Not something I saw mentioned in the article links, but it's worth bearing in mind that the support of IPv6 is mandated in the protocol stack definitions of the 3GPP standards. This means, to cut a long story short, that all 3G telecoms kit (handsets, basestations and switchgear) will support IPv6 out of the box. At least in Europe and Japan.
So, when it finally stops being vapourware, and assuming that people actually buy into this technology, I'd say that was a fairly good driver for other industries to adopt it too. Not looking forward to the transition though.:)
You assume there is no value to an object in orbit as opposed to the same item on the ground.
That's not exactly what I meant.
The Hubble space telescope wouldn't be much use on the ground.:)
I was referring mainly to commercial satellites (I would like to see Hubble stay up as long as it can be kept working).
Commercial satellites are like this big time capsules of what technology was once like. They're designed to stay up there doing their job with very little intervention, for many years, while back on Earth, technology progresses as normal.
Do you still use a ten-year-old PC? (Wait - this is Slashdot. Don't answer that.) Do you still use a ten-year-old cellphone? That's what I'm getting at.
Consider that a big comms bird runs upwards of a billion dollars
I'd dispute that. You can launch a ton into LEO for less than $25M. Let's inflate that to $100M to be on the safe side. Development cost, even including NREs un-amortized, isn't going to be remotely close to $900M. No way. Prove me wrong?:)
Think that e.g. Hughes might be interested in keeping one of those puppies running at end-of-life?
No, I don't. They put enough fuel in it that, when it runs out, the technology on-board is obsolete. This is particularly true in comms, which is quite a fast-moving industry. Who wants a load of 1990's satellite TV hardware kept running?
They call it end-of-life for a reason.
Is there actually a market for orbital recovery? Apart from Hubble, which it would be nice to have back for sentimental value, I can't think that there's much up there than needs recovering. Most satellites are so many years out of date that it makes no commercial sense to get them back again - you'd only have to re-launch them anyway, at which point you might as well have spent the money on new ones.
Equally, no-one needs to run the risk of trying to repair things that are orbiting the Earth; it's guaranteed to be cheaper to junk it and build a new one.
Methinks this guy is playing on popular support for the "keep Hubble" campaign to raise the profile of an otherwise unviable business.
The problem with ECC is that the "hard problem" on which its security relies is based on some non-trivial mathematics which, until recently, no-one's really been interested in. Contrast this with RSA, which is based on a comparatively easy-to-understand problem (factoring a product of two primes) which has been known about for centuries.
What this means is, it's possible (very unlikely, but possible) that the conjecture that the elliptic curve logarithm problem is very hard to solve might be proved wrong tomorrow. That is much less of a risk with RSA (although see under quantum computing, if you go in for that sort of thing).
Last time I checked, the best "brute force" algorithm to attack ECC was the Pollard rho method. Is that still true?
Seems to be Slashdotted already, even though I'm seeing 0 comments @ -1...
Then again, I didn't think anyone really believed this, did they? I mean, any first-year EE student can tell you that mains cable is no good for signalling on, even at modest frequencies. Bah.
From end of article (yes, I skipped straight there...:))
There is simply no point in adding on their site "caution these images are not 100% precisely actual colors" when no digital image is really 'actual colors'.
Quite. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that NASA expected most of the people who were scrutinising these pictures to have some experience with astronomical imaging, where almost nothing is "true" colour in that sense.
Personally, I'm in favour of as much rebalancing as it takes to make the images pretty. If they don't make full use of my eye's ability to perceive them, then what was the point of spending all that money obtaining them in the first place? So long as the raw originals are available too, who cares?
Or will any p2p user be allowed to attend, as long as there are enough seats?
Oh yes, they forgot to mention. Everyone who uses P2P networks is encouraged to turn up - the more, the merrier! They'll have their own special entrance, and everything! There is a special, erm, all-you-can-eat buffet organised, just for you. Yes, that's it. Oh, and P.S. bring your own handcuffs.
> more likely to be found through technological innovation rather than passage of more laws.
Yes...and...
Not everyone thinks it's that obvious, though. Particularly people who believe that copyright theft is morally equivalent to actual theft. (Yes, they do exist, just not around here:)).
I'm not sure what's going to come out of a meeting like this.
My concern is rather that whatever comes out in the end will not be listened to, even if it would solve all the world's copyright problems.
What would be nice is for the public to suddenly realise en masse that the fundamental nature of copyright as a compromise between artists and society is *not* the God-given right that those who profit buy it would have them believe. Then, perhaps the ethics and the law could be brought back "into sync", and the technology could just get on with being technology is as amoral a way possible.
But it's more likely that the grannies will be locked up. Y'know, easier.
Yes, a Summit will work! Already through the power of talking-about-things we have eliminated AIDS, poverty and global polution! Now we must turn this formidable weapon to bear on copyright theft!
Whoops, someone modded me "Insightful" when I was trying to be "Funny". Can't win 'em all, I suppose.:) And I admit that I didn't read the article this time [slaps own wrists].
> with your logic, a swastika is just a bunch of lines... how could that offend anyone?
I think that's a little different, although I can't quite put my finger on why (probably not enough coffee). Here goes anyway.
The BSD devil isn't really a devil; certainly, it doesn't depict the Biblical concept of Satan as I am familiar with it. It looks more of an imp, or a daemon. It doesn't look particularly evil. It looks like it is trying to evoke the "devil on your shoulder" concept that has been used in cartoons since, gosh, the 17th Century (or earlier? Anyone?). So intrinsically, it has little power to offend, since recognizing it as such would be the most likely reaction to it.
(Now, we could have a big theological discourse here, since the outward appearance of that which is evil may be far from unpleasant, and is thus made all the more evil for its deceitfulness, but that's a story for another day.)
The swastika, before it ever appeared on the Nazi flag, was as you rightly say, just a bunch of lines. But there can be few people in the world today who don't recognize it as a sign used by fascists and racists. You couldn't sell a product with a swastika motif on it unless it be to one of the above groups. So I think trying to compare the two is quite difficult.
It strikes me as strange that the most powerful and prominent pieces of iconography are not likenesses of good, evil, destructive, wholesome, natural or supernatural things; rather, they are simple symbols and lines: the swastika, the cross, the swatch, and, of course,/.:)
> [and] has negative cultural, and religious > ramifications.
No, it doesn't. It's a cartoon devil. It doesn't offend anyone. Really. Unless you're one of those freaks who won't let their kids watch Scoobie-doo because it's got ghosts in it. Trust me. If it were hanging on a cross or wearing a turban, *then* maybe it'd need changing.
...when it starts raining?...when you try to get through airport security?...when someone h4X0rs your jacket via Bluetooth?...when you can't find your pager/cellphone because you have 42 different pockets?
Personally, I think they haven't thought this one through. Solar power is for wimps. My jacket has a 17-foot lightning rod attached for energy collection. (It was either that or the rubber-soled-shoe/shag-pile-carpet combination, but that only works indoors.)
Looking at the map, you'll see that the sun is actually not that much farther from the Earth than Mars
It looks that way, but in fact the y-scale is logarithmic. Mars is at around 0.4AU away, whereas the Sun is (by definition) at 1.0AU. So really, the Sun is more than twice as far away.
Plus, this map must be a snapshot in time, since it's quite possible for mars to be "on the other side" of the Sun, and thus further away from Earth than it, depending on the relative phase of the two planets' orbits.
If you zoom in on the SDSS galaxies at about 1 giga-parsec, it looks like one of them's broadcasting a message... looks like... "Can you hear me now?"... that can't be right.
The big lego sets (that I got for Christmas every year) used to come with a catalogue. I remember seeing maybe two pages of sets that were blatantly girly (ponies and flowers and stuff, ew), and the rest of it was trains, cities, space, medieval, ships, and so on. 90% of the girls in my school who were into lego wouldn't have touched the girly stuff with a bargepole. (Too busy kicking my ass, for starters.:))
Lego-building always struck me as being an inherently unisex occupation. Maybe it isn't, and my childhood was a fraud. Ah well...
Slashdot Mirror
Not something I saw mentioned in the article links, but it's worth bearing in mind that the support of IPv6 is mandated in the protocol stack definitions of the 3GPP standards. This means, to cut a long story short, that all 3G telecoms kit (handsets, basestations and switchgear) will support IPv6 out of the box. At least in Europe and Japan.
:)
So, when it finally stops being vapourware, and assuming that people actually buy into this technology, I'd say that was a fairly good driver for other industries to adopt it too. Not looking forward to the transition though.
...do these awards, erm, ever get presented? :)
You assume there is no value to an object in orbit as opposed to the same item on the ground.
That's not exactly what I meant.
Commercial satellites are like this big time capsules of what technology was once like. They're designed to stay up there doing their job with very little intervention, for many years, while back on Earth, technology progresses as normal.
Do you still use a ten-year-old PC? (Wait - this is Slashdot. Don't answer that.) Do you still use a ten-year-old cellphone? That's what I'm getting at.
Here [google.com] is the last two lines of your post entered in google, except with `environment' spelled right, you lazy bastard.
That is absolutely the funniest thing I've read on Slashdot for an incredibly long time.
Consider that a big comms bird runs upwards of a billion dollars
I'd dispute that. You can launch a ton into LEO for less than $25M. Let's inflate that to $100M to be on the safe side. Development cost, even including NREs un-amortized, isn't going to be remotely close to $900M. No way. Prove me wrong? :)
Think that e.g. Hughes might be interested in keeping one of those puppies running at end-of-life?
No, I don't. They put enough fuel in it that, when it runs out, the technology on-board is obsolete. This is particularly true in comms, which is quite a fast-moving industry. Who wants a load of 1990's satellite TV hardware kept running? They call it end-of-life for a reason.
Is there actually a market for orbital recovery? Apart from Hubble, which it would be nice to have back for sentimental value, I can't think that there's much up there than needs recovering. Most satellites are so many years out of date that it makes no commercial sense to get them back again - you'd only have to re-launch them anyway, at which point you might as well have spent the money on new ones.
Equally, no-one needs to run the risk of trying to repair things that are orbiting the Earth; it's guaranteed to be cheaper to junk it and build a new one.
Methinks this guy is playing on popular support for the "keep Hubble" campaign to raise the profile of an otherwise unviable business.
</devil's advocate>
I! refuse! to! take! them! seriously! until! they! obey! the! same! punctuation! rules! as! everyone! else!
The problem with ECC is that the "hard problem" on which its security relies is based on some non-trivial mathematics which, until recently, no-one's really been interested in. Contrast this with RSA, which is based on a comparatively easy-to-understand problem (factoring a product of two primes) which has been known about for centuries.
What this means is, it's possible (very unlikely, but possible) that the conjecture that the elliptic curve logarithm problem is very hard to solve might be proved wrong tomorrow. That is much less of a risk with RSA (although see under quantum computing, if you go in for that sort of thing).
Last time I checked, the best "brute force" algorithm to attack ECC was the Pollard rho method. Is that still true?
...how long will it be before the definition of spam is extended to include not just email, but any electronic medium?
/. any time soon? :)
What I'm getting at is, will they be prosecuting people who troll on
Well, I stand corrected, because I can magically see it now. Perky intarweb.
Seems to be Slashdotted already, even though I'm seeing 0 comments @ -1...
Then again, I didn't think anyone really believed this, did they? I mean, any first-year EE student can tell you that mains cable is no good for signalling on, even at modest frequencies. Bah.
Have they gone after these guys yet?
http://support.mycrowsoft.com/
Does anyone know when "The Moon Landing Special Edition" will be out on DVD?
I heard someone just bought the rights to do a big-budget remake sometime this decade. Betcha it's not as good as the original though.
Meesa jar-jar-Bush!, erm, etc.
From end of article (yes, I skipped straight there... :))
There is simply no point in adding on their site "caution these images are not 100% precisely actual colors" when no digital image is really 'actual colors'.
Quite. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that NASA expected most of the people who were scrutinising these pictures to have some experience with astronomical imaging, where almost nothing is "true" colour in that sense.
Personally, I'm in favour of as much rebalancing as it takes to make the images pretty. If they don't make full use of my eye's ability to perceive them, then what was the point of spending all that money obtaining them in the first place? So long as the raw originals are available too, who cares?
> Amit szabad Jupiternek, nem szabad a kisokornek.
:)
Is that hungarian? Whatever it is, I like it. In fact, I might just steal it anyway, with your permission.
Is it stealing, if I have permission? There, that's almost back on-topic...
Or will any p2p user be allowed to attend, as long as there are enough seats?
Oh yes, they forgot to mention. Everyone who uses P2P networks is encouraged to turn up - the more, the merrier! They'll have their own special entrance, and everything! There is a special, erm, all-you-can-eat buffet organised, just for you. Yes, that's it. Oh, and P.S. bring your own handcuffs.
Hey... it could happen...
> more likely to be found through technological innovation rather than passage of more laws.
Yes...and...
Not everyone thinks it's that obvious, though. Particularly people who believe that copyright theft is morally equivalent to actual theft. (Yes, they do exist, just not around here :)).
I'm not sure what's going to come out of a meeting like this.
My concern is rather that whatever comes out in the end will not be listened to, even if it would solve all the world's copyright problems.
What would be nice is for the public to suddenly realise en masse that the fundamental nature of copyright as a compromise between artists and society is *not* the God-given right that those who profit buy it would have them believe. Then, perhaps the ethics and the law could be brought back "into sync", and the technology could just get on with being technology is as amoral a way possible.
But it's more likely that the grannies will be locked up. Y'know, easier.
Yes, a Summit will work! Already through the power of talking-about-things we have eliminated AIDS, poverty and global polution! Now we must turn this formidable weapon to bear on copyright theft!
</skeptic>
Whoops, someone modded me "Insightful" when I was trying to be "Funny". Can't win 'em all, I suppose. :) And I admit that I didn't read the article this time [slaps own wrists].
/. :)
> with your logic, a swastika is just a bunch of lines... how could that offend anyone?
I think that's a little different, although I can't quite put my finger on why (probably not enough coffee). Here goes anyway.
The BSD devil isn't really a devil; certainly, it doesn't depict the Biblical concept of Satan as I am familiar with it. It looks more of an imp, or a daemon. It doesn't look particularly evil. It looks like it is trying to evoke the "devil on your shoulder" concept that has been used in cartoons since, gosh, the 17th Century (or earlier? Anyone?). So intrinsically, it has little power to offend, since recognizing it as such would be the most likely reaction to it.
(Now, we could have a big theological discourse here, since the outward appearance of that which is evil may be far from unpleasant, and is thus made all the more evil for its deceitfulness, but that's a story for another day.)
The swastika, before it ever appeared on the Nazi flag, was as you rightly say, just a bunch of lines. But there can be few people in the world today who don't recognize it as a sign used by fascists and racists. You couldn't sell a product with a swastika motif on it unless it be to one of the above groups. So I think trying to compare the two is quite difficult.
It strikes me as strange that the most powerful and prominent pieces of iconography are not likenesses of good, evil, destructive, wholesome, natural or supernatural things; rather, they are simple symbols and lines: the swastika, the cross, the swatch, and, of course,
> too complicated...
for whom? for what?
> hard to reproduce...
== hard to forge...
> [and] has negative cultural, and religious
> ramifications.
No, it doesn't. It's a cartoon devil. It doesn't offend anyone. Really. Unless you're one of those freaks who won't let their kids watch Scoobie-doo because it's got ghosts in it. Trust me. If it were hanging on a cross or wearing a turban, *then* maybe it'd need changing.
Sheesh!
> the magnet clasps fell out 3 days after I put it on.
Hang on, did I read that right? They expect you to fill your pockets to overflowing with consumer electronics, and it's held together by *magnets*?
Sheesh...
...when it starts raining? ...when you try to get through airport security? ...when someone h4X0rs your jacket via Bluetooth? ...when you can't find your pager/cellphone because you have 42 different pockets?
Personally, I think they haven't thought this one through. Solar power is for wimps. My jacket has a 17-foot lightning rod attached for energy collection. (It was either that or the rubber-soled-shoe/shag-pile-carpet combination, but that only works indoors.)
Looking at the map, you'll see that the sun is actually not that much farther from the Earth than Mars
It looks that way, but in fact the y-scale is logarithmic. Mars is at around 0.4AU away, whereas the Sun is (by definition) at 1.0AU. So really, the Sun is more than twice as far away.
Plus, this map must be a snapshot in time, since it's quite possible for mars to be "on the other side" of the Sun, and thus further away from Earth than it, depending on the relative phase of the two planets' orbits.
If you zoom in on the SDSS galaxies at about 1 giga-parsec, it looks like one of them's broadcasting a message... looks like... "Can you hear me now?"... that can't be right.
The big lego sets (that I got for Christmas every year) used to come with a catalogue. I remember seeing maybe two pages of sets that were blatantly girly (ponies and flowers and stuff, ew), and the rest of it was trains, cities, space, medieval, ships, and so on. 90% of the girls in my school who were into lego wouldn't have touched the girly stuff with a bargepole. (Too busy kicking my ass, for starters. :))
Lego-building always struck me as being an inherently unisex occupation. Maybe it isn't, and my childhood was a fraud. Ah well...