"... humans are too valuable to risk" What a crock. This society of ours that human like is some incomprehensible treasure is less than the blink of an eye in recorded history, much less the history of the world. How much of the world shares that opinion? Or even, how many of our own countrymen share that opionion?
Not trying to be the troll here, but in fact humans are pretty cheap - easy to manufacture, more or less self maintaning given oxygen, water, food and shelter from harsh environments. Heck, we've got BILIONS of them just lying around.
Training them to do the job up there might be difficult (mostly trying to replicate the conditions up there), screening them to find the ones that can take the punishment and stay focused on the job might be hard, but hey, they are versatile.
And who says humans WANT to be considered too valuable to risk?? Every astronaut is a volunteer, and behind each one is a hundred more eager to take his or her place. Don't be so ready to protect us poor humans.
'Dangerous businesses' are the humans stock in trade. Always have been. There's too damn much of this mamby pamby 'PC' crap in the world.
Mr. Van Allen is a scientist. He's also an old man. Leave space exploration to those of us who are neither and GET OUT OF THE WAY.
I think it would work like this: Use the hash to determine that the data stored on the card is the data recorded when the passport was created. Then, use that verified data to validate the current facial / fingerprint scans that uses some algorithm to compare them. If all matches, all is well.
This is acually a pretty good system - the actual biometric data is NOT stored anywhere it can be stolen and reused. If the passport is lost, report it stolen, and that line in the DB (just the hash) is marked so that anyone using it is apprehended.
Then, create a new passport for the user. It will have a new hash, and due to the microscopic differences between any two face / fingerprint scans the new hash will be different.
I think they've just solved the biometric data problem. Now, just try to get the government to agree to it - note this way it can ONLY be used for verification, and only against the passport they are carrying. AND, it prevents anyone from being able to create forged passports unless they are able to insert hashes into the government database. It cannot be used in criminal investigations or general spying because the government doesn't HAVE any data (fingerprints or facial scans) to work with.
Ingenious. Perfect. Secure. Will never be adopted.
Don't especially like the monthly fee, but it does stuff I didn't even dream of in a PVR. Like MOVING the recording of a first-run show (the Dead Zone) from Sunday night to tonight in order to accomodate something else I asked it to record. All without needing to bother me with the details. I doubt MythTV does that.
I am mighty impressed with the folks writing the software at TiVo - it's all pretty slick, and JUST WORKS. No glitches, no gotchas, no excuses. That's what you need with the wife and kids using it.
Absolutely wrong - encryption code is like good wine - it gets better over time. The only way any encryption code is approved for use is to have the best and the brightest in the world beat on it for years. Good encryption code generates unbreakable encrypted data - having the source code does not help. When it is this good, then you can trust it. Anything developed by a small group and not shared WILL fail - security through obscurity is no security at all
Because that makes it free as in beer, not free as in freedom. What's to say it can't disappear tomorrow, or get relicensed, or cost money to use? If it is un-free enough that it can't be included in a distro, then it is un-free enough for linux advocates to complain about.
You missed one - how about us occasional "weekend warriors" who go skiing, or on a white water rafting trip, but don't really keep in shape? I'd love to get a temporary "boost" so I can do things I enjoy *better* and have fewer aches, bruises, and sprains afterwards.
Damn nice post! Thanks for filling in the blanks I was remembering off the cuff.
Though as I remember it (again, hazy on the details) is that Washington was offered a crown - the framers wanted to make him King - and he, to his everlasting credit, declined. They then came up with the office of President, and Washington accepted that instead.
Actually, the Constitution is very specific - I paraphrase: "Any right not enumerated is considered to belong to the people". Since privacy is NOT mentioned, it cannot be infringed by the Federal Gov. - the people have a right to privacy.
The framers, and the drafters of the "Bill of Rights" did not want to fall into the trap of forgetting something, so they made sure they had a safety net in place. They weren't dummies.
Actually, in practice there has seldom been any peer reveiw of code in 'closed source' software companies. Unless a project or program has major funding, clout, and visibility, the coders write some unit test cases and hope any bad bugs are caught in system testing (which gets reduced when the schedule gets tight - in contrast Open Source software usually has no schedule). Open Source software is therefore infinitely more secure as more often than not at least 2 pairs of eyes have seen any particular piece of code.
Close, but not correct. Prof. Gonzalez got it wrong (sorry doc).
There isn't a habitable zone - there is a developmental zone. It's the region where intelligent live can evolve in the absence of energetic local events, but with sufficent heavy elements.
Once developed, life could certainly colonize worlds outside the so-called habitable zone quite easily.
So it may be correct to say the development of intelligent life is rare in the galaxy, but that still doesn't answer the conundrum of where THEY are - even if habitable worlds are only in a narrow band around the galaxy, it would only take a few million years for the entire band to be colonized. So again, we are either unique (which seems far fetched), or first (again, farfetched), or very close seconds.
I didn't regard it as a blooper, though I had the same thoughts you did at the time. But think about it - the ring kept Gollum alive for over 500 years, and the ring itself didn't succum to the lava at once either. Perhaps the ring preserved Gollum as he was still clutching it as he sank into the lava. That's my story and I'm sticking to it - it's much cooler than a mistake.
Re:Error in Minor Factual Error - Moons Darkside
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 1
The moon has a 29.5 day cycle meaning that places on the moon experience about 15 days of daylight and about 15 days of night. The far side of the moon gets just as much (and just as little) sunlight as the near side. Only radio telescopes would see a big advantage on the farside by using the moon to block the Earth's noisy radio chatter.
Actually, since the moon had no atmosphere to defract light and give you a "sky", a hood or external shade to shade the opening of the telescope should be all you need to operate an optical telescope in the 15 days of light on the moon.
Power might still be a problem, as G4from128k pointed out, but I would think that NASA would be smarter and put a solar satellite in orbit around the moon. Could easily avoid being put in shadow, and beam power wherever it is needed - which could speed up new development and support mobil labs, mining, etc.
Sorry Charlie,
That's the price you pay for GPL - Any customer can decide to redistribute it at any time, in any manner (consistant with the GPL of course). So if a club member decides to be magnanimous who are you to question it?
Besides, doesn't BitTorrent work BETTER the more people use it?
Me? I'm going to wait and buy the PowerPack edition.
"Loss for Linux" - Please! Don't by so shortsighted. Ever hear of Apache? XFree86? If there is enough need developers will band together to create an open source solution (or several). A generic backend to handle all the hassle of figuring out localized taxes. With a config file containing all the data and rules that change, so keeping up with it is easy. It will just be another push for open source software.
It doesn't - there is a metal mesh through the glass of the door. In effect it creates a metal cage around the microwave source so that any single hole (as in the mesh) is too small to let a wavelength of the microwaves out.
While there have been a lot of really interesting questions and commontary in this thread, my opinion is that Apple will simply ignore it.... for now.
Corporations are usually very good at picking their fights, and they certainly won't want to do that over a single $.99 song. Why risk it? What would Apple hope to gain? There is no reason not to simply wait - and make a point later, under different circumstances, when it makes sense for Apple.
What you said sounds really interesting - I'd heard about plasma torch disposal of waste a year or two ago, but never any more about it. I'd really like to see what you had put together for a business plan for your university. Our town in NH is in the middle of closing our landfill and building a transfer station to the tune of a total cost of ~23 million. I'd love to present a better option to our city council. Please drop me an email (I'm hoping you read this) to bsh@inforonics.com so I can learn more. Thanks.
They aren't the only ones. Massachusetts has done something similar int the past to pass a tax hike - basically sequester the entire state legislature for 20 hours. Mass has a procudural rule that a measure cannot be presented and passed in the same day (to give time for the electorate to have their views heard I assume), so they just kept everyone out of contact with the people until 12:01, declared it a new day, and put the tax hike to a vote. Nice.
Provided that the ammendment is very specifically worded to include tests such other laws have - like would a "reasonable, average person expect to find pronography at a sight with this name" - then I'd have no problem with it.
I can see a really strong argument that such as misleading site name is fraud in a sense - deliberately taking someone somewhere they don't want to go. How this is supposed to make such as site more profitable is beyond me. Kind of like how bait-and-switch is illegal for stores, bait-and-switch in website names can arguably be made illegal as well.
Must have been a typo...
on
Using the FOIA
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You must have meant:
"Even though Slashdot isn't journalism, we thought it might be interesting"
And just go over their house for an afternoon and help them get it trained. If they are too far from you, have them find someone closer. Reading paragraphs isn't rocket science - people are by and large happy to help out. All they need do is ask.
If you can't get it to work there is a product out there called SystemCommander - I'm looking to get that (but haven't yet, so I can't tell you how good it is). It claims to be able, in addition to allowing you to install as many different OSs as disk space allows, to hide partitions from any of those OSs. Might do the trick if nothing else helps.
I too would like to see the arguments, maybe OpenLaw would like to review them to see what they think? Or maybe the EFF's lawyers?
But I think it's important not to dismiss them out of hand. The Law is a tenuous thing at best, full of opinion as well as fact. We need to see them and remember that just because whoever we consult sees the arguments as weak doesn't mean some judge somewhere won't find them compelling.
Free Software (and GNU and BSD, etc) have millions of lines of code to protect. Even if something is a long shot (legally) shouldn't we make sure we are protected against it? We have an awful lot of good work to lose that cannot easily be replaced.
My greatest debugging was on the first production run of the upgraded PATRIOT radar transmitter I was working on. The particular unit in question would start fine, run up, warm up the humoungus amplifier tubes for the radar, switch into high power (for long range operation and tracking) and BAM! reset itself.
Looked like a S/W bug to everyone, so I (as the last 'surviving' member of the S/W team at that point) was called in to find it and fix it.
Well, gathering data was the hard part - I needed to figure out what was happening with scope probes (tracing didn't work, and I couldn't rewrite all the firmware to do any logging or checkpointing). Small catch - the cycle running the system up to high power (where the bug was seen) takes 8+ minutes. Each time.
So I basically had 7 tries per hour (max) to figure out where to hang a scope probe off a backplane of about 4000 wires to figure out what the heck was going on. While at the same time leafing through 40K of assembler code trying to eye-ball the problem.
Three solid days of doing that (about 10-12 hours per day) with my boss constantly pestering me for a accurate estimate of how long it would take to fix it (Gee, thanks for that). Did I mention that I was 3 years on this project at this point - and that it was the first project I was on right out of school - and that I'd 'inherited' 2/3rds of the firmware from other developers who'd moved on? Way to be supportive boss.
Anyhow, I finally figured out it was a H/W fault, not the S/W at all. Turns out a 24 volt PS was "weak". When the 208 3-phase power that runs the transmitter dipped from the load of switching to high power, the 24 volt PS would drop it's voltage. Just enough that the 5 volt PS running the logic detected the drop in 24 volt PS voltage, and due to the fail-safes to protect the circuitry - shut itself off!
Which resets the control logic, brings down the power, steadies the 208 3-phase, bringing the 24 volt PS back in line, starting up the 5 volt PS, and away we go again.
All found with a couple of scopes. Boy that was fun.
Slashdot Mirror
"... humans are too valuable to risk" What a crock. This society of ours that human like is some incomprehensible treasure is less than the blink of an eye in recorded history, much less the history of the world. How much of the world shares that opinion? Or even, how many of our own countrymen share that opionion?
Not trying to be the troll here, but in fact humans are pretty cheap - easy to manufacture, more or less self maintaning given oxygen, water, food and shelter from harsh environments. Heck, we've got BILIONS of them just lying around.
Training them to do the job up there might be difficult (mostly trying to replicate the conditions up there), screening them to find the ones that can take the punishment and stay focused on the job might be hard, but hey, they are versatile.
And who says humans WANT to be considered too valuable to risk?? Every astronaut is a volunteer, and behind each one is a hundred more eager to take his or her place. Don't be so ready to protect us poor humans.
'Dangerous businesses' are the humans stock in trade. Always have been. There's too damn much of this mamby pamby 'PC' crap in the world.
Mr. Van Allen is a scientist. He's also an old man. Leave space exploration to those of us who are neither and GET OUT OF THE WAY.
I think it would work like this: Use the hash to determine that the data stored on the card is the data recorded when the passport was created. Then, use that verified data to validate the current facial / fingerprint scans that uses some algorithm to compare them. If all matches, all is well.
This is acually a pretty good system - the actual biometric data is NOT stored anywhere it can be stolen and reused. If the passport is lost, report it stolen, and that line in the DB (just the hash) is marked so that anyone using it is apprehended.
Then, create a new passport for the user. It will have a new hash, and due to the microscopic differences between any two face / fingerprint scans the new hash will be different.
I think they've just solved the biometric data problem. Now, just try to get the government to agree to it - note this way it can ONLY be used for verification, and only against the passport they are carrying. AND, it prevents anyone from being able to create forged passports unless they are able to insert hashes into the government database. It cannot be used in criminal investigations or general spying because the government doesn't HAVE any data (fingerprints or facial scans) to work with.
Ingenious. Perfect. Secure. Will never be adopted.
Don't especially like the monthly fee, but it does stuff I didn't even dream of in a PVR. Like MOVING the recording of a first-run show (the Dead Zone) from Sunday night to tonight in order to accomodate something else I asked it to record. All without needing to bother me with the details. I doubt MythTV does that.
I am mighty impressed with the folks writing the software at TiVo - it's all pretty slick, and JUST WORKS. No glitches, no gotchas, no excuses. That's what you need with the wife and kids using it.
Absolutely wrong - encryption code is like good wine - it gets better over time. The only way any encryption code is approved for use is to have the best and the brightest in the world beat on it for years. Good encryption code generates unbreakable encrypted data - having the source code does not help. When it is this good, then you can trust it. Anything developed by a small group and not shared WILL fail - security through obscurity is no security at all
Because that makes it free as in beer, not free as in freedom. What's to say it can't disappear tomorrow, or get relicensed, or cost money to use? If it is un-free enough that it can't be included in a distro, then it is un-free enough for linux advocates to complain about.
You missed one - how about us occasional "weekend warriors" who go skiing, or on a white water rafting trip, but don't really keep in shape? I'd love to get a temporary "boost" so I can do things I enjoy *better* and have fewer aches, bruises, and sprains afterwards.
Damn nice post! Thanks for filling in the blanks I was remembering off the cuff.
Though as I remember it (again, hazy on the details) is that Washington was offered a crown - the framers wanted to make him King - and he, to his everlasting credit, declined. They then came up with the office of President, and Washington accepted that instead.
Actually, the Constitution is very specific - I paraphrase: "Any right not enumerated is considered to belong to the people". Since privacy is NOT mentioned, it cannot be infringed by the Federal Gov. - the people have a right to privacy.
The framers, and the drafters of the "Bill of Rights" did not want to fall into the trap of forgetting something, so they made sure they had a safety net in place. They weren't dummies.
Actually, in practice there has seldom been any peer reveiw of code in 'closed source' software companies. Unless a project or program has major funding, clout, and visibility, the coders write some unit test cases and hope any bad bugs are caught in system testing (which gets reduced when the schedule gets tight - in contrast Open Source software usually has no schedule). Open Source software is therefore infinitely more secure as more often than not at least 2 pairs of eyes have seen any particular piece of code.
Close, but not correct. Prof. Gonzalez got it wrong (sorry doc).
There isn't a habitable zone - there is a developmental zone. It's the region where intelligent live can evolve in the absence of energetic local events, but with sufficent heavy elements.
Once developed, life could certainly colonize worlds outside the so-called habitable zone quite easily.
So it may be correct to say the development of intelligent life is rare in the galaxy, but that still doesn't answer the conundrum of where THEY are - even if habitable worlds are only in a narrow band around the galaxy, it would only take a few million years for the entire band to be colonized. So again, we are either unique (which seems far fetched), or first (again, farfetched), or very close seconds.
I didn't regard it as a blooper, though I had the same thoughts you did at the time. But think about it - the ring kept Gollum alive for over 500 years, and the ring itself didn't succum to the lava at once either. Perhaps the ring preserved Gollum as he was still clutching it as he sank into the lava. That's my story and I'm sticking to it - it's much cooler than a mistake.
Actually, since the moon had no atmosphere to defract light and give you a "sky", a hood or external shade to shade the opening of the telescope should be all you need to operate an optical telescope in the 15 days of light on the moon.
Power might still be a problem, as G4from128k pointed out, but I would think that NASA would be smarter and put a solar satellite in orbit around the moon. Could easily avoid being put in shadow, and beam power wherever it is needed - which could speed up new development and support mobil labs, mining, etc.
Sorry Charlie,
That's the price you pay for GPL - Any customer can decide to redistribute it at any time, in any manner (consistant with the GPL of course). So if a club member decides to be magnanimous who are you to question it?
Besides, doesn't BitTorrent work BETTER the more people use it?
Me? I'm going to wait and buy the PowerPack edition.
"Loss for Linux" - Please! Don't by so shortsighted. Ever hear of Apache? XFree86? If there is enough need developers will band together to create an open source solution (or several). A generic backend to handle all the hassle of figuring out localized taxes. With a config file containing all the data and rules that change, so keeping up with it is easy. It will just be another push for open source software.
But the gasket is metalized too, so it just forms part of the cage for the microwaves
It doesn't - there is a metal mesh through the glass of the door. In effect it creates a metal cage around the microwave source so that any single hole (as in the mesh) is too small to let a wavelength of the microwaves out.
While there have been a lot of really interesting questions and commontary in this thread, my opinion is that Apple will simply ignore it.... for now.
Corporations are usually very good at picking their fights, and they certainly won't want to do that over a single $.99 song. Why risk it? What would Apple hope to gain? There is no reason not to simply wait - and make a point later, under different circumstances, when it makes sense for Apple.
What you said sounds really interesting - I'd heard about plasma torch disposal of waste a year or two ago, but never any more about it. I'd really like to see what you had put together for a business plan for your university. Our town in NH is in the middle of closing our landfill and building a transfer station to the tune of a total cost of ~23 million. I'd love to present a better option to our city council. Please drop me an email (I'm hoping you read this) to bsh@inforonics.com so I can learn more. Thanks.
They aren't the only ones. Massachusetts has done something similar int the past to pass a tax hike - basically sequester the entire state legislature for 20 hours. Mass has a procudural rule that a measure cannot be presented and passed in the same day (to give time for the electorate to have their views heard I assume), so they just kept everyone out of contact with the people until 12:01, declared it a new day, and put the tax hike to a vote. Nice.
Provided that the ammendment is very specifically worded to include tests such other laws have - like would a "reasonable, average person expect to find pronography at a sight with this name" - then I'd have no problem with it.
I can see a really strong argument that such as misleading site name is fraud in a sense - deliberately taking someone somewhere they don't want to go. How this is supposed to make such as site more profitable is beyond me. Kind of like how bait-and-switch is illegal for stores, bait-and-switch in website names can arguably be made illegal as well.
You must have meant:
"Even though Slashdot isn't journalism, we thought it might be interesting"
And just go over their house for an afternoon and help them get it trained. If they are too far from you, have them find someone closer. Reading paragraphs isn't rocket science - people are by and large happy to help out. All they need do is ask.
If you can't get it to work there is a product out there called SystemCommander - I'm looking to get that (but haven't yet, so I can't tell you how good it is). It claims to be able, in addition to allowing you to install as many different OSs as disk space allows, to hide partitions from any of those OSs. Might do the trick if nothing else helps.
Succinct answer Bruce.
I too would like to see the arguments, maybe OpenLaw would like to review them to see what they think? Or maybe the EFF's lawyers?
But I think it's important not to dismiss them out of hand. The Law is a tenuous thing at best, full of opinion as well as fact. We need to see them and remember that just because whoever we consult sees the arguments as weak doesn't mean some judge somewhere won't find them compelling.
Free Software (and GNU and BSD, etc) have millions of lines of code to protect. Even if something is a long shot (legally) shouldn't we make sure we are protected against it? We have an awful lot of good work to lose that cannot easily be replaced.
My greatest debugging was on the first production run of the upgraded PATRIOT radar transmitter I was working on. The particular unit in question would start fine, run up, warm up the humoungus amplifier tubes for the radar, switch into high power (for long range operation and tracking) and BAM! reset itself.
Looked like a S/W bug to everyone, so I (as the last 'surviving' member of the S/W team at that point) was called in to find it and fix it.
Well, gathering data was the hard part - I needed to figure out what was happening with scope probes (tracing didn't work, and I couldn't rewrite all the firmware to do any logging or checkpointing). Small catch - the cycle running the system up to high power (where the bug was seen) takes 8+ minutes. Each time.
So I basically had 7 tries per hour (max) to figure out where to hang a scope probe off a backplane of about 4000 wires to figure out what the heck was going on. While at the same time leafing through 40K of assembler code trying to eye-ball the problem.
Three solid days of doing that (about 10-12 hours per day) with my boss constantly pestering me for a accurate estimate of how long it would take to fix it (Gee, thanks for that). Did I mention that I was 3 years on this project at this point - and that it was the first project I was on right out of school - and that I'd 'inherited' 2/3rds of the firmware from other developers who'd moved on? Way to be supportive boss.
Anyhow, I finally figured out it was a H/W fault, not the S/W at all. Turns out a 24 volt PS was "weak". When the 208 3-phase power that runs the transmitter dipped from the load of switching to high power, the 24 volt PS would drop it's voltage. Just enough that the 5 volt PS running the logic detected the drop in 24 volt PS voltage, and due to the fail-safes to protect the circuitry - shut itself off!
Which resets the control logic, brings down the power, steadies the 208 3-phase, bringing the 24 volt PS back in line, starting up the 5 volt PS, and away we go again.
All found with a couple of scopes. Boy that was fun.