Amazingly, on a 4wd (different than an all-wheel-drive vehicle) when you are in 4 wheel drive, the differential is locked up so that it doesn't allow for ANY speed difference between wheels at all. This maximizes traction (the moment one wheel moves any faster than any other, it loses all power, gaining tracton back instantly) in some situations, at a huge cost. This is why all 4wd pickups/suvs/etc have a 2wd mode for situations where wheel slip isn't expected. This mode uses a standard open diff, or sometimes a modern limited slip differential.
Amazingly, the 4wd modes are acutally more dangerous at any speed above a crawl because any turning at all must be associated with some slip of the outside wheels!
4wd is mainly a holdover from an era where the technology for limited slip or viscous differentials was not available or too expensive for everyday use. Modern AWD systems use a variety of types of differentials to put power to all wheels while allowing for differing wheel speeds, and are preferable in almost all situations to the fully locked diffs common in trucks.
Going to try to avoid clouding this with my feelings on each of the situations, here goes...
I don't think that this situation is comperable to the Slashdot/CoS situation. What Indymedia posted was people's descriptions of various illegal acts which they had done (admist a HUGE amount of other reports surrounding the FTAA conference.) These post themselves were not illegal; they were instead evidence related to illegal actions. The logs were taken in an attempt to trace the authors of the documents, much like phone records might be used.
The Slashdot/Church of Scientology situation was different though. A poster placed documents that were copyrighted trade secrets on slashdot itself. The very act of posting these documents, and Slashdot allowing them to remain was illegal. The Church of Scientology has been known to rabid in its desire to prosecute for copyright infringement, even under marginal pretenses, and here its case would have been quite a bit stronger.
I feel Slashdot's handling of the situation was reasonable. While the desire to protect speech is strong, its hard to justify a protracted, expensive, and dubiously successful legal battle to protect something that wasn't even free speech. CoS texts are widely available elsewere on the internet, and Slashdot's removal of them had little or no effect on the overall availability of these documents.
The indymedia situation, on the otherhand, is almost MORE alarming, in that the court order was taken under an order of silence, and that indymedia decided to remain in operation. While to a great degree, their hands were tied, I feel they need to reconsider what steps they take to protect their sources. Remaining in operation in essence made them part of an sting operation against their posters, something I doubt they would stand for.
Better how? In its identicality?
I suppose Microsoft's crippling of its default mpeg4v3 codec to not include.AVI file support could be considered an advantage, if you live in Redmond.
The X-15's did not follow parabolic trajectories a la Mercury. They flew much in the manner of convential aircraft with sustaned power and lift generated by fixed wings (obviously, with a great deal more power and at a much higher altitude) as opposed to rockets with a short power period followed by a period of what is essentially free-fall.
Despite the generally flat flight plan, they were able to reach altitudes above the 62 mile limit that nominally qualified the pilots as 'astronauts'.
Whats almost more amazing is when Harley Davidson attempted to trademark the sound of their engines! Not sure if they were successful, but one of the precedents they cited was NBC's successful trademark of the fanfare that precedes their newscasts--which I would have thought to have been copyrighted.
There is anecdotal evidence that the SR71 was capable of outrunning the Soviet anti-air missiles that were fired at it - indicating a maxed out speed in excess of Mach 4.
No, this is a bit of a misnomer. When SR-71 pilots talk about being able to outrun SAMs, they mean that even though the top speed of the plane was somewhat less than that of the SAM, the combination of the planes high cruiseing altitude and phenominal speed allowed them to be assured the missiles would run out of fuel long before they caught up. Indeed, for a long time it was believed that an SR-71 could pass through the entire targeting range of several generations of Russian missiles in the time it took the missiles to get to altitude, much less be targeted. However, the missiles still had a nominally greater speed.
Truly an impressive craft, a pity it didn't outlast the U-2
I'm not so sure I agree. Gibson's first trilogy was quite dystopian. However, the Virtual Light series of books (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tommorrows Parties) seemed to indicate more than anything else, that even the future will be odd, but people will find their places in it. This seems pretty much identical to Stephenson in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. As for Sterling, his writings are so varied that I'm not really sure what you are referring to.
As for a view of the future, I don't find the events of The Diamond Age to be too likely anytime soon--in fact, weren't there subtle indications that it took place roughly 70 years after Snow Crash, which generally felt like it might occur 20 or 30 years down the road?
Idoru and the other books of the series don't seem to make as global descriptions of the world as Stephenson's works do, but I think what predictions they do make are somewhat more rational, though I doubt anyone will dump enough cash into AI research to make a Rei Toei anytime soon...
But as cool as it is, would you really be willing to take it to those speeds? At 170 mph, a McLaren could drive on a ceiling. Push your bike up there, and the lift on your helmet alone will make it a full time fight to stay below the windscreen. Lose that battle and just try to hang on to the bars. Theres a reason why GP riders spend almost as much time at the gym as they do at the track--every second of a race is a 100% physical exertion.Not to mention the fact that the effects of errors in a McLaren are limited to a few bills for bodywork. Twist your throttle a little too much in third and you'll be sitting on your ass at 105 mph. Hope you greased your leathers!
This really makes me wonder if I just set a record for the fastest commission of a felony. It happened even faster than I realized it was quite possibly illegal! Although, there has to be a slashdotter that figured out what the encyption method was even before they went to the page. Which of course begs another legal question--if you reverse engineer an encryption method without actually looking at the code, sample input/outputs, etc, is it still reverse engineering? And does the DMCA cover it?
Well, considering that its a free registration system, its probably so they can attempt to collect some amount of marketing data or sell the user lists. Since thats all data thats important to be collected in mass, it hardly matters if 1% of the users slip through. Evidently they needed to provide access to their database without registration and the only solution they could come up with partners/archives/who knows what else. I'm sure the money that they are getting from selling their content to whoever needs those server is significantly more than whatver they are losing from not having a few thousand slashdotters in their user database.
What makes me really curious is that I don't need to register to buy a Times at the news stand. The per-copy charge of any newspaper is a teensy portion of their budget, often less than the cost of the paper used to print on. Why should the internet site be any different? I mean, they probably lose less money receiving a page hit than someone actually buying a copy! So, why is it so vital that they get my personal information online?
It comes from the really bad translations in the game Zero Wing for genesis. What the flash animation here has to do with anything is beyond me.
I don't care about karma. Save your mod points for someone who does.
No, instead you need a slave in Malaysia to build you air conditioner. You no longer need a courier, you need a copper mine, probably in Africa, semiconductor plans, probably in Taiwan, and container ships, probabyl 30+ years old and registered in Liberia or Morrocco and stocked with a crew of workers who may or may not be paid enough to cover their food expenses when they land in port to unload the stuff.
People seem to assume that advances in technology make things more efficient. Frankly, I'm wondering if they don't transfer the burden to the rest of the world. It is now belived that 30,000 years ago, it was neccessary for only the adult members of society to work only 15-20 hours a week for all survival functions--I'm not suggesting we go back, but it certainly makes you wonder...
The quality of the INPUT data was rather poor... making it an even more amazing feat that he was able to develop a functional algorithm for assembling and decoding it--the Celera data was apparently much better organized and more complete. Nobody is doubting the quality of the actual solution--if anything, it is probably more robust than whatever Celera was designing.
As time goes on, it is likely that his software will be used on better data, an act which likely would otherwise be illegal right now.
No it isn't, because unless all the studios suddenly start providing Region 8 DVDs for general consumption, the astronauts won't be able to play any of their discs. That's the whole point...
I'm sure the MPAA is crying a river.
>>They're probably stuck watching VHS tapes on a dusty old multisystem VCR.
>How is this VCR going to collect dust in near-zero gravity?
Static electricity, of course!
>>> So, a Playstation card is more important than a project summary for a VP of the comapany you work for?
Get to the fourth disk of any SquareSoft title, and you'll agree...
I think you've been watching a certain cable channel too much. Most of the original Japanese soundtracks contain little techno-type music of any sort. For reasons unknown, Cartoon Network prefers to replace the utterly repetitive, forgettible, and strangly addicting Japanese pop music that fills the original soundtracks with utterly repetitive, forgettable, and somewhat less addicting techno and drum and bass.
Strangely, mecha seems to be less and less popular in Japan, but I have no insight there
>>I will stick to my CPU. I can do more and play more than any console. I really think that gaming is best on the >>desktop but then again, I like my dual heads and my keyboard and my multitasking... That is just me.
My CPU kinda sucks for gaming--it just sits there. Once I tried to use it as a checker piece, but it didn't really fit into the squares very well. I suppose you could probably run a pool around the office about how long it takes to fry an egg or something.
Once I put it back in my computer, it was OK, but too far away from the couch.
As a highly advanced listening post, I'd imagine that some pretty sensitive devices were kept inside. It might just be easier to attempt to minimize static electricity in the building as a whole than to try to shield each device properly and make it fault compliant. Also, I would imagine that a fair amount of electronics work would be carried done in the facility itself, another good reason to attempt to remove all static charge build-up.
If I understand correctly, EMP attacks don't have much to do with static charges. They are caused by a large EMF fluctation which causes massive currents to form in electrical companants. I think that techniques to prevent static charges would have little to do with those that protect against EMPs.
I don't think so; if you were running user mode conceiveably you'd be doing important tasks on the other modes (besides the honeypot) The danger would be that the rooted honeypot could be used to suck up cycles and bring the whole system to a halt.
Not to mention the danger that the implementation wouldn't be perfect and that they could somehow access the other modes--shared resources could make this a possibility.
It would be better to make a honeypot that shares a minumum of resources with other machines. I don't really like the whole concept--if script kiddies are able to root your honeypot, it is just as useful to launch a DoS or do whatever they do as is any other machine, and you could be held (slightly)responsible. Not to mention the fact that it will be pretty obvious that they've got a honey pot--it won't be doing anything! I can't imagine a hacker not doing a 'users' upon login, and figuring out something was up, especially with the recent publicity.
They've been banned from Indy/Cart and F1, but they are several classes of Jet powered Dragsters. Interestingly, they are still slower than top-fuelers and funny cars. Not sure, but I think they use the jet as a plane would, with no mechanical connection to the wheels. A shaft driven one might actually be faster. Fun to watch because they actually seem accelerate faster at higher speed, after moving from the line at a relative crawl.
Real reason turbine cars haven't hit the mainstream is that turbine engines remain ungodly expensive and are very demanding of proper maintainence. Banned from Indycar when people realized that whereas you can cut the ignition on a Combustion Engine, the only thing you can do to a turbine is shut off the fuel and wait for the damn thing to stop spinning.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazingly, on a 4wd (different than an all-wheel-drive vehicle) when you are in 4 wheel drive, the differential is locked up so that it doesn't allow for ANY speed difference between wheels at all. This maximizes traction (the moment one wheel moves any faster than any other, it loses all power, gaining tracton back instantly) in some situations, at a huge cost. This is why all 4wd pickups/suvs/etc have a 2wd mode for situations where wheel slip isn't expected. This mode uses a standard open diff, or sometimes a modern limited slip differential. Amazingly, the 4wd modes are acutally more dangerous at any speed above a crawl because any turning at all must be associated with some slip of the outside wheels! 4wd is mainly a holdover from an era where the technology for limited slip or viscous differentials was not available or too expensive for everyday use. Modern AWD systems use a variety of types of differentials to put power to all wheels while allowing for differing wheel speeds, and are preferable in almost all situations to the fully locked diffs common in trucks.
I don't think that this situation is comperable to the Slashdot/CoS situation. What Indymedia posted was people's descriptions of various illegal acts which they had done (admist a HUGE amount of other reports surrounding the FTAA conference.) These post themselves were not illegal; they were instead evidence related to illegal actions. The logs were taken in an attempt to trace the authors of the documents, much like phone records might be used.
The Slashdot/Church of Scientology situation was different though. A poster placed documents that were copyrighted trade secrets on slashdot itself. The very act of posting these documents, and Slashdot allowing them to remain was illegal. The Church of Scientology has been known to rabid in its desire to prosecute for copyright infringement, even under marginal pretenses, and here its case would have been quite a bit stronger. I feel Slashdot's handling of the situation was reasonable. While the desire to protect speech is strong, its hard to justify a protracted, expensive, and dubiously successful legal battle to protect something that wasn't even free speech. CoS texts are widely available elsewere on the internet, and Slashdot's removal of them had little or no effect on the overall availability of these documents. The indymedia situation, on the otherhand, is almost MORE alarming, in that the court order was taken under an order of silence, and that indymedia decided to remain in operation. While to a great degree, their hands were tied, I feel they need to reconsider what steps they take to protect their sources. Remaining in operation in essence made them part of an sting operation against their posters, something I doubt they would stand for.Better how? In its identicality? I suppose Microsoft's crippling of its default mpeg4v3 codec to not include .AVI file support could be considered an advantage, if you live in Redmond.
Which is somewhat ironic, because after reading the article, I don't see ANY meat at all. Not even ridiculously inaccurate meat!
The X-15's did not follow parabolic trajectories a la Mercury. They flew much in the manner of convential aircraft with sustaned power and lift generated by fixed wings (obviously, with a great deal more power and at a much higher altitude) as opposed to rockets with a short power period followed by a period of what is essentially free-fall. Despite the generally flat flight plan, they were able to reach altitudes above the 62 mile limit that nominally qualified the pilots as 'astronauts'.
Whats almost more amazing is when Harley Davidson attempted to trademark the sound of their engines! Not sure if they were successful, but one of the precedents they cited was NBC's successful trademark of the fanfare that precedes their newscasts--which I would have thought to have been copyrighted.
I'm not so sure I agree. Gibson's first trilogy was quite dystopian. However, the Virtual Light series of books (Virtual Light, Idoru, and All Tommorrows Parties) seemed to indicate more than anything else, that even the future will be odd, but people will find their places in it. This seems pretty much identical to Stephenson in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. As for Sterling, his writings are so varied that I'm not really sure what you are referring to. As for a view of the future, I don't find the events of The Diamond Age to be too likely anytime soon--in fact, weren't there subtle indications that it took place roughly 70 years after Snow Crash, which generally felt like it might occur 20 or 30 years down the road? Idoru and the other books of the series don't seem to make as global descriptions of the world as Stephenson's works do, but I think what predictions they do make are somewhat more rational, though I doubt anyone will dump enough cash into AI research to make a Rei Toei anytime soon...
Was this encypted somehow? I tried rot13, and it made a little more sense, but beyond that, I'm stumped.
But as cool as it is, would you really be willing to take it to those speeds? At 170 mph, a McLaren could drive on a ceiling. Push your bike up there, and the lift on your helmet alone will make it a full time fight to stay below the windscreen. Lose that battle and just try to hang on to the bars. Theres a reason why GP riders spend almost as much time at the gym as they do at the track--every second of a race is a 100% physical exertion.Not to mention the fact that the effects of errors in a McLaren are limited to a few bills for bodywork. Twist your throttle a little too much in third and you'll be sitting on your ass at 105 mph. Hope you greased your leathers!
This really makes me wonder if I just set a record for the fastest commission of a felony. It happened even faster than I realized it was quite possibly illegal! Although, there has to be a slashdotter that figured out what the encyption method was even before they went to the page. Which of course begs another legal question--if you reverse engineer an encryption method without actually looking at the code, sample input/outputs, etc, is it still reverse engineering? And does the DMCA cover it?
Well, considering that its a free registration system, its probably so they can attempt to collect some amount of marketing data or sell the user lists. Since thats all data thats important to be collected in mass, it hardly matters if 1% of the users slip through. Evidently they needed to provide access to their database without registration and the only solution they could come up with partners/archives/who knows what else. I'm sure the money that they are getting from selling their content to whoever needs those server is significantly more than whatver they are losing from not having a few thousand slashdotters in their user database. What makes me really curious is that I don't need to register to buy a Times at the news stand. The per-copy charge of any newspaper is a teensy portion of their budget, often less than the cost of the paper used to print on. Why should the internet site be any different? I mean, they probably lose less money receiving a page hit than someone actually buying a copy! So, why is it so vital that they get my personal information online?
42 in base 13... Perhaps early humans had extra digits?
It comes from the really bad translations in the game Zero Wing for genesis. What the flash animation here has to do with anything is beyond me. I don't care about karma. Save your mod points for someone who does.
I don't know, where did the MIR mold come from?
No, instead you need a slave in Malaysia to build you air conditioner. You no longer need a courier, you need a copper mine, probably in Africa, semiconductor plans, probably in Taiwan, and container ships, probabyl 30+ years old and registered in Liberia or Morrocco and stocked with a crew of workers who may or may not be paid enough to cover their food expenses when they land in port to unload the stuff. People seem to assume that advances in technology make things more efficient. Frankly, I'm wondering if they don't transfer the burden to the rest of the world. It is now belived that 30,000 years ago, it was neccessary for only the adult members of society to work only 15-20 hours a week for all survival functions--I'm not suggesting we go back, but it certainly makes you wonder...
The quality of the INPUT data was rather poor... making it an even more amazing feat that he was able to develop a functional algorithm for assembling and decoding it--the Celera data was apparently much better organized and more complete. Nobody is doubting the quality of the actual solution--if anything, it is probably more robust than whatever Celera was designing.
As time goes on, it is likely that his software will be used on better data, an act which likely would otherwise be illegal right now.
No it isn't, because unless all the studios suddenly start providing Region 8 DVDs for general consumption, the astronauts won't be able to play any of their discs. That's the whole point... I'm sure the MPAA is crying a river.
>>They're probably stuck watching VHS tapes on a dusty old multisystem VCR. >How is this VCR going to collect dust in near-zero gravity? Static electricity, of course!
>>> So, a Playstation card is more important than a project summary for a VP of the comapany you work for? Get to the fourth disk of any SquareSoft title, and you'll agree...
I think you've been watching a certain cable channel too much. Most of the original Japanese soundtracks contain little techno-type music of any sort. For reasons unknown, Cartoon Network prefers to replace the utterly repetitive, forgettible, and strangly addicting Japanese pop music that fills the original soundtracks with utterly repetitive, forgettable, and somewhat less addicting techno and drum and bass.
Strangely, mecha seems to be less and less popular in Japan, but I have no insight there
>>I will stick to my CPU. I can do more and play more than any console. I really think that gaming is best on the >>desktop but then again, I like my dual heads and my keyboard and my multitasking... That is just me. My CPU kinda sucks for gaming--it just sits there. Once I tried to use it as a checker piece, but it didn't really fit into the squares very well. I suppose you could probably run a pool around the office about how long it takes to fry an egg or something. Once I put it back in my computer, it was OK, but too far away from the couch.
As a highly advanced listening post, I'd imagine that some pretty sensitive devices were kept inside. It might just be easier to attempt to minimize static electricity in the building as a whole than to try to shield each device properly and make it fault compliant. Also, I would imagine that a fair amount of electronics work would be carried done in the facility itself, another good reason to attempt to remove all static charge build-up. If I understand correctly, EMP attacks don't have much to do with static charges. They are caused by a large EMF fluctation which causes massive currents to form in electrical companants. I think that techniques to prevent static charges would have little to do with those that protect against EMPs.
I don't think so; if you were running user mode conceiveably you'd be doing important tasks on the other modes (besides the honeypot) The danger would be that the rooted honeypot could be used to suck up cycles and bring the whole system to a halt. Not to mention the danger that the implementation wouldn't be perfect and that they could somehow access the other modes--shared resources could make this a possibility. It would be better to make a honeypot that shares a minumum of resources with other machines. I don't really like the whole concept--if script kiddies are able to root your honeypot, it is just as useful to launch a DoS or do whatever they do as is any other machine, and you could be held (slightly)responsible. Not to mention the fact that it will be pretty obvious that they've got a honey pot--it won't be doing anything! I can't imagine a hacker not doing a 'users' upon login, and figuring out something was up, especially with the recent publicity.
They've been banned from Indy/Cart and F1, but they are several classes of Jet powered Dragsters. Interestingly, they are still slower than top-fuelers and funny cars. Not sure, but I think they use the jet as a plane would, with no mechanical connection to the wheels. A shaft driven one might actually be faster. Fun to watch because they actually seem accelerate faster at higher speed, after moving from the line at a relative crawl. Real reason turbine cars haven't hit the mainstream is that turbine engines remain ungodly expensive and are very demanding of proper maintainence. Banned from Indycar when people realized that whereas you can cut the ignition on a Combustion Engine, the only thing you can do to a turbine is shut off the fuel and wait for the damn thing to stop spinning.