One important point that others above have alluded to but haven't outright stated:
While the exponential scaling of rocket equation is an important limiting issue when building larger and larger rockets, for any given rocket (or rocket configuration) the payload capacity is fixed. If you have a payload that is too large for a Falcon 1Pegasus, but doesn't need the full capacity of a Falcon 9, all that extra capacity goes to waste. It costs essentially the same amount to launch a Falcon 9 at 60% capacity as it does to launch it at 90% capacity. You can share payload with multiple customers, but that limits which orbits they can use.
Space X can calculate how much weight the recovery system and fuel requires and how much money they can save by reusing the first stage, and give a discount to customers who give up that additional payload capacity. If there is a market for those lower cost launches, then great. If not, then keep treating the 1st stage as disposable.
Running a business like this takes a lot of work, and for it to succeed well enough to actually get working rockets off the ground you need to attract top-notch engineers who believe that working for you isn't just a waste of their time (more than a billionaire's plaything), and management that can create the right environment for them to succeed without blowing through your money for nothing. It is much less expensive, less risky and less time consuming to just pay Russia for a thrill ride than to create your own rocket company. So I can understand why most would choose to go that route, and leave the latter for those who genuinely want to shake up the market.
That said, the total payload mass that the ship could support is roughly the same whether it is inside the airship or outside in a gondola, and the more space you want to make available for use, the more mass you would have to dedicate to structure rather than payload. So it would be less cramped than a tiny capsule, but you would still need large expanses of mostly empty space to provide the needed buoyancy.
In practice, it might be better to have a balloon filled with a less dense gas to decrease the total volume needed to support the desired payload, and then have an attached air-filled "gondola" that is nearly as large as the balloon.
You don't have to wait for someone to pop out of the woodworks. BPG is nothing but a still frame of HEVC video which is patented up the ass. Bellard and other open source video authors are accustomed to ignoring the patent situation because they don't really have a choice if you want to be interoperable, but that isn't an excuse for creating patent problems in a field where there are already widespread royalty free standards (JPEG, PNG).
Yeah same here. The only bad thing I saw were the MRAPs which have already been in the local news. I can't imagine that there are enough situations where such a vehicle would be needed to justify the high maintenance costs. They are mostly used for show, as projections of power.
Other than that, it's a bunch of useful items. The larger police departments got explosive ordinance disposal robots, scopes, utility trucks, helicopter. The forest service got a bunch of night vision supplies. The department of corrections got a big ol power distributor. One of the more rural tribal departments got a road grader, some generators, welders, and even a field kitchen.
Good to see that tax payer funded equipment going to good use.
Well based on the current interface, it will differentiate itself by making articles a series of disconnected statements, with no editing for flow at all. This makes it easier to link back to the original source of each statement, but kills any sort of readability like the worst of the inverse pyramid writing style rising again after its near death.
I still don't know what to make of this since it wasn't just one paper, but all the ones I looked at. I'm no conspiracy nut, but how does that happen?
If they were all wrong in the same way, it is possible you were just reading slightly edited versions of the same account provided by a news feed like the Associated Press.
Wood showed WIRED a little grey box, which contained the only copy of Hawking's speech synthesiser. It's a CallText 5010, a model given to Hawking in 1988 when he visited the company that manufactured it, Speech Plus. The card inside the synthesiser contains a processor that turns text into speech, a device that was also used for automated telephone answering systems in the 80s.
"I'm trying to make a software version of Stephen's voice so that we don't have to rely on these old hardware cards," says Wood....
Hawking is very attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the new synthesiser, the voice was different so he asked them to replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the early 80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul". "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice.
This is based on WebRTC which is a W3C draft that both Safari and Internet Explorer have committed to implement. There has to be a first browser to implement any proposed standard.
If you look at the absorption and efficiency plots in the linked nature abstract, the improvement is pretty broad spectrum as it is. Based on the Fourier analysis plots, it does seem like a slightly wider pit spacing would better concentrate the energy in their desired sweet spot, but CDs and DVDs would be too wide. HD-DVD actually looks like it might have the most ideal pit spacings.
Now that they have a proof of concept, it is an obvious thing for researchers to try different pit sizes and patterns in order to optimize the efficiency
Actually, that already happened. As the abstract of the paper notes, previous research has already identified how to theoretically optimize patterns, but arbitrary patterns require expensive photo lithography equipment to create. This research shows that an existing inexpensive mass production technique generates results that are almost as good as the optimized patterns, but not quite as good because the spacing of the pits is a bit too periodic (especially across tracks rather than along them).
This is an HBO series, not a movie. They are big on dramas, not CGI explodaramas. I have my reservations about how well this will translate, but if it sucks it won't be because they turned it into a Michael Bay action shit-fest.
We prefer Firefox, but I was about to switch my wife over to using Chrome as it has become impossible to figure out which of the dozens of tabs she has open was slowing everything down, even with ad-blocking enabled. It will be interesting to see how the multi-process support impacts memory overhead, though, as Firefox has had the lead on Chrome in that area.
The A+ and B+ boards still have composite video, they just output it on the smaller 3.5mm jack to save space, like many other mobile devices do. You can get adapter cables to split out the typical red,white,yellow RCA connectors for a couple bucks.
Total overreach, and I don't understand why they couldn't have gone with some simpler "destruction of evidence" charge (which I'm sure is still fairly serious and would turn a fine into a prison sentence).
Because previous laws aren't applicable to this situation. To my knowledge, and according to the two surveys of federal obstruction of justice statutes, all previous laws (like 18 U.S.C. 1503 and 1505) only apply when there is judicial or grand jury proceeding at the time. The purpose of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c) and 1519 (enacted by Sarbanes-Oxley) were to expand the scope of obstruction laws to apply when an investigation was underway but charges had not yet been filed. That is what the prosecutor means when saying the intent of these sections was to close a loophole or fill gaps in the current law. I have to agree that it needed to be filled, and this was the correct statute to apple to this case.
In both the new and old statutes cases the offender must be aware of the proceedings or investigation and act with intent in order for the law to apply, so they can't be abused in that manner. Sarbanes-Oxley also doubled the maximum penalties for these laws, which increases the potential for abuse. Personally, I would feel better if the statutes explicitly stated that the maximum penalty should be proportional to the penalty of the crime being covered up. That is currently up to judicial discretion and precedence, AFAIK.
And those risk tolerances change over time. It's been 10 years since SpaceShipOne won the X-Prize, and Virgin Galactic started taking reservations not too long after that. Someone could have gotten married and had multiple kids since then. What was an acceptable risk to them as a bachelor, may not be an acceptable risk as a parent. I wouldn't be surprised if this has been a latent concern for some time, but one could be ignored for the meanwhile since it was still a ways off. Heck if the schedule kept slipping like it has been, the risk equation could have changed again, so why not kick the decision down the road. This crash forced the issue into clear view.
Yeah, but not by default. I agree that this won't influence most businesses who are still running IE. But old grandma running IE 6 will find that her internet is broken, and will ask someone to fix it for her, which most likely will involve upgrading to an newer browser.
It may also bring back the days of banks requiring the use of IE, as none of the citi group websites support any version of TLS. Of course, those in the know should cancel their citi accounts. Even if you don't use their website, if their security is this lax in one area, it probably isn't great in others as well. Sucks for people with mortgages and such that are very expensive to move to another company, though.
Yeah, more test data across the spectrum of body types is always a good thing. The article mentions that they are working on building dummies to better model elderly people as well.
[quote]It's just irresponsible for the package maintainers to come back and say "we can't pull it, we're leaving it as is, and we're not patching it either".[/quote] The package maintainers didn't say that. This package is in the universe repository. The entire purpose of this repository is that volunteers can upload packages that Canonical has decided they aren't going to support. So Canonical isn't the package maintainer and you can't really blame them for not supporting packages that they said they aren't going to support.
Furthermore, it sounds like the ownCloud developers want Ubuntu to either use the latest & greatest release, or remove the package entirely. If that is correct, then I think it is irresponsible on the developer's part. Version 7 only came out 3 months ago, so they really ought to be providing security patches for version 6.
Even if BTSync were to process one connection string per CPU clock cycle, it would still take 1e20 years to try all the possible 20-character Base64 strings that BTSync uses by default. If you choose a longer string, then it will take even more time. In otherwords, the standard strings have 120 bits of entropy, and you can increase that to up to 240 bits. This is less than is typically used for encryption these days, but btsync doesn't have to deal with offline attacks.
Rather than key size, I would be more concerned about whether the client potentially leaks data through timing attacks, or any MITM/sniffing attacks that speed up the cracking faster than brute force.
That isn't an open source implementation of btsync. It is just an unofficial debian package that installs the official proprietary btsync binary. It makes it easier to install and update btsync on debian based systems, but it is the exact same software that you download from the official site.
Slashdot Mirror
One important point that others above have alluded to but haven't outright stated:
While the exponential scaling of rocket equation is an important limiting issue when building larger and larger rockets, for any given rocket (or rocket configuration) the payload capacity is fixed. If you have a payload that is too large for a Falcon 1Pegasus, but doesn't need the full capacity of a Falcon 9, all that extra capacity goes to waste. It costs essentially the same amount to launch a Falcon 9 at 60% capacity as it does to launch it at 90% capacity. You can share payload with multiple customers, but that limits which orbits they can use.
Space X can calculate how much weight the recovery system and fuel requires and how much money they can save by reusing the first stage, and give a discount to customers who give up that additional payload capacity. If there is a market for those lower cost launches, then great. If not, then keep treating the 1st stage as disposable.
Running a business like this takes a lot of work, and for it to succeed well enough to actually get working rockets off the ground you need to attract top-notch engineers who believe that working for you isn't just a waste of their time (more than a billionaire's plaything), and management that can create the right environment for them to succeed without blowing through your money for nothing. It is much less expensive, less risky and less time consuming to just pay Russia for a thrill ride than to create your own rocket company. So I can understand why most would choose to go that route, and leave the latter for those who genuinely want to shake up the market.
That said, the total payload mass that the ship could support is roughly the same whether it is inside the airship or outside in a gondola, and the more space you want to make available for use, the more mass you would have to dedicate to structure rather than payload. So it would be less cramped than a tiny capsule, but you would still need large expanses of mostly empty space to provide the needed buoyancy.
In practice, it might be better to have a balloon filled with a less dense gas to decrease the total volume needed to support the desired payload, and then have an attached air-filled "gondola" that is nearly as large as the balloon.
Like Disney World, will it also have accompanying lodging.
You don't have to wait for someone to pop out of the woodworks. BPG is nothing but a still frame of HEVC video which is patented up the ass. Bellard and other open source video authors are accustomed to ignoring the patent situation because they don't really have a choice if you want to be interoperable, but that isn't an excuse for creating patent problems in a field where there are already widespread royalty free standards (JPEG, PNG).
Yeah same here. The only bad thing I saw were the MRAPs which have already been in the local news. I can't imagine that there are enough situations where such a vehicle would be needed to justify the high maintenance costs. They are mostly used for show, as projections of power.
Other than that, it's a bunch of useful items. The larger police departments got explosive ordinance disposal robots, scopes, utility trucks, helicopter. The forest service got a bunch of night vision supplies. The department of corrections got a big ol power distributor. One of the more rural tribal departments got a road grader, some generators, welders, and even a field kitchen.
Good to see that tax payer funded equipment going to good use.
Well based on the current interface, it will differentiate itself by making articles a series of disconnected statements, with no editing for flow at all. This makes it easier to link back to the original source of each statement, but kills any sort of readability like the worst of the inverse pyramid writing style rising again after its near death.
I still don't know what to make of this since it wasn't just one paper, but all the ones I looked at. I'm no conspiracy nut, but how does that happen?
If they were all wrong in the same way, it is possible you were just reading slightly edited versions of the same account provided by a news feed like the Associated Press.
From the second link:
Wood showed WIRED a little grey box, which contained the only copy of Hawking's speech synthesiser. It's a CallText 5010, a model given to Hawking in 1988 when he visited the company that manufactured it, Speech Plus. The card inside the synthesiser contains a processor that turns text into speech, a device that was also used for automated telephone answering systems in the 80s.
"I'm trying to make a software version of Stephen's voice so that we don't have to rely on these old hardware cards," says Wood. ...
Hawking is very attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the new synthesiser, the voice was different so he asked them to replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the early 80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul". "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice.
This is based on WebRTC which is a W3C draft that both Safari and Internet Explorer have committed to implement. There has to be a first browser to implement any proposed standard.
If you look at the absorption and efficiency plots in the linked nature abstract, the improvement is pretty broad spectrum as it is. Based on the Fourier analysis plots, it does seem like a slightly wider pit spacing would better concentrate the energy in their desired sweet spot, but CDs and DVDs would be too wide. HD-DVD actually looks like it might have the most ideal pit spacings.
Now that they have a proof of concept, it is an obvious thing for researchers to try different pit sizes and patterns in order to optimize the efficiency
Actually, that already happened. As the abstract of the paper notes, previous research has already identified how to theoretically optimize patterns, but arbitrary patterns require expensive photo lithography equipment to create. This research shows that an existing inexpensive mass production technique generates results that are almost as good as the optimized patterns, but not quite as good because the spacing of the pits is a bit too periodic (especially across tracks rather than along them).
This is an HBO series, not a movie. They are big on dramas, not CGI explodaramas. I have my reservations about how well this will translate, but if it sucks it won't be because they turned it into a Michael Bay action shit-fest.
We prefer Firefox, but I was about to switch my wife over to using Chrome as it has become impossible to figure out which of the dozens of tabs she has open was slowing everything down, even with ad-blocking enabled. It will be interesting to see how the multi-process support impacts memory overhead, though, as Firefox has had the lead on Chrome in that area.
The A+ and B+ boards still have composite video, they just output it on the smaller 3.5mm jack to save space, like many other mobile devices do. You can get adapter cables to split out the typical red,white,yellow RCA connectors for a couple bucks.
Total overreach, and I don't understand why they couldn't have gone with some simpler "destruction of evidence" charge (which I'm sure is still fairly serious and would turn a fine into a prison sentence).
Because previous laws aren't applicable to this situation. To my knowledge, and according to the two surveys of federal obstruction of justice statutes, all previous laws (like 18 U.S.C. 1503 and 1505) only apply when there is judicial or grand jury proceeding at the time. The purpose of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c) and 1519 (enacted by Sarbanes-Oxley) were to expand the scope of obstruction laws to apply when an investigation was underway but charges had not yet been filed. That is what the prosecutor means when saying the intent of these sections was to close a loophole or fill gaps in the current law. I have to agree that it needed to be filled, and this was the correct statute to apple to this case.
In both the new and old statutes cases the offender must be aware of the proceedings or investigation and act with intent in order for the law to apply, so they can't be abused in that manner. Sarbanes-Oxley also doubled the maximum penalties for these laws, which increases the potential for abuse. Personally, I would feel better if the statutes explicitly stated that the maximum penalty should be proportional to the penalty of the crime being covered up. That is currently up to judicial discretion and precedence, AFAIK.
And those risk tolerances change over time. It's been 10 years since SpaceShipOne won the X-Prize, and Virgin Galactic started taking reservations not too long after that. Someone could have gotten married and had multiple kids since then. What was an acceptable risk to them as a bachelor, may not be an acceptable risk as a parent. I wouldn't be surprised if this has been a latent concern for some time, but one could be ignored for the meanwhile since it was still a ways off. Heck if the schedule kept slipping like it has been, the risk equation could have changed again, so why not kick the decision down the road. This crash forced the issue into clear view.
Yeah, but not by default. I agree that this won't influence most businesses who are still running IE. But old grandma running IE 6 will find that her internet is broken, and will ask someone to fix it for her, which most likely will involve upgrading to an newer browser.
It may also bring back the days of banks requiring the use of IE, as none of the citi group websites support any version of TLS. Of course, those in the know should cancel their citi accounts. Even if you don't use their website, if their security is this lax in one area, it probably isn't great in others as well. Sucks for people with mortgages and such that are very expensive to move to another company, though.
Yeah, more test data across the spectrum of body types is always a good thing. The article mentions that they are working on building dummies to better model elderly people as well.
Nobody includes failures during component testing into the failure rate of a rocket. Doing so is completely meaningless and disingenuous.
[quote]It's just irresponsible for the package maintainers to come back and say "we can't pull it, we're leaving it as is, and we're not patching it either".[/quote]
The package maintainers didn't say that. This package is in the universe repository. The entire purpose of this repository is that volunteers can upload packages that Canonical has decided they aren't going to support. So Canonical isn't the package maintainer and you can't really blame them for not supporting packages that they said they aren't going to support.
Furthermore, it sounds like the ownCloud developers want Ubuntu to either use the latest & greatest release, or remove the package entirely. If that is correct, then I think it is irresponsible on the developer's part. Version 7 only came out 3 months ago, so they really ought to be providing security patches for version 6.
While that is good information in general, SSL would help in this particular attack, as it would still block the Tor exit node from seeing the data.
Even if BTSync were to process one connection string per CPU clock cycle, it would still take 1e20 years to try all the possible 20-character Base64 strings that BTSync uses by default. If you choose a longer string, then it will take even more time. In otherwords, the standard strings have 120 bits of entropy, and you can increase that to up to 240 bits. This is less than is typically used for encryption these days, but btsync doesn't have to deal with offline attacks.
Rather than key size, I would be more concerned about whether the client potentially leaks data through timing attacks, or any MITM/sniffing attacks that speed up the cracking faster than brute force.
That isn't an open source implementation of btsync. It is just an unofficial debian package that installs the official proprietary btsync binary. It makes it easier to install and update btsync on debian based systems, but it is the exact same software that you download from the official site.