Actually, Astro tripped over a chain and pulled the plug on one of the big canals, causing all the water to run down the drain. "I was carrying Cadet Manning over my shoulder at the time and couldn't see clearly," explained Cadet Astro. "I'm really sorry."
...when I could sit down at the terminal in a co-worker's office and log on as me? Or today, when I can ssh to my office box from anywhere a modem works?
It's so amusing to watch people laboring mightily to add back all the stuff that the "PC revolution" threw out as irrelevant and obviously wrong. And frequently doing a poorer job.
And collectively all those bits, taken together, don't constitute identification, since more than one person could know them all for any given individual. A secret can only be used to identify as long as it remains secret from *everyone else*. The minute you give up a secret, it becomes something that identifies *two* (or more) individuals, but cannot distinguish one from the other. The only durable identifier based solely on knowledge is one which allows you to prove that you possess the secret without ever revealing the secret itself. Every single one of those data you listed fails this test, and the concatenation of them all fails it as well.
Apparently this *is* news to some people, because they continue to accept non-identifiers as identification. The only thing most people in the U.S. have which could, by some stretch of the imagination, be regarded as identification is a driver's license, because it generally has a photo attached, is slightly difficult to forge, and is backed by means of quickly checking the validity of the information asserted on it. Being able to recite someone's SSN and his cat's maiden name is nowhere near as strong as producing a driver's license, even though seven out of ten underage drinkers can tell you where to get a fake one.
Actually humans are too intelligent to make good couriers. We lose focus, we get tired or bored or preoccupied, we come to think we know better than whoever gives the orders. The robot, on the other hand, has only the motivations which we engineer into it. Taking stuff from here to there without thinking about *anything* else is clearly a job made for machines.
Set up a complex of expert systems and try it against a few good diagnosticians, and see how quickly (on average) each group converges to a correct diagnosis, and you may get a different picture.
Oh, I wasn't asking how two different companies could've applied for patents on the same idea. I was asking how the same USPTO could grant two different patents on the same idea, submitted at roughly the same time.
I suppose it's a case of "checking for dupes is too hard, let that be the inventors' problem". Which is both sensible and rotten at the same time.
Y'see, though, the jobs *shift*. Lose 2000 jobs, gain 3000, but they aren't the same jobs and the same people can't fill 'em. If the couriers could do engineering, most of them would have been engineers rather than couriers -- the pay's better.
Not to mention that digital records are way more legible. I often recall with shivers the time I handed in a prescription at the local pharmacy and watched while two experienced pharmacists held a mini-conference to try to figure out what the heck the physician had intended to write.
These days, "doctor's orders" ought to be digitized, reviewed by expert systems, cryptographically signed, printed in barcode as well as $LOCAL_LANGUAGE, and offered as email or download to my smart token as an alternative to paper. Instead we get scraps of paper that look like they were cut from a seismogram.:-P
Yes, could someone please explain how two different entities could be granted separate patents for the same invention, as is often asserted about LZW? (Okay, simple error could account for the grants, but how have both managed to retain "valid" status for all these years?)
Having seen what people do with GIF animation, I'd have to classify PNG's lack of same as a feature. If the authors could've made it kill and Flash too, I'd nominate them for sainthood.
Uhhuh. Exposure length approximately 3600 times as long, then. How much more shielding does it take to keep the particle flux down to levels accumulating no more than a safe dose in that amount of time? I don't think it'll have to be anywhere near 3600 times as thick.
The flux will be attenuated somewhat as the vehicle picks up charge from the particle field and begins to repel them. Vehicles that go through in seconds wouldn't acquire much of a charge. Got any numbers to show whether this would be significant? Or whether we could use active shielding to slow/reflect charged particles enough to yield a net reduction in shielding weight?
Keep in mind also that the flux is not uniform across the entire volume of the belts. Much of the time spent in that zone will present significantly less than the maximum flux, and that reduces the total dose.
Actually I'm now more worried about what's going to happen when we have a carbon-nanotube ribbon stuck permanently through the belts. How will they interact? Will the ribbon be weakened in some way over time, as happens to metal (due to a different sort of radiation) in nuclear reactors? Will we have to deal with significant potential differences along the length of the ribbon? Could we *use* such differences to help power the cars? Will the belts be significantly affected in good or bad ways?
(A lot of my speculation is based on dim memory that the "radiation belts" are primarily composed of protons captured from the solar wind. If that's hooey then please correct me now.)
If a space elevator can only be a cargo lifter then it won't be anything, because without people to make use of the stuff there's no market for cargo lifting.
Meanwhile, the asymptotic process you're describing is well understood. It's like the one which sets the necessary size of rockets to achieve some amount of lift. Once you figure out the parameters, you can likely look the answer up in a book of engineering tables, although the labels won't match.
BTW astronauts have been passing through those particle belts for decades. We know what to do about it. We just need to do a bit more of it. We can probably provide *more effective* types of shielding on a slow elevator car than we can on a rocket-powered vehicle subject to tremendous amounts of vibration and dynamic loading -- we should have options which would have been impractical for Apollo. Oh, can you tell us what the dose/thickness curve looks like for particle shielding?
True, Open Source requires not only source but the right to make use of it. If you have source but you're not allowed to read it, or barred from using your understanding of it, then what do you have?
I dunno -- what does it cost to send the workers back home via elevator vs. the cost of building a reentry vehicle and hauling it up to orbit?
What workers, you say? Just build the thing robotically? What's the point of having it if people can't go up, and eventually down? To recycle someone else's argument, there is nothing up there *until people arrive*. The whole point is to get stuff up to orbit cheaply for people to use, and some of those uses mean that the users will want to be there.
I'm talking about the operational phase, not the construction phase. Maybe the thing can be built entirely without human labor. I think it would cost less to just build the thing capable of sending work crews up and down safely, though.
Once this is a going concern, you are going to be bringing payloads *back* too. Junked space vehicles for recycling (or, eventually, the already recycled materials). Equipment to be repaired. Things *manufactured* in orbit for terrestrial consumption. Scientific samples. Trash. And of course people whose work is done or whose voyage has ended.
I think that the uses of near-Earth space may actually be coordinated to *ensure* a rough balance between upward and downward transfer tonnage. You may have to pay premium rates to send up that which you don't intend to bring down again. Hmmm, people who primarily bring stuff down may actually have to be *paid*, since they are adding energy-of-position to the system which will be harvested by the braking mechanism. Possibly one of the earliest businesses built around the elevator's operation will be a bank.
You have the same problem we do, then. Nick a nonphoto ID card and a gas bill, and you are in. The NI number adds nothing, but apparently some people think it does, and that's a problem.
Personal identification needs two things: binding to the person (photo, biometric, etc.) and that it cost more to forge than the forgery is worth. All that other stuff on the card only says who is asserting the binding, or is private to the binding agency and nothing to do with authentication. Most "identification" cards are not identification at all; they're just handy memory aids.
Slashdot Mirror
"For centuries Mankind has dreamed of destroying the sun." -- Montgomery Burns
After Planet Spaceball failed to take all of Druidia's air, they realized they were out of water too....
Actually, Astro tripped over a chain and pulled the plug on one of the big canals, causing all the water to run down the drain. "I was carrying Cadet Manning over my shoulder at the time and couldn't see clearly," explained Cadet Astro. "I'm really sorry."
...when I could sit down at the terminal in a co-worker's office and log on as me? Or today, when I can ssh to my office box from anywhere a modem works?
It's so amusing to watch people laboring mightily to add back all the stuff that the "PC revolution" threw out as irrelevant and obviously wrong. And frequently doing a poorer job.
And collectively all those bits, taken together, don't constitute identification, since more than one person could know them all for any given individual. A secret can only be used to identify as long as it remains secret from *everyone else*. The minute you give up a secret, it becomes something that identifies *two* (or more) individuals, but cannot distinguish one from the other. The only durable identifier based solely on knowledge is one which allows you to prove that you possess the secret without ever revealing the secret itself. Every single one of those data you listed fails this test, and the concatenation of them all fails it as well.
Apparently this *is* news to some people, because they continue to accept non-identifiers as identification. The only thing most people in the U.S. have which could, by some stretch of the imagination, be regarded as identification is a driver's license, because it generally has a photo attached, is slightly difficult to forge, and is backed by means of quickly checking the validity of the information asserted on it. Being able to recite someone's SSN and his cat's maiden name is nowhere near as strong as producing a driver's license, even though seven out of ten underage drinkers can tell you where to get a fake one.
We can build it as soon as you can tell us *precisely* how doctors do medicine.
Why would Nazi shock troops waste time fiddling with robot paths in hospitals?
And they can spell, too!
Maybe the world is waiting for *you* to write and publish the DTD for medical information.
Shouldn't the dodgy monitor go back to Clinical Engineering for repair?
You *can* get fluid flows to do switching and even proportional control. See "fluidics". Rather old now.
Actually humans are too intelligent to make good couriers. We lose focus, we get tired or bored or preoccupied, we come to think we know better than whoever gives the orders. The robot, on the other hand, has only the motivations which we engineer into it. Taking stuff from here to there without thinking about *anything* else is clearly a job made for machines.
Set up a complex of expert systems and try it against a few good diagnosticians, and see how quickly (on average) each group converges to a correct diagnosis, and you may get a different picture.
Oh, I wasn't asking how two different companies could've applied for patents on the same idea. I was asking how the same USPTO could grant two different patents on the same idea, submitted at roughly the same time.
I suppose it's a case of "checking for dupes is too hard, let that be the inventors' problem". Which is both sensible and rotten at the same time.
Y'see, though, the jobs *shift*. Lose 2000 jobs, gain 3000, but they aren't the same jobs and the same people can't fill 'em. If the couriers could do engineering, most of them would have been engineers rather than couriers -- the pay's better.
Not to mention that digital records are way more legible. I often recall with shivers the time I handed in a prescription at the local pharmacy and watched while two experienced pharmacists held a mini-conference to try to figure out what the heck the physician had intended to write.
:-P
These days, "doctor's orders" ought to be digitized, reviewed by expert systems, cryptographically signed, printed in barcode as well as $LOCAL_LANGUAGE, and offered as email or download to my smart token as an alternative to paper. Instead we get scraps of paper that look like they were cut from a seismogram.
But did you pick up the _Colossus: the Forbin Project_ reference in the article? :-)
Yes, could someone please explain how two different entities could be granted separate patents for the same invention, as is often asserted about LZW? (Okay, simple error could account for the grants, but how have both managed to retain "valid" status for all these years?)
"You can't make animations with PNG files...."
Having seen what people do with GIF animation, I'd have to classify PNG's lack of same as a feature. If the authors could've made it kill and Flash too, I'd nominate them for sainthood.
Meanwhile my SR-T 101 still makes pretty pictures whenever I show it how, and the shutter button isn't lost under a mound of features.
My usual question about product cycles is, "how many of them will go whooshing by before they make some change I care about?"
Uhhuh. Exposure length approximately 3600 times as long, then. How much more shielding does it take to keep the particle flux down to levels accumulating no more than a safe dose in that amount of time? I don't think it'll have to be anywhere near 3600 times as thick.
The flux will be attenuated somewhat as the vehicle picks up charge from the particle field and begins to repel them. Vehicles that go through in seconds wouldn't acquire much of a charge. Got any numbers to show whether this would be significant? Or whether we could use active shielding to slow/reflect charged particles enough to yield a net reduction in shielding weight?
Keep in mind also that the flux is not uniform across the entire volume of the belts. Much of the time spent in that zone will present significantly less than the maximum flux, and that reduces the total dose.
Actually I'm now more worried about what's going to happen when we have a carbon-nanotube ribbon stuck permanently through the belts. How will they interact? Will the ribbon be weakened in some way over time, as happens to metal (due to a different sort of radiation) in nuclear reactors? Will we have to deal with significant potential differences along the length of the ribbon? Could we *use* such differences to help power the cars? Will the belts be significantly affected in good or bad ways?
(A lot of my speculation is based on dim memory that the "radiation belts" are primarily composed of protons captured from the solar wind. If that's hooey then please correct me now.)
If a space elevator can only be a cargo lifter then it won't be anything, because without people to make use of the stuff there's no market for cargo lifting.
Meanwhile, the asymptotic process you're describing is well understood. It's like the one which sets the necessary size of rockets to achieve some amount of lift. Once you figure out the parameters, you can likely look the answer up in a book of engineering tables, although the labels won't match.
BTW astronauts have been passing through those particle belts for decades. We know what to do about it. We just need to do a bit more of it. We can probably provide *more effective* types of shielding on a slow elevator car than we can on a rocket-powered vehicle subject to tremendous amounts of vibration and dynamic loading -- we should have options which would have been impractical for Apollo. Oh, can you tell us what the dose/thickness curve looks like for particle shielding?
Yup, it's called a "sunset law". We have 'em in Indiana. I think that sunsetting only applies to new laws, though.
True, Open Source requires not only source but the right to make use of it. If you have source but you're not allowed to read it, or barred from using your understanding of it, then what do you have?
I dunno -- what does it cost to send the workers back home via elevator vs. the cost of building a reentry vehicle and hauling it up to orbit?
What workers, you say? Just build the thing robotically? What's the point of having it if people can't go up, and eventually down? To recycle someone else's argument, there is nothing up there *until people arrive*. The whole point is to get stuff up to orbit cheaply for people to use, and some of those uses mean that the users will want to be there.
I'm talking about the operational phase, not the construction phase. Maybe the thing can be built entirely without human labor. I think it would cost less to just build the thing capable of sending work crews up and down safely, though.
Once this is a going concern, you are going to be bringing payloads *back* too. Junked space vehicles for recycling (or, eventually, the already recycled materials). Equipment to be repaired. Things *manufactured* in orbit for terrestrial consumption. Scientific samples. Trash. And of course people whose work is done or whose voyage has ended.
I think that the uses of near-Earth space may actually be coordinated to *ensure* a rough balance between upward and downward transfer tonnage. You may have to pay premium rates to send up that which you don't intend to bring down again. Hmmm, people who primarily bring stuff down may actually have to be *paid*, since they are adding energy-of-position to the system which will be harvested by the braking mechanism. Possibly one of the earliest businesses built around the elevator's operation will be a bank.
You have the same problem we do, then. Nick a nonphoto ID card and a gas bill, and you are in. The NI number adds nothing, but apparently some people think it does, and that's a problem.
Personal identification needs two things: binding to the person (photo, biometric, etc.) and that it cost more to forge than the forgery is worth. All that other stuff on the card only says who is asserting the binding, or is private to the binding agency and nothing to do with authentication. Most "identification" cards are not identification at all; they're just handy memory aids.