Actually, it's very, very hot. The kinetic energy of what few particles there are is very high. It just acts really cold because there are so few of them that heat transfer by conduction is reduced to a negligable rate.
Octopuses are hard to test. They can demonstrate impressive intelligence in maze and puzzle tests - but they have very short lifespans, which makes any type of long-term learning experiment difficult. You get a year, maybe two.
There, watched. What he discusses is something similar to what I was envisioning, only he takes it further. Too far, in my view - he wants to make everything content-addressable, while I believe that existing transports are better suited to all things real-time and 1-to-1 and so current packet switching and content-addressable models should coexist. I do like his idea of CAN nodes as ubiquitous appliances, and that is exactly what I am calling for: Put them in the sat downlinks, put them in mobile phones, put them in vehicles, as appliances on your network, on the corporate network, in your cable box, in every laptop and tablet. A CAN doesn't *need* node addresses, it doesn't need configuration or routing beyond one hop unless you want low-latency... and that is what the conventional packet-switching is for.
Just envision what it could mean. You're on the train, on your phone, and a friend sends you a youtube video to watch. With today's technology, you would click the link and the video would begin downloading over the mobile network... which is slow, and which faces enough contention that you're probably on a transfer quota. In a world where PS and CAN coexist as I'd like them to, you'd still get the link via the SMS/IM/whatever means as you do today, but when you open it your phone will broadcast a message to all in range: 'I want the file of SHA1 xxxxx, anyone got it?' And, given that the most popular videos get millions of views, there's a good chance someone else on that train will have seen it earlier. Their phone sends it to you, you get your video. Much faster, and without putting any demand on the mobile network. If none of them have a file by that hash, then the phone can fall back to the current method.
Existing TCP/IP (By then, IPv6) and a CAN for content distribution, together. That's the type of technology that could make an ac-hoc internet possible.
Not the only ones. Content-addressible networking has enjoyed on-and-off support for years by pirates - as a community that has a desire to shift massive amounts of data with limited resources and in a decentralised manner, they do put a lot of work into appropriate technologies. For a time the ed2k link was king, before the rise of bittorrent, and now magnet links are starting to be seen more and more. Freenet runs on the idea. The pirates and the free-sat-network people have the same problem: How to distribute lots of data on limited transfer capacity. So it makes sense that they would find common solutions.
Also, there is no ccnx.org. Watching the video now though.
I think they were trying to get some good photos for propaganda use. Hunters looking celebratry while holding twenty bird corpses still dripping red in each hand, that sort of thing. Something that might sway public oppinion a little.
I really doubt high-speed traders run common internet traffic. No, they'll be running on their own dedicated cables for the short-distance links from exchange to offices, and leased TDM slots on long-distance fiber for inter-exchange traffic. Expensive, yes - but for an industry where miliseconds mean millions, worth the cost.
If it were that simple, then posession would be a mere civil offence. The subject could claim damages, but the police would stay out and there would be no jail time.
Telepresence is fine for orbital work, but light-lag will get really awkward if you go further out. Though I suppose it might help on mars... you can send your ship of operators out there, have them operate the science robots, then return home. Saves the problem of having to achieve a launch from planet surface and the uncomfortably deep gravity well.
You misunderstand. I didn't mean billions of times per request. I meant that it gets sent once per request, regardless of how many requests there may be. Which may be a lot. If a million people view a website (Large, but far from the largest userbase around) and each looks a thousand times (quite likely when checking for new posts, editing wikis or watching forums) than the page and all it's associated images, adverts and, CSS and JS files will all be requested and sent across the fiber. A billion duplicates of each traversing the same link. Browser caching only partially helps to alleviate the problem, because it still depends on the IMS request - and even IMSs are going to be ugly at orbital latency.
I almost got expelled from school because I refused to deny accusations of hacking, instead trying unsuccessfully to convince the teachers that they were using the word incorrectly and that, while I was hacking, I was not hacking in the sense they were misusing the term.
No, only the earth would need a channel. The moon is conveniently tide-locked. You could have the cable skim the upper atmosphere (Put bayload on balloon, balloon goes up, wait for cable, transfer payload) but you'd still need the type of cable that makes nanotubes look like tissue paper.
Because the moon has Stuff. You can build things from Stuff. The moon may not be the best place to go mining, but it's infinitely better than vacuum - and even unprocessed moonrock will make a decent radiation shield if you bury your base under enough of it.
I meant to say dumb-router, not dumb-endpoint. Kept getting distracted by work.
Anyway, to clarify, I'm thinking something like this: If there is demand for a particular file (be it a short video, an image from a popular website protesting the latest oppression of insert-government-here, a software update, etc - the network itsself would be content neutral), it shall be broadcast by the sat. Every listening ground station then picks in up and stores it, indexed by hash. Should any user then want it, they need only the hash - their local store already has the file. It combines the inherent efficiency of a broadcast network with the convenience and control of a packet-switched dumb network. There are a lot of practical considerations (not least how to decide what gets broadcast), but if there is to be any hope of this idea working it's going to need to take advantage of the broadcast nature of the communications medium. Given that a few popular files are going to make up a sizeable portion of demand, a content-addressible store seems to be an efficient way to go about that goal.
Sucks for realtime and point-to-point, of course. Still have to rely on the conventional internet-style methods for that. But what's the alternative? A thousand people view a website and every image, html and css file gets sent a thousand times in duplicate? Not practical.
Don't think of this as 'free internet in space.' The internet model, with it's simple dumb-endpoint packet-switching, isn't going to work. It's massively inefficient: Every time someone in the UK wants to view a webpage on a US server it gets send, possibly billions of times, through the oceanic fiber. If there is to be hope of getting any more than text through bidirectionally (And it must be bidirectional: Having one operator decide who gets precious capacity isn't in the hacker spirit) then it's going to mean some serious rethinking of networking fundamentals.
There is an advantage to be had with modern technology though. Storage is cheap. Cheap as dirt. Want to put a few gig in every ground station? Easy. Want to put a few terabytes in the larger ones? Compared to the cost of the radio gear you need anyway, barely adds anything. So I think what should be looked into is trying to shift the internet further towards content-addressible networking and caching (Proper content-addressible hash-based caching, not the evil that is trying to cache HTTP where every access needs to ask the server if the content has changed). Such technologies would reduce the need for expensive bandwidth by orders of magnitude, at the expense of consuming far cheaper storage at every caching node. Magnet links are a good place to start.
My steampunk styled nixie die uses chips of a design so old, the datasheet has the CCCP symbol on. I like to brag that it is made with genuine Soviet engineering. This is half-true: The chips are actually manufactured more recently, but the mask was designed by Soviet engineers.
Quite likely. From what I read at the time, there was a lot of quite hostile dispute within the student population between those who believed Freshwater had overstepped the bounds by preaching in class and the devout Christian faction of the student body who believed he he was preaching as the Lord commended. I never read of any incidents of violence, but there were claims of defaced lockers, torn-up workbooks and intimidation. All the common bullying tactics as each side did their best to drive the other into shutting up or leaving the school. I can't say how much of that was actually true though, because trying to seperate truth from rumor in a population of students is almost as hard as doing so on the internet - and all I ever had access to, not being at that school myself, were third-hand accounts on blogs.
In Freshwater's case, none of the student's he burned or their families agreed to press charges. One of them did sue Freshwater for damages, but the case was settled out of court for undisclosed terms. He was suspended in 2008, but it took two years to actually get him fired - for all of which he was comfortably doing nothing at all and still getting full pay for it.
That is how hard it is to get a teacher fired. Even if one goes so far as to burn students (admitidly volunteers) with a high voltage generator in direct violation of a clear safety warning, and to burn them with a crucific no less, in front of multible witness, for which one sues demanding compensation, and with the offending burn documented photographically... even after all that, it *STILL* takes two years on full pay to get him fired! It would actually have been easier to convict him for assault (The consent of a minor to be physically injured isn't worth much in court) if any of the parents had wished to press charges, rather then just one of them seeing it as a chance for a quick and lucrative settlement.
It's actually very difficult to fire a public school teacher in the US. Take, for example, the case of Freshwater. Not only did he repeatly ignore the curriculum, but he used his position as a teacher to preach his religious views to the class, and then *repeatly burned students*. Yes, he actually branded them. Used the science equipment to physically injure them. You might think that if a teacher does that he'd be fired on the spot, but it actually took months of paperwork and reviews to get him fired - and then he appealed it in a legal battle that cost the school millions of dollars.
I picked him out because he should be well-known to the slashdot crowd, but this isn't a liberal-vs-conservative thing. There are plenty of teachers from both sides who like to use their position to advance their own agenda (It's why some of them become reachers) and a lot who are simply incompetant. They are just very difficult and very expensive to get rid of. Teachers have some very powerful unions, and have used that power to achieve incredible job security.
So think.. what would schools really like to help manage their teachers? How about some rule that is hard to obey, ideally so convoluted that you'd need a lawyer just to work out what it permits, and for which offenders can be promply sacked? The FCC standards are ideal. Hard to even figure out, and it only takes a momentary lapse of thought to violate them. The law appears to have no right of appeal, no board review. It's just written for selective enforcement. If the management wants to continue employing a teacher, they can just turn a blind eye to the occasional bit of mild profanity... but if they want rid of a teacher, all they need to do is wait. When the rules are so difficult to follow, everyone will slip up sooner or later. Indecency becomes the perfect excuse.
Exactly what that results in would just depend on the school. It might be used as a quick-and-sneaky way to fire inept teachers without having to go through years of reviews and appeals, which is good. But equally it might be used for ideological clensing, so management can more easily stock the school with a staff who will indoctrinate the students into their own political agenda.
Birth control is 99-point-a-few-more-nines effective, *if* it is used correctly. The problem is that even those people who use it tend to do so incorrectly or inconsistantly. It isn't as simple as just sticking a condom on - firstly because you need to know a few useful things (Check the expiration date, careful not to slice it with your nail extensions, and don't put it on back-to-front), and secondly because you should always be doubling up. Condom in addition to the Pill, usually. Sure, one may fail... but two highly unlikely failures occuring at once? Not going to happen. Even better, an IUD: Even more reliable than the Pill, you can't forget to take it, and none of the potential side-effects. If you find condoms kill the mood too much (They do tend to ruin the spontinuity of the moment), send the male off for a vasectomy: 100% effective (Providing he isn't stupid enough to run home and mate before the existing sperm have all died off), perfectly safe, done under a local anasthetic. The only downside is the irrevesibility, so if you do plan to have kids in the future... CONDOM+IUD!
There. Condom + (IUD or Pill) = safe, childless, freest-love-since-the-hippies sex. Is is that hard for people to remember.
Except for a flaw in 2b: It would requite SOCA sieze computer equipment from a significant number of users. They could do that easily enough, but they couldn't do it without being noticed - one of those victims would be sure to talk about it, and we'd all know by now. As we've heard nothing about home computer seizures, that rules out another possibility.
I'm favoring the simpliest explanation: Someone at SOCA just made the 'deleting histories' thing up in order to scare people a little more. They are relying on scare tactics at the moment (Just look at the notice they put up!), and hinting that they can tell if a history has been deleted is a way to up the scareyness a little more.
Here in the UK and most of Europe, we get the levy... and it's *still* illegal to download or copy*. Is it any wonder people are starting to dislike the media industry so much?
* It's actually illegal to so much as rip your purchased CD onto a portable player for convenience in the UK, but no-one bothers to enforce that one.
True, but realistically a TV is just such an essential part of a modern lifestyle that it's almost unthinkable for a household not to have one. That's grounds to suspect any unlicenced household of having an illegal TV. Not proof, but suspicious enough to send an inspector around to take a look.
The above posters are right: TV detector vans were used once upon a time, when TVs were rarer and electromagnetically noisy. They don't work on non-CRT TVs though.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's very, very hot. The kinetic energy of what few particles there are is very high. It just acts really cold because there are so few of them that heat transfer by conduction is reduced to a negligable rate.
Octopuses are hard to test. They can demonstrate impressive intelligence in maze and puzzle tests - but they have very short lifespans, which makes any type of long-term learning experiment difficult. You get a year, maybe two.
There, watched. What he discusses is something similar to what I was envisioning, only he takes it further. Too far, in my view - he wants to make everything content-addressable, while I believe that existing transports are better suited to all things real-time and 1-to-1 and so current packet switching and content-addressable models should coexist. I do like his idea of CAN nodes as ubiquitous appliances, and that is exactly what I am calling for: Put them in the sat downlinks, put them in mobile phones, put them in vehicles, as appliances on your network, on the corporate network, in your cable box, in every laptop and tablet. A CAN doesn't *need* node addresses, it doesn't need configuration or routing beyond one hop unless you want low-latency... and that is what the conventional packet-switching is for.
Just envision what it could mean. You're on the train, on your phone, and a friend sends you a youtube video to watch. With today's technology, you would click the link and the video would begin downloading over the mobile network... which is slow, and which faces enough contention that you're probably on a transfer quota. In a world where PS and CAN coexist as I'd like them to, you'd still get the link via the SMS/IM/whatever means as you do today, but when you open it your phone will broadcast a message to all in range: 'I want the file of SHA1 xxxxx, anyone got it?' And, given that the most popular videos get millions of views, there's a good chance someone else on that train will have seen it earlier. Their phone sends it to you, you get your video. Much faster, and without putting any demand on the mobile network. If none of them have a file by that hash, then the phone can fall back to the current method.
Existing TCP/IP (By then, IPv6) and a CAN for content distribution, together. That's the type of technology that could make an ac-hoc internet possible.
Not the only ones. Content-addressible networking has enjoyed on-and-off support for years by pirates - as a community that has a desire to shift massive amounts of data with limited resources and in a decentralised manner, they do put a lot of work into appropriate technologies. For a time the ed2k link was king, before the rise of bittorrent, and now magnet links are starting to be seen more and more. Freenet runs on the idea. The pirates and the free-sat-network people have the same problem: How to distribute lots of data on limited transfer capacity. So it makes sense that they would find common solutions.
Also, there is no ccnx.org. Watching the video now though.
I think they were trying to get some good photos for propaganda use. Hunters looking celebratry while holding twenty bird corpses still dripping red in each hand, that sort of thing. Something that might sway public oppinion a little.
I really doubt high-speed traders run common internet traffic. No, they'll be running on their own dedicated cables for the short-distance links from exchange to offices, and leased TDM slots on long-distance fiber for inter-exchange traffic. Expensive, yes - but for an industry where miliseconds mean millions, worth the cost.
If it were that simple, then posession would be a mere civil offence. The subject could claim damages, but the police would stay out and there would be no jail time.
Telepresence is fine for orbital work, but light-lag will get really awkward if you go further out. Though I suppose it might help on mars... you can send your ship of operators out there, have them operate the science robots, then return home. Saves the problem of having to achieve a launch from planet surface and the uncomfortably deep gravity well.
You misunderstand. I didn't mean billions of times per request. I meant that it gets sent once per request, regardless of how many requests there may be. Which may be a lot. If a million people view a website (Large, but far from the largest userbase around) and each looks a thousand times (quite likely when checking for new posts, editing wikis or watching forums) than the page and all it's associated images, adverts and, CSS and JS files will all be requested and sent across the fiber. A billion duplicates of each traversing the same link. Browser caching only partially helps to alleviate the problem, because it still depends on the IMS request - and even IMSs are going to be ugly at orbital latency.
Because air is only 21% oxygen, give or take a little. We already have rockets that use atmospheric oxygen: We just call them jet engines.
I almost got expelled from school because I refused to deny accusations of hacking, instead trying unsuccessfully to convince the teachers that they were using the word incorrectly and that, while I was hacking, I was not hacking in the sense they were misusing the term.
No, only the earth would need a channel. The moon is conveniently tide-locked. You could have the cable skim the upper atmosphere (Put bayload on balloon, balloon goes up, wait for cable, transfer payload) but you'd still need the type of cable that makes nanotubes look like tissue paper.
Because the moon has Stuff. You can build things from Stuff. The moon may not be the best place to go mining, but it's infinitely better than vacuum - and even unprocessed moonrock will make a decent radiation shield if you bury your base under enough of it.
I meant to say dumb-router, not dumb-endpoint. Kept getting distracted by work.
Anyway, to clarify, I'm thinking something like this: If there is demand for a particular file (be it a short video, an image from a popular website protesting the latest oppression of insert-government-here, a software update, etc - the network itsself would be content neutral), it shall be broadcast by the sat. Every listening ground station then picks in up and stores it, indexed by hash. Should any user then want it, they need only the hash - their local store already has the file. It combines the inherent efficiency of a broadcast network with the convenience and control of a packet-switched dumb network. There are a lot of practical considerations (not least how to decide what gets broadcast), but if there is to be any hope of this idea working it's going to need to take advantage of the broadcast nature of the communications medium. Given that a few popular files are going to make up a sizeable portion of demand, a content-addressible store seems to be an efficient way to go about that goal.
Sucks for realtime and point-to-point, of course. Still have to rely on the conventional internet-style methods for that. But what's the alternative? A thousand people view a website and every image, html and css file gets sent a thousand times in duplicate? Not practical.
Don't think of this as 'free internet in space.' The internet model, with it's simple dumb-endpoint packet-switching, isn't going to work. It's massively inefficient: Every time someone in the UK wants to view a webpage on a US server it gets send, possibly billions of times, through the oceanic fiber. If there is to be hope of getting any more than text through bidirectionally (And it must be bidirectional: Having one operator decide who gets precious capacity isn't in the hacker spirit) then it's going to mean some serious rethinking of networking fundamentals.
There is an advantage to be had with modern technology though. Storage is cheap. Cheap as dirt. Want to put a few gig in every ground station? Easy. Want to put a few terabytes in the larger ones? Compared to the cost of the radio gear you need anyway, barely adds anything. So I think what should be looked into is trying to shift the internet further towards content-addressible networking and caching (Proper content-addressible hash-based caching, not the evil that is trying to cache HTTP where every access needs to ask the server if the content has changed). Such technologies would reduce the need for expensive bandwidth by orders of magnitude, at the expense of consuming far cheaper storage at every caching node. Magnet links are a good place to start.
Words change. These words have changed so much, hardly anyone knows what they mean any more.
Overexplained the joke.
My steampunk styled nixie die uses chips of a design so old, the datasheet has the CCCP symbol on. I like to brag that it is made with genuine Soviet engineering. This is half-true: The chips are actually manufactured more recently, but the mask was designed by Soviet engineers.
Uranium hexafluride is nasty stuff just in chemical terms.
Quite likely. From what I read at the time, there was a lot of quite hostile dispute within the student population between those who believed Freshwater had overstepped the bounds by preaching in class and the devout Christian faction of the student body who believed he he was preaching as the Lord commended. I never read of any incidents of violence, but there were claims of defaced lockers, torn-up workbooks and intimidation. All the common bullying tactics as each side did their best to drive the other into shutting up or leaving the school. I can't say how much of that was actually true though, because trying to seperate truth from rumor in a population of students is almost as hard as doing so on the internet - and all I ever had access to, not being at that school myself, were third-hand accounts on blogs.
In Freshwater's case, none of the student's he burned or their families agreed to press charges. One of them did sue Freshwater for damages, but the case was settled out of court for undisclosed terms. He was suspended in 2008, but it took two years to actually get him fired - for all of which he was comfortably doing nothing at all and still getting full pay for it.
That is how hard it is to get a teacher fired. Even if one goes so far as to burn students (admitidly volunteers) with a high voltage generator in direct violation of a clear safety warning, and to burn them with a crucific no less, in front of multible witness, for which one sues demanding compensation, and with the offending burn documented photographically... even after all that, it *STILL* takes two years on full pay to get him fired! It would actually have been easier to convict him for assault (The consent of a minor to be physically injured isn't worth much in court) if any of the parents had wished to press charges, rather then just one of them seeing it as a chance for a quick and lucrative settlement.
It's actually very difficult to fire a public school teacher in the US. Take, for example, the case of Freshwater. Not only did he repeatly ignore the curriculum, but he used his position as a teacher to preach his religious views to the class, and then *repeatly burned students*. Yes, he actually branded them. Used the science equipment to physically injure them. You might think that if a teacher does that he'd be fired on the spot, but it actually took months of paperwork and reviews to get him fired - and then he appealed it in a legal battle that cost the school millions of dollars.
I picked him out because he should be well-known to the slashdot crowd, but this isn't a liberal-vs-conservative thing. There are plenty of teachers from both sides who like to use their position to advance their own agenda (It's why some of them become reachers) and a lot who are simply incompetant. They are just very difficult and very expensive to get rid of. Teachers have some very powerful unions, and have used that power to achieve incredible job security.
So think.. what would schools really like to help manage their teachers? How about some rule that is hard to obey, ideally so convoluted that you'd need a lawyer just to work out what it permits, and for which offenders can be promply sacked? The FCC standards are ideal. Hard to even figure out, and it only takes a momentary lapse of thought to violate them. The law appears to have no right of appeal, no board review. It's just written for selective enforcement. If the management wants to continue employing a teacher, they can just turn a blind eye to the occasional bit of mild profanity... but if they want rid of a teacher, all they need to do is wait. When the rules are so difficult to follow, everyone will slip up sooner or later. Indecency becomes the perfect excuse.
Exactly what that results in would just depend on the school. It might be used as a quick-and-sneaky way to fire inept teachers without having to go through years of reviews and appeals, which is good. But equally it might be used for ideological clensing, so management can more easily stock the school with a staff who will indoctrinate the students into their own political agenda.
Birth control is 99-point-a-few-more-nines effective, *if* it is used correctly. The problem is that even those people who use it tend to do so incorrectly or inconsistantly. It isn't as simple as just sticking a condom on - firstly because you need to know a few useful things (Check the expiration date, careful not to slice it with your nail extensions, and don't put it on back-to-front), and secondly because you should always be doubling up. Condom in addition to the Pill, usually. Sure, one may fail... but two highly unlikely failures occuring at once? Not going to happen. Even better, an IUD: Even more reliable than the Pill, you can't forget to take it, and none of the potential side-effects. If you find condoms kill the mood too much (They do tend to ruin the spontinuity of the moment), send the male off for a vasectomy: 100% effective (Providing he isn't stupid enough to run home and mate before the existing sperm have all died off), perfectly safe, done under a local anasthetic. The only downside is the irrevesibility, so if you do plan to have kids in the future... CONDOM+IUD!
There. Condom + (IUD or Pill) = safe, childless, freest-love-since-the-hippies sex. Is is that hard for people to remember.
Except for a flaw in 2b: It would requite SOCA sieze computer equipment from a significant number of users. They could do that easily enough, but they couldn't do it without being noticed - one of those victims would be sure to talk about it, and we'd all know by now. As we've heard nothing about home computer seizures, that rules out another possibility.
I'm favoring the simpliest explanation: Someone at SOCA just made the 'deleting histories' thing up in order to scare people a little more. They are relying on scare tactics at the moment (Just look at the notice they put up!), and hinting that they can tell if a history has been deleted is a way to up the scareyness a little more.
Here in the UK and most of Europe, we get the levy... and it's *still* illegal to download or copy*. Is it any wonder people are starting to dislike the media industry so much?
* It's actually illegal to so much as rip your purchased CD onto a portable player for convenience in the UK, but no-one bothers to enforce that one.
True, but realistically a TV is just such an essential part of a modern lifestyle that it's almost unthinkable for a household not to have one. That's grounds to suspect any unlicenced household of having an illegal TV. Not proof, but suspicious enough to send an inspector around to take a look.
The above posters are right: TV detector vans were used once upon a time, when TVs were rarer and electromagnetically noisy. They don't work on non-CRT TVs though.