I'd like to get a good smartphone based on Linux one day, but I'm not even sure where to look. I've heard of the OpenMoko, but I don't know how well that works or if it's even a smartphone. You can now order an OpenMoko Neo1973 from www.openmoko.com, although this is still the "developer preview" model. The mass-market version is supposed to be available in October. You can find out more details about the hardware on their wiki. It's a Linux operating system, so you can run (and/or write) any software you want.
Is there another option? I've never heard of a vacuum tube capacitor. Vacuum Capacitors exist, although you're not likely to find them on a PC motherboard.
So uhh.. where's the source code? I didn't see any mention of source code or documentation on their web site; did I miss it? Look on the Wiki and on projects.openmoko.org.
The only reason not to use breeder reactors is that they (gasp) produce weapons-grade waste. Not necessarily. U238 + n = Pu239, the weapons variety. However Pu239 + n = Pu240, so if you leave the fuel in the reactor for a long enough time it will build up enough Pu240 to only be "reactor-grade".
I saw it on an earlier comment to something else and tried typing it into a hex convertor to find out what the secret message was! Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally. Nuclear power by standard Canadian technology (CANDU) can use natural uranium as fuel. Technically there is still a requirement for "enrichment", but it's enrichment of deuterium in order to obtain the heavy-water moderator.
You unlock them using the Dallas Semiconductor iButtons. Each one has a unique serial number imbedded it it and it can't be copied. A serial number certainly can be copied. Relying on it for security is like relying on MAC-address filtering on a wireless router (i.e. insufficient). You can't copy the serial number onto another iButton, but you can program a little microcontroller to speak the same 1-wire protocol and pretend to be the iButton interest. It's not hard to discover the serial number of an iButton; it's printed right on the case of each device.
There used to be a "crypto iButton" that provided real copy-proof security. It could be programmed with a private RSA key, and could be challenged to produce a signature that you could then verify with the user's public key. The physical device was quite tamper-resistant so it would be very difficult for an attacker to extract the private key. However this product seems to have been discontinued a few years ago.
We still don't know just how much of this polonium is around our normal lives to be worried about the scaremongering. Maybe all planes contain traces of it,
There will be some natural polonium-210 anywhere that has radon gas in the air, or uranium in the soil. It's also found in cigarette smoke. I don't know how the natural concentration compares to the 'traces' that are being reported in this case.
Do you have any more details of those calculations? I haven't seen many published estimates of the dose that he ingested in this case. One was around 1 mg, but that seems too high.
My own rough calculations suggested that a couple of antistatic brushes would be enough to kill someone if ingested:
500 uCi = (500e-6) * (3.7e10) = 1.85e7 decays/sec Energy per particle is about 5 MeV (5 MeV) * (1.85e7) = 9.25e7 MeV/s = 1.48e-5 J/s
Assume the material is evenly distributed in a person's body, mass 100 kg: 1.48e-7 (J/kg)/s = 1.48e-7 Gy/s
Applying a scaling factor of 20 (for alphas), this equals 2.96e-6 Sv/s. Multiplied by 86400, 0.256 Sv/day or 5.4 Sv in 3 weeks from the material in one brush.
Not included in this calculation: the fraction of ingested material which is absorbed, the rate at which it is excreted from the body, or different concentrations in different areas of the body. Would these (or other) effects be enough to require a 200x higher ingested dose?
Unfortunately, it used a funky "One Wire" adaptor to get power and talk to a PC. If only they would reintroduce it in a USB format!
They do sell USB adapters for iButtons - see http://www.maxim-ic.com/products/ibutton/products/ adapters.cfm. However it looks like the crypto iButton itself has been discontinued. I hope that someone does release a similar product in the future, before the battery dies in the one I am currently using.
4. If you must talk about Usenet, call it Google Groups.
Re:Won't start until 10 minutes before game.
on
ASCII World Cup
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I tried earlier during match time only to be told it'd maxed out on connections.
This is Slashdot. Surely somebody here can whip up a network of mirrors in time for tomorrow's game...
("netcat ascii-wm.net 2006 | netcat -u 224.0.0.1 5555" to bridge it to a local multicast stream, an inetd-launched daemon to handle client connections, round-robin DNS for load balancing, etc.)
A related question (though at micron scales rather than nano) - does anyone know how safe those "magic eraser" cleaning sponges are? They are an open-cell melamine foam that gradually breaks down as it is used.
I don't know the size of the particles that break off and get washed down the drain, but given the hardness of the material it seems that they could be hazardous to anything that ingested them (filter-feeding aquatic organisms, fish's gills, and so on). Does anyone know if there have been studies to see how far these particles get in the environment, how long it takes them to break down chemically, etc?
Personally, i'm saving up real gold for when we return to the Gold Standard (tm).
You might be interested in e-gold (referral link; remove the last bit of the URL if you want). It's a digital currency (i.e. bits stored in a database), but it's 100% backed by actual gold stored in a vault. The idea is to combine the convenience and flexibility of Internet payment systems with the principles of the Gold Standard.
That and his theories were used to create the atomic bomb, ending WWII
Einstein had some political involvement in the development of the atomic bomb, but he does not deserve much of the technical credit. "E=mc^2" a bit of useless trivia in the context of developing an atomic bomb. Fission of uranium had been observed experimentally, and had been shown to produce a large amount of energy as well as an excess of neutrons (thus enabling a chain reaction).
how does/would IP multicast account for missing or dropped packets?
That's a problem for a higher-layer protocol. I previously worked for a company that received live stock-market data via multicast. Each message included a sequence count, and if you did not receive some messags then you would ask the exchange to re-transmit a range of sequence counts. These re-transmissions would be mixed in with the regular data stream, with a flag to indicate that they were retransmissions.
I haven't worked with multicast since that company cratered, but I would suspect that there are standard protocols available to perform this sort of NACK / retransmission. Another approach would be to use forward error correction, as used by satellite TV broadcasts.
Earlier this year I was invited to become a Nielsen viewer (in Canada). The first problem was that I did not have a telephone landline, and their box needed one in order to phone home with its data. They initially said there was nothing they could do, but a couple of months later they called back and offered to pay for the landline if I had one installed.
They then asked for details about my TVs and such, down to the brands and model numbers. This is becuase they had to hook up monitoring equipment to measure the channel selected by the tuner, whether the VCR was playing or recording, etc. Everything was OK until we got to my MythTV box (with PVR-350 card). They could not monitor it properly, so we had to call the whole thing off. The technician (who was quite impressed with what MythTV could do) said that they might have ways to monitor such setups in the future, but he wasn't sure about it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just links that are killed; Fark won't even let you put "the numbers" into a field in your user profile.
There used to be a "crypto iButton" that provided real copy-proof security. It could be programmed with a private RSA key, and could be challenged to produce a signature that you could then verify with the user's public key. The physical device was quite tamper-resistant so it would be very difficult for an attacker to extract the private key. However this product seems to have been discontinued a few years ago.
The radon-222 decay chain contains Po-218, Po-214, and Po-210. Link (PDF).
.001%.
There is a small gamma component to Po-210 decays, but only something like
The United Nuclear sources are 0.1 uCi. Antistatic brushes are available with up to 500 uCi, and industrial ionizers can contain up to 40 mCi.
We still don't know just how much of this polonium is around our normal lives to be worried about the scaremongering. Maybe all planes contain traces of it,
There will be some natural polonium-210 anywhere that has radon gas in the air, or uranium in the soil. It's also found in cigarette smoke. I don't know how the natural concentration compares to the 'traces' that are being reported in this case.
Geiger counters are only useful for Beta and Gamma sources.
You need a special tube to detect alpha radiation, but it's pretty common even on cheaper models. See here for example.
Do you have any more details of those calculations? I haven't seen many published estimates of the dose that he ingested in this case. One was around 1 mg, but that seems too high.
My own rough calculations suggested that a couple of antistatic brushes would be enough to kill someone if ingested:
500 uCi = (500e-6) * (3.7e10) = 1.85e7 decays/sec
Energy per particle is about 5 MeV
(5 MeV) * (1.85e7) = 9.25e7 MeV/s = 1.48e-5 J/s
Assume the material is evenly distributed in a person's body, mass 100 kg: 1.48e-7 (J/kg)/s = 1.48e-7 Gy/s
Applying a scaling factor of 20 (for alphas), this equals 2.96e-6 Sv/s. Multiplied by 86400, 0.256 Sv/day or 5.4 Sv in 3 weeks from the material in one brush.
Not included in this calculation: the fraction of ingested material which is absorbed, the rate at which it is excreted from the body, or different concentrations in different areas of the body. Would these (or other) effects be enough to require a 200x higher ingested dose?
That description is correct - an alpha particle is the same as the nucleus of a helium atom.
Yes, available here for example. The 3" model ($47.84) has 500 uCi of polonium-210.
Unfortunately, it used a funky "One Wire" adaptor to get power and talk to a PC. If only they would reintroduce it in a USB format!
/ adapters.cfm. However it looks like the crypto iButton itself has been discontinued. I hope that someone does release a similar product in the future, before the battery dies in the one I am currently using.
They do sell USB adapters for iButtons - see http://www.maxim-ic.com/products/ibutton/products
There are some who would say that today is Mon Sep 4815 1993.
4. If you must talk about Usenet, call it Google Groups.
I tried earlier during match time only to be told it'd maxed out on connections.
This is Slashdot. Surely somebody here can whip up a network of mirrors in time for tomorrow's game...
("netcat ascii-wm.net 2006 | netcat -u 224.0.0.1 5555" to bridge it to a local multicast stream, an inetd-launched daemon to handle client connections, round-robin DNS for load balancing, etc.)
A related question (though at micron scales rather than nano) - does anyone know how safe those "magic eraser" cleaning sponges are? They are an open-cell melamine foam that gradually breaks down as it is used.
I don't know the size of the particles that break off and get washed down the drain, but given the hardness of the material it seems that they could be hazardous to anything that ingested them (filter-feeding aquatic organisms, fish's gills, and so on). Does anyone know if there have been studies to see how far these particles get in the environment, how long it takes them to break down chemically, etc?
Interesting. It doesn't say that experiments say otherwise; it just says that the experiments haven't been done.
They have been done, on Mythbusters. The venom didn't produce any significant effects.
Personally, i'm saving up real gold for when we return to the Gold Standard (tm).
You might be interested in e-gold (referral link; remove the last bit of the URL if you want). It's a digital currency (i.e. bits stored in a database), but it's 100% backed by actual gold stored in a vault. The idea is to combine the convenience and flexibility of Internet payment systems with the principles of the Gold Standard.
That and his theories were used to create the atomic bomb, ending WWII
Einstein had some political involvement in the development of the atomic bomb, but he does not deserve much of the technical credit. "E=mc^2" a bit of useless trivia in the context of developing an atomic bomb. Fission of uranium had been observed experimentally, and had been shown to produce a large amount of energy as well as an excess of neutrons (thus enabling a chain reaction).
how does/would IP multicast account for missing or dropped packets?
That's a problem for a higher-layer protocol. I previously worked for a company that received live stock-market data via multicast. Each message included a sequence count, and if you did not receive some messags then you would ask the exchange to re-transmit a range of sequence counts. These re-transmissions would be mixed in with the regular data stream, with a flag to indicate that they were retransmissions.
I haven't worked with multicast since that company cratered, but I would suspect that there are standard protocols available to perform this sort of NACK / retransmission. Another approach would be to use forward error correction, as used by satellite TV broadcasts.
Earlier this year I was invited to become a Nielsen viewer (in Canada). The first problem was that I did not have a telephone landline, and their box needed one in order to phone home with its data. They initially said there was nothing they could do, but a couple of months later they called back and offered to pay for the landline if I had one installed.
They then asked for details about my TVs and such, down to the brands and model numbers. This is becuase they had to hook up monitoring equipment to measure the channel selected by the tuner, whether the VCR was playing or recording, etc. Everything was OK until we got to my MythTV box (with PVR-350 card). They could not monitor it properly, so we had to call the whole thing off. The technician (who was quite impressed with what MythTV could do) said that they might have ways to monitor such setups in the future, but he wasn't sure about it.