As the 'skin' is sprayed on, the fibers could be electrically or magnetically aligned prior to the skin solidifying. Fibers embedded in the skin could be designed to run through them, and a computer could send signals through the skin learning the fiber map. This would then allow the computer to take in signals through the fiber network of stress applied to the skin, and send out signals to those locations as needed, boosting the strength there.
This leaves a lot of questions open (how to handle cross-talk, for instance), but is how I first thought of things. They're talking about this kind of thing being perhaps decades away, and unlikely to appear in the next few years. One day, we'll look back on astronauts in current spacesuits the way we look at warriors in plate armor: bulky and inefficient suits worn by people dedicated and brave enough to train to face the unknown with primitive technology.
Which raises the question of how they compute it in the first place. I've always wondered that. The only way that I've seen that makes sense is the ever-shrinking triangle method, where successively smaller triangles are used to compute estimates of the value of pi.
No, repeating the point that the attempt to look educated through the use of an improperly-formed word only makes the speaker look ignorant, and continuing to repeat it each time the word is noted, until someone backs down. Those advocating the correct form generally have more patience than those attempting unsuccessfully to appear sophisticated.
C'mon, man. We're still drooling over Civ IV. Don't make us start drooling about the next six versions after that or you're going to see a lot of Slashdot geeks swimming home.
And you definitely do not want to see that.:)
Re:So don't use a camera that honors this...
on
No Pictures, Thanks
·
· Score: 1
Not really. The Supreme Court, whether left, center, or right, has always had issues with the suppression of the press. Generally speaking, even the current conservative court does not like to get involved in politics, and has managed to do a lot to annoy conservatives in its rulings (or refusals to revisit) on issues such as abortion, the death penalty, and school prayer. Whoever gets to that level is usually held pretty firm by the traditions of the Court, which is to not intervene unless real questions are posed, or unless two Circuit Courts of Appeals have ruled directly opposite in something (and occasionally not even then), and even then to address the issue as narrowly as possible. There are certain exceptions to this, of course, but for the most part, my confidence in the Supreme Court has been proven time and again with 6-3 and stronger positions, regardless of the personal politics of the Justices.
Re:So don't use a camera that honors this...
on
No Pictures, Thanks
·
· Score: 1
Press freedom would be inhibited strongly by such a technology, so I doubt such a law would survive more than a few minutes in courts at any level.
Re:Camera shutter SFX can't be turned off
on
No Pictures, Thanks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There have been some pushing for mandated sounds on camera phones, to avoid people snapping pictures down blouses or up skirts without some chance of the target knowing about it. I believe I saw something recently that the EU was strongly in favor of this.
To my knowledge, there's no such thing as a "blanket" license for Windows. Even the largest companies are required to estimate the total number of licenses used in their deployments and pay for them, and Microsoft does have the right to audit the company's actual use if they suspect that they have been short-changed.
No, they won't provide you with a key. They have no proof that you have actually lost it and aren't continuing to use it somewhere. They tell you to take care of your software keys because not doing so means you have to buy another copy.
Terminations on the part of The Planet are supposed to be 30-day notices, if I read their ToS correctly. There may have been ongoing issues with payments, but 48 hours still seems too short to fit into the wording they use.
I'm going to wait a bit to see what happens, but this does look odd to me.
I find it interesting how people here constantly think I'm a Republican when I'm not.
What I am is concerned about the California budget, which as of June 1, 2004, had $40 billion in existing bond debt, plus another $30 billion authorized but not issued because the projects they're for haven't reached specific phases, plus $15B in bonds approved by voters one last time to bail out the state, plus the $3B for the stem cell research -- $88 billion in bond debt in place or authorized, payable over the next 30 years, with as much as about $9B going to paying back bond debt in a single year. The state is bond-happy, and has been for years, because we don't have to pay it off until some time that is not now.
Going into this round of budget talks, we have a budget shortfall of $8B, out of a total spending package of more than $100B. The Legislature has served notice that it's not happy with the governor's submitted budget, and plans to fight it with their own version of things, and it's going to get nasty, because there can be no more borrowing to cover the deficit, and there's less than $4B left in last year's $15B authorization to cover the gap. Something is going to have to give, and it will not at all surprise me to see July 1 come rolling around without a budget again.
Note that I support embryonic stem cell research, but I also support not pushing the state's finances any more than they already are. Trim some of the other programs out of the way and make room for the money first, then spend it.
I don't use less than 15-character passwords on Windows 2000+ systems so as to force a null hash to be entered for the LanMan hash. It's not especially secure, but it does prevent the most trivial attacks. Passwords are often a fair bit longer than that, even. And with databases now appearing that can provide lookups for various hashing algorithms, even the 8-character passwords may not be secure for much longer. Many people don't worry much if their password hash gets grabbed, because it can't be reversed, but if an attacker just needs to hit a website for a lookup (or get their own), it may not be that difficult.
I'm doing some rough computations, but if a single 2GHz P4 CPU can go through 50,000,000 bytes/sec in 8-byte segments using certain Windows implementations (nevermind a more customized assembly-language on a slimmer OS), it seems to me that, based on a 96-character array (all standard character keys on the keyboard, including space, and adding null), it would have about 7.21E15 combinations and take about 4.5 years to crunch through the entire space. Storage of all of those results seems more problematic, requiring something like 1.8 million terabytes of storage space to store the whole space, but that number feels wrong (32 characters for the MD5 hash plus 8 for the password, times the attack space, plus overhead). Implausible now for all but governments, but perhaps not so much so a few years from now, and habits set now are hard to change down the line for many people. You and I may be able to use larger passphrases, but what are the chances that the executives and secretaries, who we often already have to chase to come up with decent passwords, will make those changes willingly?
I have to get under the desk, pull out the computer, hold the stuff stacked on top in place, tip the case forward, then reach behind stuff to try for the network cable and hope that's the only one I pull out.
One of these days, I need to get back there and do some cable management. I think I shall do it next Hargarkarfargenday.
Re:"New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the U
on
US Stem Cells Contaminated
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't have much of a problem with the state funding the research, but dammit, we don't have the money to be doing this right now. That $3B borrowed will cost the state $6B, possibly more if the state's credit rating doesn't improve in the next few years. Lets get our house in order, and then wait a couple of years before we go into this.
Not to mention the questions about just who would be profiting under this.:/
Thank you for making this point. There are some societal rules which the state should take an interest in enforcing, and among these is the prohibition of children being involved in certain activities, such as pornography. At this point, the vast majority of people consider child pornography to be wrong, and I doubt this is changing anytime soon. There is a need for certain limited restrictions on what may be viewed by people. The difficult part comes in drawing the appropriate line.
The employer can detect it as abnormal, depending on what kind of security they have on the network. They can set their IDS to scan traffic for specific strings (like those associated with encrypted mail) and some of them can even record traffic for at least hours if not days at a time -- terabyte RAID arrays aren't all that expensive. They may also be able to set up filters at the anti-spam server to block all outgoing messages with such encryption from certain people. All of this is available for very little money, too. A complete system to capture this could be in place for a very tiny fraction of a major company's IT budget, and even a medium-sized company could implement something without too much difficulty.
And if it's storing your password on the disk as well as the obligatory keys, then they have all of the information needed to file a lawsuit against you -- complete with gag order, making it difficult to get any information out -- just before they fire you. Yes, it's possible to get around it, but they can certainly make life hell for a while.
So they are. I was under the impression that the HST had maneuvering thrusters to adjust its orbit if not significantly in altitude, then at least laterally to avoid debris.
I know that the gyros only control orientation. On other satellites, the final gyro commands are usually sent to set things up for braking the craft so as to de-orbit the unit. It is that action to which I was referring, although standard practice seems to de-orbit at two good gyros, to allow for one failing during de-orbit procedures.
Original plans were to bring it back in the shuttle's cargo bay for display in the Smithsonian Museum. No one knew the shuttle program was going to have so many problems.
The JWST was meant to complement the Hubble, not replace it. It functions almost entirely in the infrared range, whereas Hubble covers a very wide range of wavelengths. The JWST was intended to fill in one of the HST's weak points.
As soon as it gets to the point where it becomes a re-entry risk (which happens when only one gyro remains functional), NASA will drop it into the Pacific. They don't want to risk an unplanned, uncontrolled descent that may put it in the middle of a population area.
"Costly" doesn't begin to describe HavenCo's servers (which are located in Sealand). Exorbitant is more accurate. Colocation starts at $1500 per month, and you get a paltry 256kbps connection. A 1Mbps connection is $1800 per month.
They claim to have intensive security, but it doesn't seem to me anything that would be too trivial for a reasonably-skilled team to get around. Miles of ocean separating Sealand and Britain and only a handful of residents on the island means that if something was wanted, it wouldn't be too difficult to get.
The author seems to be pretty severely biased against it. While he does have some good arguments, some of them are phrased so as to make it seem like this will leak interference at every frequency known to man. In addition, his admittedly BOTN cost comparison amortizes the cost of equipment over two years when it's much more likely to be factored over ten years, and I think both has a lower than expected customer uptake (30%) and customer availability in all except the most extreme cases of farmland (10 per mile).
I'm still not convinced of either side. I know that BPL has serious potential issues, but I'm not sure that either side has addressed them properly, either by under- or over-playing their particular concerns.
Unlikely. If BPL works as expected over large-scale trials, much of the grid is going to be turned into internet connections, which plenty of people out in the boondocks are going to really appreciate, and which will introduce more competition for the cablemodem and DSL companies.
At the risk of the wrath of ham radio community, this is something that may well prove to be of more use than amateur radio. I'm aware of the various social and emergency uses, but BPL would affect millions, possibly tens of millions, while there are less than one million licensed operators in the United States.
How much of the amateur radio spectrum is affected by BPL? And is there any way of filtering the noise generated by BPL?
Slashdot Mirror
As the 'skin' is sprayed on, the fibers could be electrically or magnetically aligned prior to the skin solidifying. Fibers embedded in the skin could be designed to run through them, and a computer could send signals through the skin learning the fiber map. This would then allow the computer to take in signals through the fiber network of stress applied to the skin, and send out signals to those locations as needed, boosting the strength there.
This leaves a lot of questions open (how to handle cross-talk, for instance), but is how I first thought of things. They're talking about this kind of thing being perhaps decades away, and unlikely to appear in the next few years. One day, we'll look back on astronauts in current spacesuits the way we look at warriors in plate armor: bulky and inefficient suits worn by people dedicated and brave enough to train to face the unknown with primitive technology.
Which raises the question of how they compute it in the first place. I've always wondered that. The only way that I've seen that makes sense is the ever-shrinking triangle method, where successively smaller triangles are used to compute estimates of the value of pi.
No, repeating the point that the attempt to look educated through the use of an improperly-formed word only makes the speaker look ignorant, and continuing to repeat it each time the word is noted, until someone backs down. Those advocating the correct form generally have more patience than those attempting unsuccessfully to appear sophisticated.
Civ X?
:)
C'mon, man. We're still drooling over Civ IV. Don't make us start drooling about the next six versions after that or you're going to see a lot of Slashdot geeks swimming home.
And you definitely do not want to see that.
Not really. The Supreme Court, whether left, center, or right, has always had issues with the suppression of the press. Generally speaking, even the current conservative court does not like to get involved in politics, and has managed to do a lot to annoy conservatives in its rulings (or refusals to revisit) on issues such as abortion, the death penalty, and school prayer. Whoever gets to that level is usually held pretty firm by the traditions of the Court, which is to not intervene unless real questions are posed, or unless two Circuit Courts of Appeals have ruled directly opposite in something (and occasionally not even then), and even then to address the issue as narrowly as possible. There are certain exceptions to this, of course, but for the most part, my confidence in the Supreme Court has been proven time and again with 6-3 and stronger positions, regardless of the personal politics of the Justices.
Press freedom would be inhibited strongly by such a technology, so I doubt such a law would survive more than a few minutes in courts at any level.
There have been some pushing for mandated sounds on camera phones, to avoid people snapping pictures down blouses or up skirts without some chance of the target knowing about it. I believe I saw something recently that the EU was strongly in favor of this.
To my knowledge, there's no such thing as a "blanket" license for Windows. Even the largest companies are required to estimate the total number of licenses used in their deployments and pay for them, and Microsoft does have the right to audit the company's actual use if they suspect that they have been short-changed.
No, they won't provide you with a key. They have no proof that you have actually lost it and aren't continuing to use it somewhere. They tell you to take care of your software keys because not doing so means you have to buy another copy.
Terminations on the part of The Planet are supposed to be 30-day notices, if I read their ToS correctly. There may have been ongoing issues with payments, but 48 hours still seems too short to fit into the wording they use.
I'm going to wait a bit to see what happens, but this does look odd to me.
I find it interesting how people here constantly think I'm a Republican when I'm not.
What I am is concerned about the California budget, which as of June 1, 2004, had $40 billion in existing bond debt, plus another $30 billion authorized but not issued because the projects they're for haven't reached specific phases, plus $15B in bonds approved by voters one last time to bail out the state, plus the $3B for the stem cell research -- $88 billion in bond debt in place or authorized, payable over the next 30 years, with as much as about $9B going to paying back bond debt in a single year. The state is bond-happy, and has been for years, because we don't have to pay it off until some time that is not now.
Going into this round of budget talks, we have a budget shortfall of $8B, out of a total spending package of more than $100B. The Legislature has served notice that it's not happy with the governor's submitted budget, and plans to fight it with their own version of things, and it's going to get nasty, because there can be no more borrowing to cover the deficit, and there's less than $4B left in last year's $15B authorization to cover the gap. Something is going to have to give, and it will not at all surprise me to see July 1 come rolling around without a budget again.
Note that I support embryonic stem cell research, but I also support not pushing the state's finances any more than they already are. Trim some of the other programs out of the way and make room for the money first, then spend it.
Are you kidding? They're still coding for Netscape 3 users.
Probably running kernel 2.0, too.
C'mon, Taco and Neal... Make with the CSS already.
I don't use less than 15-character passwords on Windows 2000+ systems so as to force a null hash to be entered for the LanMan hash. It's not especially secure, but it does prevent the most trivial attacks. Passwords are often a fair bit longer than that, even. And with databases now appearing that can provide lookups for various hashing algorithms, even the 8-character passwords may not be secure for much longer. Many people don't worry much if their password hash gets grabbed, because it can't be reversed, but if an attacker just needs to hit a website for a lookup (or get their own), it may not be that difficult.
I'm doing some rough computations, but if a single 2GHz P4 CPU can go through 50,000,000 bytes/sec in 8-byte segments using certain Windows implementations (nevermind a more customized assembly-language on a slimmer OS), it seems to me that, based on a 96-character array (all standard character keys on the keyboard, including space, and adding null), it would have about 7.21E15 combinations and take about 4.5 years to crunch through the entire space. Storage of all of those results seems more problematic, requiring something like 1.8 million terabytes of storage space to store the whole space, but that number feels wrong (32 characters for the MD5 hash plus 8 for the password, times the attack space, plus overhead). Implausible now for all but governments, but perhaps not so much so a few years from now, and habits set now are hard to change down the line for many people. You and I may be able to use larger passphrases, but what are the chances that the executives and secretaries, who we often already have to chase to come up with decent passwords, will make those changes willingly?
Just under the desk?
I have to get under the desk, pull out the computer, hold the stuff stacked on top in place, tip the case forward, then reach behind stuff to try for the network cable and hope that's the only one I pull out.
One of these days, I need to get back there and do some cable management. I think I shall do it next Hargarkarfargenday.
I don't have much of a problem with the state funding the research, but dammit, we don't have the money to be doing this right now. That $3B borrowed will cost the state $6B, possibly more if the state's credit rating doesn't improve in the next few years. Lets get our house in order, and then wait a couple of years before we go into this.
:/
Not to mention the questions about just who would be profiting under this.
Thank you for making this point. There are some societal rules which the state should take an interest in enforcing, and among these is the prohibition of children being involved in certain activities, such as pornography. At this point, the vast majority of people consider child pornography to be wrong, and I doubt this is changing anytime soon. There is a need for certain limited restrictions on what may be viewed by people. The difficult part comes in drawing the appropriate line.
The employer can detect it as abnormal, depending on what kind of security they have on the network. They can set their IDS to scan traffic for specific strings (like those associated with encrypted mail) and some of them can even record traffic for at least hours if not days at a time -- terabyte RAID arrays aren't all that expensive. They may also be able to set up filters at the anti-spam server to block all outgoing messages with such encryption from certain people. All of this is available for very little money, too. A complete system to capture this could be in place for a very tiny fraction of a major company's IT budget, and even a medium-sized company could implement something without too much difficulty.
And if it's storing your password on the disk as well as the obligatory keys, then they have all of the information needed to file a lawsuit against you -- complete with gag order, making it difficult to get any information out -- just before they fire you. Yes, it's possible to get around it, but they can certainly make life hell for a while.
So they are. I was under the impression that the HST had maneuvering thrusters to adjust its orbit if not significantly in altitude, then at least laterally to avoid debris.
I know that the gyros only control orientation. On other satellites, the final gyro commands are usually sent to set things up for braking the craft so as to de-orbit the unit. It is that action to which I was referring, although standard practice seems to de-orbit at two good gyros, to allow for one failing during de-orbit procedures.
Original plans were to bring it back in the shuttle's cargo bay for display in the Smithsonian Museum. No one knew the shuttle program was going to have so many problems.
Cost of maintenance: $600M-$800M
Cost of Hubble in 1990 dollars: $1.5B
Cost of Hubble in 2004 dollars: $2.2B
That doesn't include launch costs. It would also probably take ~10 years to plan and build.
The JWST was meant to complement the Hubble, not replace it. It functions almost entirely in the infrared range, whereas Hubble covers a very wide range of wavelengths. The JWST was intended to fill in one of the HST's weak points.
As soon as it gets to the point where it becomes a re-entry risk (which happens when only one gyro remains functional), NASA will drop it into the Pacific. They don't want to risk an unplanned, uncontrolled descent that may put it in the middle of a population area.
"Costly" doesn't begin to describe HavenCo's servers (which are located in Sealand). Exorbitant is more accurate. Colocation starts at $1500 per month, and you get a paltry 256kbps connection. A 1Mbps connection is $1800 per month.
They claim to have intensive security, but it doesn't seem to me anything that would be too trivial for a reasonably-skilled team to get around. Miles of ocean separating Sealand and Britain and only a handful of residents on the island means that if something was wanted, it wouldn't be too difficult to get.
The author seems to be pretty severely biased against it. While he does have some good arguments, some of them are phrased so as to make it seem like this will leak interference at every frequency known to man. In addition, his admittedly BOTN cost comparison amortizes the cost of equipment over two years when it's much more likely to be factored over ten years, and I think both has a lower than expected customer uptake (30%) and customer availability in all except the most extreme cases of farmland (10 per mile).
I'm still not convinced of either side. I know that BPL has serious potential issues, but I'm not sure that either side has addressed them properly, either by under- or over-playing their particular concerns.
Unlikely. If BPL works as expected over large-scale trials, much of the grid is going to be turned into internet connections, which plenty of people out in the boondocks are going to really appreciate, and which will introduce more competition for the cablemodem and DSL companies.
At the risk of the wrath of ham radio community, this is something that may well prove to be of more use than amateur radio. I'm aware of the various social and emergency uses, but BPL would affect millions, possibly tens of millions, while there are less than one million licensed operators in the United States.
How much of the amateur radio spectrum is affected by BPL? And is there any way of filtering the noise generated by BPL?