... was a Timex Sinclair 1000. It had 16k of RAM and loaded programs on audio cassettes! You had to be pretty consistent with the volume or you'd "lose" programs. I programmed Monopoly into it, complete with color-pixel graphics, all in BASIC!
One thing that piques my interest is cost. 800 liters/day is a significant amount of water, but what's the cost per gallon when amortized over 20 years? This isn't a small windmill, the main chamber is the size of a small house!
Remember that deserts are defined by precipitation, not humidity. Deserts next to coastal areas lacking sufficient mountains to extract the humidity (such as Abu Dabi, referenced in TFA) are prime candidates.
This wouldn't work nearly as well in, say, Phoenix Arizona which is not only a desert, but is also arid and dry in every sense of the word.
Except that there's no evidence at all that this significantly lowers their "bandwidth bill". Most of their "bandwidth costs" are in the last mile, building and maintaining the cable / fiber that runs to each home, an overhead cost that likely dwarves peering point costs.
As one of those very small numbers of private pilots out there, this has occurred to me many times. Flying a plane is not like driving a car. They aren't even slightly related.
If you have a problem in a car, you slow down or stop. Anybody can do this. But if you have a problem in your plane, and you slow down or stop, you stall and immediately go into free-fall. Generally, you can recover from a stall quite easily, but if done near the ground, you die.
I'm convinced we'd have to get rid of the verbal radio system now in use for ATC in order to scale flying up much at all. Fly over any really busy airspace like LAX and you have frequencies so jammed with traffic that it's 100% talking, no meaningful silence at all. How could you even imagine 10x the traffic, let alone the 100x or so it would take to make flying a commodity?
In my humble opinion, the only way to make private flying a commodity is through extensive use of computer technology. Some type of swarm-based algorithm over radio based on proximity. With a combination of self-announce technology coupled with radar-backed verification, such a system could be highly reliable.
2a. Consequently, it would auto-rotate so the barrel always points away from you, 2b. making it worthless for work in any trench where the soldier is laying down.
I grew up having to go to church. And every week, I would wait so impatiently for the 20 minutes or so at the end of service when all of us kids would get the run of the main hall and run around in circles and burn off all the energy we'd saved up sitting still!
We had a perpetual paper airplane contest, because every week there were program sheets passed out that nobody cared about after the service. So I spent years competing for the best flying airplane, at least among other children under 12 or so.
The very best design I ever concocted was a "square plane" design, something like this one, except that instead of folding it down the middle, I bent it up about 1" along either side, making it into a low, squared off "U" shape when viewed from the front. Experiment with different sizes of roll, different lengths of roll until you get it right. (I didn't get much result making the fins down either side much smaller or bigger, 1" is about perfect) I usually got best results with the plane being 6" wide and 6" long - nearly perfect square, with about 5 inches of paper rolled up at the front.
Launch by pulling it into the air straight up, over your head, with your fingers under the front rolled-over part, it will gently fly with the fins up ("upside down") and glide a long way, dancing along the edge of stall. If you are looking for excellent hang times (not speed) this is the plane you want. 30 seconds or more of airtime are commonplace.
they'll simply find someone who can technically assist them.
That somebody may be quite expensive. Governments don't have unlimited funds. At least in the United States, law enforcement agencies pretty much chronically underfunded.
It's silly to try to argue that improving security won't result in improved security. No, it's not impenetrable, but nothing ever is. Good security is about balancing needs and risk, not about making something invulnerable.
Given the constraints of data locality, I really do not understand why more ISPs haven't offered data backup solutions!?!?!
ISPs typically have fat, beefy connections between your computer and their network, but then have to pay dearly for their connection to the general Internet. Why allow some "cloud company" to use their expensive connection to back up TB of data, when they could both eliminate the data transfer expense and charge the client for off site backups?
Anybody who has their own plane pretty much does whatever they want. I've landed my plane at large airports (EG: Oakland, CA) with extensive security lines for commercial flights, and driven my car out to the plane in order to load it. The only credentials I need are the keys to a plane and maybe a driver's license.
I've landed my private plane at big airports in order to hook up with commercial flights, and it's truly absurd to land, walk in off the tarmac, be personally greeted at the private aviation side of the airport, and then take a shuttle to be treated like a potential criminal in a cattle stock yard. This affords me very little respect for the TSA.
You don't need to be a Fortune 500 CEO to have a private plane, the actual cost to own (especially for a time share aka "flight club") can be similar in cost to owning a recent model car.
As a pilot, takeoff is not at all a sensitive time of flight. Pretty much, you mash the gas all the way forwardward, and keep the plane pretty much in line with the runway. (yawn)
The sensitive part is LANDING the plane! Here, you are actually aiming at the ground with minimal power right up to the last 10 seconds or so, where you pull the nose up just inches off the ground and (if all goes well) allow the loss of speed to force the wings to stop producing enough lift to stay airborne.
It's merely a matter of practice to do safely, but it's *tough* to do elegantly every time. Every pilot blows a landing and bounces or comes down rough every so often.
But again, that's the *pilot* that we're talking about. Personally, I wouldn't care 1 whit about what the passengers do during the landing sequence.
That may be technically true, but upgrading to Fedora 16 KDE brought a new KMail which pretty much borked EVERYTHING during the upgrade, effectively resulting in a complete loss of data.
To be honest, I have a !@# lot of email, and it was pretty tragic. I had backups, of course, and the actual email was still safe on the IMAPS server, but years worth of carefully tuned filter settings, folders, and the like were trashed beyond recognition. Since there is no migration tool that actually works between the previous and new versions of KDE, my only choices were to retrograde, or re-set up the new KMail. Since I couldn't get it to save its settings, I switched to Thunderbird Mail, and I'm not at all a happy camper about it. It works, but lacks the elegance that KMail used to have.
I loved KMail, and the new steaming pile of crap bearing its name doesn't even deserve the K.
But I've got a 13" Macboo Pro in my livingroom that covers this role, and I'd NEVER be able to drop down to a tablet -- why? Because after i look up whatever it was on the tablet, I'll refresh the slashdot home page and look at the news... and if I decide to reply, then suddenly I reget being on a tablet.... and this is where my Droid2 smart phone comes to the rescue, with its built-in keyboard that's just enough to make comments like this, something I do frequently.
Um...if I was doing development with just a laptop screen sure... I guess I'd appreciate a tablet... but the real question is why is my development platform so wholly inadequate for the job. Where am developing I that I'm carrying a laptop -and- a tablet around but can't have a proper multiscreen setup?
And of course, I have such a multi-screen set up at work, including a 40" mirror screen for sharing my screen with a group as needed. I have a tablet, and occasionally use it, but find that my phone does as good or better a job because of its proper keyboard and it's *always* being on my person.
The only thing that the tablet really does better at, IMHO, is watching movies, and I prefer a BIG screen (32" or better) and a decent lounge chair for that!
I'm honestly curious as to what experiences you've had with Zimbra not working well as an Exchange replacement. The OSS edition is fine as a web-based mail client, but the Enterprise edition with all the Outlook connectors and seamless integration with IOS/Android is mightily impressive.
I have a highly priced, 1 year old Dell Precision M4500 with pretty much every upgrade it could be purchased with. The screen is razor sharp, crisp LED, enough to mirror on a 40" 1920x1080 external screen and still looks gorgeous! A little fleck of dust on this 15" screen is annoying when the font size I use on the display is 6 pixels, and the iPad 3 has a SIGNIFICANTLY SHARPER display on a smaller screen?
I'm pretty sure I don't give a rat's *** about the difference, to be honest.
What I'd like to see is some kind of very tough civics test as a requirement for voting. It should be as openly and transparently administered as possible, so that anyone who wants to study and learn could pass it but very few who didn't care to study would stand a chance.
This oh god yes this! Unfortunately, a requirement like this will be seen as racist since the people least likely to be educated are the poor (and implicitly, non-white) even if this means that they are unqualified to vote in their own best interests. *cough*
In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival.
Nope! Just about everybody is entitled, nowadays. For example, married couples qualify for tax deductions. This is an entitlement. Bad, bad bad idea.
The last thing I would change is that all campaigns be publically funded, each candidate gets a very generous amount, and any other "contributions" are treasonous bribery resulting in a death penalty for the candidate and 20 years in prison for the one "contributing" the money.
Punishment sounds a bit harsh, and the details are bit overdone, but the idea is basically sound. I'd require an accounting of expenditures, otherwise homeless people will run for office so they can buy booze. I like the anonymous meta-group way of doing things, were the ideas themselves are allows to sink or swim on their own merits. Getting the private money out of the campaigning process should be one of our highest priorities!
We all expect to buy a new computer every few years. For me, it's about 4 years. Expectations change; I have a P3 that was once a raging fast desktop machine but is now basically worthless for anything other than what I use it for: a headless network monitor, web server, mail server, DNS server, and router.
RAM is the thing that gets expensive later on. On any system you have, I recommend you max out the RAM while it's cheap. Pretty much every desk/laptop computer I've used for the last 10 years or so, I've maxed out the RAM shortly after (or during) purchase, as much as it will take. I tend to buy Dell, but I buy minimal RAM from them and then upgrade later from pricewatch.com because Dell overcharges on RAM.
This maximizes the utility of the computer, gives as much performance as it's capable as long as possible, and costs relatively little over the long haul. Seriously, don't skimp on the RAM - far more than processor speed, it determines how fast your computer will be under load.
PS: Unless it's games you're into, then the video card counts, too.
Years ago, I chose RedHat because I understood where people would be obligated to make it work, even if they didn't want to. Strangely, RedHat abandoned people like me, and now I depend on unpaid volunteers (CentOS) to give me the RedHat I learned to depend on without getting raped in the process.
I don't know if CentOS will work forever, but I'm pretty used to the RedHat way and I've never regretted going this route.
From what I see, it seems that "double encryption" simply means using encrypted channels to send already encrypted data, which is generally a good thing. An analog might be to use a VPN to connect to a corporate network in order to block people outside the organization from having access to your data stream, but then also encrypting the email you send to a party within the organization so that even the IT staff cannot read your message since they may have a more restricted security clearance than you and/or the receiving party.
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that somebody out there isn't out to get you.
From a purely technical standpoint, it's true that encrypting data twice provides no real assurance of increased randomness, but in practice, standard ciphers like 3DES, Blowfish, etc. provide strong enough encryption that it's rarely beneficial to try to use brute force anyway! It's almost always easier to do it some other way. (EG: exploit the smartphone/computer, beat the guy with a $5 wrench until he talks, etc)
You could do what Google/Apple has done and take the user out of the equation. In both Google Market and iTunes, you can buy stuff with reasonable confidence that it won't hork your phone. By standardizing a place to safely get applications, and making it palatable for legitimate developers to submit to the implicit oversight, they've made it tough to end users to do stupid things like download an obvious scam/malware from an ad.
Whatever the effect on our freedoms, the truth is that we can't reasonably expect people to be sharp enough to distinguish between malware and legit stuff. Heck, I've been doing software/computers for 20 years and I've been had a time or two. Especially recently, the scammers are getting rather good.
I guess it's popular to link anything and everything to a conspiracy theory, and that's a commentary on our culture. Like anything, drones are a tool. There's nothing to indicate that these environmentallists using drones to survey wildlife has anything to do with da gubbmint watching you, simply that the confluence of cheap, high quality GPS units, computing, and electronics is now making possible applications that were simply infeasible in times past. This type of progress is due to the advancement of technology, not the advancement of a gubbmint agenda.
Perhaps you missed the part that not only is this drone unmanned, it's unpiloted. Unlike R/C planes which have a limited, set range, this model has waypoints that it uses GPS location to navigate to, extending the range well beyond that possible with normal radio control.
To me, it's a bit silly to call a model airplane with some electronics taped onto it a "drone" but ever since the military's UAV "drone" project, it's become a buzzword.
Forget the rocket. How about using centrifugal force? There's no atmosphere to worry about, just start spinning the thing you want to launch at the end of a string until it's got enough force to do what you need and release.
Slashdot Mirror
... was a Timex Sinclair 1000. It had 16k of RAM and loaded programs on audio cassettes! You had to be pretty consistent with the volume or you'd "lose" programs. I programmed Monopoly into it, complete with color-pixel graphics, all in BASIC!
One thing that piques my interest is cost. 800 liters/day is a significant amount of water, but what's the cost per gallon when amortized over 20 years? This isn't a small windmill, the main chamber is the size of a small house!
Many deserts are also relatively humid.
Remember that deserts are defined by precipitation, not humidity. Deserts next to coastal areas lacking sufficient mountains to extract the humidity (such as Abu Dabi, referenced in TFA) are prime candidates.
This wouldn't work nearly as well in, say, Phoenix Arizona which is not only a desert, but is also arid and dry in every sense of the word.
Except that there's no evidence at all that this significantly lowers their "bandwidth bill". Most of their "bandwidth costs" are in the last mile, building and maintaining the cable / fiber that runs to each home, an overhead cost that likely dwarves peering point costs.
This is a shameless grab for money.
As one of those very small numbers of private pilots out there, this has occurred to me many times. Flying a plane is not like driving a car. They aren't even slightly related.
If you have a problem in a car, you slow down or stop. Anybody can do this. But if you have a problem in your plane, and you slow down or stop, you stall and immediately go into free-fall. Generally, you can recover from a stall quite easily, but if done near the ground, you die.
I'm convinced we'd have to get rid of the verbal radio system now in use for ATC in order to scale flying up much at all. Fly over any really busy airspace like LAX and you have frequencies so jammed with traffic that it's 100% talking, no meaningful silence at all. How could you even imagine 10x the traffic, let alone the 100x or so it would take to make flying a commodity?
In my humble opinion, the only way to make private flying a commodity is through extensive use of computer technology. Some type of swarm-based algorithm over radio based on proximity. With a combination of self-announce technology coupled with radar-backed verification, such a system could be highly reliable.
2. People would hold them wrong.
2a. Consequently, it would auto-rotate so the barrel always points away from you,
2b. making it worthless for work in any trench where the soldier is laying down.
I grew up having to go to church. And every week, I would wait so impatiently for the 20 minutes or so at the end of service when all of us kids would get the run of the main hall and run around in circles and burn off all the energy we'd saved up sitting still!
We had a perpetual paper airplane contest, because every week there were program sheets passed out that nobody cared about after the service. So I spent years competing for the best flying airplane, at least among other children under 12 or so.
The very best design I ever concocted was a "square plane" design, something like this one, except that instead of folding it down the middle, I bent it up about 1" along either side, making it into a low, squared off "U" shape when viewed from the front. Experiment with different sizes of roll, different lengths of roll until you get it right. (I didn't get much result making the fins down either side much smaller or bigger, 1" is about perfect) I usually got best results with the plane being 6" wide and 6" long - nearly perfect square, with about 5 inches of paper rolled up at the front.
Launch by pulling it into the air straight up, over your head, with your fingers under the front rolled-over part, it will gently fly with the fins up ("upside down") and glide a long way, dancing along the edge of stall. If you are looking for excellent hang times (not speed) this is the plane you want. 30 seconds or more of airtime are commonplace.
I think you're thinking of the Wiz which is an entirely different take on the Wizard of Oz...
they'll simply find someone who can technically assist them.
That somebody may be quite expensive. Governments don't have unlimited funds. At least in the United States, law enforcement agencies pretty much chronically underfunded.
It's silly to try to argue that improving security won't result in improved security. No, it's not impenetrable, but nothing ever is. Good security is about balancing needs and risk, not about making something invulnerable.
Given the constraints of data locality, I really do not understand why more ISPs haven't offered data backup solutions!?!?!
ISPs typically have fat, beefy connections between your computer and their network, but then have to pay dearly for their connection to the general Internet. Why allow some "cloud company" to use their expensive connection to back up TB of data, when they could both eliminate the data transfer expense and charge the client for off site backups?
Strangely, this hasn't happened. (shrug)
Anybody who has their own plane pretty much does whatever they want. I've landed my plane at large airports (EG: Oakland, CA) with extensive security lines for commercial flights, and driven my car out to the plane in order to load it. The only credentials I need are the keys to a plane and maybe a driver's license.
I've landed my private plane at big airports in order to hook up with commercial flights, and it's truly absurd to land, walk in off the tarmac, be personally greeted at the private aviation side of the airport, and then take a shuttle to be treated like a potential criminal in a cattle stock yard. This affords me very little respect for the TSA.
You don't need to be a Fortune 500 CEO to have a private plane, the actual cost to own (especially for a time share aka "flight club") can be similar in cost to owning a recent model car.
As a pilot, takeoff is not at all a sensitive time of flight. Pretty much, you mash the gas all the way forwardward, and keep the plane pretty much in line with the runway. (yawn)
The sensitive part is LANDING the plane! Here, you are actually aiming at the ground with minimal power right up to the last 10 seconds or so, where you pull the nose up just inches off the ground and (if all goes well) allow the loss of speed to force the wings to stop producing enough lift to stay airborne.
It's merely a matter of practice to do safely, but it's *tough* to do elegantly every time. Every pilot blows a landing and bounces or comes down rough every so often.
But again, that's the *pilot* that we're talking about. Personally, I wouldn't care 1 whit about what the passengers do during the landing sequence.
That may be technically true, but upgrading to Fedora 16 KDE brought a new KMail which pretty much borked EVERYTHING during the upgrade, effectively resulting in a complete loss of data.
To be honest, I have a !@# lot of email, and it was pretty tragic. I had backups, of course, and the actual email was still safe on the IMAPS server, but years worth of carefully tuned filter settings, folders, and the like were trashed beyond recognition. Since there is no migration tool that actually works between the previous and new versions of KDE, my only choices were to retrograde, or re-set up the new KMail. Since I couldn't get it to save its settings, I switched to Thunderbird Mail, and I'm not at all a happy camper about it. It works, but lacks the elegance that KMail used to have.
I loved KMail, and the new steaming pile of crap bearing its name doesn't even deserve the K.
But I've got a 13" Macboo Pro in my livingroom that covers this role, and I'd NEVER be able to drop down to a tablet -- why? Because after i look up whatever it was on the tablet, I'll refresh the slashdot home page and look at the news... and if I decide to reply, then suddenly I reget being on a tablet. ... and this is where my Droid2 smart phone comes to the rescue, with its built-in keyboard that's just enough to make comments like this, something I do frequently.
Um...if I was doing development with just a laptop screen sure ... I guess I'd appreciate a tablet... but the real question is why is my development platform so wholly inadequate for the job. Where am developing I that I'm carrying a laptop -and- a tablet around but can't have a proper multiscreen setup?
And of course, I have such a multi-screen set up at work, including a 40" mirror screen for sharing my screen with a group as needed. I have a tablet, and occasionally use it, but find that my phone does as good or better a job because of its proper keyboard and it's *always* being on my person.
The only thing that the tablet really does better at, IMHO, is watching movies, and I prefer a BIG screen (32" or better) and a decent lounge chair for that!
There is a way around that particular hurdle... own (at least part of) the business.
In your post, replace "PC" with "Mainframe" and then "ipad" with "PC". Voila! You've just recreated a common argument circa 1980!
I'm honestly curious as to what experiences you've had with Zimbra not working well as an Exchange replacement. The OSS edition is fine as a web-based mail client, but the Enterprise edition with all the Outlook connectors and seamless integration with IOS/Android is mightily impressive.
I have a highly priced, 1 year old Dell Precision M4500 with pretty much every upgrade it could be purchased with. The screen is razor sharp, crisp LED, enough to mirror on a 40" 1920x1080 external screen and still looks gorgeous! A little fleck of dust on this 15" screen is annoying when the font size I use on the display is 6 pixels, and the iPad 3 has a SIGNIFICANTLY SHARPER display on a smaller screen?
I'm pretty sure I don't give a rat's *** about the difference, to be honest.
What I'd like to see is some kind of very tough civics test as a requirement for voting. It should be as openly and transparently administered as possible, so that anyone who wants to study and learn could pass it but very few who didn't care to study would stand a chance.
This oh god yes this! Unfortunately, a requirement like this will be seen as racist since the people least likely to be educated are the poor (and implicitly, non-white) even if this means that they are unqualified to vote in their own best interests. *cough*
In addition, anyone currently receiving some form of "entitlement" should not get to vote because what they're going to vote for is not difficult to guess and this situation is too exploitable and too dangerous for our long-term survival.
Nope! Just about everybody is entitled, nowadays. For example, married couples qualify for tax deductions. This is an entitlement. Bad, bad bad idea.
The last thing I would change is that all campaigns be publically funded, each candidate gets a very generous amount, and any other "contributions" are treasonous bribery resulting in a death penalty for the candidate and 20 years in prison for the one "contributing" the money.
Punishment sounds a bit harsh, and the details are bit overdone, but the idea is basically sound. I'd require an accounting of expenditures, otherwise homeless people will run for office so they can buy booze. I like the anonymous meta-group way of doing things, were the ideas themselves are allows to sink or swim on their own merits. Getting the private money out of the campaigning process should be one of our highest priorities!
We all expect to buy a new computer every few years. For me, it's about 4 years. Expectations change; I have a P3 that was once a raging fast desktop machine but is now basically worthless for anything other than what I use it for: a headless network monitor, web server, mail server, DNS server, and router.
RAM is the thing that gets expensive later on. On any system you have, I recommend you max out the RAM while it's cheap. Pretty much every desk/laptop computer I've used for the last 10 years or so, I've maxed out the RAM shortly after (or during) purchase, as much as it will take. I tend to buy Dell, but I buy minimal RAM from them and then upgrade later from pricewatch.com because Dell overcharges on RAM.
This maximizes the utility of the computer, gives as much performance as it's capable as long as possible, and costs relatively little over the long haul. Seriously, don't skimp on the RAM - far more than processor speed, it determines how fast your computer will be under load.
PS: Unless it's games you're into, then the video card counts, too.
Years ago, I chose RedHat because I understood where people would be obligated to make it work, even if they didn't want to. Strangely, RedHat abandoned people like me, and now I depend on unpaid volunteers (CentOS) to give me the RedHat I learned to depend on without getting raped in the process.
I don't know if CentOS will work forever, but I'm pretty used to the RedHat way and I've never regretted going this route.
From what I see, it seems that "double encryption" simply means using encrypted channels to send already encrypted data, which is generally a good thing. An analog might be to use a VPN to connect to a corporate network in order to block people outside the organization from having access to your data stream, but then also encrypting the email you send to a party within the organization so that even the IT staff cannot read your message since they may have a more restricted security clearance than you and/or the receiving party.
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that somebody out there isn't out to get you.
From a purely technical standpoint, it's true that encrypting data twice provides no real assurance of increased randomness, but in practice, standard ciphers like 3DES, Blowfish, etc. provide strong enough encryption that it's rarely beneficial to try to use brute force anyway! It's almost always easier to do it some other way. (EG: exploit the smartphone/computer, beat the guy with a $5 wrench until he talks, etc)
You could do what Google/Apple has done and take the user out of the equation. In both Google Market and iTunes, you can buy stuff with reasonable confidence that it won't hork your phone. By standardizing a place to safely get applications, and making it palatable for legitimate developers to submit to the implicit oversight, they've made it tough to end users to do stupid things like download an obvious scam/malware from an ad.
Whatever the effect on our freedoms, the truth is that we can't reasonably expect people to be sharp enough to distinguish between malware and legit stuff. Heck, I've been doing software/computers for 20 years and I've been had a time or two. Especially recently, the scammers are getting rather good.
I guess it's popular to link anything and everything to a conspiracy theory, and that's a commentary on our culture. Like anything, drones are a tool. There's nothing to indicate that these environmentallists using drones to survey wildlife has anything to do with da gubbmint watching you, simply that the confluence of cheap, high quality GPS units, computing, and electronics is now making possible applications that were simply infeasible in times past. This type of progress is due to the advancement of technology, not the advancement of a gubbmint agenda.
Perhaps you missed the part that not only is this drone unmanned, it's unpiloted. Unlike R/C planes which have a limited, set range, this model has waypoints that it uses GPS location to navigate to, extending the range well beyond that possible with normal radio control.
To me, it's a bit silly to call a model airplane with some electronics taped onto it a "drone" but ever since the military's UAV "drone" project, it's become a buzzword.
Forget the rocket. How about using centrifugal force? There's no atmosphere to worry about, just start spinning the thing you want to launch at the end of a string until it's got enough force to do what you need and release.