All right! This is great! My wife will be thrilled.
I have two defunct laser printers, probably at least one dead monitor, and some other misc. stuff to come out of my basement. Stuff that frankly is too expensive to ship to sell on ebay.
The competition begins with a call for Expressions of Interest from multi-disciplinary design teams. A shortlist will be invited to submit Concept Proposals and selected teams will then be commissioned to further develop their proposals. The winning design will be announced in September 2005. Deadline for Expressions of Interest is 3 August 2004. Details from www.ribacompetitions.com.
It would be interesting to find out what the break-even point is. If you did deploy such a system, how long would it take until the energy savings recouped the cost of putting the thing into orbit.
That measurement as compared to the expected mean time between failure of the orbital system would be a very important number to the reliability of such a system. If the MTBF was 5X, then it's golden; 1.5X not so good.
An interesting concept. Stamping of the mail is computationally intensive, verifying it isn't. I think that it's impressive for something that's calling itself an 0.3 version.
This could really change the way e-mail is distributed.
100 km is the official "edge of space", which is presumably matched to some definition of the "thin-ness" of the atmosphere. It may be the height at which 99% of the atmosphere (by mass) is below you.
Achieving orbits is a 2-step process. You need to get high enough that the atmospheric drag is small enough that it's possible to acheive orbital velocity. Then you have a vehicle with enough thrust to kick you into orbit. Height/velocity isn't the only issue. If you accelerated a vehicle to escape velocity at the earth's surface, it would have the energy to leave the earths gravity well completely; however, the energy would turned into heat by friction with the atmosphere, and the craft would be vaporized.
You know, I don't think that can possibly be an enforcable license provision. That would be like M$ trying to control what sorts of papers people could and couldn't write with Word.
Once the announcement came out that the only free version would roll over every 6 months, I switched to Debian on all my work systems (I already run Debian exclusively at home).
One of the great things about all of the Linux-based operating systems is that while they are viable competitors for M$, even if they don't eventually crush them, they're a reminder that there are alternatives.
I think that one of the reasons that Windows XP is, quite frankly, vastly better than previous Windows incarnations is that Microsoft knew that someone was gunning for them. Remember--Bill Gates knows the power of the position of the underdog. He knows that young and hungry people can dominate the Big Guy. He did it himself.
This is just another step in the evolution of publishing. A lot of rapid turn-over material like this will soon be published this way. This will make it much easier to keep things up to date.
Well, if you're missing that authentic "gritty" feel, you can always write your own rules. You won't have to deal with the expense of big glossy manuals, and you can always change things to suit.
I have my 486-66 on my network as my CD burner. It's certainly not the most efficient machine to do that on, and in fact compared to everything else I own is horribly slow.
However, I am loathe to give it up because that's the machine that I played and beat Dark Forces on when I was in graduate school. (After my qualifying exams, I went home and played DF for about 4 days straight. Ah--those were the days!)
It's quite possible the reason that they keep their mouth shut about their capabilities is to avoid the NSA (or someone like them) to come calling. After all, they basically have a distributed database of the entire net, which they index efficiently on a continuous basis. Who wants to bet that their system is better at gathering intelligence than any government agency in the world?
On the other hand, here's the conspiracy theory version: what if Google IS the NSA? The IPO is a smokescreen to try to avert attention. The reason they can't show their true capability is that when the company goes public, only 20% of their hardware will actually go into the public company "Google", the rest of the hardware will still be hidden and a part of the NSA's system.:-)
[For the humor impaired, I'm just joking, but it does make you wonder...]
I've seen a few presentations/demos on this. Basically the idea is the transmission runs on probability. Each photon has a certain probability of being lost. So the receiving station knows what the general frequency that it can expect, and if its not, the signal is being tampered with.
The reason that the man-in-the-middle attack doesn't work is that by doing so, you introduce two sets of attenuation rather than one. If the message is intercepted and then re-transmitted, the message has now been sent through the attenuation cycle twice. This means that instead of the signal being modified by the original attenuation function, it's modified by the attenuation function squared, which is easy to distinguish.
I wonder how this is going to hold up in court? Are digital photographs of the fingerprints (I assume that's how the pics are taken) submittable as evidence in a court of law?
I think it's a terrific idea, but the first time it's used, there's going to be a huge fight about the guarantee of authenticity of the prints.
Just for the record, some people who make salaries do, in fact, work as many hours a week as they're supposed to. Researchers tend to be salaried positions, and many of them work 60+ hour work weeks.
I am not in the 100k range, but in the 50k range, and I get a salary and don't punch a time clock. I work essentially as a research programmer and I, at least, think I earn it all (and so does my boss).
The article says: "Chao said about 107,000 white-collar workers earning $100,000 or more a year could lose their eligibility."
People in that salary bracket are being paid hourly? I had always assumed that anywhere in the 50+ per year range is a salaried position, and overtime isn't an issue anyway, because you don't keep a time clock.
Re:Slashdotted? How about Cachedotted?
on
HDD Assault Cannon
·
· Score: 1
I believe there are are sites that are designed to cope with this type of thing. The guy that designed
the TRON costume at Penguicon
has his site at home on a DSL, but copied the site to ibiblio before submitting to slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
And where do I find these blessed individuals? A link with "find a store near you" would be great.
I have two defunct laser printers, probably at least one dead monitor, and some other misc. stuff to come out of my basement. Stuff that frankly is too expensive to ship to sell on ebay.
The competition begins with a call for Expressions of Interest from multi-disciplinary design teams. A shortlist will be invited to submit Concept Proposals and selected teams will then be commissioned to further develop their proposals. The winning design will be announced in September 2005. Deadline for Expressions of Interest is 3 August 2004. Details from www.ribacompetitions.com.
Can this wired magazine article survive a slashdotting? Tune in next week!
Someone needs to figure out a way to put a canard on a solar power station, and then Burt Rutan will build one inside of 10 years.
That measurement as compared to the expected mean time between failure of the orbital system would be a very important number to the reliability of such a system. If the MTBF was 5X, then it's golden; 1.5X not so good.
This could really change the way e-mail is distributed.
True. As nice as they might be to have, that's going to be a barrier to having digital signatures for quite some time.
Craig Steffen, former Indiana resident
Achieving orbits is a 2-step process. You need to get high enough that the atmospheric drag is small enough that it's possible to acheive orbital velocity. Then you have a vehicle with enough thrust to kick you into orbit. Height/velocity isn't the only issue. If you accelerated a vehicle to escape velocity at the earth's surface, it would have the energy to leave the earths gravity well completely; however, the energy would turned into heat by friction with the atmosphere, and the craft would be vaporized.
You know, I don't think that can possibly be an enforcable license provision. That would be like M$ trying to control what sorts of papers people could and couldn't write with Word.
My understanding was that Fedora would roll over every 6 months, and that one and only one version would be supported at a time.
Once the announcement came out that the only free version would roll over every 6 months, I switched to Debian on all my work systems (I already run Debian exclusively at home).
I think that one of the reasons that Windows XP is, quite frankly, vastly better than previous Windows incarnations is that Microsoft knew that someone was gunning for them. Remember--Bill Gates knows the power of the position of the underdog. He knows that young and hungry people can dominate the Big Guy. He did it himself.
This is just another step in the evolution of publishing. A lot of rapid turn-over material like this will soon be published this way. This will make it much easier to keep things up to date.
Well, if you're missing that authentic "gritty" feel, you can always write your own rules. You won't have to deal with the expense of big glossy manuals, and you can always change things to suit.
However, I am loathe to give it up because that's the machine that I played and beat Dark Forces on when I was in graduate school. (After my qualifying exams, I went home and played DF for about 4 days straight. Ah--those were the days!)
On the other hand, here's the conspiracy theory version: what if Google IS the NSA? The IPO is a smokescreen to try to avert attention. The reason they can't show their true capability is that when the company goes public, only 20% of their hardware will actually go into the public company "Google", the rest of the hardware will still be hidden and a part of the NSA's system. :-)
[For the humor impaired, I'm just joking, but it does make you wonder...]
Also seen in a James Bond film, I forget which one. Googling "James Bond rocket pack" seems to indicate Thunderball.
The reason that the man-in-the-middle attack doesn't work is that by doing so, you introduce two sets of attenuation rather than one. If the message is intercepted and then re-transmitted, the message has now been sent through the attenuation cycle twice. This means that instead of the signal being modified by the original attenuation function, it's modified by the attenuation function squared, which is easy to distinguish.
So the transaction slip presumably says:
Your transaction number has a 90% probability of being between 8765432 and 8765478.
Have a 75% nice day.
I wonder how this is going to hold up in court? Are digital photographs of the fingerprints (I assume that's how the pics are taken) submittable as evidence in a court of law?
I think it's a terrific idea, but the first time it's used, there's going to be a huge fight about the guarantee of authenticity of the prints.
Just for the record, some people who make salaries do, in fact, work as many hours a week as they're supposed to. Researchers tend to be salaried positions, and many of them work 60+ hour work weeks.
I am not in the 100k range, but in the 50k range, and I get a salary and don't punch a time clock. I work essentially as a research programmer and I, at least, think I earn it all (and so does my boss).
The article says: "Chao said about 107,000 white-collar workers earning $100,000 or more a year could lose their eligibility."
People in that salary bracket are being paid hourly? I had always assumed that anywhere in the 50+ per year range is a salaried position, and overtime isn't an issue anyway, because you don't keep a time clock.
I believe there are are sites that are designed to cope with this type of thing. The guy that designed the TRON costume at Penguicon has his site at home on a DSL, but copied the site to ibiblio before submitting to slashdot.