Well, there are probably at least two things that are more impressive than a launch. The obvious one is actually being launched. But the less obvious one is a test firing. I spent 18 months working at Thiokol Propulsion got to see several of them, including shuttle boosters, peacekeeper missles, and experimental engines. You stand on the side of the road a half a mile from the rocket and they have it strapped down to a huge slab of concrete and they light it up and it burns for 123 seconds in the case of a shuttle booster. So not only are you closer but the motor isn't a few miles away after several seconds.
So what happens? You stand on the side of the road and they have a countdown. After they hit zero there is a bright flash of light and you see the flames but don't hear anything. If the weeds are tall during the summer or fall you see them bending over in a wave coming towards you. You also see birds taking flight as the sound wave hits them, probably giving them the fright of their lives. Old timers claim that they can see the spherical distortion of the air expanding outward from the motor, though I was never observant enough to catch that myself.
Soon enough the sound hits you. And I do mean hits you. You don't hear it nearly as much as you feel it. It is like a deep tissue massage that doesn't let up. It is a continuous roar that is punctuated by sharp cracks. The missiles crack more often than the shuttle boosters. The goes on for the length of the burn. Some people cheer, others giggle at the absurdity of so much power at such close range.
The missile tests don't last as long (about 60 seconds) but are more impressive. If you're ever in northern Utah I suggest calling Thiokol and asking if they have a test scheduled. While I was out there they were doing them every two months or so. I would guess that with the new launch vehicle program they'll be testing out the five segment boosters with greater frequency for a while, given that the shuttles use four segments.
I've been in a similar situation. My sister's car was broken into and her purse stolen. A week later the purse shows up at a post office, minus the cash plus some other stuff. However it did include a receipt for a gas station half a mile from our house issued a hour after the purse was stolen. Note that the purse was stolen 30 miles away. Note that there was a house key in the purse. She had called the cops initially and I called them when we got the receipt. I had already verified that the gas station would turn over credit card records and video tapes to the cops. The cops refused to do anything. Told me to get lost. It was rather infuriating.
A family member now works for the Gates Foundation. In conversations with her prior to her employment there she mentioned that after the GF gave enormous amounts of money to India for combating disease that many of the government's Linux and Open Source initiatives died almost instantly. The Gates Foundation does a lot of good, but the money comes with strings attached. It is for that reason that I was very sad that Warren Buffett elected to give away his fortune through that organization.
Stanford's CS 106a class is famous not only for being a popular class (1/3rd of all Stanford students take it) but for producing amazing TAs as well. When I took the coursea long time ago not only did the TA had grade a print out of your code, but they then scheduled a 15 one on one session with you to talk about what you did right and how you could improve. This sort of mentoring in the intro to programming course preped students for writing more complex code for other courses and meant that TA resources in later classes could concentrate on the topics at hand and not have to worry about spaghetti.
The TAing program became so famous that Silicon Valley companies would recruit people that had been TAs and pay big bucks for someone that had been head TA.
I agree that other approaches that achieve the same end result would probably be treated differently by the courts. ClearPlay has a player that is able to filter an unmodified DVD. Again, a Linux player could easily be made that would do all sorts of interesting things.
The problem is, as you state, that the studios don't do this. In fact, they do just the opposite and release versions with more content that many would judge to be offensive. When DVDs were first coming to market the ability to filter content was trumpeted as a feature that would soon be realized. I would be interested to see the history of why this never happned. DVD technology is such that this would be very easy to implement without having to issue a separate disc. I wonder if there are vestigages of this goal left in the media and player specs.
This is a win for big copyright and a loss for free culture./.ers are only seeing censorship here when they should be seeing remixing and control of content that you've bought./. has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue because of a lack of vision about what it represents. How/. can champion Free DVD software for Linux so that you can watch a movie on the OS of your choice but not favor this is a mystery to me. What if that Free player knew how to skip the booring bits (Jar Jar?) or replay the naughty bits in slow mo while leaving the original media untouched? All the/.ers would be lining up behind it! But if someone uses technology for a purpose that is seen as socially conservative all the idiots here go bonkers. Your fear of "censorship" has blinded you to a corporate power grab of your culture.
I was on financial aid and working my way through school and I purchased a crappy Mac Performa for $1700. At the time (1995) it was the cheapest thing that I could get that would handle CodeWarrior. I still had to wait for memory to go on sale at Fry's in order to bump it up to 24 MB so that compiling didn't cause an hour of swapping. It cost me about $30 a month while I was in school and I paid off the rest of the loan the instant I got a job. I considered it an education expense since I was much more likely to do my CS work on it than I was to head across campus to use a lab machine. $899 is nearly half the cost for a machine that is considerably more capable. It comes with a free iPod nano in addition. I fail to see how a working university student with a part time job couldn't afford this unless they are married and have two kids already.
Now I'm deceitful? Not only that, I'm amazed. Of course I'm allowed to publically register my opinion about this issue. It has as much effectiveness as people are willing to give it. Obviously you think it is bunk. Others disagree. All of that is fine.
So I'm not allowed to fight against the tide of idiocy? My little comment has created a thread with dozens of comments, and I would guess that at least some of the people reading it or participating it will now think twice before using the phrase to mean "raises the question." So what exactly it wrong with me participating in the "living language" process? Or are only morons invited to that party?
Actually the original meaning of hacker had no negative connotations and meant someone that would hack at a keyboard pounding out code quickly and naturally in order to cause a machine to do something novel. The evil hacker image came much later. The meaning that many/.ers insist on is very close to the original. The universally accepted definition is merely a subset of the original and a product of the ignorant media.
People that use the phrase incorrectly generally don't have the training in logic to really grasp the correct meaning of it. If they did have that training they'd never use it incorrectly. I'd be happy if they used the phrase that they mean, which is, "raises the question," stopped trying to look/sound sophisticated.
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else entirely and if you aren't 100% sure that you know exactly what it means you should probably never use the term.
It is the card (not the reader) that supports encryption ON THE CARD. I have a stack of contactless smart cards sitting here on my desk that do 3DES and RSA in the chip. These are much hard to crack than a dumb RFID tag.
Think of the reader as simply being a network connection between one computer (the card in this case) and another (your desktop or whatever it is that is letting you in the door).
Actually all the tests I have seen have shown the Intel graphics chipset spanking the Radeon 9200. I have a G4 mini. It is great for what I use it for, but it is a serious dog at 3d.
So do you want to do it correctly or not? It isn't like this isn't a solved problem. Two way communication is cheap compared to both having your card stolen and putting MB of storage in the key fob.
How about a $2 smart card chip with less than 2k of memory that can securely store a single 3DES (or AES) key and can initiate a secure session with the car, which also has the key? There are several well established methods of doing this and there is basically now weakness. They have to either attack the hardward to extract the keys or crack 3DES or AES, which hasn't been done.
These systems don't need to have 2 MB of memory. That is the wrong solution. They just need to be properly thought out to begin with.
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Well, there are probably at least two things that are more impressive than a launch. The obvious one is actually being launched. But the less obvious one is a test firing. I spent 18 months working at Thiokol Propulsion got to see several of them, including shuttle boosters, peacekeeper missles, and experimental engines. You stand on the side of the road a half a mile from the rocket and they have it strapped down to a huge slab of concrete and they light it up and it burns for 123 seconds in the case of a shuttle booster. So not only are you closer but the motor isn't a few miles away after several seconds.
So what happens? You stand on the side of the road and they have a countdown. After they hit zero there is a bright flash of light and you see the flames but don't hear anything. If the weeds are tall during the summer or fall you see them bending over in a wave coming towards you. You also see birds taking flight as the sound wave hits them, probably giving them the fright of their lives. Old timers claim that they can see the spherical distortion of the air expanding outward from the motor, though I was never observant enough to catch that myself.
Soon enough the sound hits you. And I do mean hits you. You don't hear it nearly as much as you feel it. It is like a deep tissue massage that doesn't let up. It is a continuous roar that is punctuated by sharp cracks. The missiles crack more often than the shuttle boosters. The goes on for the length of the burn. Some people cheer, others giggle at the absurdity of so much power at such close range.
The missile tests don't last as long (about 60 seconds) but are more impressive. If you're ever in northern Utah I suggest calling Thiokol and asking if they have a test scheduled. While I was out there they were doing them every two months or so. I would guess that with the new launch vehicle program they'll be testing out the five segment boosters with greater frequency for a while, given that the shuttles use four segments.
I've been in a similar situation. My sister's car was broken into and her purse stolen. A week later the purse shows up at a post office, minus the cash plus some other stuff. However it did include a receipt for a gas station half a mile from our house issued a hour after the purse was stolen. Note that the purse was stolen 30 miles away. Note that there was a house key in the purse. She had called the cops initially and I called them when we got the receipt. I had already verified that the gas station would turn over credit card records and video tapes to the cops. The cops refused to do anything. Told me to get lost. It was rather infuriating.
I would hope that one of them would be petrified.
A family member now works for the Gates Foundation. In conversations with her prior to her employment there she mentioned that after the GF gave enormous amounts of money to India for combating disease that many of the government's Linux and Open Source initiatives died almost instantly. The Gates Foundation does a lot of good, but the money comes with strings attached. It is for that reason that I was very sad that Warren Buffett elected to give away his fortune through that organization.
Stanford's CS 106a class is famous not only for being a popular class (1/3rd of all Stanford students take it) but for producing amazing TAs as well. When I took the coursea long time ago not only did the TA had grade a print out of your code, but they then scheduled a 15 one on one session with you to talk about what you did right and how you could improve. This sort of mentoring in the intro to programming course preped students for writing more complex code for other courses and meant that TA resources in later classes could concentrate on the topics at hand and not have to worry about spaghetti.
The TAing program became so famous that Silicon Valley companies would recruit people that had been TAs and pay big bucks for someone that had been head TA.
In fact, the first game I ever bough from EA was a Donkey Kong rip-off called Hard Hat Mack. Boy did I waste a lot of time on that game...
I agree that other approaches that achieve the same end result would probably be treated differently by the courts. ClearPlay has a player that is able to filter an unmodified DVD. Again, a Linux player could easily be made that would do all sorts of interesting things.
The problem is, as you state, that the studios don't do this. In fact, they do just the opposite and release versions with more content that many would judge to be offensive. When DVDs were first coming to market the ability to filter content was trumpeted as a feature that would soon be realized. I would be interested to see the history of why this never happned. DVD technology is such that this would be very easy to implement without having to issue a separate disc. I wonder if there are vestigages of this goal left in the media and player specs.
This is a win for big copyright and a loss for free culture. /.ers are only seeing censorship here when they should be seeing remixing and control of content that you've bought. /. has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue because of a lack of vision about what it represents. How /. can champion Free DVD software for Linux so that you can watch a movie on the OS of your choice but not favor this is a mystery to me. What if that Free player knew how to skip the booring bits (Jar Jar?) or replay the naughty bits in slow mo while leaving the original media untouched? All the /.ers would be lining up behind it! But if someone uses technology for a purpose that is seen as socially conservative all the idiots here go bonkers. Your fear of "censorship" has blinded you to a corporate power grab of your culture.
I was on financial aid and working my way through school and I purchased a crappy Mac Performa for $1700. At the time (1995) it was the cheapest thing that I could get that would handle CodeWarrior. I still had to wait for memory to go on sale at Fry's in order to bump it up to 24 MB so that compiling didn't cause an hour of swapping. It cost me about $30 a month while I was in school and I paid off the rest of the loan the instant I got a job. I considered it an education expense since I was much more likely to do my CS work on it than I was to head across campus to use a lab machine. $899 is nearly half the cost for a machine that is considerably more capable. It comes with a free iPod nano in addition. I fail to see how a working university student with a part time job couldn't afford this unless they are married and have two kids already.
Now I'm deceitful? Not only that, I'm amazed. Of course I'm allowed to publically register my opinion about this issue. It has as much effectiveness as people are willing to give it. Obviously you think it is bunk. Others disagree. All of that is fine.
So I'm not allowed to fight against the tide of idiocy? My little comment has created a thread with dozens of comments, and I would guess that at least some of the people reading it or participating it will now think twice before using the phrase to mean "raises the question." So what exactly it wrong with me participating in the "living language" process? Or are only morons invited to that party?
Actually the original meaning of hacker had no negative connotations and meant someone that would hack at a keyboard pounding out code quickly and naturally in order to cause a machine to do something novel. The evil hacker image came much later. The meaning that many /.ers insist on is very close to the original. The universally accepted definition is merely a subset of the original and a product of the ignorant media.
People that use the phrase incorrectly generally don't have the training in logic to really grasp the correct meaning of it. If they did have that training they'd never use it incorrectly. I'd be happy if they used the phrase that they mean, which is, "raises the question," stopped trying to look/sound sophisticated.
Odd that an article about science going down hill would use a term of art from logic in such a terrible way. Oh wait, it isn't odd, merely ironic.
You're as ignorant as you are anonymous.
That's tyranny you moron. Yes, I'm talking about myself here.
Tyrany of the moronic majority! If only we could beg (oh, I mean raise) the IQ of the masses!
It does not beg the question. It raises the question. Begging the question is something else entirely and if you aren't 100% sure that you know exactly what it means you should probably never use the term.
Are you at least smart enough to grasp that you don't get it?
Yet it seems that you buy Acers over and over again. Might I suggest a quality laptop such as an Apple or a Lenovo?
It is the card (not the reader) that supports encryption ON THE CARD. I have a stack of contactless smart cards sitting here on my desk that do 3DES and RSA in the chip. These are much hard to crack than a dumb RFID tag.
Think of the reader as simply being a network connection between one computer (the card in this case) and another (your desktop or whatever it is that is letting you in the door).
Actually all the tests I have seen have shown the Intel graphics chipset spanking the Radeon 9200. I have a G4 mini. It is great for what I use it for, but it is a serious dog at 3d.
So do you want to do it correctly or not? It isn't like this isn't a solved problem. Two way communication is cheap compared to both having your card stolen and putting MB of storage in the key fob.
How about a $2 smart card chip with less than 2k of memory that can securely store a single 3DES (or AES) key and can initiate a secure session with the car, which also has the key? There are several well established methods of doing this and there is basically now weakness. They have to either attack the hardward to extract the keys or crack 3DES or AES, which hasn't been done.
These systems don't need to have 2 MB of memory. That is the wrong solution. They just need to be properly thought out to begin with.