Looking at the 50-inch plasma screens, the lowest is 163W and the highest is 609W. That's quite a range. Maybe it really is worthwhile setting legally enforced efficiency standards, because it's clear the industry hasn't sorted the issue out.
The authorities can cast a wider net by being lazy, but this is the real reason we shouldn't tolerate it: it's almost laughably exploitable.
The British version sends you the picture the camera takes in the mail with your fine. This pushes the price of validating the "offense" onto the accused - if the car is the wrong make/model/colour then the fine will be easily disputed. The plus side is it's a little harder to exploit. The downside is if the other car really is the same make/model and colour, you're assumed guilty. And as the article says, you'll have a hell of a problem disputing it.
BTW, they've started sending photos in the mail when they issue you with a parking ticket. This apparently greatly reduces the number of contested tickets, and at the same time reduces the temptation for the traffic warden to issue extra "unnecessary" tickets for whatever reason. For once, this actually seems to be a good use of technology.
but as a parent you don't care about who a vaccine is generally saving the whole of society if it is your own kid that is the 1% or 1/10th% who gets screwed over with a bad reaction to a vaccine. All you care about really is how it is going to impact your own children.
Well, I'm in the 1% who got screwed over from NOT having the vaccine. I got mumps when I was 12, and I'm nearly completely deaf in one ear as a result. Completely preventable. Needless to say, we did do the research when it came to vaccines for our kids, and they both did get the MMR.
By the way, some people don't really get too much of a choice. One requirement to get a US greencard is to prove you've been vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella.
Actual prior art, which would be sufficient to legally defeat a patent, must read on all of a patent's claims.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I have successfully contested several patents in court (one European, one US case), and had them invalidated. Your statement is not quite correct.
Usually a patent has a series of independent claims. A piece of prior art must read on all the elements of a single claim to invalidate that claim. However you can use different pieces of prior art to invalidate different independent claims.
I agree - but the key is to keep trying new things. Otherwise you settle into the same old mental rut; if you stop trying to learn new things, you'll stop being able to learn new things.
I'm 41. I'm not as fast at learning new things as I used to be (though I'm still faster than half of the students I teach), but I'm much much better than I used to be at fitting new things into the big picture. That only comes with experience. I don't fixate on the details as much, but skim through to get the overview. I know I can pick up the details if I want to - I wrote about 15K lines of code this summer, though coding isn't what I do daily - but often younger people fixate on the details and miss what's important.
So often I get grad students come to me with graphs of the behaviour of some code they've written, trying to tell me how well it works. I don't know the details of their code, but often I can say "your code is buggy". Their first reaction is "no it's not!", then "how can you tell?". It's usually something really simply like the slope of the graph is different from what it should be. They fixated on the absolute values, and missed the bigger picture.
Anyway, my advice is don't stop learning, or you'll go rusty. And play to your strengths - the ability to assimilate data into the bigger picture is something that (should) improve with experience. But don't try and race the youngsters at learning the details - you will lose that race!
Let's not forget that half of the water that's distilled will be used to give the crew oxygen too, so that might have positive returns on how many Lithium Oxide cells (do they still use those?)to change carbon dioxide into oxygen, so that's less of those shipped over.
I think you mean Lithium Hydroxide. However, Lithium Hydroxide doesn't change CO2 into Oxygen, but rather into Lithium Carbonate and Water. So I don't think recycling water would have any impact on the need for Lithium Hydroxide canisters.
However, the ISS doesn't normally use Lithium Hydroxide. Instead it uses a zeolite-based filter to separate CO2, then vents the CO2 to space. More information is in this NASA article.
M(o) = Mass of spaceship without reaction mass
M(f) = Mass of reaction mass
e = natural log number, about 2.178
Are you sure you got the mass ratio the right way up?
M(o)/(M(o)+M(f)) is fractional, but e^(Vd/Vex) is greater than one for positive Vd, Vex, so this can't work.
That may have been true at one time, but in its latest incarnation, it has a gearbox with two forward speeds, because low speed acceleration was wanting.
You've got that the wrong way round. The old powertrain was two-speed. The new, simpler and more reliable version is single speed.
This was definitely not a crash. No, definitely not, really. Honest. Accidentally parking a 747 on a golf course could happen to anyone, and in no way constitutes a crash.
Umm... the attitude sensor was a Northrop Grumman part, used in some Airbus models (2 A330 models, and A340) and "some other non-Airbus" aircraft.
As you said, this same part is used on several makes of aircraft. In fact the only similar occurrence I know of actually happened on a Boeing 777. You can read the details here.
It is concerning that a single failed sensor can cause this sort of upset, but it doesn't (at first glance) seem like either Boeing or Airbus are any better where this particular failure mode is concerned. And both the A330 and the B777 have excellent safety records, considerably better than the previous generation of planes. Without playing down the seriousness for the passengers who were hurt, at least the rest of the flight control system seems to have prevented the plane pulling its wings off in both cases.
Andrews and Arnold are actually very competent and no-nonsense - I've been using them for a few years now. Only ISP I know of where home users can interact with real human techies that actually understand the technology.
I'd just be happy with 20 duplicate copies of a standard definition DVD movie on there. Then there's some chance it will last more than 15 minutes once my 2-year old son gets hold of it.
BTW, the first mission to mars will also be private enterprise. And it will be a one-way mission
I'd go. Even if I knew from the start it was a one-way mission, with no return possible. There are quite a few people like me, getting on in years but still fit (mentally and physically), who have kids who would have finished college by the time such a mission starts. I'd far rather spend my last years exploring Mars than growing old ungracefully on earth, even if it means dying 15 years earlier.
I've also had quite a few Macs, and hate my Macbook. I agree about the sharp edges. The keyboard sucks - if you hit the keys slightly off center, they don't register. And I hate the shiny screen, which has the worst viewing angle of any LCD I've used.
In just about all respects except CPU power, my old 12" G4 Powerbook was so much better. But if the new Macbook comes with a 14" screen, I won't buy one - it will be too big for airplane use. And the Macbook Air doesn't have a replaceable battery, so it's no good for long flights either (yes, I do a lot of work on long-haul flights). Looks like I'm stuck with my crappy Macbook - I'm compelled to run MS Office and need a Unix development environment so I'm going to stick with MacOS X. Money isn't an issue - it's a company machine. But Apple seem determined not to make the full-featured but fairly compact machine I really need.
Yes, anonymous public key exchange is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack, unless you use something like the Interlock Protocol, which is probably a bit heavyweight to use for all connections.
But what this does do is tilt the balance of power against the eavesdropper. It prevents passive eavesdropping attacks - for example it prevents anyone recording all traffic and then after-the-fact deciding what they want to decode.
Anyone wanting to decode your traffic is forced to be an active adversary, and this makes them detectable, which means they won't do it all the time because there'd be a huge outcry. No more mining all the traffic that passes on internet backbone links - you could tell when the first ISP put an eavesdropping box into their network, and switch to another ISP, which would strongly discourage anyone from doing this in the first place.
It's much more expensive to be an active man in the middle for all traffic - the best bet would be to downgrade traffic by pretending the other end didn't support the option. Even this isn't cheap. To leave the traffic encrypted and intercept it all would require a ridiculous number of public key accelerators cards.
In the end, it doesn't stop anyone eavesdropping if they suspect one particular person, but it does make such interception detectable if you know what you're doing, and it does stop them eavesdropping all traffic in the hope of hearing something incriminating.
Unless you're running on pretty rare 64-bit hardware, an int will still only be 32 bits. I can't remember what happens when you overflow 2^31 and try to de-reference a negative pointer (probably it just implicitly casts to unsigned), but you sure aren't going to overflow an exabyte buffer that way.
With the iPhone, iPod, and so on, to save power and keep prices down you really want system-on-a-chip designs. But if you buy commodity, then you get the same system-on-a-chip everyone else can get. It's hard to do something different. For desktop machines, you can distinguish yourself by the combination of features (even though Apple machines aren't that different to anyone elses these days, except possibly for firewire), but you can't do that in the embedded/mobile space if cost and power dictate it's a single chip design. So, my guess is they want their own in-house capability to build system-on-a-chip designs that are different from everyone else. Different in what way though, I have no idea.
They're gaining experience with aerodynamics at mach 3.5 or so. For comparison, the Space Shuttle jettisons the SRBs at roughly this speed and MaxQ (maximum aerodynamic stress) is somewhere around mach 1.5.
They're gaining experience with maintaining attitude using orbital manoeuvring thrusters. Sure it has the feathering system to provide fail-safe attitude when re-entering, but they still use thrusters to maintain attitude before that.
Now clearly SS2 is never going to reach orbit - nowhere near enough delta-V and no minimal thermal protection ensure that. But I agree the experience gained is non trivial. And if it is a financial success, maybe they'll get to use that experience for the next step.
Gizmodo interview with Datamancer
on
Ye Olde World Charm
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Seeing as Datamancer's site is slashdotted, you can catch the laptop on Gizmodo
. Better still, here's their interview with Richard Nagy, its very talented creator.
Cheers,
Fzz
I have an argument against it. How do they know there aren't submarine patents covering H.264/AAC in addition to the patents they're paying license fees for?
My guess at their reasoning:
H.264 and AAC were developed in standards organizations where members need to declare what patents they have that a new standard might infringe. So there should be no submarine patents from the main industry players.
H.264 and AAC have been around long enough and are deployed widely enough (think iPods and HD-TV) that any patent bandit would have sued them already.
Whereas in comparison, there hasn't been anyone worth suing over Ogg Vorbis or Theora.
Such is the screwed up state of the world of software patents:-(
Here's a rough summary of the concerns Nokia have:
No-one knows if Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Theora are encumbered by patents. They were developed to be free of the main known patents, but they could still be encumbered by some submarine patent. If they're accepted as the baseline, Nokia face unknown risk if such a patent emerges after they've deployed the technology in hundreds of millions of phones. With H.261/AAC, the risks are more known because an unknown patent-holder would have sued someone by now.
There's a lot of content available online (though not directly as part of Web standards). Nokia in concerned that the content producers will will stear clear of Ogg in favour of solutions that support DRM or at least have a known track record. Better the devil you know...
The second concern is probably rubbish, in so far as they are asking for H.264/AAC instead. DRM on these is completely orthogonal to the issue of the codec - you could easily wrap Theora in a DRM wrapper if you wanted (though why you'd want to is beyond me).
The first concern though is more interesting. Basically Nokia seems to be saying that they'd rather pay predictable patent licensing fees for H.264/AAC than face unknown risk. That's a business decision, and I don't know of any good argument against it - we really don't know if there are any submarine patents that Theora or Vorbis might infringe on. From what I know about coding, it seems unlikely (especially in the case of Vorbis), but not impossible to me.
Despite this, I think W3C made the right call and should stick to it.
If you look at the list you linked to, all the Salyuts are very small and just single-launch spacecraft. Skylab is four times larger, but still not that big and still launched in one piece. Only Mir and the ISS are really of large size and involve complex in-orbit assembly. These are the first true space stations - the rest are not in the same league at all and are more like long-duration capsules. So, yes, we really are on the steepest part of the learning curve when it comes to space stations and in-orbit assembly.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the 50-inch plasma screens, the lowest is 163W and the highest is 609W. That's quite a range. Maybe it really is worthwhile setting legally enforced efficiency standards, because it's clear the industry hasn't sorted the issue out.
The British version sends you the picture the camera takes in the mail with your fine. This pushes the price of validating the "offense" onto the accused - if the car is the wrong make/model/colour then the fine will be easily disputed. The plus side is it's a little harder to exploit. The downside is if the other car really is the same make/model and colour, you're assumed guilty. And as the article says, you'll have a hell of a problem disputing it.
BTW, they've started sending photos in the mail when they issue you with a parking ticket. This apparently greatly reduces the number of contested tickets, and at the same time reduces the temptation for the traffic warden to issue extra "unnecessary" tickets for whatever reason. For once, this actually seems to be a good use of technology.
Well, I'm in the 1% who got screwed over from NOT having the vaccine. I got mumps when I was 12, and I'm nearly completely deaf in one ear as a result. Completely preventable. Needless to say, we did do the research when it came to vaccines for our kids, and they both did get the MMR.
By the way, some people don't really get too much of a choice. One requirement to get a US greencard is to prove you've been vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I have successfully contested several patents in court (one European, one US case), and had them invalidated. Your statement is not quite correct.
Usually a patent has a series of independent claims. A piece of prior art must read on all the elements of a single claim to invalidate that claim. However you can use different pieces of prior art to invalidate different independent claims.
I'm 41. I'm not as fast at learning new things as I used to be (though I'm still faster than half of the students I teach), but I'm much much better than I used to be at fitting new things into the big picture. That only comes with experience. I don't fixate on the details as much, but skim through to get the overview. I know I can pick up the details if I want to - I wrote about 15K lines of code this summer, though coding isn't what I do daily - but often younger people fixate on the details and miss what's important.
So often I get grad students come to me with graphs of the behaviour of some code they've written, trying to tell me how well it works. I don't know the details of their code, but often I can say "your code is buggy". Their first reaction is "no it's not!", then "how can you tell?". It's usually something really simply like the slope of the graph is different from what it should be. They fixated on the absolute values, and missed the bigger picture.
Anyway, my advice is don't stop learning, or you'll go rusty. And play to your strengths - the ability to assimilate data into the bigger picture is something that (should) improve with experience. But don't try and race the youngsters at learning the details - you will lose that race!
I think you mean Lithium Hydroxide. However, Lithium Hydroxide doesn't change CO2 into Oxygen, but rather into Lithium Carbonate and Water. So I don't think recycling water would have any impact on the need for Lithium Hydroxide canisters.
However, the ISS doesn't normally use Lithium Hydroxide. Instead it uses a zeolite-based filter to separate CO2, then vents the CO2 to space. More information is in this NASA article.
M(o) = Mass of spaceship without reaction mass
M(f) = Mass of reaction mass
e = natural log number, about 2.178
Are you sure you got the mass ratio the right way up?
M(o)/(M(o)+M(f)) is fractional, but e^(Vd/Vex) is greater than one for positive Vd, Vex, so this can't work.
You've got that the wrong way round. The old powertrain was two-speed. The new, simpler and more reliable version is single speed.
This was definitely not a crash. No, definitely not, really. Honest. Accidentally parking a 747 on a golf course could happen to anyone, and in no way constitutes a crash.
As you said, this same part is used on several makes of aircraft. In fact the only similar occurrence I know of actually happened on a Boeing 777. You can read the details here.
It is concerning that a single failed sensor can cause this sort of upset, but it doesn't (at first glance) seem like either Boeing or Airbus are any better where this particular failure mode is concerned. And both the A330 and the B777 have excellent safety records, considerably better than the previous generation of planes. Without playing down the seriousness for the passengers who were hurt, at least the rest of the flight control system seems to have prevented the plane pulling its wings off in both cases.
Andrews and Arnold are actually very competent and no-nonsense - I've been using them for a few years now. Only ISP I know of where home users can interact with real human techies that actually understand the technology.
I'd just be happy with 20 duplicate copies of a standard definition DVD movie on there. Then there's some chance it will last more than 15 minutes once my 2-year old son gets hold of it.
I'd go. Even if I knew from the start it was a one-way mission, with no return possible. There are quite a few people like me, getting on in years but still fit (mentally and physically), who have kids who would have finished college by the time such a mission starts. I'd far rather spend my last years exploring Mars than growing old ungracefully on earth, even if it means dying 15 years earlier.
In just about all respects except CPU power, my old 12" G4 Powerbook was so much better. But if the new Macbook comes with a 14" screen, I won't buy one - it will be too big for airplane use. And the Macbook Air doesn't have a replaceable battery, so it's no good for long flights either (yes, I do a lot of work on long-haul flights). Looks like I'm stuck with my crappy Macbook - I'm compelled to run MS Office and need a Unix development environment so I'm going to stick with MacOS X. Money isn't an issue - it's a company machine. But Apple seem determined not to make the full-featured but fairly compact machine I really need.
But what this does do is tilt the balance of power against the eavesdropper. It prevents passive eavesdropping attacks - for example it prevents anyone recording all traffic and then after-the-fact deciding what they want to decode.
Anyone wanting to decode your traffic is forced to be an active adversary, and this makes them detectable, which means they won't do it all the time because there'd be a huge outcry. No more mining all the traffic that passes on internet backbone links - you could tell when the first ISP put an eavesdropping box into their network, and switch to another ISP, which would strongly discourage anyone from doing this in the first place.
It's much more expensive to be an active man in the middle for all traffic - the best bet would be to downgrade traffic by pretending the other end didn't support the option. Even this isn't cheap. To leave the traffic encrypted and intercept it all would require a ridiculous number of public key accelerators cards.
In the end, it doesn't stop anyone eavesdropping if they suspect one particular person, but it does make such interception detectable if you know what you're doing, and it does stop them eavesdropping all traffic in the hope of hearing something incriminating.
Unless you're running on pretty rare 64-bit hardware, an int will still only be 32 bits. I can't remember what happens when you overflow 2^31 and try to de-reference a negative pointer (probably it just implicitly casts to unsigned), but you sure aren't going to overflow an exabyte buffer that way.
Or just build Google's datacenter next door, and use the cheap cool air to chill it.
No, if it's really valuable enough we'll go and mine the asteroids or the moon or somewhere else where it's available. It does come down to economics.
I got that earlier, but it's working now. This is posted with 3.0.
With the iPhone, iPod, and so on, to save power and keep prices down you really want system-on-a-chip designs. But if you buy commodity, then you get the same system-on-a-chip everyone else can get. It's hard to do something different. For desktop machines, you can distinguish yourself by the combination of features (even though Apple machines aren't that different to anyone elses these days, except possibly for firewire), but you can't do that in the embedded/mobile space if cost and power dictate it's a single chip design. So, my guess is they want their own in-house capability to build system-on-a-chip designs that are different from everyone else. Different in what way though, I have no idea.
- They're gaining experience with aerodynamics at mach 3.5 or so. For comparison, the Space Shuttle jettisons the SRBs at roughly this speed and MaxQ (maximum aerodynamic stress) is somewhere around mach 1.5.
- They're gaining experience with maintaining attitude using orbital manoeuvring thrusters. Sure it has the feathering system to provide fail-safe attitude when re-entering, but they still use thrusters to maintain attitude before that.
Now clearly SS2 is never going to reach orbit - nowhere near enough delta-V and no minimal thermal protection ensure that. But I agree the experience gained is non trivial. And if it is a financial success, maybe they'll get to use that experience for the next step.Seeing as Datamancer's site is slashdotted, you can catch the laptop on Gizmodo . Better still, here's their interview with Richard Nagy, its very talented creator. Cheers, Fzz
My guess at their reasoning:
- H.264 and AAC were developed in standards organizations where members need to declare what patents they have that a new standard might infringe. So there should be no submarine patents from the main industry players.
- H.264 and AAC have been around long enough and are deployed widely enough (think iPods and HD-TV) that any patent bandit would have sued them already.
Whereas in comparison, there hasn't been anyone worth suing over Ogg Vorbis or Theora.Such is the screwed up state of the world of software patents :-(
- No-one knows if Ogg Vorbis or Ogg Theora are encumbered by patents. They were developed to be free of the main known patents, but they could still be encumbered by some submarine patent. If they're accepted as the baseline, Nokia face unknown risk if such a patent emerges after they've deployed the technology in hundreds of millions of phones. With H.261/AAC, the risks are more known because an unknown patent-holder would have sued someone by now.
- There's a lot of content available online (though not directly as part of Web standards). Nokia in concerned that the content producers will will stear clear of Ogg in favour of solutions that support DRM or at least have a known track record. Better the devil you know...
The second concern is probably rubbish, in so far as they are asking for H.264/AAC instead. DRM on these is completely orthogonal to the issue of the codec - you could easily wrap Theora in a DRM wrapper if you wanted (though why you'd want to is beyond me).The first concern though is more interesting. Basically Nokia seems to be saying that they'd rather pay predictable patent licensing fees for H.264/AAC than face unknown risk. That's a business decision, and I don't know of any good argument against it - we really don't know if there are any submarine patents that Theora or Vorbis might infringe on. From what I know about coding, it seems unlikely (especially in the case of Vorbis), but not impossible to me.
Despite this, I think W3C made the right call and should stick to it.
If you look at the list you linked to, all the Salyuts are very small and just single-launch spacecraft. Skylab is four times larger, but still not that big and still launched in one piece. Only Mir and the ISS are really of large size and involve complex in-orbit assembly. These are the first true space stations - the rest are not in the same league at all and are more like long-duration capsules. So, yes, we really are on the steepest part of the learning curve when it comes to space stations and in-orbit assembly.