I just wanted to say thank you for such a thoughtful post. There aren't enough people out there who would take the time to think about these issues, let alone write eloquently about them.
Yeah, and they'll answer their phones in the middle of the night, too...
Good grief! The poster is calling companies in the middle of the night expecting them to have crack 24-hour teams ready to deal with the information he has? Surprise! The vast majority of people work during business hours.
SO CALL THEM DURING BUSINESS HOURS! Both credit card companies offered to have you talk to their security people, so give 'em a call.
Even talking to the police, nobody is going to want to take a statement from you or have any detectives talk to you, except during the work day.
(I'm posting at 4am local time -- I know what insomnia is; that doesn't mean I expect to be able to conduct normal business right now)
And really, are there actually "millions of people" who still watch over the air television? Almost everyone I know has cable or satellite, and if they don't it's because they don't watch TV at all.
Well, there are roughly 300 million people in the US. If you know 300 people, and more than one or two of them watch broadcast television, there are your statistical "millions of people".:)
Conduction and convection are not going to work in a vacuum, but radiation works just fine. This is electromagnetic radiation, like light and radio waves, so it does not need a medium
Which is why vacuum flasks also use silvered glass, to help reflect the infrared radiation back into your hot soup.:)
Are 1,6, and 11 the only channels that don't overlap?
You can get away with using four without much problem. I use 1, 4, 8, 11 for my wide-area 802.11b network.
You have to plan out in 3 dimensions when you have multiple access points like that. Often the strongest signal available to a roaming user is above or below them, rather than on their floor.
With only 3 channels available, it's too hard to map them out. With 4 you can at least guarantee that no two adjacent access points are on the same channel.
I'm actually puzzled why Apple put the "Apple" on the later command keys, since the symbol is not used in any of their software to denote keyboard shortcuts. The purists among us bristle at references to "apple-q to quit". Bah! It's "command-q".:)
(The IIgs keyboard was never actually sold with Macs, was it? I remember it having a fairly unique design that matched the styling of the GS)
As head of the International Committee to Get Rid of the Extraneous "And", I feel obligated to point out that in english, there is no "and" in numbers unless you're referring to a fraction:
2004: two thousand four 1999: one thousand nine hundred ninety nine 3.14: three and fourteen hundredths
We at ICTGROTEA call on all english speakers to spread the word and protect this poor word from overuse.
when he comes up wondering why he can't get out to the net show him the logs and explain that one guy using 95% of the bandwidth is not acceptable and he can either cut it out or go get his own dedicated pipe to the 'net.
That would be the three-year-old's approach.
No, instead, just talk to the user first.
It is MUCH more complicated if that user is paying you money for the service (albeit not much money). If you didn't explicitly state in some sort of contract an acceptable use policy, YOU are the one who gets in trouble for discontinuing service.
Another example: the water bill is paid by my landlord, and so somehow built in to my rent. But there is a clause in the renter's agreement that states that "excessive" water use can result in a fine or charges. That protects the landlord.
Without that, I'm legally entitled to use something that is "included" in my rent -- fill all the neighbors swimming pools if I wanted to. The landlord would be the one getting in trouble for retaliating in any way.
Of course, this is only if people choose to be litigious bastards. If people act like human beings, a nice friendly conversation can solve the problem.
But I can assure you: acting like a three-year-old and unplugging the user without warning WILL make them mad, and more likely to act like a litigious bastard.:)
uhm... LCDs fed with analog signals do NOT have a flickering refresh effect like CRTs do. Between frames the LCD pixels just stay right where they are; they don't fade to black until refreshed. The picture from a digital signal is not very different -- just a bit sharper, a bit better color etc.
But regardless, the vertical refresh of CRTs isn't what causes photo-sensitive seizures of this kind. Flashing lights on the order of 5 to 20 Hz are the culprit.
A "lightning" effect is usually done by painting pure white over the entire screen for a couple frames, then back to the (usually dark) previous image, then white again, then dark... at a perfect rate to accidentally stimulate the victim's sensitive brain.
It was indeed only megabits. So with 25Mb, the first batch of data they received was just over 3MB of data. The transmission rate was about 4kB/s. Not bad for a 300 million mile distance. Some of NASAs first probes sent back their pictures and data at 170 bits per second. Those were some patient scientists.
This was not using Spirit's high-gain antenna, however -- and was not communicated directly to earth. The first data was received by Mars Global Surveyor as it flew over the rover, and relayed to us, since the rover was on the "far side" of Mars at the time.
I think the high-gain antenna will be deployed and set up some time tonight. Then we get the "fire hose" of data they mentioned.
Not to mention the fact that Americans have decided that the penis is the most horrible awful thing that must be shunned at all costs. NEVER allow one on tv.
Except that the article is wrong. Google around for GLORIAD, and you'll find many references to its present 155Mbps speed. (That's a common speed, used by OC3 etc)
But what's an order of magnitude between friends?:)
Wow, stunning...not. Even after the upgrade, it will be outdated before it ever finds a use.
Wow, stunning. You don't know what you're talking about.
The "B" is capitalized here for a reason. It's Bytes, not bits.
And if you were to RTFA, you'd find:
The network, expected to go online next month, will ring the Northern Hemisphere, connecting computers in Chicago with machines in Amsterdam, Moscow, Siberia, Beijing and Hong Kong before hooking up with Chicago again, said Greg Cole of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, one of the leaders of the Little GLORIAD project. Data will flow at
155 million bytes per second.
(emphasis mine)
A wide-area-network at well over 1Gbps (that's bits) is nothing to sneeze at.
From the same article:
Little GLORIAD is a "first big step" toward development of the higher-speed GLORIAD, Cole said. That effort, expected to be launched later this year, will move data at 10 gigabytes per second, 60 times faster than the Little GLORIAD.
Once you start talking about DVD-per-second rates of data, you've got something.
Ion propulsion works very differently than any other type of normal rocket. The idea with ion engines is that they're able to take individual atoms of their "propellant" and accelerate them to high velocities, using electricity as the energy, rather than some sort of chemical reaction.
Rockets in space work by taking some mass and throwing it in the opposite direction you want to go. Imagine yourself floating in space holding a bowling ball. You wouldn't have to push the ball away from you very hard to get yourself moving, since it's very heavy. But what if you only had a ping-pong ball: to get yourself moving quickly, you'd have to "throw" the ping-pong ball away from you very very very fast, to make up for its very small mass.
Chemical rockets take some combination of chemicals that react strongly together, creating heat. The result is a hot gas at high pressure, which blows out in the direction of the rocket nozzle, providing thrust the other direction.
The xenon ion engine takes xenon gas at very very low pressure, ionizes the atoms so that they're electrically charged, and then uses electric force to fling them at VERY high speed out into space. The velocity is much higher than in any chemical rocket. But ion engines aren't very strong -- the process works with just a little tiny bit of xenon at a time, so the engine as a whole winds up giving just a very gentle push. But since not much xenon is used up, the xenon that you have will last a LONG time.
That's the "specific impluse": a measure of how much a rocket can push you "per pound" of fuel. This page says that the space shuttle's chemical engines have a specific impulse of 460. This latest ion engine has a specific impulse of 6000!
So with the same weight of fuel, the ion engine would get you going about 13 times faster by the time you used up the fuel.
And how should apple support products of theirs that some tech at Voelker soldered back together?
No major manufacturer allows official support people to repair broken parts, only replace them. Yes, it's perhaps a bit silly, but because manhours are so expensive, it's cheaper in the long run.
Did you pay your grandpa's friend at least $30/hour for his time?
It's not too hard to understand why Apple would make these decisions. I doubt Dell or Gateway would have their support technicians repair damage like that either.
I happened to pick up an 802.11 signal from the place next door, so I used it.
Which is arguably wrong. Without proving damages, it shouldn't be prosecuted as a crime, however.
Just because something isn't protected by a password doesn't mean that it may be used by anyone. It's especially important to realize that many APs come out of the box with no WEP enabled, and work as a plug-and-play device with no configuration. At what point, legally, do you hold consumers responsible for locking down their own equipment to prevent unauthorized use?
Consider a much much older technological example: early cordless phones -- the old 49MHz variety -- did not employ access protection, such that a neighbor with a compatible phone could, even accidentally, reach your base station and make calls on your phone line. That should certainly be illegal, no? Well, at least if your neighbor did it willfully.
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I just wanted to say thank you for such a thoughtful post. There aren't enough people out there who would take the time to think about these issues, let alone write eloquently about them.
- Peter
call the local news media
Yeah, and they'll answer their phones in the middle of the night, too...
Good grief! The poster is calling companies in the middle of the night expecting them to have crack 24-hour teams ready to deal with the information he has? Surprise! The vast majority of people work during business hours.
SO CALL THEM DURING BUSINESS HOURS! Both credit card companies offered to have you talk to their security people, so give 'em a call.
Even talking to the police, nobody is going to want to take a statement from you or have any detectives talk to you, except during the work day.
(I'm posting at 4am local time -- I know what insomnia is; that doesn't mean I expect to be able to conduct normal business right now)
- Peter
And really, are there actually "millions of people" who still watch over the air television? Almost everyone I know has cable or satellite, and if they don't it's because they don't watch TV at all.
:)
Well, there are roughly 300 million people in the US. If you know 300 people, and more than one or two of them watch broadcast television, there are your statistical "millions of people".
- Peter
The problem it seems would be outputting enough power to have a noticable effect on a non-volatile slug in that small of a timeframe.
:)
I suppose that merely heating the slug to a molten blob of metal doesn't really help, does it, if that blob is still going to impact you soon.
- Peter
Conduction and convection are not going to work in a vacuum, but radiation works just fine. This is electromagnetic radiation, like light and radio waves, so it does not need a medium
:)
Which is why vacuum flasks also use silvered glass, to help reflect the infrared radiation back into your hot soup.
- Peter
Are 1,6, and 11 the only channels that don't overlap?
You can get away with using four without much problem. I use 1, 4, 8, 11 for my wide-area 802.11b network.
You have to plan out in 3 dimensions when you have multiple access points like that. Often the strongest signal available to a roaming user is above or below them, rather than on their floor.
With only 3 channels available, it's too hard to map them out. With 4 you can at least guarantee that no two adjacent access points are on the same channel.
- Peter
However, the Lisa and Macintosh keyboards both had closed apple symbols.
:)
The Macintosh keyboard had NO Apple symbol at all.
Susan Kare was asked to pick an abstract symbol. She found a sweedish campground map symbol that's been in use ever since.
I'm actually puzzled why Apple put the "Apple" on the later command keys, since the symbol is not used in any of their software to denote keyboard shortcuts. The purists among us bristle at references to "apple-q to quit". Bah! It's "command-q".
(The IIgs keyboard was never actually sold with Macs, was it? I remember it having a fairly unique design that matched the styling of the GS)
- Peter
As head of the International Committee to Get Rid of the Extraneous "And", I feel obligated to point out that in english, there is no "and" in numbers unless you're referring to a fraction:
2004: two thousand four
1999: one thousand nine hundred ninety nine
3.14: three and fourteen hundredths
We at ICTGROTEA call on all english speakers to spread the word and protect this poor word from overuse.
Thank you.
when he comes up wondering why he can't get out to the net show him the logs and explain that one guy using 95% of the bandwidth is not acceptable and he can either cut it out or go get his own dedicated pipe to the 'net.
:)
That would be the three-year-old's approach.
No, instead, just talk to the user first.
It is MUCH more complicated if that user is paying you money for the service (albeit not much money). If you didn't explicitly state in some sort of contract an acceptable use policy, YOU are the one who gets in trouble for discontinuing service.
Another example: the water bill is paid by my landlord, and so somehow built in to my rent. But there is a clause in the renter's agreement that states that "excessive" water use can result in a fine or charges. That protects the landlord.
Without that, I'm legally entitled to use something that is "included" in my rent -- fill all the neighbors swimming pools if I wanted to. The landlord would be the one getting in trouble for retaliating in any way.
Of course, this is only if people choose to be litigious bastards. If people act like human beings, a nice friendly conversation can solve the problem.
But I can assure you: acting like a three-year-old and unplugging the user without warning WILL make them mad, and more likely to act like a litigious bastard.
- Peter
As long as the camera creates a live DV stream and puts it on the Firewire bus, it doesn't matter what platform or app you use.
In fact, you should be able to connect two camcorders together and use one to record the live video of the other.
Any software that allows you to import DV video from tape won't know the difference -- it's the same stream.
(Unless really DUMB software insists on doing device-control and somehow turns the camera's live feed OFF explicitly)
- Peter
>>Tell that to the people who were on board the Hindenberg...
>Why? The Hindenberg didn't explode.
And hydrogen didn't cause the fire. The hydrogen barely even contributed to it until most of the ship had already burned.
Now, if you pre-mix two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen... the smallest spark will make a big boom.
- Peter
uhm... LCDs fed with analog signals do NOT have a flickering refresh effect like CRTs do. Between frames the LCD pixels just stay right where they are; they don't fade to black until refreshed. The picture from a digital signal is not very different -- just a bit sharper, a bit better color etc.
But regardless, the vertical refresh of CRTs isn't what causes photo-sensitive seizures of this kind. Flashing lights on the order of 5 to 20 Hz are the culprit.
A "lightning" effect is usually done by painting pure white over the entire screen for a couple frames, then back to the (usually dark) previous image, then white again, then dark... at a perfect rate to accidentally stimulate the victim's sensitive brain.
- Peter
I hate birds.
- Peter
Gosh I hope you don't mean "in parallel" -- you'd want that resistor in series, or all it's doing is wasting power!
- Peter
It was indeed only megabits. So with 25Mb, the first batch of data they received was just over 3MB of data. The transmission rate was about 4kB/s. Not bad for a 300 million mile distance. Some of NASAs first probes sent back their pictures and data at 170 bits per second. Those were some patient scientists.
This was not using Spirit's high-gain antenna, however -- and was not communicated directly to earth. The first data was received by Mars Global Surveyor as it flew over the rover, and relayed to us, since the rover was on the "far side" of Mars at the time.
I think the high-gain antenna will be deployed and set up some time tonight. Then we get the "fire hose" of data they mentioned.
- Peter
Not to mention the fact that Americans have decided that the penis is the most horrible awful thing that must be shunned at all costs. NEVER allow one on tv.
Naked ladies are okay though.
?
- Peter
Except that the article is wrong. Google around for GLORIAD, and you'll find many references to its present 155Mbps speed. (That's a common speed, used by OC3 etc)
:)
But what's an order of magnitude between friends?
- Peter
Oh. Except in this case, the article itself is wrong.
/. editors.
Stupid, stupid article. Stupider
The network is just a 155Mbps -- that's Megabits per second -- network. That's just an OC3.
Look at the google cache of a powerpoint discussing this network.
So this breaks no speed records -- but it is a nice fat pipe into some places that have very limited bandwidth to the outside world.
- Peter
Be careful with your spelling:
MBps == MegaBytes per second
Mbps == Megabits per second.
100BASE-T ethernet is 100Mbps. Note the small "b".
- Peter
Wow, stunning. You don't know what you're talking about.
The "B" is capitalized here for a reason. It's Bytes, not bits.
And if you were to RTFA, you'd find:(emphasis mine)
A wide-area-network at well over 1Gbps (that's bits) is nothing to sneeze at.
From the same article:
Once you start talking about DVD-per-second rates of data, you've got something.
- Peter
What kind of plaintext: ASCII or Unicode?
:)
Hey, what about EBCDIC?
- Peter
Ion propulsion works very differently than any other type of normal rocket. The idea with ion engines is that they're able to take individual atoms of their "propellant" and accelerate them to high velocities, using electricity as the energy, rather than some sort of chemical reaction.
Rockets in space work by taking some mass and throwing it in the opposite direction you want to go. Imagine yourself floating in space holding a bowling ball. You wouldn't have to push the ball away from you very hard to get yourself moving, since it's very heavy. But what if you only had a ping-pong ball: to get yourself moving quickly, you'd have to "throw" the ping-pong ball away from you very very very fast, to make up for its very small mass.
Chemical rockets take some combination of chemicals that react strongly together, creating heat. The result is a hot gas at high pressure, which blows out in the direction of the rocket nozzle, providing thrust the other direction.
The xenon ion engine takes xenon gas at very very low pressure, ionizes the atoms so that they're electrically charged, and then uses electric force to fling them at VERY high speed out into space. The velocity is much higher than in any chemical rocket. But ion engines aren't very strong -- the process works with just a little tiny bit of xenon at a time, so the engine as a whole winds up giving just a very gentle push. But since not much xenon is used up, the xenon that you have will last a LONG time.
That's the "specific impluse": a measure of how much a rocket can push you "per pound" of fuel. This page says that the space shuttle's chemical engines have a specific impulse of 460. This latest ion engine has a specific impulse of 6000!
So with the same weight of fuel, the ion engine would get you going about 13 times faster by the time you used up the fuel.
- Peter
Discrimination! What about the XXX and XYY minority? :)
- Peter
And how should apple support products of theirs that some tech at Voelker soldered back together?
No major manufacturer allows official support people to repair broken parts, only replace them. Yes, it's perhaps a bit silly, but because manhours are so expensive, it's cheaper in the long run.
Did you pay your grandpa's friend at least $30/hour for his time?
It's not too hard to understand why Apple would make these decisions. I doubt Dell or Gateway would have their support technicians repair damage like that either.
- Peter
I happened to pick up an 802.11 signal from the place next door, so I used it.
Which is arguably wrong. Without proving damages, it shouldn't be prosecuted as a crime, however.
Just because something isn't protected by a password doesn't mean that it may be used by anyone. It's especially important to realize that many APs come out of the box with no WEP enabled, and work as a plug-and-play device with no configuration. At what point, legally, do you hold consumers responsible for locking down their own equipment to prevent unauthorized use?
Consider a much much older technological example: early cordless phones -- the old 49MHz variety -- did not employ access protection, such that a neighbor with a compatible phone could, even accidentally, reach your base station and make calls on your phone line. That should certainly be illegal, no? Well, at least if your neighbor did it willfully.
- Peter