Re:interesting approach
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Alan Turing invented the Bombes"
Err, no. The Polish Code breakers invented Bombes long before Blechley Park started really trying to crack the German codes. It was only when the enigma machines got an additional roter that the Poles turned over their designs for the bombes to the British, becuase the Poles didn't have the resources to build the much greater number of bombes that would now be needed. Also they wanted to get the code breaking ability out of their county before the pending German invasion.
Even if the patriots did fail, why would that have grave implications for our anti ballistic missile shield? SCUDs are cruise missiles, not ballistic missiles. Why do you think those big computers at Norad can accurately predict where the warheads will hit just after boost?
Um, no. The SCUD is the theater ballistic missile not a cruise missle. It looks like a WWII German V2. See this page for more info.
"A EULA that says "Do you promise not to give this game to all your friends?" just won't do."
Of course it won't. Then if you gave the game to N-1 of your friends you would have followed the EULA. "But your honor, the EULA said not to give the game to all my friends; I didn't give it to my friend Alice, just Bob and Carol"
of course Alice intercepted it but thats a different subject.
Pioneer 10's speed is 12.24 km/s Pioneer 11's speed is 12 km/sec
And by my calcualtions that makes their speed relative to c (~300,000,000 m/s) to be: V1: 0.000058 c V2: 0.000053 c P10: 0.0000408 c P11: 0.00004
so it looks like you math was a bit off. Oh and incidentelly, 320,000,000 miles per year is about 16,000 m/s not 3090 m/s; and it looks like you used 300,000 m/s for c, not 300,000,000. Oops.
Just as soon as I get this accursed immortality serum to work correctly...
Come on, it shouldn't be that hard. I'd swear that there are millions of people out there that have managed to get a working immorality serum...
Well since you've got a working immorality serum you should have any problem with selling Violet Null some of that immortality serum since (he/she/it) is having problems making their own.
The Sat company isn't asking permission to distributed local channels anywhere in the US for free. They are asking that the law prohibiting them from selling them be removed.
The New York Times can sell a newspaper subscription to someone in Dallas and send them the paper through the mail.
The New York NBC affiliate is prohibited by law from selling access to that same person is dallas and distributing it via satillite. A bit more complicated becuase the NBC affiliate actually sells access to the sat company who resells it to the Dallas viewer; but that is something to be resolved in the contract between the sat co. and the TV station. But you can't start working that out until it is leagle to do it at all.
If the local TV station didn't want its content shown outside its normal viewing area then just make that a condition of the contract with the sat co.
The same tactics with Newspapers would be obviously illegal.
Since when is it legal to scan in a newspaper and broadcast it for free over the internet?
Um, this isn't about sending shows over the internet. EchoStar (a satellite tv provider) is asking for permission to sell people in Akron, for example, network feeds from New York, for example. EchoStar already send the info from the satellites but they are required by law to cause the satellite receivers to refuse to show network programming unless that programming feed comes from the local network that broadcasts the feed over the air to the subscriber in question.
This means that the vast majority of the country can't receive network channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, UPN) because EchoStar doesn't have the bandwidth to carry every singe local station in the whole country; but they can't sell equivalent programming from either a national network feed or a different local station.
The same tactic in newspapers would be if there was a law stating that it was illegal to sell a newspaper subscription to someone who didn't live in the normal newspaper distribution and newspapers had to ensure that people accessing their websites also lived in the local area of the newspaper.
So you wouldn't be able to subscribe to or read online the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) or the New York Times (www.nytimes.com) unless you lived in DC or NY respectively. It would be a preposterous law
"Yeah, but why the hell would you want to record it if it's not viewable? =)"
The point is if you can record the encrypted stream, even if you don't know how to decrypt and view it the TV does. So if you then feed the encrypted non-viewable stream into the input of the TV then it becomes viewable.
Actually DirecTV receivers with TiVo work this way. What is recorded to the hard drive of the tivo is the encrypted mpeg2 stream straight from the satellite. It isn't decrypted by the directv access card until you actually watch the program.
Embedding time synch into the encrypted signal is worthless without a trusted outside source to compare it to.
If you used something (like a directivo) to buffer the incoming encrypted stream for 10 min, then when you tried to watch it at 8:40, and the time stream said it should only play at 8:30... It will play anyway because the data stream has no way to know what time it really is; and therefore it has no way to tell if it is 8:30.
Now the TV could check the time against an internal clock, but then you have to have a tamper resistant internal clock that can't be set by the end users (or they would just adjust it to play the content); But for it to be reliable it must have a very low time drift because you don't want to lock out people who are viewing the stream live. It must reset quickly and reliably after loss of power and survive being run on whatever screwed up power is fed to it (i.e. it can't really trust that the power signal is 60 Hz, so it has to be isolated)
Getting trusted time is hard, especially cheaply and without being able to specify the environment the device will operate it.
Taking the time from the GPS satellites or radio broadcast atomic time is great, until you have customers returning your product or complaining because their new TV can't receive the time signal so it refuses to display anything.
The us airlines would do this for international flight, but I guess they thought it was too much hassle for domestic flights. After all, no-one had tried to blow up domestic us flights by leaving bombs on board.
The article did a poor job differentiating between two different magnetic uses. MagLev, magnetic levitation, which is nice for reducing friction; and magnetic propulsion.
The Navy is researching using magnetic propulsion so it can replace its steam driven catapults with electric ones, similar in principle to the magnetically launched roller coasters becoming popular in amusement parks. The Navy doesn't care about MagLev because all its planes still need wheels and the related systems anyway so they can land at ground bases;
They just want to remove the large and complex steam systems used to throw airplanes off the deck and replace it with smaller simpler electromagnets.
Re:How much space does it take to store a word?
on
The Story Of GMR Heads
·
· Score: 2, Funny
>If an word averages 6 characters, then they are using over 100 bytes to
represent each word!
Or watch the history channel sometime. In WWII the British had a special squadron of planes to blow up German damns, the way they did it was to get the explosive [barrel in this case] to drop most of the way down the damn on the water side; because water transfers pressure and therefore explosions more efficiently than air.
How hard do you think it would be for somebody to rig a big explosive, drag it behind a boat and then go fishing near a major damn?
Extensive structural knowledge is necessary if you want to use a minimum of explosive, or want to control some aspect of the collapse, otherwise you can go the brute force and ignorance route.
Re:you're seriously deluded...
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>which leaves a ground war with troops and little armour support
---
And mines; lots of mines.
In the gulf once we broke through the initial Iraqi defensive lines our tanks (and trucks, and armored personel carries, and artillery, etc) were manuvering though open desert with no real mine hazard.
In Afganistan we would be involved in a prolonged fight, mainly infantry, who would have to be supplied by air or by truck down very narrow winding mountain roads. The soviets discovered how easy it is to run into an ambush on those road, which allows an entire convoy to be wiped out by RPGs. And the Afgan fighters are or were heavily supplies with US man portable surface to air missiles to deal with russian attack and transport helicoptors; those missile will be just as effective at shooting down US aircraft.
Which leads you fighting a nebulus enemy who blends into the local population, is hightly motivated, has excelent knowlege of the local terrain and skill in setting ambushes. Also uses small easily transportable personal weapons to fight and run, not easily spotted armored vehicles.
The Apollo modules used for the US moon landings used a plutonium thermal generator for power during the trip to the moon. On Apollo 13 becuase the command module came back on an unexpected tragetory (compaired to a normal mission) the power source couldn't be diverted to miss earth. The plutonium sorce in its protective shell was jetisoned, it reentered and landed in the pacific...
Actually NASA had nothing to do with popularizing the use of teflon (PTFE). Dupont had discovered it in the late 1930s but the US Government classified it during WWII because it was used to coat the interior of pipes used in gaseous uranium separation for the Manhattan project. For building an atomic bomb you only want one of the uranium isotopes, and the way that the Manhattan project separated it was by turning the uranium into a gas, by reacting it with fluoride. The problem is that uranium hexafluoride is extremely reactive and would erode through steel pipe, so the pipes were lined with teflon to prevent this.
In the 1960s a french chemist independently rediscovered teflon (PTFE) and sold it to a french company who produced pots and pans for use as a non-stick coating. Rumor is that the US government flipped when they discovered that their top secret material for uranium processing was being sold on frying pans in the local Sears.
I expect that people in the not too distant future will say the same thing about various digital artifacts. They'll figure out all sorts of uses for pixelation and compression artifacts and even deliberately introduce them into works that didn't have them in the first place just for their artistic effect. Pretty soon everyone will be so used to them that they won't even consider the fact that at one time they were considered to be undesirable and to detract from the artwork.
A good example of that in computer games (which aren't usually considered art, but use similar display techniques) is how pretty much every game for the last couple of years has tried to build a lens flare effect in when looking towards the sun. Lens flares were considered undesirable in normal photography and video footage because they interfere with what you were trying to get an image of. (Unless of course you wanted a picture of a lens flare...) Now programmers and graphics artists put in extra effort to introduce a reproduction of a physical artifact into their computer generated pictures.
A couple of corrections. You were right that the Air Force had a couple of flying wings in the 1940's. They were built by Northrop and competed against the B-36 for the Air Force long range bomber contract.
Also correct is that flying wings are stable, at least mostly. They do have a slight yawing problem because of the last of vertical tail. The air force deemed that this adversely affected bombing accuracy an unacceptable amount. The B2 could be flown without computers (or rather its shape could, the actual B2's fly by wire system wouldn't work without its computers) However this shape would also have the yawing issue. It is not enough to cause problems flying, but seriously affects unguided bomb accuracy. The computers on the B2 make hundreds of control inputs a second with it wingtip ailerons to counter yaw forces.
And finally Northrop not Lockheed designed and build the B2. Lockheed did build the F-117.
>Why didn't DAT kick out analog tape from its market? All the non-SCMS disadvantages of DAT you mentioned apply to analog tape. And analog tapes are STILL mentioned in those ads for music albums on TV.
-------------------
Because of the huge install base of analog tape. Tape players are everywhere, build into cars, in stereos, walkmen, portable stereos, etc. Even CD which offered some real advantages over tape (generally better sounding, doesn't degrade, no rewinding) took a long time to replace tapes. Sound Quality just doesn't sell that well. The only real advantage of DAT over analog tape is it sounds better. It was more expensive, less available, and you had to go out and buy a new deck to play it.
To sum up DAT had the disadvantage of both tape and cds without having the benefits of either. Sounds like a good reason for it not to catch on.
[The Chernobyl fallout pretty much trashed cities 200 miles away.]
And if Chernobyl had a containment dome like all western reactors, it wouldn't have contaminated anything but the immediate area. Still bad, but nowhere near a bad. If you have ever seen pictures of Chernobyl before the accident it looks like a large office building, not any sort of nuclear power plant. The force of the steam explosion would not have been sufficent to break throught a containment dome built to western standards.
Also, as bad as the fallout was, it clearly didn't completely ruin even the immediate area around Chernobyl since the other nuclear reactors as the site continued operation until just a couple of years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
"Alan Turing invented the Bombes"
Err, no. The Polish Code breakers invented Bombes long before Blechley Park started really trying to crack the German codes. It was only when the enigma machines got an additional roter that the Poles turned over their designs for the bombes to the British, becuase the Poles didn't have the resources to build the much greater number of bombes that would now be needed.
Also they wanted to get the code breaking ability out of their county before the pending German invasion.
Um, no. The SCUD is the theater ballistic missile not a cruise missle. It looks like a WWII German V2. See this page for more info.
I've seen it driving around the Tyson's Corners area of VA. Very amusing
"A EULA that says "Do you promise not to give this game to all your friends?" just won't do."
Of course it won't. Then if you gave the game to N-1 of your friends you would have followed the EULA. "But your honor, the EULA said not to give the game to all my friends; I didn't give it to my friend Alice, just Bob and Carol"
of course Alice intercepted it but thats a different subject.
well according to NASAr 21 7.html
s /p ioneer/PNStat.html
http://vraptor.jpl.nasa.gov/voyager/pressrel/vg
Voyager 1's speed is 17.4 km/s
Voyager 2's speed is 15.9 km/s
http://spaceprojects.arc.nasa.gov/Space_Project
Pioneer 10's speed is 12.24 km/s
Pioneer 11's speed is 12 km/sec
And by my calcualtions that makes their speed relative to c (~300,000,000 m/s) to be:
V1: 0.000058 c
V2: 0.000053 c
P10: 0.0000408 c
P11: 0.00004
so it looks like you math was a bit off. Oh and incidentelly, 320,000,000 miles per year is about 16,000 m/s not 3090 m/s; and it looks like you used 300,000 m/s for c, not 300,000,000. Oops.
Just as soon as I get this accursed immortality serum to work correctly...
Come on, it shouldn't be that hard. I'd swear that there are millions of people out there that have managed to get a working immorality serum...
Well since you've got a working immorality serum you should have any problem with selling Violet Null some of that immortality serum since (he/she/it) is having problems making their own.
The Sat company isn't asking permission to distributed local channels anywhere in the US for free. They are asking that the law prohibiting them from selling them be removed.
The New York Times can sell a newspaper subscription to someone in Dallas and send them the paper through the mail.
The New York NBC affiliate is prohibited by law from selling access to that same person is dallas and distributing it via satillite. A bit more complicated becuase the NBC affiliate actually sells access to the sat company who resells it to the Dallas viewer; but that is something to be resolved in the contract between the sat co. and the TV station. But you can't start working that out until it is leagle to do it at all.
If the local TV station didn't want its content shown outside its normal viewing area then just make that a condition of the contract with the sat co.
The same tactics with Newspapers would be obviously illegal.
Since when is it legal to scan in a newspaper and broadcast it for free over the internet?
Um, this isn't about sending shows over the internet. EchoStar (a satellite tv provider) is asking for permission to sell people in Akron, for example, network feeds from New York, for example. EchoStar already send the info from the satellites but they are required by law to cause the satellite receivers to refuse to show network programming unless that programming feed comes from the local network that broadcasts the feed over the air to the subscriber in question.
This means that the vast majority of the country can't receive network channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, UPN) because EchoStar doesn't have the bandwidth to carry every singe local station in the whole country; but they can't sell equivalent programming from either a national network feed or a different local station.
The same tactic in newspapers would be if there was a law stating that it was illegal to sell a newspaper subscription to someone who didn't live in the normal newspaper distribution and newspapers had to ensure that people accessing their websites also lived in the local area of the newspaper.
So you wouldn't be able to subscribe to or read online the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com) or the New York Times (www.nytimes.com) unless you lived in DC or NY respectively.
It would be a preposterous law
The ORZ.
want to *dancing* in *slippery space*?
Huh, MAE east is easy, it's right across the street from the Olive Garden
"Yeah, but why the hell would you want to record it if it's not viewable? =)"
The point is if you can record the encrypted stream, even if you don't know how to decrypt and view it the TV does. So if you then feed the encrypted non-viewable stream into the input of the TV then it becomes viewable.
Actually DirecTV receivers with TiVo work this way. What is recorded to the hard drive of the tivo is the encrypted mpeg2 stream straight from the satellite. It isn't decrypted by the directv access card until you actually watch the program.
Embedding time synch into the encrypted signal is worthless without a trusted outside source to compare it to.
If you used something (like a directivo) to buffer the incoming encrypted stream for 10 min, then when you tried to watch it at 8:40, and the time stream said it should only play at 8:30... It will play anyway because the data stream has no way to know what time it really is; and therefore it has no way to tell if it is 8:30.
Now the TV could check the time against an internal clock, but then you have to have a tamper resistant internal clock that can't be set by the end users (or they would just adjust it to play the content); But for it to be reliable it must have a very low time drift because you don't want to lock out people who are viewing the stream live. It must reset quickly and reliably after loss of power and survive being run on whatever screwed up power is fed to it (i.e. it can't really trust that the power signal is 60 Hz, so it has to be isolated)
Getting trusted time is hard, especially cheaply and without being able to specify the environment the device will operate it.
Taking the time from the GPS satellites or radio broadcast atomic time is great, until you have customers returning your product or complaining because their new TV can't receive the time signal so it refuses to display anything.
The us airlines would do this for international flight, but I guess they thought it was too much hassle for domestic flights. After all, no-one had tried to blow up domestic us flights by leaving bombs on board.
Quick, protect the nuclear power plant from the cannibals.
The article did a poor job differentiating between two different magnetic uses. MagLev, magnetic levitation, which is nice for reducing friction; and magnetic propulsion.
The Navy is researching using magnetic propulsion so it can replace its steam driven catapults with electric ones, similar in principle to the magnetically launched roller coasters becoming popular in amusement parks. The Navy doesn't care about MagLev because all its planes still need wheels and the related systems anyway so they can land at ground bases;
They just want to remove the large and complex steam systems used to throw airplanes off the deck and replace it with smaller simpler electromagnets.
>If an word averages 6 characters, then they are using over 100 bytes to
:)
represent each word!
I guess they are using MS Word
Or watch the history channel sometime. In WWII the British had a special squadron of planes to blow up German damns, the way they did it was to get the explosive [barrel in this case] to drop most of the way down the damn on the water side; because water transfers pressure and therefore explosions more efficiently than air.
How hard do you think it would be for somebody to rig a big explosive, drag it behind a boat and then go fishing near a major damn?
Extensive structural knowledge is necessary if you want to use a minimum of explosive, or want to control some aspect of the collapse, otherwise you can go the brute force and ignorance route.
>which leaves a ground war with troops and little armour support
---
And mines; lots of mines.
In the gulf once we broke through the initial Iraqi defensive lines our tanks (and trucks, and armored personel carries, and artillery, etc) were manuvering though open desert with no real mine hazard.
In Afganistan we would be involved in a prolonged fight, mainly infantry, who would have to be supplied by air or by truck down very narrow winding mountain roads. The soviets discovered how easy it is to run into an ambush on those road, which allows an entire convoy to be wiped out by RPGs. And the Afgan fighters are or were heavily supplies with US man portable surface to air missiles to deal with russian attack and transport helicoptors; those missile will be just as effective at shooting down US aircraft.
Which leads you fighting a nebulus enemy who blends into the local population, is hightly motivated, has excelent knowlege of the local terrain and skill in setting ambushes. Also uses small easily transportable personal weapons to fight and run, not easily spotted armored vehicles.
Sounds a lot more like Vietnam than Desert Storm.
The Apollo modules used for the US moon landings used a plutonium thermal generator for power during the trip to the moon. On Apollo 13 becuase the command module came back on an unexpected tragetory (compaired to a normal mission) the power source couldn't be diverted to miss earth. The plutonium sorce in its protective shell was jetisoned, it reentered and landed in the pacific...
Actually NASA had nothing to do with popularizing the use of teflon (PTFE). Dupont had discovered it in the late 1930s but the US Government classified it during WWII because it was used to coat the interior of pipes used in gaseous uranium separation for the Manhattan project. For building an atomic bomb you only want one of the uranium isotopes, and the way that the Manhattan project separated it was by turning the uranium into a gas, by reacting it with fluoride. The problem is that uranium hexafluoride is extremely reactive and would erode through steel pipe, so the pipes were lined with teflon to prevent this.
In the 1960s a french chemist independently rediscovered teflon (PTFE) and sold it to a french company who produced pots and pans for use as a non-stick coating. Rumor is that the US government flipped when they discovered that their top secret material for uranium processing was being sold on frying pans in the local Sears.
I expect that people in the not too distant future will say the same thing about various digital artifacts. They'll figure out all sorts of uses for pixelation and compression artifacts and even deliberately introduce them into works that didn't have them in the first place just for their artistic effect. Pretty soon everyone will be so used to them that they won't even consider the fact that at one time they were considered to be undesirable and to detract from the artwork.
A good example of that in computer games (which aren't usually considered art, but use similar display techniques) is how pretty much every game for the last couple of years has tried to build a lens flare effect in when looking towards the sun. Lens flares were considered undesirable in normal photography and video footage because they interfere with what you were trying to get an image of. (Unless of course you wanted a picture of a lens flare...)
Now programmers and graphics artists put in extra effort to introduce a reproduction of a physical artifact into their computer generated pictures.
> http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/psummary.php3? id=226692
? id=79812
Um,
http://stats.distributed.net/rc5-64/psummary.php3
A couple of corrections. You were right that the Air Force had a couple of flying wings in the 1940's. They were built by Northrop and competed against the B-36 for the Air Force long range bomber contract.
Also correct is that flying wings are stable, at least mostly. They do have a slight yawing problem because of the last of vertical tail. The air force deemed that this adversely affected bombing accuracy an unacceptable amount. The B2 could be flown without computers (or rather its shape could, the actual B2's fly by wire system wouldn't work without its computers) However this shape would also have the yawing issue. It is not enough to cause problems flying, but seriously affects unguided bomb accuracy. The computers on the B2 make hundreds of control inputs a second with it wingtip ailerons to counter yaw forces.
And finally Northrop not Lockheed designed and build the B2. Lockheed did build the F-117.
>Why didn't DAT kick out analog tape from its market? All the non-SCMS disadvantages of DAT you mentioned apply to analog tape. And analog tapes are STILL mentioned in those ads for music albums on TV.
-------------------
Because of the huge install base of analog tape. Tape players are everywhere, build into cars, in stereos, walkmen, portable stereos, etc. Even CD which offered some real advantages over tape (generally better sounding, doesn't degrade, no rewinding) took a long time to replace tapes. Sound Quality just doesn't sell that well. The only real advantage of DAT over analog tape is it sounds better. It was more expensive, less available, and you had to go out and buy a new deck to play it.
To sum up DAT had the disadvantage of both tape and cds without having the benefits of either. Sounds like a good reason for it not to catch on.
[The Chernobyl fallout pretty much trashed cities 200 miles away.]
And if Chernobyl had a containment dome like all western reactors, it wouldn't have contaminated anything but the immediate area. Still bad, but nowhere near a bad. If you have ever seen pictures of Chernobyl before the accident it looks like a large office building, not any sort of nuclear power plant. The force of the steam explosion would not have been sufficent to break throught a containment dome built to western standards.
Also, as bad as the fallout was, it clearly didn't completely ruin even the immediate area around Chernobyl since the other nuclear reactors as the site continued operation until just a couple of years ago.