What IS interesting is the idea of the fibre being shared by competing telcos. Has that been done before?
All the time. On pretty much any major civil engineering project where you have are going to have large scale free wireless (airports, ports and other large commercial buildings) the normal model would be for the developer to install a fibre optic network then offer to lease bandwidth to the wireless service providers at a small price. That usually results in telcos sharing the same multi-core fibre to link their APs to their backhaul hardware, albeit on different physical pairs, but it's not unheard of for them to be on separate modulations going down the same pair either.
I'm currently involved with three MAJOR projects that are going down the latter route, and it's becoming increasingly common to share pairs between third parties and segregate the traffic at layer 2 or even layer 3. There's that much bandwidth available on fibre these days it's kind of stupid running dozens of pairs for each stakeholder when you can likely put all of the low-bandwidth traffic down just one pair.
Yeah, but "75mT"? It's nice to see US Senators trying to get to grips with this new fangled metric system when they specify their pork, but 75 milli-Tonnes would be 75KG. Perhaps NASA should fax their designated rocket motor supplier in Utah some of its own blueprints for a surface to air missile and just get on with whatever it is that NASA actually wants to do, which might actually be something useful.
Alternatively, they could just claim to be catering to their stated directive about "reaching out to Muslims" and tell the not-so-honorable Senator from Utah "We don't do pork anymore as it might offend Muslims."
After all, almost everything else they do goes through a length beta programme before it's ready; several years in the case of GMail. Why should we expect "Google 10^100 Winner Section Process (Beta)" to be any different?
Meanwhile, photojournalists Marc Vallee and Jason Parkinson last week received compensation of £3,500 apiece in respect of an incident outside the Greek Embassy in December 2008.
If anything, the circumstances of Jules' Stop with its made up legislation and rough handling is a more severe breach of The Human Rights Act than that of Marc Vallee and Jason Parkinson, so a payout is entirely possible, given the closing line of the article:
The bill for the Met may be about to get a little bit higher, as Marc also informed us this morning that he has just "sorted a lawyer out for Jules".
Small nit, but after pointing out the importance of semantics and making incorrect assumptions in this problem, you then make the following assertion:
...you can't have twins because only one was born on Tuesday.
That's not actually correct. It is perfectly possible to have twins, identical or otherwise, that are born either side of midnight, and sometimes by quite a considerably margin, even several days. For a family that is of some relevence to this due to their particularly perverse combination of childrens birthdays and twins, take a look at this story.
The problem with that argument is that the group of people that might be considered to be in the set "Environmentalist" is itself a collection of sub-sets, each of which has their own preferred solutions and solutions they oppose. Given the number of people in the set "Environmentalist" the chances are that for every single alternative technology power supply there are going to be people that oppose it loudly enough to get reported in the media.
Personally, I wouldn't class a burner app as "semi-decent" if it doesn't automatically convert.MKV files (or any other suitable format) into VOBs on the fly and add the necessary file table info to play on a standard player whenever I use the "DVD Movie Disc" or equivalent option/switch. YMMV.
Of course, you could also wait a while. I'd say the chances are pretty good that if/when the first series is done there will be a pressed and boxed set of DVDs or BluRay(s) for sale from the Series' website to help fund the next season.
In that box of blanks on your shelf. Download the Matroska file via BitTorrent, and burn to disc with any semi-decent burner app to add a menu or whatever else you want.
Don't forget to seed, either.
Re:Does it have a monitor and full-size keyboard?
on
Flight of the Desktops
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· Score: 1
That's actually doable, although whether it's saleable is another matter.
There have been several models of laptop that have an optional expansion module that clips on underneath and adds extra ports, DVD drive and other extras. It wouldn't be impossible to put other things in such a thing as well; a second battery, more CPU cores, memory, larger and/or faster hard drives, a second graphics card that could run in SLI mode... Going a step further you could make it modular too, so you could only install the bits you need for the type of work you expect to do on the day to help keep the weight down and battery life up.
Possibly, but I don't think it's going to help much, at least not just yet. The problem is twofold; firstly the exoplanets found so far are generally inhospitable to all but the most exotic imaginings of what might constitute extra-terrestrial life. Secondly, the articles I have seen tend to imply that planets are much more plentiful than has been thought, and this is a big problem, because even the post pessimistic attempts at the Drake equation have the galaxy teaming with life. If planets are even more plentiful than previously assumed, then that should equate to even more life, so where is everybody? The answer seems to be that either one or more of the assumptions we are making about values in the Drake equation is wildly out of touch with reality or there is another factor to the equation that we are overlooking.
Mars has an atmosphere, not much of one to be sure, but it does have one. Why else do you think so many landers used parachutes to help slow their descent?
At first, perhaps. But what happens if Murdoch sees his revenue from The Times go up by a few percent once the paywall goes up? Might it not be tempting for the Telegraph and Guardian to offer a similar service and see if they can find a similar improvement?
Even if they were to try such a thing as "an ad-free alternative" to test the waters, I've heard enough stories of increasing advertisementing time on supposedly paid-for TV services to know that probably wouldn't remain true for long. If, by some miracle, Murdoch actually sees a significant online revenue increase from this gambit then I'd expect to see at quite a few more toes being dipped into the water, and probably a few sink or swim attempts too. I wonder who is going to be the first to do the deal with the devil and go for an exclusive DRM laden deal with the Apple iPad?
As I understand it, that's Murdoch's point (or hope, anyway). He's not been able to make enough money off his news sites through advertisement based revenue streams, so now he's going to try and make people pay for the content and make his money that way. That only works if the content is not available for free elsewhere, even if it's only the first paragraph on a news indexer like Google's site as that is all many people would read.
Sure, a lot of people will go elsewhere for their news, but as long as more money comes in from those who are prepared to pay for their content then Murdoch will improve his bottom line, albeit probably by nowhere near the amount he is hoping for. I think we've seen what happens after than with Cable TV; despite paying for the service, you'll start getting more and more adverts anyway because Murdoch is nothing if not a greedy bastard. Unlike with Cable TV however, these adverts will be to logged in and thus trackable users, meaning adverts will be much more targetable and slightly more lucrative to Murdoch.
The scary part is what happens if his model actually works, or at least is better a better source of revenue than the current model? Chances are in that case at least some of the potential alternative news outlets will go the same way and the remaining choices might not exactly be bastions of sound journalism. I suppose there's always the BBC since they are funded by the license fee, but even they appear to have been restricting some overseas access of late to things like iPlayer videos embedded in stories.
Freely available international news coverage is not something that I want to see in the position of being the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
That was my first thought too, but between legislation like ACTA, DMCA and increasing restrictions being placed on Fair Use rights, where they exist at all, I suspect that there is going to be a push to make transcoding a violation of something or other. Yes, it's ridiculous to load a 25GB of files from a BluRay disc onto a portable media player, but you don't *have* to transcode to play the video on the device.
Of course, the people that are uploading cams and DVD rips to the Internet now are still going to be breaking copyright laws whatever happens, so it's not like the situation is going to change in practice, is it?
Apparently so. Try clicking on the "Show Search Options" link by the GMail search box as that lets you limit your search to everything on your list except for the last one about attachments, also look at the help topic for "Searching" as there is also an extensive set of search keywords to further control what matches the search criteria.
Don't be so restrained, you know it's a fudamental truth.
You know, I think that actually works better without the extra "n" given the smoke being blown around this by **AAs et al. +1 for inclusion in the next update of the OED.
It's an interesting idea, but I fail to see how they might the slightest chance of maintaining the secrecy element of the single polar orbit mission profile proposed in the article. You are going to have a huge light trail visible across half of Florida whenever they have a launch at Canaveral followed by a flurry of activity at Vandenberg when they recover it afterward, or whichever launch/recovery sites they use. It's hardly going to take much in the way of intelligence smarts to put those two observations together with "one of our satellites just went dark" and work out what probably went down.
Of course, maybe plausible deniability is enough, or they are going to use a non-observable recovery site; launches from Vandenberg and recoveries at Diego Garcia perhaps?
Perhaps you could suggest they provide two networks. One secure network that requires the full disk encryption and allows access to patient records etc. to which the hospital provides all client workstations for work use and a second guest network for everything else that doesn't require the encryption. If you make the guest network open to patients and their visitors as well then it might even be possible to at least partly fund the installation with a pay for access scheme. You'd probably want to push for free/reduced rates for staff though.:)
Doh! That should be just "4339 bits" and not "2^4339 bits" which is a somewhat larger value, to put it mildly... I think you could theoretically describe a snapshot of the state of the entire universes in 2^4339 bits, and probably do so several times over as well, let alone the entire Internet.:)
It does what is required of the competition. There are 2^4339 available bits in a valid tweet so the first algorithm takes any 2^4339 bit sequence and converts it into a valid tweet, the second converts it back again. What is missing is the means for generating that 2^4339 bit value and converting it back into the original content.
4339 bits is 542 bytes plus three spare bits, so if you wanted to actually use this for something you could use those three bits to define your data format from one of eight types, then "attach" your data payload to the header to generate the sequence of 4339 bits. Some ideas for the payload would be:
A sequence of 542 8bit characters
A sequence of 619 7bit characters + 3 padding bits
A sequence of 722 6bit characters + 4 padding bits
A Zip file equal to, or smaller than, 542 bytes
A GZip file equal to, or smaller than, 542 bytes
etc.
If using compressed files, you'd also need some way of dealing with spare bytes in the payload; either a decompressor that can ignore extra characters at the end of the file or a compressor that can manipulate the file to equal 542 bytes - using the comments field of the archive, perhaps.
I know I've "decommissioned" a few floppy disks in my time by turning them into Christmas decorations. One particularly slow December at an employer we did the entire tree and most of the streamers strung across our office ceiling. I doubt that there are still enough people doing this to reach the kind of numbers cited in the article though.
Four L-shaped desks arranged to form a cross with modest height dividers (about eye level when seated) that can double as pinboards along the joins. The height of the dividers needs to be tall enough that someone can get their head down and not be distracted when they need to, but low enough so they can look over to talk without having to stand up. Optionally provide a shelf that clips onto the dividers for additional surface space and/or a small magnetic whiteboard that will also hang from the dividers on a person by person basis.
No, the SSID's should be sufficient for most practical uses, but I am guessing here as you'd need access to Google's data to be certain of that. Don't forget that they'll also know the cell that you are sending the request from, so I'd imagine there will be enough uniqueness about any given combination of SSIDs to get a fix, especially given the growing numbers of wireless networks around these days. The time it would break down is if you are in the middle a large cell and are within range of a single generic SSID like "Linksys" which is one of several such isolated SSIDs within that cell with the same SSID.
Google is, first and foremost, an Ad company. While this undoubtably has other, totally benign uses, you can almost be certain that those MACs are going to be used as some method of Cookie-less user tracking as soon as Google can figure out how. Assuming, that is, that they haven't done so already...
Yes, but they can do that with the SSIDs, which are more likely to have extra uses as you can look for common service provider SSIDs to annotate your map with, say, the nearest retail chain offering a complimentary WiFi service without having to mooch. The only uses I can see for capturing the MACs is to tell identical SSIDs such as "LinkSys" apart or as a means of tracking users (or groups of users) for their Ad business.
Lets say that a given computer's MAC is known to exist in a given town. Now imagine if Google somehow included the MAC of that computer in the payload traffic going to one of Google's services. Put the two together and you have a superb means of providing not only targetted adverts, but location aware ones as well. Best of all (for Google), there's no Cookies required.
More importantly, what on Earth is Google going to do with the MAC addresses? They are a layer two thing and only get transmitted as far as the next hop router, so not much use unless Google either *is* the next hop router or they are tranmitting the MAC of the originating requests within the payload of at least some of the TCP or UDP packets going to them. Time to do some traffic captures of a HTTP session to some Google services I think...
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All the time. On pretty much any major civil engineering project where you have are going to have large scale free wireless (airports, ports and other large commercial buildings) the normal model would be for the developer to install a fibre optic network then offer to lease bandwidth to the wireless service providers at a small price. That usually results in telcos sharing the same multi-core fibre to link their APs to their backhaul hardware, albeit on different physical pairs, but it's not unheard of for them to be on separate modulations going down the same pair either.
I'm currently involved with three MAJOR projects that are going down the latter route, and it's becoming increasingly common to share pairs between third parties and segregate the traffic at layer 2 or even layer 3. There's that much bandwidth available on fibre these days it's kind of stupid running dozens of pairs for each stakeholder when you can likely put all of the low-bandwidth traffic down just one pair.
Yeah, but "75mT"? It's nice to see US Senators trying to get to grips with this new fangled metric system when they specify their pork, but 75 milli-Tonnes would be 75KG. Perhaps NASA should fax their designated rocket motor supplier in Utah some of its own blueprints for a surface to air missile and just get on with whatever it is that NASA actually wants to do, which might actually be something useful.
Alternatively, they could just claim to be catering to their stated directive about "reaching out to Muslims" and tell the not-so-honorable Senator from Utah "We don't do pork anymore as it might offend Muslims."
After all, almost everything else they do goes through a length beta programme before it's ready; several years in the case of GMail. Why should we expect "Google 10^100 Winner Section Process (Beta)" to be any different?
If anything, the circumstances of Jules' Stop with its made up legislation and rough handling is a more severe breach of The Human Rights Act than that of Marc Vallee and Jason Parkinson, so a payout is entirely possible, given the closing line of the article:
That's not actually correct. It is perfectly possible to have twins, identical or otherwise, that are born either side of midnight, and sometimes by quite a considerably margin, even several days. For a family that is of some relevence to this due to their particularly perverse combination of childrens birthdays and twins, take a look at this story.
The problem with that argument is that the group of people that might be considered to be in the set "Environmentalist" is itself a collection of sub-sets, each of which has their own preferred solutions and solutions they oppose. Given the number of people in the set "Environmentalist" the chances are that for every single alternative technology power supply there are going to be people that oppose it loudly enough to get reported in the media.
Personally, I wouldn't class a burner app as "semi-decent" if it doesn't automatically convert .MKV files (or any other suitable format) into VOBs on the fly and add the necessary file table info to play on a standard player whenever I use the "DVD Movie Disc" or equivalent option/switch. YMMV.
Of course, you could also wait a while. I'd say the chances are pretty good that if/when the first series is done there will be a pressed and boxed set of DVDs or BluRay(s) for sale from the Series' website to help fund the next season.
In that box of blanks on your shelf. Download the Matroska file via BitTorrent, and burn to disc with any semi-decent burner app to add a menu or whatever else you want.
Don't forget to seed, either.
That's actually doable, although whether it's saleable is another matter.
There have been several models of laptop that have an optional expansion module that clips on underneath and adds extra ports, DVD drive and other extras. It wouldn't be impossible to put other things in such a thing as well; a second battery, more CPU cores, memory, larger and/or faster hard drives, a second graphics card that could run in SLI mode... Going a step further you could make it modular too, so you could only install the bits you need for the type of work you expect to do on the day to help keep the weight down and battery life up.
Possibly, but I don't think it's going to help much, at least not just yet. The problem is twofold; firstly the exoplanets found so far are generally inhospitable to all but the most exotic imaginings of what might constitute extra-terrestrial life. Secondly, the articles I have seen tend to imply that planets are much more plentiful than has been thought, and this is a big problem, because even the post pessimistic attempts at the Drake equation have the galaxy teaming with life. If planets are even more plentiful than previously assumed, then that should equate to even more life, so where is everybody? The answer seems to be that either one or more of the assumptions we are making about values in the Drake equation is wildly out of touch with reality or there is another factor to the equation that we are overlooking.
Mars has an atmosphere, not much of one to be sure, but it does have one. Why else do you think so many landers used parachutes to help slow their descent?
At first, perhaps. But what happens if Murdoch sees his revenue from The Times go up by a few percent once the paywall goes up? Might it not be tempting for the Telegraph and Guardian to offer a similar service and see if they can find a similar improvement?
Even if they were to try such a thing as "an ad-free alternative" to test the waters, I've heard enough stories of increasing advertisementing time on supposedly paid-for TV services to know that probably wouldn't remain true for long. If, by some miracle, Murdoch actually sees a significant online revenue increase from this gambit then I'd expect to see at quite a few more toes being dipped into the water, and probably a few sink or swim attempts too. I wonder who is going to be the first to do the deal with the devil and go for an exclusive DRM laden deal with the Apple iPad?
As I understand it, that's Murdoch's point (or hope, anyway). He's not been able to make enough money off his news sites through advertisement based revenue streams, so now he's going to try and make people pay for the content and make his money that way. That only works if the content is not available for free elsewhere, even if it's only the first paragraph on a news indexer like Google's site as that is all many people would read.
Sure, a lot of people will go elsewhere for their news, but as long as more money comes in from those who are prepared to pay for their content then Murdoch will improve his bottom line, albeit probably by nowhere near the amount he is hoping for. I think we've seen what happens after than with Cable TV; despite paying for the service, you'll start getting more and more adverts anyway because Murdoch is nothing if not a greedy bastard. Unlike with Cable TV however, these adverts will be to logged in and thus trackable users, meaning adverts will be much more targetable and slightly more lucrative to Murdoch.
The scary part is what happens if his model actually works, or at least is better a better source of revenue than the current model? Chances are in that case at least some of the potential alternative news outlets will go the same way and the remaining choices might not exactly be bastions of sound journalism. I suppose there's always the BBC since they are funded by the license fee, but even they appear to have been restricting some overseas access of late to things like iPlayer videos embedded in stories.
Freely available international news coverage is not something that I want to see in the position of being the one eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.
That was my first thought too, but between legislation like ACTA, DMCA and increasing restrictions being placed on Fair Use rights, where they exist at all, I suspect that there is going to be a push to make transcoding a violation of something or other. Yes, it's ridiculous to load a 25GB of files from a BluRay disc onto a portable media player, but you don't *have* to transcode to play the video on the device.
Of course, the people that are uploading cams and DVD rips to the Internet now are still going to be breaking copyright laws whatever happens, so it's not like the situation is going to change in practice, is it?
Apparently so. Try clicking on the "Show Search Options" link by the GMail search box as that lets you limit your search to everything on your list except for the last one about attachments, also look at the help topic for "Searching" as there is also an extensive set of search keywords to further control what matches the search criteria.
You know, I think that actually works better without the extra "n" given the smoke being blown around this by **AAs et al. +1 for inclusion in the next update of the OED.
It's an interesting idea, but I fail to see how they might the slightest chance of maintaining the secrecy element of the single polar orbit mission profile proposed in the article. You are going to have a huge light trail visible across half of Florida whenever they have a launch at Canaveral followed by a flurry of activity at Vandenberg when they recover it afterward, or whichever launch/recovery sites they use. It's hardly going to take much in the way of intelligence smarts to put those two observations together with "one of our satellites just went dark" and work out what probably went down.
Of course, maybe plausible deniability is enough, or they are going to use a non-observable recovery site; launches from Vandenberg and recoveries at Diego Garcia perhaps?
Perhaps you could suggest they provide two networks. One secure network that requires the full disk encryption and allows access to patient records etc. to which the hospital provides all client workstations for work use and a second guest network for everything else that doesn't require the encryption. If you make the guest network open to patients and their visitors as well then it might even be possible to at least partly fund the installation with a pay for access scheme. You'd probably want to push for free/reduced rates for staff though. :)
Doh! That should be just "4339 bits" and not "2^4339 bits" which is a somewhat larger value, to put it mildly... I think you could theoretically describe a snapshot of the state of the entire universes in 2^4339 bits, and probably do so several times over as well, let alone the entire Internet. :)
4339 bits is 542 bytes plus three spare bits, so if you wanted to actually use this for something you could use those three bits to define your data format from one of eight types, then "attach" your data payload to the header to generate the sequence of 4339 bits. Some ideas for the payload would be:
I know I've "decommissioned" a few floppy disks in my time by turning them into Christmas decorations. One particularly slow December at an employer we did the entire tree and most of the streamers strung across our office ceiling. I doubt that there are still enough people doing this to reach the kind of numbers cited in the article though.
Four L-shaped desks arranged to form a cross with modest height dividers (about eye level when seated) that can double as pinboards along the joins. The height of the dividers needs to be tall enough that someone can get their head down and not be distracted when they need to, but low enough so they can look over to talk without having to stand up. Optionally provide a shelf that clips onto the dividers for additional surface space and/or a small magnetic whiteboard that will also hang from the dividers on a person by person basis.
No, the SSID's should be sufficient for most practical uses, but I am guessing here as you'd need access to Google's data to be certain of that. Don't forget that they'll also know the cell that you are sending the request from, so I'd imagine there will be enough uniqueness about any given combination of SSIDs to get a fix, especially given the growing numbers of wireless networks around these days. The time it would break down is if you are in the middle a large cell and are within range of a single generic SSID like "Linksys" which is one of several such isolated SSIDs within that cell with the same SSID.
Google is, first and foremost, an Ad company. While this undoubtably has other, totally benign uses, you can almost be certain that those MACs are going to be used as some method of Cookie-less user tracking as soon as Google can figure out how. Assuming, that is, that they haven't done so already...
Yes, but they can do that with the SSIDs, which are more likely to have extra uses as you can look for common service provider SSIDs to annotate your map with, say, the nearest retail chain offering a complimentary WiFi service without having to mooch. The only uses I can see for capturing the MACs is to tell identical SSIDs such as "LinkSys" apart or as a means of tracking users (or groups of users) for their Ad business.
Lets say that a given computer's MAC is known to exist in a given town. Now imagine if Google somehow included the MAC of that computer in the payload traffic going to one of Google's services. Put the two together and you have a superb means of providing not only targetted adverts, but location aware ones as well. Best of all (for Google), there's no Cookies required.
More importantly, what on Earth is Google going to do with the MAC addresses? They are a layer two thing and only get transmitted as far as the next hop router, so not much use unless Google either *is* the next hop router or they are tranmitting the MAC of the originating requests within the payload of at least some of the TCP or UDP packets going to them. Time to do some traffic captures of a HTTP session to some Google services I think...