They are basic, note-taking, doc-writing, email-sending, web-surfing, e-book-reading, port-able, wire-less, hand-held AKA lap-top devices that don't cost much. Perfect for the coffee table to look up imdb ratings in front of the TV or to check the weather radar/forecast before heading out in the morning.
For starters, of the 60 or so you claim to be in close proximity, only the ones actively moving data or carrying a conversation will be actually transmitting anything more than house keeping messages. That alone thins the pool quite a bit. If you are monitoring conversations from a particular set of towers and discover something interesting, then you will be able to know which phone is carrying that conversation in an instant.
Even if you don't know which conversation is interesting, you can still localize each phone by triangulation one at a time, continuously. If you discover that one or more of them is near a "location of interest" then you can tag that phone for closer monitoring in the future. If you notice such anomalies like a phone switching off before entering a certain locale(where you know the signal is good and so it is not a drop), you can tag it for later surveillance. If any phone in question has a GPS, it can be commanded to *send* the location data without notifying the user. Sooo easy.
More, the base station can command any nearby phones to lower their output power or even switch off, and the inverse, the cell tower can command the desired phone to increase output power to the maximum available, and cause it to transmit continuously, EVEN IF THE PHONE IS IDLE. If the spy folks are anywhere near the target phone with a couple of directional antennas, then the phone is readily located and the game is over.
All of these 'features' are documented in the standards. No special code versions or hacking required. If you 'own' the cell systems as any gov effectively does, then special versions of the software can be loaded at will, with even more 'features' available for tracking and even eavesdropping.
Believe me, if you want to hide from the gov, don't carry a cell and don't let anyone that has one near you.;-)
If it was legit, all he'd have to do is hook it up to a conventional generator, from there to a grid-intertie unit and then to the local power grid. Then start selling electricity to the power company. Take the revenue from that and build another, and another.... They'd eventually notice and *boom* he'd have all the fame and support funding for future development he can handle.
He does not need "peer review" by scientists or any academic scrutiny to *prove* that it works.
It's not "free" open source anymore. It's become restricted - literally, and will receive little support from the community. As soon as you start to put restrictions on what you can do with it(Can I port/run it on X-BSD? How about OS-X?...), someone will start their own version of the project. Consider Pidgin or Xorg and how they came to be.
> No, really, I get it. Linux needs a "killer app" and all that.
It'll never happen. That is, Linux will never have a killer app that is not also available on window$.
Reason: Any killer app produced by the open source crew will be ported to window$ in the blink of an eye after(perhaps even before) said app becomes "killer".
Any closed source killer app that runs on Linux will be poorly supported(compared to FOSS apps) as all are now and the prime source of revenue will be the window$ version which will always be bugfixed and otherwise updated more often/before the Linux version.
>From 200 miles away, can you observe the fall of shot?
Easy, current Aegis radars can track ballistic missiles from 200+ miles away. Of course it has to be above the horizon. Actual impact will have to have another observer.
>2 minutes' worth of flight gives plenty of time for winds to drive the shot slightly off course.
Not true, most of the (200 mile) flight time will be spent in or near vacuum. In-atmosphere flight time will be very short on both ends, somewhere in the range of 10 seconds. As it traverses the atmosphere, there will not be consistent steady pressure in one direction or another. Instead there will be "noise", a series of small random deflections. With accurate remote weather sensors, even these will be known in advance.
If you are going to be tethered, you might as well scrap the second hull and put all the warfighting gear that would have been on it, on the power providing hull. If you do it right, the new larger hull will be faster even though you don't change the size of the power plant.;-)
The difference is: no one would ever claim to have heard the explosion before they saw it. The speed of light has a special place in the math that we use to describe the universe. It is integral to the equations that model electromagnetic phenomenon. All that being said, we have not observed anything propagating at >c speeds. That does not ultimately rule it out; rather, our best work so far does.
The observers at your gravity detector would disagree with your claimed "true order" of events. They would say "It's obvious, look at this video. You can clearly see the gravity detector deflect from its normal course and then later we see the light beam!"
That is, the observed sequence changes depending on where you make the observation. That does not lead to a universe that is rational at least according to humans.
I guess I have to inform you that you do not decide for the world what is relevant to what and what is not. You say that suborbital joyrides are irrelevant to orbital(you left out the 'manned') spaceflight. I say that they are relevant, period. Who cares? What it boils down to is: is the post relevant to Slashdot?
Scaled does not care if you think their work is relevant to orbital(you left out the 'manned') spaceflight or not. What they do care about is making a profit on manned spaceflight(I and they left out the 'orbital').
Your analogy works, you just don't understand why.
The 'causality' comes from the transfer of information. As far as we know, there is no way for information to travel faster than light.
I'll modify your example a bit: Your gravity detector(any handy observable mass) was sitting idle in space and traveling in a straight line since there were no forces acting on it to CAUSE it to accelerate. Suddenly, your gravity detector veers off to one side and starts to accelerate for no apparent reason at all. All of your physicists are scratching their heads wondering what is going on. Later, the light beam from my gravity generator is spotted and everyone sighs and says "Oh, so that's what CAUSED it!".
You observed the effects of my gravity generator BEFORE you saw me turn it on. That's a causality violation. You should be able to see(detect and comprehend) all the events in order. Imagine being hit by my car while you were watching me open the door and get in. Only later as you are laying on the pavement do you see me start the car, head in your direction, and then actually hit you. Pretty bizarre eh? That's a causality violation. It would be possible if I had a car that could travel at speeds greater than c. I've got a fast car(gravity wave generator), but not that fast.;-)
Exactly the comment my wife made the instant the first credits appeared. I was not so harsh. It's definitely more exploration of the "Blair Witch" first person form which was and still is waaaayyy over rated IMO.
BWP was pure hype and a total waste of time. This one was just barely interesting.
And has eyes that can still see the difference, then take him to a store and show him. The dual sided HD/DVD of '300' is a decent example. Play the low-D side in the HD-DVD player, which also upscales low-D DVDs. Then play the HD side in the same player-HDTV combination. He won't argue about quality anymore. He might switch to "It still costs too much, not worth it" or somesuch, but he won't try to keep up the "Just as good as...", "There's no difference..." arguments anymore.
So perhaps in reality your argument is reversed? My observations support it. More tech, more education, more wealth, all lead to less kids.
Soon enough we'll be over run by the Luddites because:
They couldn't afford an HDTV so they f*cked the evening away instead of watching '300' in HD.
They can't afford season tickets to the local sports franchise so they drank cheap bourbon and Coke and f*cked all afternoon while the game was shown on their Low-D TV.
Can't afford to go on vacation in Europe and look at a bunch of ancient, but very carefully stacked, piles of rocks so instead on their day off they slept late after a good night of f*cking.
Don't have enough education to know better so instead of spending money on doctor appointments and contraceptives they...
No karma blown, they've never tried one so therefore ebooks/readers must suck.
Yes I like reading processed trees as much as any bibliophile, but I'd really rather carry my Nokia 770 with me. Currently there are 76 books loaded in there from all over the place, Gutenberg, the Baen Free Library, the CIA World Factbook, and more. It was really great on vacation this last Summer. All those endless train rides across Europe and there was no way I was going to pack a half a dozen paperbacks and an equal number of roadmaps for the trip.
Ever since they canceled the season I just don't have any interest. This from some one who was once an avid fan. My wife and I met while watching an NHL game at a bar, and we used to have season tickets.
Now I'm 100% NFL. Glad that that boring waste of time called baseball is not cluttering up the airwaves anymore. Back to my roots you might say, speed and violence!
You may be right about them not knowing about HD sources, but I will say this: Our HD TV produces the best analog Standard Def TV picture I have ever seen. Of course the SD/LowD pic does not compare to the HD pic, but it is still much better than that of our last analog TV.
Slashdot Mirror
They will implement some sort of an encrypted challenge-response system that you can't just tap into with tcpdump or ethereal and then echo later.
Now, if you can hack the console and "patch" the running code, you're free again.
They are basic, note-taking, doc-writing, email-sending, web-surfing, e-book-reading, port-able, wire-less, hand-held AKA lap-top devices that don't cost much. Perfect for the coffee table to look up imdb ratings in front of the TV or to check the weather radar/forecast before heading out in the morning.
Couldn't fit-in any more hyphens.
For starters, of the 60 or so you claim to be in close proximity, only the ones actively moving data or carrying a conversation will be actually transmitting anything more than house keeping messages. That alone thins the pool quite a bit. If you are monitoring conversations from a particular set of towers and discover something interesting, then you will be able to know which phone is carrying that conversation in an instant.
;-)
Even if you don't know which conversation is interesting, you can still localize each phone by triangulation one at a time, continuously. If you discover that one or more of them is near a "location of interest" then you can tag that phone for closer monitoring in the future. If you notice such anomalies like a phone switching off before entering a certain locale(where you know the signal is good and so it is not a drop), you can tag it for later surveillance. If any phone in question has a GPS, it can be commanded to *send* the location data without notifying the user. Sooo easy.
More, the base station can command any nearby phones to lower their output power or even switch off, and the inverse, the cell tower can command the desired phone to increase output power to the maximum available, and cause it to transmit continuously, EVEN IF THE PHONE IS IDLE. If the spy folks are anywhere near the target phone with a couple of directional antennas, then the phone is readily located and the game is over.
All of these 'features' are documented in the standards. No special code versions or hacking required. If you 'own' the cell systems as any gov effectively does, then special versions of the software can be loaded at will, with even more 'features' available for tracking and even eavesdropping.
Believe me, if you want to hide from the gov, don't carry a cell and don't let anyone that has one near you.
That's ancient tech.
How about a bottle or a bucket?
Try an even older and more generic container, a sack.
Old tech hangs around because it does it's job and has not been improved upon in any meaningful fashion by later tech.
Incandescent lights might actually exit the stage soon...
This bit was written by the ever adorable Rob Enderle?
/. front page.
I'm surprised it even made it to the
It made the news.
Who's the dolt that doesn't recognize "insightful"?
If it was legit, all he'd have to do is hook it up to a conventional generator, from there to a grid-intertie unit and then to the local power grid. Then start selling electricity to the power company. Take the revenue from that and build another, and another.... They'd eventually notice and *boom* he'd have all the fame and support funding for future development he can handle.
He does not need "peer review" by scientists or any academic scrutiny to *prove* that it works.
It's not "free" open source anymore. It's become restricted - literally, and will receive little support from the community. As soon as you start to put restrictions on what you can do with it(Can I port/run it on X-BSD? How about OS-X?...), someone will start their own version of the project. Consider Pidgin or Xorg and how they came to be.
> No, really, I get it. Linux needs a "killer app" and all that.
It'll never happen. That is, Linux will never have a killer app that is not also available on window$.
Reason: Any killer app produced by the open source crew will be ported to window$ in the blink of an eye after(perhaps even before) said app becomes "killer".
Any closed source killer app that runs on Linux will be poorly supported(compared to FOSS apps) as all are now and the prime source of revenue will be the window$ version which will always be bugfixed and otherwise updated more often/before the Linux version.
I guess you never read the comic book.
This system is *only* a megawatt class laser. The railgun system is in another league.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
>From 200 miles away, can you observe the fall of shot?
Easy, current Aegis radars can track ballistic missiles from 200+ miles away. Of course it has to be above the horizon. Actual impact will have to have another observer.
>2 minutes' worth of flight gives plenty of time for winds to drive the shot slightly off course.
Not true, most of the (200 mile) flight time will be spent in or near vacuum. In-atmosphere flight time will be very short on both ends, somewhere in the range of 10 seconds. As it traverses the atmosphere, there will not be consistent steady pressure in one direction or another. Instead there will be "noise", a series of small random deflections. With accurate remote weather sensors, even these will be known in advance.
If you are going to be tethered, you might as well scrap the second hull and put all the warfighting gear that would have been on it, on the power providing hull. If you do it right, the new larger hull will be faster even though you don't change the size of the power plant. ;-)
Nobody seems able to think of the obvious target set:
Satellites, aircraft, incoming missiles
Any ballistic device with a range of 220 miles horizontal will be able to reach 100 miles vertical.
The difference is: no one would ever claim to have heard the explosion before they saw it. The speed of light has a special place in the math that we use to describe the universe. It is integral to the equations that model electromagnetic phenomenon. All that being said, we have not observed anything propagating at >c speeds. That does not ultimately rule it out; rather, our best work so far does.
The observers at your gravity detector would disagree with your claimed "true order" of events. They would say "It's obvious, look at this video. You can clearly see the gravity detector deflect from its normal course and then later we see the light beam!"
That is, the observed sequence changes depending on where you make the observation. That does not lead to a universe that is rational at least according to humans.
I guess I have to inform you that you do not decide for the world what is relevant to what and what is not. You say that suborbital joyrides are irrelevant to orbital(you left out the 'manned') spaceflight. I say that they are relevant, period. Who cares? What it boils down to is: is the post relevant to Slashdot?
Scaled does not care if you think their work is relevant to orbital(you left out the 'manned') spaceflight or not. What they do care about is making a profit on manned spaceflight(I and they left out the 'orbital').
Later,
Your analogy works, you just don't understand why.
;-)
The 'causality' comes from the transfer of information. As far as we know, there is no way for information to travel faster than light.
I'll modify your example a bit: Your gravity detector(any handy observable mass) was sitting idle in space and traveling in a straight line since there were no forces acting on it to CAUSE it to accelerate. Suddenly, your gravity detector veers off to one side and starts to accelerate for no apparent reason at all. All of your physicists are scratching their heads wondering what is going on. Later, the light beam from my gravity generator is spotted and everyone sighs and says "Oh, so that's what CAUSED it!".
You observed the effects of my gravity generator BEFORE you saw me turn it on. That's a causality violation. You should be able to see(detect and comprehend) all the events in order. Imagine being hit by my car while you were watching me open the door and get in. Only later as you are laying on the pavement do you see me start the car, head in your direction, and then actually hit you. Pretty bizarre eh? That's a causality violation. It would be possible if I had a car that could travel at speeds greater than c. I've got a fast car(gravity wave generator), but not that fast.
Exactly the comment my wife made the instant the first credits appeared. I was not so harsh. It's definitely more exploration of the "Blair Witch" first person form which was and still is waaaayyy over rated IMO.
BWP was pure hype and a total waste of time. This one was just barely interesting.
Won't buy the DVD that's for sure.
And has eyes that can still see the difference, then take him to a store and show him. The dual sided HD/DVD of '300' is a decent example. Play the low-D side in the HD-DVD player, which also upscales low-D DVDs. Then play the HD side in the same player-HDTV combination. He won't argue about quality anymore. He might switch to "It still costs too much, not worth it" or somesuch, but he won't try to keep up the "Just as good as...", "There's no difference..." arguments anymore.
So perhaps in reality your argument is reversed? My observations support it. More tech, more education, more wealth, all lead to less kids.
Soon enough we'll be over run by the Luddites because:
They couldn't afford an HDTV so they f*cked the evening away instead of watching '300' in HD.
They can't afford season tickets to the local sports franchise so they drank cheap bourbon and Coke and f*cked all afternoon while the game was shown on their Low-D TV.
Can't afford to go on vacation in Europe and look at a bunch of ancient, but very carefully stacked, piles of rocks so instead on their day off they slept late after a good night of f*cking.
Don't have enough education to know better so instead of spending money on doctor appointments and contraceptives they...
Etc...
No karma blown, they've never tried one so therefore ebooks/readers must suck.
Yes I like reading processed trees as much as any bibliophile, but I'd really rather carry my Nokia 770 with me. Currently there are 76 books loaded in there from all over the place, Gutenberg, the Baen Free Library, the CIA World Factbook, and more. It was really great on vacation this last Summer. All those endless train rides across Europe and there was no way I was going to pack a half a dozen paperbacks and an equal number of roadmaps for the trip.
Some of us were involved in the construction of this mess called "The Internet". We feel responsible.
Not any more.
Ever since they canceled the season I just don't have any interest. This from some one who was once an avid fan. My wife and I met while watching an NHL game at a bar, and we used to have season tickets.
Now I'm 100% NFL. Glad that that boring waste of time called baseball is not cluttering up the airwaves anymore. Back to my roots you might say, speed and violence!
You may be right about them not knowing about HD sources, but I will say this: Our HD TV produces the best analog Standard Def TV picture I have ever seen. Of course the SD/LowD pic does not compare to the HD pic, but it is still much better than that of our last analog TV.
Made some decent returns doing that over the last few years...