I know it would be hard and probably not pratical but... You take a big warehouse, rig the floor and ceiling with 6' high wooden or plastic rod. Each rod is controlled by pneumatic (or whatever) to raise (in the case of the floor rod) or lower (for the ceiling one) and they meet in the middle (assuming a 12' space between the rods)
I don't see how you get the illusion of motion then. You're suggesting that
rods extend and retract to do that? They'd have to be able to do it pretty
fast so it wouldn't look cheesy. And if you have enough power to extend a
6 foot rod from the floor in a thirtieth of a second or so, and the rod is
rigid enough to withstand it, then I don't want to fall off the tracking
platform. It might make an entertaining episode of CSI, though.
"We found this guy on the golf course. He's been run through seventy-three
times with some kind of wooden or plastic rod. Seventy-two times seem
to have happened after he was dead."
If you're already using the VR helmet thingie, you might as well
just paint the rooms using it too.
If your idea was just to make a configurable building without the ability
to pincushion your guests, then I retract my comments.
They will not charge you for the card (it's illegal) and you'll be sure you are not leaving a lot of valuable personal information on it that could be easily lifted off with any simple scanning device card reader.
Illegal?
I can't imagine any reason it would be illegal to demand payment for a missing key. I suppose some states might have laws like that, but it would clearly be a state or local matter.
However, I have never been asked to return a missing card. I assumed it was because they were so cheap.
I understand that a significant problem for Apple is that they've
achieved so much market penetration that most of the people that want
an iPod have an iPod. The solution to this is to produce new models
that will encourage those people to chug their old purchase and get
a new one.
I find the sound quality on my Mini to be perfectly fine for my
middle-aged ears. I don't miss the ability to "view album covers
in full color" and if I want to share photos with someone, that's
why God made the internet.
The smaller size is great, but the Mini is already really small--much
smaller than my wallet. The only part that seems attractive is that
there isn't a mini-drive in there to pug out.
I think that Apple has a tough row to hoe when it comes to getting
people like to me switch up. I can't think of any features that
could reasonably be incorporated in a new iPod that would make me
dump my present one, except maybe if it could convert those
miserable DRM files that iTunes sells to MP3s.
Seems to me that if they're trying to decide
whether a wireless signal is coming from near or far, they're relying
on that old speed-of-light thingie, which I recall as being around
one nanosecond per foot.
In order to establish a "bubble" within which users must be
located, you have to determine the position of the furthest
legitimate user and then add one foot per nanosecond of
worst-case response time. For a real-world situation, this
new sphere is likely to take in some real estate that isn't
under your physical control. For instance, at my house
I have a machine that's around 60 feet from my AP. If I
add 40 nanoseconds (feet) to that, an illegitimate user
could park on the street. Even if we assumed a zero-time
latency, someone could sit on the curb and be within
the bubble. If the only way for this to help
is to restrict users to living room, it doesn't
seem to be very "wireless" any more.
Cryptography seems like a much better solution for the
real world.
I hope safe returns in the future aren't news but instead are commonplace. Hopefully NASA's shift in ideology regarding spacecraft design will usher in a new era in incident free missions.
I hope as a society we grow a pair and realize that space travel is likely to be risky for some time. If aviation had the focus on safety that they've had in the space program, the big flying news for the year would be that the next attempt to cross the English channel had to be aborted again.
Of course, that doesn't mean I don't hope for safe flights too, but let's be realistic so we can make some progress. I'll volunteer with the present safety record...
So, to sum it up, the shuttle is more expensive, less reliable, less capable, and more dangerous than its predecessor.
I see a lot of people make the claim the shuttle is more dangerous than the spam-in-a-can solutions, e.g., Apollo. If you count the pad fire, Apollo has a 6% loss rate vs. the shuttle's 2%. If you discount the fire (and ignore the near loss of the Apollo 13 crew), you have to recognize there were only a few manned Apollo missions. There is no statistical validity to the claim that there are less than 2% of black marbles in the bag if you only pulled out 17 to check. Well, technically, there is statistical validity, but the statement is so weak it is completely worthless.
Note: I'm not saying the shuttle isn't more dangerous than Apollo, I'm just saying that there's no good evidence that it is. If we'd been able to examine the service modules on all the Apollo flights, we might have made some hair-raising discoveries.
It's surprising to see so many people overlook one key fact: this guy obtained his research information from a corporation he signed an NDA with.
Where did you get the information that he was under an NDA? I didn't see that in either of the articles I read. I'm not saying it isn't correct--I'd like to see it myself.
The worst VOIP provider had an availability of 94.8% (which isn't bad)
I disagree entirely! When someone's life may depend on a call going through (911) I would say anything below 99.99 (repeating) is unacceptable.
I disagree too. An availability of 94.8% means once in twenty times when
you pick up the phone, there's no dialtone. Considering that I was probably 20 before the first time this happened with my land line (except for when the
other people on the party line were talking), I'd say VOIP is not ready for prime time.
I have a geekie friend that has VOIP and he's thinking of dropping it because it sounds worse than his cell phone(!).
I read one page--the one on "Theroy." I find it distracting when someone
doesn't bother with even elementary proofreading. If the content is
interesting enough, I can overlook it, but this didn't seem all that
novel. Just so there'd be some discussion, I made a quick list of the first errors that sprang out at me in
the "Theroy" page. Doesn't everyone know some pedantic jerk that will edit
their stuff for them?
principals : principles
cheep : cheap
cellulous : celluloid?
threw : through
LCD's : LCDs
Simi-gloss : semi-gloss
portal : portable
Walmount : wall-mount
theroy : theory
togeather : together
its : it's
. : ?
I anxiously await the first person to point out a spelling or usage error
in my post--it's traditional.
Isn't this just a swamp cooler? Aren't they rendered useless in humid environments? Wouldn't reading this article be a complete waste of time for the majority of us?
No.
Yes.
Apparently not.
A swamp cooler is evaporative. This isn't. It just runs the water out
the window after one trip through a copper coil.
Odd that the parent got an "informative" moderation. The moderator must
not have read the article either.
Years back, he hypothesized that future aliens contacting us might bring along their entire libraries on a single piece of titanium. Doesn't matter what size: just mark one end with A, one end with B, and make a notch somewhere in the middle.
Measure A/B, convert the resulting fraction into a hexadecimal string, and there's your data.
Only problem is that your microscope has to be really good.
Assuming for the sake of argument that there are 10**30 atoms in the rod,
and that you can represent any value from 1 through 10**30, you can still
only store around 100 bits. I wonder if Heinlein worked it out and thought
it was too mind-blowing to omit, or whether he never thought about it?
Note that even if you assume that A, B, and the notch can be anywhere, you
have at most 300 bits (times a constant to make up for the fact that 10**30 was
not the right number). It's still smaller than a page of a paperback--much less "all knowlege."
Web based forum software offer a lot more features than newsgroups.
Yeah, like you can attach cute smileys to your posts.
Well, I guess that's the only clear advantage I've ever seen. Maybe
after sixteen years on USENET I'm just set in my ways, but with
careful kill file management, you can still find interesting stuff
to read and interesting people to interact with.
It has not escaped my notice that Slashdot is a web-based forum.
I can't really say that it offers "a lot more features than newsgroups."
The only extra feature it offers is moderation, which on USENET is done on
an individual (or I should say in-duh-vidual) basis. That way, I make my
own decisions about who to ignore, instead of relying on possibly-biased
moderators. Not necessarily better, just different.
Well, why pay 3 USD for a rent, when you can own a not-so-shabby quality copy of it for the same price? Consider that average minimum wage in, say, Mexico, is about 5 USD PER DAY.
Consider, now, that for a hit title, like Spider-Man 2, we are talking about thousands of [3-dollar] illegal copies sold, instead of thousands of [15-dollar] legitimate ones.
Your last sentence should be "Consider now that for a hit title like Spiderman 2, we are talking about thousands of [3-dollar] illegal copies sold, instead of several [15-dollar] legitimate ones."
I have no idea if your $5/day number is correct or not, but I'm assuming that if I clear $100 a day, I *might* buy a
$65 DVD once in a great while, but I sure as hell am never going to buy a $300 one.
Even the most advanced so-called random number generators repeat themselves after millions of digits.
I'm willing to bet that they're using an actual random generator--one that's based on some source of noise rather than a psuedo-random stream. There are a number of these available. They're extremely useful for generating keys, because a predictable key isn't worth much.
How is using an RFID system which is more accurate, efficient, and convenient any different from tracking students on paper?
The teacher presumably recognizes the student. The reader recognizes the RFID chip. Assignment: show three interesting scams that could be perpetrated based on the difference between these two systems, relying on the fact that school officials will not realize the difference and will regard the (probably easily hackable) records as Gospel.
The only way to make the two schemes equivalent with respect to this property is to attach the chips to the students in a permanent fashion. And even that is pretty easily hackable just by covering the real chip with something and wearing a counterfeit one. Hey! Maybe we could make each student swallow a chip when they arrive in the morning! Then we only need to positively identify the student once (and make sure they really swallowed it, and that they aren't wearing a metalic t-shirt, and that they don't go in the can and hork it up, and that they don't have the runs . . . ).
I won't address the issues of human dignity, freedom, and American ideals, since everyone seems to have their own read on them, except to say that every time I hear the "if you have nothing to hide you shouldn't care if the government has unlimited information" argument I can hear the Founding Fathers rotating. I think it's our responsibility as citizens to provide a healthy amount of back pressure against "innovations" that increase government power. Some may be valuable, but I suspect the majority are not.
The service is limited to family members living in the same household, that means goods will(should) always be delivered to that one address, and I don't see many people can abuse it.
Lots of people buy gifts from Amazon. Around half my Amazon shipments go
to different addresses. Presumably that would allow some nefarious canoodling (actually that's the wrong word, but I like the sound).
The haves suddenly find themselves less motivated to care what anyone thinks (ask any Microsoftie about the "FYIFV" buttons that early employees wore when their options suddenly made them millionaires), so they work when they feel like it, on what they feel like.
This link claims that the FYIFV story is an urban legend. The summary: it was a metaphor for a certain attitude and much later one person made up a t-shirt that they wore on their last day. Heck, if I was leaving Microsoft, I think I'd have just an "FY" shirt....
The issue of some people getting rewards that others see as out of proportion is a toughie. The problem I've seen with it is that management usually
sees management and marketing as the tough jobs, so that's where the rewards
go.
That's right. The way that works is you have to enter a password when you start the computer or it won't boot into the OS. That means that nobody has a snowball's chance in HELL of getting onto my machine when I'm not around.
As well as the "reset the BIOS" solution, they can stuff in a new BIOS
if it's socketed, or just take out the drive and boot/mount it in another
machine.
Of course, you'd probably notice that last one if they didn't get it back before you returned....
If we can make industrial diamonds, we will eventually be able to make industrial oil with close to the same process.
Excellent. That should make even less sense than gasohol. If it takes the energy equivalent of three barrels of oil to make a barrel of oil, we're in the position of that guy in the old gag: "I'm losing money on each unit, but I make it up on volume!"
What I meant was, what's the point if I can just cut the fibre and put a transmitter/receiver pair in the middle?
The reason you can't do that is that unless you send each photon using the same orientation the guy on the other end won't get the right measurements on some of them. You only get a correct measurement on those photons that you measured in the same orientation the sender used. For the ones you measured in the wrong orientation, you get a random result (if the orientation is off by 90 degrees, I believe there is no correlation at all--if off by 45 degrees there is some correlation but there's still a random component). So for those cases (which essentially amount to 1/2 the bit string) you're sending random values. This means that the key as received will be wrong.
So, you could send a key to the other end, but it wouldn't be the same
key that you received, because the key is created during the exchange based on which photons were encoded in the same orientation they were measured. So, any protocol that uses this has to be designed to take advantage of this property to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Apparently the crypto boys and girls feel this is enough of an advantage to be done--I haven't inspected any protocols that do this, so I can't explain how it's achieved. But simply sending a long key and XORing the message with it isn't enough--the man in the middle could foil that by just generating a new key and reencrypting.
I'm sure someone has a good discussion of this up on the web. The question is if there's one that's accessible to the non-cryptographer.
I object to the on-call people being in movie theatres. Go see the frickin' movie on the night when you're NOT on-call.
I simply don't go to movies because they're too damned loud. I could wear
earplugs and hear quite clearly.
Given that this is true, what the heck difference does a patron on a cell phone
make? Or a pager? The only way you'll hear it even if you're wearning it is if the sound track is totally silent at that point, in which case you're not missing anything.
Of course, for the price of two movie tickets, two sodas, and a large popcorn I can rent a DVD, buy a case of pop, a bag of unpopped corn, some cooking oil, and probably a cheap saucepan to pop it in. I just don't see the upside to the movie theater experience unless you just HAVE to see the latest wunderflik before it comes out on DVD....
Slashdot Mirror
"We found this guy on the golf course. He's been run through seventy-three times with some kind of wooden or plastic rod. Seventy-two times seem to have happened after he was dead."
If you're already using the VR helmet thingie, you might as well just paint the rooms using it too.
If your idea was just to make a configurable building without the ability to pincushion your guests, then I retract my comments.
I can't imagine any reason it would be illegal to demand payment for a missing key. I suppose some states might have laws like that, but it would clearly be a state or local matter.
However, I have never been asked to return a missing card. I assumed it was because they were so cheap.
Global warming is even affecting the weather on the sun! It's a joke . . . ah say . . . it's a joke, sun.
I understand that a significant problem for Apple is that they've achieved so much market penetration that most of the people that want an iPod have an iPod. The solution to this is to produce new models that will encourage those people to chug their old purchase and get a new one.
I find the sound quality on my Mini to be perfectly fine for my middle-aged ears. I don't miss the ability to "view album covers in full color" and if I want to share photos with someone, that's why God made the internet.
The smaller size is great, but the Mini is already really small--much smaller than my wallet. The only part that seems attractive is that there isn't a mini-drive in there to pug out.
I think that Apple has a tough row to hoe when it comes to getting people like to me switch up. I can't think of any features that could reasonably be incorporated in a new iPod that would make me dump my present one, except maybe if it could convert those miserable DRM files that iTunes sells to MP3s.
In order to establish a "bubble" within which users must be located, you have to determine the position of the furthest legitimate user and then add one foot per nanosecond of worst-case response time. For a real-world situation, this new sphere is likely to take in some real estate that isn't under your physical control. For instance, at my house I have a machine that's around 60 feet from my AP. If I add 40 nanoseconds (feet) to that, an illegitimate user could park on the street. Even if we assumed a zero-time latency, someone could sit on the curb and be within the bubble. If the only way for this to help is to restrict users to living room, it doesn't seem to be very "wireless" any more.
Cryptography seems like a much better solution for the real world.
Of course, that doesn't mean I don't hope for safe flights too, but let's be realistic so we can make some progress. I'll volunteer with the present safety record...
Note: I'm not saying the shuttle isn't more dangerous than Apollo, I'm just saying that there's no good evidence that it is. If we'd been able to examine the service modules on all the Apollo flights, we might have made some hair-raising discoveries.
I have a geekie friend that has VOIP and he's thinking of dropping it because it sounds worse than his cell phone(!).
I anxiously await the first person to point out a spelling or usage error in my post--it's traditional.
A swamp cooler is evaporative. This isn't. It just runs the water out the window after one trip through a copper coil.
Odd that the parent got an "informative" moderation. The moderator must not have read the article either.
Note that even if you assume that A, B, and the notch can be anywhere, you have at most 300 bits (times a constant to make up for the fact that 10**30 was not the right number). It's still smaller than a page of a paperback--much less "all knowlege."
Well, I guess that's the only clear advantage I've ever seen. Maybe after sixteen years on USENET I'm just set in my ways, but with careful kill file management, you can still find interesting stuff to read and interesting people to interact with.
It has not escaped my notice that Slashdot is a web-based forum. I can't really say that it offers "a lot more features than newsgroups." The only extra feature it offers is moderation, which on USENET is done on an individual (or I should say in-duh-vidual) basis. That way, I make my own decisions about who to ignore, instead of relying on possibly-biased moderators. Not necessarily better, just different.
I have no idea if your $5/day number is correct or not, but I'm assuming that if I clear $100 a day, I *might* buy a $65 DVD once in a great while, but I sure as hell am never going to buy a $300 one.
The only way to make the two schemes equivalent with respect to this property is to attach the chips to the students in a permanent fashion. And even that is pretty easily hackable just by covering the real chip with something and wearing a counterfeit one. Hey! Maybe we could make each student swallow a chip when they arrive in the morning! Then we only need to positively identify the student once (and make sure they really swallowed it, and that they aren't wearing a metalic t-shirt, and that they don't go in the can and hork it up, and that they don't have the runs . . . ).
I won't address the issues of human dignity, freedom, and American ideals, since everyone seems to have their own read on them, except to say that every time I hear the "if you have nothing to hide you shouldn't care if the government has unlimited information" argument I can hear the Founding Fathers rotating. I think it's our responsibility as citizens to provide a healthy amount of back pressure against "innovations" that increase government power. Some may be valuable, but I suspect the majority are not.
The issue of some people getting rewards that others see as out of proportion is a toughie. The problem I've seen with it is that management usually sees management and marketing as the tough jobs, so that's where the rewards go.
So, you could send a key to the other end, but it wouldn't be the same key that you received, because the key is created during the exchange based on which photons were encoded in the same orientation they were measured. So, any protocol that uses this has to be designed to take advantage of this property to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks. Apparently the crypto boys and girls feel this is enough of an advantage to be done--I haven't inspected any protocols that do this, so I can't explain how it's achieved. But simply sending a long key and XORing the message with it isn't enough--the man in the middle could foil that by just generating a new key and reencrypting.
I'm sure someone has a good discussion of this up on the web. The question is if there's one that's accessible to the non-cryptographer.
Of course, for the price of two movie tickets, two sodas, and a large popcorn I can rent a DVD, buy a case of pop, a bag of unpopped corn, some cooking oil, and probably a cheap saucepan to pop it in. I just don't see the upside to the movie theater experience unless you just HAVE to see the latest wunderflik before it comes out on DVD....