How far is the foreseeable future? I'm thinking not as far as people would like to think. So the answer is "perhaps". 1) Yes economics has something to do with it.. but extrapolating concord economics to a hypersonic might be stretch.. the train is cheaper than air travel.. but you don't see near as much train travel as air travel on longer routes. It depends on the economics of the system. No you won't see a hypersonic concord, but a concord can't go hypersonic anyway. When the cost per hour (time saved) exceeds cost difference of travel.. you will see a niche. That depends on the technology and the relative cost for the energy difference. If for example you have miracle fuel where energy is cheap and the mechanicals aren't too expensive, you will see it. Or if it fills a unique niche (time delivery or areas not easily serviced by subsonic airplanes) would also push it to execution. 2) Security.. I can imagine a number of security counter arguments.. example there is no pilot so no human error, Or the defense forces have a destruct button, or that antiballistic missile technology actually works.. for one incoming craft with a transponder. I think there are ways around the security arguments. Also the sensing arguments similar.. (infrared trackers, satellite radar, transponders, etc). 3) No, hypersonic tech isn't here, so it is rather hard to say what it would look like.. what the ground time would be for air time. But I expect if they are constructing it.. and it is economic, that the concord gives the high side of maintenance time, I would expect automatic testing, adaptive structures, advanced materials and of course engine/propulsion (and or heat/aerodynamics) would be needed to push the turn around time down. Imagine no pilot, and the craft is controlled from the ground it being so smart you mostly say go from space port A to space port B, After it lands it cycles itself through a plane service/refinish line and is ready for flight very shortly.. it might be worth while, does that make it economic.. depends on all those little details on how it does it. How well do you foresee the future?
hmm.. I would agree with a number of people. memory is generally lossy. However the other point would be from the argument I get the implied that: Consciousness requires lossy memory.. lossy memory is certainly easy to generate. Though it might not be deterministic (depends on how you loose memory).
I too have had your problem, and so created a 21 mile wireless link (yes 100 milliwatt works just fine for 21 miles at 11 Mbs with proper antenna and line of sight.) A satellite link is going to kill you on latency. I would suggest what you need is a tower to get above the trees (and possible hills) so you do get line of sight to where you need (cell tower or town). I would then look at cell phone (data) service (possible with a repeater available from several vendors like cyberguys). Another possibility mentioned going wireless to a local wireless provider (or creating your own) is also possible (just by going to somewhere in a local town that you get line of sight to from your tower). But line of sight really is a starting point for all of this.
Most trees can be gotten over with 60 foot of tower, hills might be higher than that, depends on your area, you'll really need about 30 more feet that what ever the tallest item is between you and where you want to go.
Let say for a second that interstellar travel is too expensive, not worth the gain, and we just stay home and tend our little planet (hopefully making a nice place to live). What might we gain? or lose?
I guess we don't spend resources (time and effort, since all the rest of the resources are recyclable), however what if another civilization manages to accomplish interstellar travel. It doesn't matter how, perhaps it is only as a robotic seed ship. From history.. the culture that goes visiting always is at an advantage. If for no other reason than the meeting isn't at their home. You can do all sorts of things if you are visiting someone.. and not have to worry about the results back at home.. Especially if the people you are visiting think it is impossible to travel back to you.
Now ask yourself.. do you want to be the people traveling (or trying) or the people getting the interstellar visitors, who might be very ill mannered.
Yes as the article suggested shipping material is expensive, much more so than information. There are however other reasons than economic to colonize. For example if you believe in the lottery (or VC funding) while it maybe expensive to set up a colony, the reward may very well be ownership of your own eden (just the way you defined it), or ownership of your own planet. How much is that worth? Of course the chances are low you would succeed, but as technology marches on (and others go before you) your chances get better, and probably your costs lower.
Other reasons can also include access to resources you might not get here.. as an example maybe you do want to make your own kilogram of antimatter (goes with the rockets you want to build...) that would be impossible here (aside from the technical issues, what country would let you make it?) maybe set up solar arrays on mercury, store your energy as antimatter, ship it around the solar system (or out of the system). A few light seconds makes a lot of difference in rule enforcement.
As an observation, life just doesn't flourish anywhere.. it goes *everywhere* it can reach. If space is now reachable.. I would expect life to find niches there.. even if I can't imagine how exactly it would work economically, or exactly what reasons it wanted to go there. I would expect life would move out there, because it *could*.
It is sad to see several services get knocked out by DDOS attacks. Several people have commented that these people leaving is a good thing in that they don't like blackhole lists and all the associated e-mail blocking and the possible trouble of getting unblacklisted. However think carefully. This type of attack can pretty much be used against any service that some one dislikes. This might be RIAA against a download site, or spammers and a blackhole list, or a news service with an unpopular story. And just because someone runs a blacklist site, doesn't mean people have to use it to block mail.
This will be a problem in the future as the bandwidth available for zombie gets higher (ah, broadband) and more common. And as the average person gets all the advantages (without the security) of such a connection. DDOS is almost impossible to defend against without deep pockets. As almost all the sources are (innocent, if ignorant) 3rd parties, with the luck of large pipes and open machines.
The only real solution I see (other than deep pockets which only makes it harder, but not a solution) is P2P systems that have trustworth sources (public/private key encryption) and that can be distributed in the same environment (big pipe, many consumer) machines. But you still need to build a system and get it distributed out there before this solution is going to work.
We will see this tactic again.. not just against black hole lists.. so be careful what you wish for.
Anyone look at the power/pound? Let's see.. 27000 V, 20 microamp, for 3 millipound.. think that works out to something like.54 Watt..54 W/.003 lb = 180 W/lb.. Anyone know how this compares to say "normal" engines? Seems to be a really good battery, unless you have a tether (or beamed power).
Well depends on who you want to help, and how much you are willing to spend.
(I would send this e-mail, but your address is not public) You could have contacted the holder of the redirected addresses (66.220.17.47) They are all together and all on one class C.. All owned and mapped to one entity (Hurricane Electric). You can find this by doing a search at www.arin.net. They might be more receptive to your call (if anyone is there) as either they are doing the redirect, or their boxes have been compromised.
Personally depending on how nice you want to be, you could just make your own firewall/dns/etc (not hard with linux) and have it search the root domains for every DNS lookup.. It is more secure, though if everyone did that the root servers would probably die. Leave a report with your ISP, get off and try again tomorrow when someone who might be able to help (and/or cares) sees the note. I would also recommend that you call the next day (business hours) as your note might well get misplaced. You might also think about this response and determine.. Do you want them as your ISP (might not be an option.. but is something you might think about).
If you want to be more vigorous I suppose you could find someone to fix the hack. It is indeed an interesting hack, took sometime to set up, and they are looking for some gain.. Your ISP should care, and frankly the others should too with this amount of effort, they don't have anything (dollars) yet, but I expect it would be really easy to use this to catch who did it. (Phony credit card numbers anyone?) But while it might not be an ideal world.. I expect most enforcement people have hotter priorities.
I am in a similar situation. That is I am in a rural area, and broadband solutions of DSL or cable modems are not possible here. As there is no cable system here, and the phone system CO is about 4 miles as the crow flies (longer by wire) and the wire is circa 1970.. phone modems work at somewhere between 21 and 33 Kb.
We are using wireless. Actually I am using a linksys (with a decent antenna) and it works well going out to half a mile or better with decent antennas (15 db mini-dish). One of the new linksys would do better, or you could go with a 24 db dish and get something like a factor of 3-5 on range (+3db = double the power). A lower frequency will work through trees better (900 Mhz). In our case (2.4 Ghz) a tree kills about 5 db (more if it is wet) or drops you to 30% range. In your case it depends on how many trees are between the customer and base stations. Note there are limits to the linksys for number of people connected, so if you are going to have a lot per node (greater than 30) you should invest in enterprise level (cisco or tranzeo, I did like aeronet (cisco), but their new software has some issues. I haven't got the new tranzeo yet, but they look very good). You will probably want to use decent antennas on the systems, you might try hyperlink (www.hyperlink.com) but there are probably cheaper places on the net or ebay. For our location trenching and running wire or fiber was cost prohibitive.. so I expect it will be for you also. Though fiber does wonders for bandwidth. If you can get the cooperation of your local phone company DSL might work for you (see ruby ranch), but have found at least locally that doesn't work. (old phone lines and uncooperative phone company).
For bandwidth I would highly recommend say something like packeteer, however if you are a true geek, I have found that a cheap linux system with ipchains (or iptables) is much more cost effective. There is more setup involved, but you also get more flexability. I use ipchains, NAT and TOS mangles to manange the bandwidth here and it is very effective.. though what is "fair" can be hard to say some days.. in this case e-mail, goes first, then http, then ftp and finally others.
Currently the neighbors are averaging around 100 B/s, peak at 128 Kb for a couple of minutes (since that is the limit they can get) and in total move about 98 Meg a month.. they are rural (and not slashdotters..) so they are pretty much e-mail and http. Generally they aren't running servers. A T-1 will work well to start (IMHO, contrary to others), but of course it will grow as you get more people on, and they start using more bandwidth. Remember (for some of you city folk).. they were on 21 Kb modems on a good day so this is much an improvement! Don't need to make a superhighway today when just a decent dirt road will work fine (and gets the job done faster and cheaper.)
Oh duh, this will tend to give the hardware speed (fastest), if you want average throughput, you should use the average ping times instead of the fastest.
But it really looks like the other experts have it covered from the comments before this..
Yes most of the bandwidth testers I have seen have real problems with things over about 700 Kbaud, and their accuracy is a problem at the higher speeds. I have found that FTP to a site you know is fast works well, you might try NCSA. And you want a large file (couple of hundred Meg works best, need to average over a number of minutes). Also contrary to what a person said previous it is not 8 bit/byte.. there is some overhead with IP and possibly transport, I use 10 bit/byte which is a bit high, but I can divide by 10 easy.. (most nights) You might want to do this in a quite time (say 4 am is good), but anytime of day should work.
IF you are a real fussy person you can do the following: take ping and ping say 20 times with a packet length of 64 bytes - take the fastest number, repeat with length of 128, 256, 512, 1024 bytes,again with the fastest times. Get your self a page of graph paper (okay, I suppose for slashdot people you can use your hp graphing calculator) Plot bytes going up, and time going out, it should be a straight line within the accuracy of your pinger (I would recommend using a linux system for this, windows is a bit course). The slope is speed (bytes/sec) without overheads, if you note, it doesn't go though (0 sec,0 byte) - the offset (0 byte, time value) is going to be your latency. You can do this with any node you can ping (so you can go past your ISP to test your ISP's upsteam ISP), remember this reflects the slowest link.
It is possible to work backwards and find all the speeds (and latencies) for links from you out (with increasing errors).. but that is more complicated and for another time...
Slashdot Mirror
How far is the foreseeable future? I'm thinking not as far as people would like to think. So the answer is "perhaps".
1) Yes economics has something to do with it.. but extrapolating concord economics to a hypersonic might be stretch.. the train is cheaper than air travel.. but you don't see near as much train travel as air travel on longer routes. It depends on the economics of the system. No you won't see a hypersonic concord, but a concord can't go hypersonic anyway. When the cost per hour (time saved) exceeds cost difference of travel.. you will see a niche. That depends on the technology and the relative cost for the energy difference. If for example you have miracle fuel where energy is cheap and the mechanicals aren't too expensive, you will see it.
Or if it fills a unique niche (time delivery or areas not easily serviced by subsonic airplanes) would also push it to execution.
2) Security.. I can imagine a number of security counter arguments.. example there is no pilot so no human error, Or the defense forces have a destruct button, or that antiballistic missile technology actually works.. for one incoming craft with a transponder. I think there are ways around the security arguments. Also the sensing arguments similar.. (infrared trackers, satellite radar, transponders, etc).
3) No, hypersonic tech isn't here, so it is rather hard to say what it would look like.. what the ground time would be for air time. But I expect if they are constructing it.. and it is economic, that the concord gives the high side of maintenance time, I would expect automatic testing, adaptive structures, advanced materials and of course engine/propulsion (and or heat/aerodynamics) would be needed to push the turn around time down. Imagine no pilot, and the craft is controlled from the ground it being so smart you mostly say go from space port A to space port B, After it lands it cycles itself through a plane service/refinish line and is ready for flight very shortly.. it might be worth while, does that make it economic.. depends on all those little details on how it does it. How well do you foresee the future?
hmm.. I would agree with a number of people. memory is generally lossy.
However the other point would be from the argument I get the implied that:
Consciousness requires lossy memory.. lossy memory is certainly easy to generate.
Though it might not be deterministic (depends on how you loose memory).
I too have had your problem, and so created a 21 mile wireless link (yes 100 milliwatt works just fine for 21 miles at 11 Mbs with proper antenna and line of sight.) A satellite link is going to kill you on latency. I would suggest what you need is a tower to get above the trees (and possible hills) so you do get line of sight to where you need (cell tower or town). I would then look at cell phone (data) service (possible with a repeater available from several vendors like cyberguys). Another possibility mentioned going wireless to a local wireless provider (or creating your own) is also possible (just by going to somewhere in a local town that you get line of sight to from your tower). But line of sight really is a starting point for all of this.
Most trees can be gotten over with 60 foot of tower, hills might be higher than that, depends on your area, you'll really need about 30 more feet that what ever the tallest item is between you and where you want to go.
Here is something else to think about.
Let say for a second that interstellar travel is too expensive, not worth the gain, and we just stay home and tend our little planet (hopefully making a nice place to live). What might we gain? or lose?
I guess we don't spend resources (time and effort, since all the rest of the resources are recyclable), however what if another civilization manages to accomplish interstellar travel. It doesn't matter how, perhaps it is only as a robotic seed ship. From history.. the culture that goes visiting always is at an advantage. If for no other reason than the meeting isn't at their home. You can do all sorts of things if you are visiting someone.. and not have to worry about the results back at home.. Especially if the people you are visiting think it is impossible to travel back to you.
Now ask yourself.. do you want to be the people traveling (or trying) or the people getting the interstellar visitors, who might be very ill mannered.
Yes as the article suggested shipping material is expensive, much more so than information. There are however other reasons than economic to colonize. For example if you believe in the lottery (or VC funding) while it maybe expensive to set up a colony, the reward may very well be ownership of your own eden (just the way you defined it), or ownership of your own planet. How much is that worth? Of course the chances are low you would succeed, but as technology marches on (and others go before you) your chances get better, and probably your costs lower.
Other reasons can also include access to resources you might not get here.. as an example maybe you do want to make your own kilogram of antimatter (goes with the rockets you want to build...) that would be impossible here (aside from the technical issues, what country would let you make it?) maybe set up solar arrays on mercury, store your energy as antimatter, ship it around the solar system (or out of the system). A few light seconds makes a lot of difference in rule enforcement.
As an observation, life just doesn't flourish anywhere.. it goes *everywhere* it can reach. If space is now reachable.. I would expect life to find niches there.. even if I can't imagine how exactly it would work economically, or exactly what reasons it wanted to go there. I would expect life would move out there, because it *could*.
It is sad to see several services get knocked out by DDOS attacks. Several people have commented that these people leaving is a good thing in that they don't like blackhole lists and all the associated e-mail blocking and the possible trouble of getting unblacklisted. However think carefully. This type of attack can pretty much be used against any service that some one dislikes. This might be RIAA against a download site, or spammers and a blackhole list, or a news service with an unpopular story. And just because someone runs a blacklist site, doesn't mean people have to use it to block mail.
This will be a problem in the future as the bandwidth available for zombie gets higher (ah, broadband) and more common. And as the average person gets all the advantages (without the security) of such a connection. DDOS is almost impossible to defend against without deep pockets. As almost all the sources are (innocent, if ignorant) 3rd parties, with the luck of large pipes and open machines.
The only real solution I see (other than deep pockets which only makes it harder, but not a solution) is P2P systems that have trustworth sources (public/private key encryption) and that can be distributed in the same environment (big pipe, many consumer) machines. But you still need to build a system and get it distributed out there before this solution is going to work.
We will see this tactic again.. not just against black hole lists.. so be careful what you wish for.
Anyone look at the power/pound? .54 Watt. .54 W/ .003 lb = 180 W/lb..
Let's see.. 27000 V, 20 microamp, for 3 millipound.. think that works out to something like
Anyone know how this compares to say
"normal" engines?
Seems to be a really good battery, unless you have a tether (or beamed power).
Well depends on who you want to help, and how much you are willing to spend.
(I would send this e-mail, but your address is not public) You could have contacted the holder of the redirected addresses (66.220.17.47) They are all together and all on one class C.. All owned and mapped to one entity (Hurricane Electric). You can find this by doing a search at www.arin.net. They might be more receptive to your call (if anyone is there) as either they are doing the redirect, or their boxes have been compromised.
Personally depending on how nice you want to be, you could just make your own firewall/dns/etc (not hard with linux) and have it search the root domains for every DNS lookup.. It is more secure, though if everyone did that the root servers would probably die. Leave a report with your ISP, get off and try again tomorrow when someone who might be able to help (and/or cares) sees the note. I would also recommend that you call the next day (business hours) as your note might well get misplaced. You might also think about this response and determine.. Do you want them as your ISP (might not be an option.. but is something you might think about).
If you want to be more vigorous I suppose you could find someone to fix the hack. It is indeed an interesting hack, took sometime to set up, and they are looking for some gain.. Your ISP should care, and frankly the others should too with this amount of effort, they don't have anything (dollars) yet, but I expect it would be really easy to use this to catch who did it. (Phony credit card numbers anyone?) But while it might not be an ideal world.. I expect most enforcement people have hotter priorities.
I am in a similar situation. That is I am in a rural area, and broadband solutions of DSL or cable modems are not possible here. As there is no cable system here, and the phone system CO is about 4 miles as the crow flies (longer by wire) and the wire is circa 1970.. phone modems work at somewhere between 21 and 33 Kb.
We are using wireless. Actually I am using a linksys (with a decent antenna) and it works well going out to half a mile or better with decent antennas (15 db mini-dish). One of the new linksys would do better, or you could go with a 24 db dish and get something like a factor of 3-5 on range (+3db = double the power). A lower frequency will work through trees better (900 Mhz). In our case (2.4 Ghz) a tree kills about 5 db (more if it is wet) or drops you to 30% range. In your case it depends on how many trees are between the customer and base stations. Note there are limits to the linksys for number of people connected, so if you are going to have a lot per node (greater than 30) you should invest in enterprise level (cisco or tranzeo, I did like aeronet (cisco), but their new software has some issues. I haven't got the new tranzeo yet, but they look very good). You will probably want to use decent antennas on the systems, you might try hyperlink (www.hyperlink.com) but there are probably cheaper places on the net or ebay.
For our location trenching and running wire or fiber was cost prohibitive.. so I expect it will be for you also. Though fiber does wonders for bandwidth. If you can get the cooperation of your local phone company DSL might work for you (see ruby ranch), but have found at least locally that doesn't work. (old phone lines and uncooperative phone company).
For bandwidth I would highly recommend say something like packeteer, however if you are a true geek, I have found that a cheap linux system with ipchains (or iptables) is much more cost effective. There is more setup involved, but you also get more flexability. I use ipchains, NAT and TOS mangles to manange the bandwidth here and it is very effective.. though what is "fair" can be hard to say some days.. in this case e-mail, goes first, then http, then ftp and finally others.
Currently the neighbors are averaging around 100 B/s, peak at 128 Kb for a couple of minutes (since that is the limit they can get) and in total move about 98 Meg a month.. they are rural (and not slashdotters..) so they are pretty much e-mail and http. Generally they aren't running servers. A T-1 will work well to start (IMHO, contrary to others), but of course it will grow as you get more people on, and they start using more bandwidth. Remember (for some of you city folk).. they were on 21 Kb modems on a good day so this is much an improvement! Don't need to make a superhighway today when just a decent dirt road will work fine (and gets the job done faster and cheaper.)
Oh duh, this will tend to give the hardware speed (fastest), if you want average throughput, you should use the average ping times instead of the fastest.
But it really looks like the other experts have it covered from the comments before this..
Yes most of the bandwidth testers I have seen have real problems with things over about 700 Kbaud, and their accuracy is a problem at the higher speeds. I have found that FTP to a site you know is fast works well, you might try NCSA. And you want a large file (couple of hundred Meg works best, need to average over a number of minutes). Also contrary to what a person said previous it is not 8 bit/byte.. there is some overhead with IP and possibly transport, I use 10 bit/byte which is a bit high, but I can divide by 10 easy.. (most nights) You might want to do this in a quite time (say 4 am is good), but anytime of day should work.
IF you are a real fussy person you can do the following: take ping and ping say 20 times with a packet length of 64 bytes - take the fastest number, repeat with length of 128, 256, 512, 1024 bytes,again with the fastest times. Get your self a page of graph paper (okay, I suppose for slashdot people you can use your hp graphing calculator) Plot bytes going up, and time going out, it should be a straight line within the accuracy of your pinger (I would recommend using a linux system for this, windows is a bit course). The slope is speed (bytes/sec) without overheads, if you note, it doesn't go though (0 sec,0 byte) - the offset (0 byte, time value) is going to be your latency. You can do this with any node you can ping (so you can go past your ISP to test your ISP's upsteam ISP), remember this reflects the slowest link.
It is possible to work backwards and find all the speeds (and latencies) for links from you out (with increasing errors).. but that is more complicated and for another time...