. Your comparison is bogus.
Slashdot Mirror
So when you debug one thing, something else brakes.
So true... I often see that my code has come to a screeching halt.
Wouldn't it be possible to kill key logging if keyboard-to-computer comunication was encrypted via hardward with some form of changing key? Or is this not a good route?
If somebody has the physical access to install a keylogger, they also have enough access to open your keyboard and install a logger somewhere upstream of the encryption process. Barring that, they could place sensors directly on the keys themselves. I've even heard of software that can figure out what keys you're pressing by analyzing the keyboard clicking sounds. In general it's not possible to secure a keyboard without securing its physical surroundings as well.
If the machine is insecure enough to have a keylogger, it's hard to say what other kinds of software may be presesnt on the machine.
We Have The Solution: Announcing the CryptoGoggle 9000. Supported by dozens of popular websites, our technology causes websites to be displayed as a random mash of blended colors. By donning the CryptoGoggle 9000, this incomprehensible mishmash can be magically unscrambled before your very eyes! Take the CryptoGoggle 9000 everywhere you go! Weight 26.4 pounds, shipped weight 34.1 pounds. And as a bonus, you get to look like a special forces secret operative while using it! Only $1,999.99, while supplies last! Order yours today!The login process an ING would stop keyloggers. Kind of hard to explain, but basically you have to enter a piece of your authentication info using an onscreen keypad. The numbers on the keypad are mapped to keys (the change every time), so you can use a keyboard to enther the info, but the keystrokes would be different everytime.
I have an ING account and I HATE the fact that you are allowed to type the numbers in. It should force you to use mouse clicks. Even better, the entire keypad should be rearranged after EVERY digit entered.
Suppose your pin is 7717. No matter how the letters are chosen, the attacker will be able to tell that the first, second, and fourth digits are the same. That reduces the space of possibilities to a mere 100 instead of 10000. If you click to enter the PIN, the attacker is stuck (well, unless they have some pretty cool AI which can track your mouse movements AND comprehend what's on the screen, but at that point why not just spy on the box using VNC or something?)
Well, if it's a Virtual Private Network, I'd hardly see how it could be unencrypted.
My house is private, but it's not encrypted. My paycheck stubs are private but they're not encrypted either. It's true, I've never heard of an UNencrypted VPN, but I think the "private" is really referring more to the fact that it is a network set up for private use.
Private doesn't mean secret, necessarily. When I'm in the bathroom, I'd really appreciate some privacy, but it's not like nobody knows what I'm doing in there!
Radiowaves are big and they go through just about everything.
They don't go THROUGH anything at all (at least nothing conductive). It would be more accurate to say they go AROUND things, but that's not really correct either. It's really a matter of scattering and interference. And they DO interact with things -- your car's radio antenna is not particularly substantial and yet it picks up radio waves.
In general, a wave will reflect from a conductive surface that is much larger than its wavelength, it will pass by an object much smaller than its wavelength seemingly unchanged, and between these two extremes the behavior is complex and depends on the specific geometries of the situation.
Are you American? Over here, a mute person can write a treatise offensive to the government, get hassled for it by the government, then go to court to have the writing declared "protected speech"?
The actual wording of the First Amendment refers to freedom of speech and of the press. It gives equal footing to spoken and written language but still distinguishes them. You seem unable to comprehend what is actually written in the Constitution.
You are an incredibly narrow-minded and self-absorbed person. You can't see beyond your personal, parochial definitions.
I am expressing my opinion. You apparently like the word "pwned," I do not, therefore you don't like me. I don't really care. You seem to be arguing that if I only believed what you believe, I would not be narrow-minded, self-absorbed, and parochial. So what's that make you?
The context is of knowing just enough to think that you have mastered the subject and of believing that you're capable of speaking with authority on the subject.
It is the capability and right of every person to hold and express an opinion. I never claimed to be any sort of arbiter of language use. I think "pwned" is stupid. I think a lot of people agree with me. I think you're a baby who can't stand a little discord.
I very much agree. At work I use two 19" LCD displays, one of which I use for coding, editor and shell windows, the other display for everything else (browser, VMWare session, email client, etc.) On top of that, KDE lets me flip between 4 virtual desktops, each of which is another two screen's worth of content.
The strongest arguments in the article are that bigger screens let you fit more windows, which makes drag-and-drop easier. This is true, but I think it highlights a weakness of the drag-and-drop data interaction model -- why should the each of use of the interface depend on the dimensions of your display? Ease of use should not depend on real estate on the desktop.
Data objects are not physical, they have no physical "location" in space, and modeling data interaction by dragging icons around, while tremendously useful and elegant in a few isolated cases, is generally a bad way to go, IMHO.
All languages change over time.
Yes, but not all change is an improvement. You say: "Words like "pwn" appearing in common speech is part of this ongoing process." Common speech? I've never heard anybody, ever, say the word "pwned." It's a dumb, unfunny joke amongst basement dwelling computer geeks. How would you even pronounce it? The word (your word) "speech" means something which is spoken. A typo on a computer screen is not speech.
In fact, that's another example of the language degrading, not improving. When you use words like "speech" to refer to written language you throw away the usefulness of the word -- the means by which it can describe a specific concept. I'm left wondering if you've lost the distinction in your mind as well.
You seem to imply that rejection of the word "pwned" implies that one is against all change in language. I reject "pwned" because it has no utility, the joke it was supposed to be is stupid and not funny, it is unpronouncable, and in general it looks dumb. Give me a new word that is aesthetically pleasing, pronouncable, and helps me say something more elegantly and in fewer words than before, and I'll accept it any day of the week.
Using Google: 5.4e20 G's. Whoa.
Have you considered that possibly the reason that Americans are winning so many prizes is that US funding for the sciences dwarfs that of any other country and that the US university system is the best in the world. Neither of these has changed since 1989.
Throw a billion dollars in a room full of retards and what do you get?
You need a base of smart, curious people to feed into this miraculous educational system. The US culture of glorification of stupidity and ignorance is not producing the sort of potential students we need to take advantage of our base of skilled educators. By all means continue stroking yourself while you sit in awe of our educational system.
You can't solidify liquid shit into a gold brick.
The various "injustices" of the prizes awarded for the microwave cosmic background are well known in physics circles. It's old, it's over, it sucks, whatever, get over it.
So all 4 Nobel winners this year so far have been Americans. Brain drain?! Bah!
If you care to READ, you see that the physics research the prize was awarded for was carried out in 1989. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with whether or not we have a "brain drain" currently.
It is common for prizes to be awarded 20 to 30 years after the research has been conducted. The medical prize was somewhat more recent (1998) but 8 years is still quite a while. Before spouting about how this disproves ongoing "brain drain" try checking a few DATES.
They don't just hand out Nobels for something you did last week.
Upsampling will not put more information in the picture. It just makes it look better.
Sure it puts information in the picture. Anything that isn't just doubling pixels has to, by definition, put some kind of information in the picture. The question is whether that information is "close to" what the REAL information would have been if the video had originally been shot at a higher resolution.
I've played with neural networks that "upsample" an image to double its original resolution, and the results (for a network properly trained on the appropriate types of images) are pretty stunning. It's not a general purpose thing by any means, but it does show how interpolating upsamplers can actually insert information into the image. Does that information come from anywhere "real?" I assert that it does, because images are not entirely random (or even close to it) and extra information can be inferred from relationships in the data (this is why lossy compression works).
Of course, what you really care about isn't the information content, but the subjective quality of the upsampled image. There's no real relationship between "extra bits" and perceived image quality. This is why general case upsampling is a very arcane subject.
There's no "more or less" about it. Mass is conserved. Energy is conserved.
Nope. Mass-energy is conserved. Anywhere you have potential energy, you have mass. Energy and mass warp spacetime precisely the same way, according to the simple relationship E = mc^2. Wherever you have energy E, you have spacetime warping identical to that caused by a mass of E/c^2. The complete equivalence of the two is one of the most core concepts of relativity.
So when you burn a gallon of gas, then cool and weigh the end products (assuming you had an infinitely accurate scale), you'd measure slightly less mass than the original gasoline.
Of course, if you DON'T cool the end products, you'll get the exact same measurement as before, because the heat actually has a mass (twists the mind, doesn't it?)
Actually, you don't lose mass when you burn something. Chemical combustion converts potential chemical energy into heat, but the end products mass as much as the starting ones.
Actually, you always lose relativistic mass when you release potential energy. A gallon of gasoline is more massive than the sum of the masses of its individual atoms (but not by much), due to the electromagnetic potential energy of the chemical bonds. By general relativity, any place in space with a nonzero mass or energy density is warped. Thus, the potential energy (think of it as being contained in the electromagnetic field between the atoms) actually contributes slightly to the effective mass of the system.
The fraction of relativistic mass lost when you burn a gallon of gas is probably so small as to be unmeasurable by any known measurement device, but it's there (at least if GR is correct).
ust as Gates couldn't imagine what anyone would want with more memory than 640KB, we can't imagine what people will do with 80 cores. I'm confident in predicting that they'll find ways to use every bit of that capacity and demand more.
He wasn't asking what 80 cores are good for. He's asking why we need 80 cores on one chip. As opposed to 40 dual-core processors, for example. And it's a good question. I imagine that these 80 cores can communicate extremely fast between their nearest neighbors. This could be amenable to implementing mesh-based parallel algorithms. Maybe toss in a couple hundred K of local RAM for each core, or shared blocks of RAM for every 4 cores, or whatever. Or maybe the core interconnections are arranged in a hypercube... Or imagine a super-hypercube configuration where each node of the hypercube is an 80-core mesh, to develop hybrid mesh/cube algorithms. Cool stuff.
Power requirements for a single, 80 core CPU are probably going to be much less than 40 dual-cores, as well.
The GP seemed to be saying that while you fall, you are in zero gravity, which is not the case.
Not the case in who's reference frame? In the frame of the falling body, it's perfectly physically valid to say that there is no gravity. The perfect equivalence of freefall with zero gravity is at the very core of general relativity itself.
No. When you are free-falling, you are experiencing acceleration due to gravity of 9.81(ish*) m/s^2. What isn't experienced is the upwards force keeping you stationary on the ground. There's a (massive) difference.
Wrong. Freefall is identical to zero gravity. Einstein says so.Even in space, it is not actually 'weightless', there is still the gravity that holds the celestial bodies in orbit. While the plane may make it more like .01 G instead of .000001 G, it's not as if it's entirely a different thing from being in space (microgravity is the term).
It's not the presence of gravity that matters, it's freefall that matters. When a body is falling freely under only the influence of gravity, it sees no gravitational force (period!) in its own reference frame. Even if the gravitational field is enormous. The plane can simulate this by moving ballistically, and it doesn't even have to do it exactly accurately -- the contents of the plane will "float" around inside, in a perfectly ballistic trajectory. As long as they don't touch the sides of the aircraft, the effect is identical to perfect freefall. It's not 0.01 G, or 0.000001 G, it's 0 G, exactly. (Well, strictly, this ignores the effects of air movement in the cabin of the aircraft, but oh well... You can't simulate everything.)
The only forces to be contended with are tidal gravity, which for an object the size of a human body is so small as to be immeasurable, especially in orbit.
Nowadays, most kids are barely able to click an icon.
What? One of my friends has a 5 year old, and I've seen her do the following:
Children are only as stupid as their parents make them.
Current and voltage?
You can figure it out if you're willing to make educated guesses.
Assuming 6.2 cents per kilowatt-hour (price in my state), $9 of power is about 145 kilowatt-hours. This energy is delivered in 5 minutes according to the article. 145 KWh / 5 minutes = 1.74 megawatts AVERAGE charging power.
But that's AVERAGE. Because this is a capacitor (albeit an "ultra" one), it charges in an exponential fashion. The peak charging power during the first few seconds of charging is going to be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than 1.74 megawatts. How MUCH higher depends on the impedance of the charging system.
The real value missing here is capacitance. If we knew that, we could work out peak charging currents for given fixed charging voltages, or vice versa. According to Wiki, the "largest capacitance" of an ultra capacitor is 2.6 kilofarads. Using this as a reasonable but arbitrary number, we can set the total energy equal to CV^2 / 2 and figure out the charge voltage: 633 volts.
Okay, so we have a capacitance of 2.6 kilofarads, a charging voltage of 633 volts, and a charging time of 5 minutes. Further, we have to assume some percentage charge on the capacitor -- it never reaches 100% charge because it charges exponentially, so let's say it charges to 99%. We can use that to figure out the impedance of the charging system using the equation for a charging capacitor: 1-exp(-t/RC)=0.99. Let t = 5 minutes, C = 2.6 kilofarads, and we get a charging impedance (value of R) of 0.06 ohms.
Whoo! Now you can compute the peak charging power (at the very beginning of the charge cycle), which is V^2/R = about 6.5 megawatts. That's 10550 amps. And some of that power is lost as heat in the (very large) wires you'll need to do this -- what fraction of the total is lost as heat is left as an exercise for the reader ;-) But suffice it to say, that heat loss will be at a MAXIMUM when the wire resistance is equal to half the charging impedance, so it implies that the resistance of the wire has to be a lot less than 0.03 ohms.
Feel free to work through it using your own numbers pulled from your own butt, if you want.
I know I'm replying to this late (I was away for a week). And my God, does Slashdot really have a million users now? Anyway...
The cool thing about PDF is that PDF documents can be cryptographically signed. It would be easy to implement (if not implemented already) a system where JavaScript functionality is only enabled for documents signed by a trusted key. Then, the government (or some other trusted entity) could take advantage of JavaScript in PDF and other untrusted documents could be treated with a higher level of paranoia.
The building blocks are all there.
PDF does not contain PostScript. The outward appearance of PDF's high-level data types (like dictionaries), and the PDF graphics language were inspired by PostScript, but it is NOT a stack based language. You can't, for instance, write a PDF which computes Mandelbrot's fractal and displays it (as you could with a PostScript program).
Get the facts straight. Just because a PDF looks "kinda like" a PostScript file in a binary editor doesn't mean it's PostScript.
Tibet, anyone?
Yes, but is China overthrowing governments RIGHT NOW? Tibet was what, almost 50 years ago? Now I'm not saying China is perfect by any means, but would you draw the same comparison with the Japanese? Their behavior during WWII (similar amount of time ago) was completely atrocious, yet you didn't pick on them. Why? I wonder if it has to do with your personal biases about the particular styles of government these countries now use.
In contrast, the US invasion of Iraq is a current event, which is still ongoing. Your comparison is bogus.