I like having constantly updated maps and more timely traffic information, and I'd prefer to have only one device on my windshield, but until those above problems get fixed, I'll keep my TomTom.
*laugh* One? I've got my Tom Tom and my iPod. My cell speaks to my car stereo via Bluetooth.
It's like central command when I'm on a road trip.:-P
Until you have 16 choices, all of them dirt. At least GPS can show you which one is least curvy. It's also great for curvy roads that you don't know and don't have signs, so you can see that hairpin half a mile before you fly off the road.
What I really like it for is the 'unguided and unplanned meandering drive'. Turn on the GPS, drive around and take random roads you'd never take if you were worried about getting lost. Go ahead, get lost. Navigate by the sun or follow a river.
Eventually, tell it to take you home. It's actually a pretty decent way to explore your area.
The more rural the area, the fewer route choices, and thusly the less importance a GPS due to the lack of choice.
I think it depends on where you live, and what the roads are like.
In my experience, a lot of rural places have a lot of smaller criss-cross roads and dirt roads that may or may not go anyplace. There's way more than two routes to almost anywhere. Then there's the "old highway" and the "new highway" in a lot of places, with the old highway being the scenic route.
If there are no other roads, then maybe what you say is true. If there's lots of roads spread out over a large area, I'd say that's when a GPS is at it's best. For any sufficiently long drive, or any drive to places where I don't know very well... I've found a GPS to be an incredibly useful thing.
My mother still has to program the destination for my father's GPS, but he can tell it to get him home. For them it's a godsend, since he travels to place that are several hours drive away and that he's never been to before -- quite often actually for an old guy. They find the GPS gets them where they're going, and my father has decided he really likes to see exactly where he's going and know how far until the next turn.
Hell, even in town I find I can read the street signs on my Tom Tom before I can even see the physical street signs. For me, I'll stick with having the GPS.
Note that this hypothesis is more plausible than it might seem at first glance since we've seen comets impact gas giants before. Most famously, in 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 was observed directly impacting on Jupiter. This also isn't the first time this sort of technique has been used to detect historic comet impacts. As TFA notes, this technique was previously used to show that a similar event likely occurred around 230 years ago on Saturn.
You know, what's actually kind of scary about what you've written is just how damned frequently the gas giants have been getting hit by comets.
We tend to think of the solar system as mostly static with much of the major disruptions mostly sorted out millions if no billions of years ago.
That many observations in just 200 years means there's still loads of rocky-bits out there waiting to bump into things.
Kinda makes you think the likelihood of getting splatted by a stray chunk is higher than one might think. That, or the gas giants are doing a bang-up job and deserve a raise.:-P
[ And, in a totally off-topic question... what exactly would happen to a rock that falls into Jupiter? Crushed? Vaporized? Turned to diamond? Suddenly it occurs to me that I've no idea what would happen. ]
PS. And you know, this "I bet if you launched 100 mylar balloons near a US airforce base, you'd get a pretty swift response." does sound fun:)
I think it would be interesting to see the results. I'm not so sure if it would be 'fun'.
But, personally I'd not be willing to twist the tiger's tail. And, until they respond, you really don't know what they could charge you under. You could find yourself in a good deal more trouble than you anticipated.
Intentionally raising the ire of the security people can be a really bad choice.
Well, if the coating is ablative, then after an exceedingly short period of time, the laser is now hitting the real surface and doing damage, no?
For some bonus points, make the coating release a barrier (in whatever form - aerosol, plasma, who cares as long as it works)
I'm not a high-energy physicist, but I get the impression that at the energy levels in question, any gas etc out in front is going to just burn off.
For that matter - how hard millions of toy balloons with small retro- and ordinary reflectors scattered in the area can be?
Hmmm... getting millions of toy balloons into the same area where your missile is likely to be striking in time to be a diversion before the missile arrives... I can't see that being difficult to pull off.:-P
"99 Luftabaloons" might have been prophetic, in a way;)
Heck, in 1983 everyone was living in a heightened fear that could cause people to scramble jets and whatnot. I'm sure Germany being squeezed in between the west and the Soviet felt it quite keenly. Heck, at the time we were fairly convinced the world would blow itself to shit at any time.
I bet if you launched 100 mylar balloons near a US airforce base, you'd get a pretty swift response.
If I were to make a missile/plane/uav with a chrome coating, something mirror-like and reflective, would the laser still work?
The usual response here on Slashdot is that since most of the mirror surfaces you're likely to get are irregular/imperfect, the heat from the laser would likely ablate (burn off) any mirror coating you have before it would do what you're thinking. In the case of chrome, it's not a perfect mirror, and it wouldn't work.
I think you would need a very perfect mirror surface, and even then I get the impression it wouldn't have the desired effect.
Ben Affleck playing a super-computer-genius by connecting a ribbon cable to a microchip (paycheck). Do that, and you get to sleep with Uma Thurman. Ooo, big prize.
*sigh* If only it was that easy to get a chance to sleep with Uma Thurman.
In addition to being corny as hell, "cyberwarrior" implies a dangerously literal application of traditional military doctrines(ie. you have the civilians, who do whatever, and then you have an army that stands between them and the bad guys and blows things up) to computer security.
We're looking for someone to take on a once-in-a-lifetime assignment: spend a Month at the Museum, to live and breathe science 24/7 for 30 days. From October 20 to November 18, 2010, this person's mission will be to experience all the fun and education that fits in this historic 14-acre building, living here full-time and reporting your findings to the outside world.
So, there will be at least one visitor there overnight.
I'd like to hear how ACTA could survive some sort of Constitutional challenge.
I'd like to know how the rest of the world can stop this.
From my perspective, this is basically an export of a law the US already has -- the DMCA.
I feel that far too many things that are already legal for many of us (fair use for example) is being stripped to cater to the interests of the MPAA and RIAA -- who are largely formed of multinationals who have a vested interest in getting every country to settle on the most draconian of laws.
As to the legalities, who knows. We're talking about a treaty being done in secret with no room for public input. For reasons I've never understood, all of the information about the content and process of this needs to be kept secret -- likely because people would realize how badly they're getting railroaded all in the name of protecting US movies from being copied.
You make a big deal out them knowing your gender and age, but any human being you walk past would know that immediately. Why does the fact that it's being done with technology make you uncomfortable, but for another human to know that is perfectly ok?
Easy, because a human can't automatically upload an image of your face to a database, correlate your movements with all of your credit card purchases, make inferences about your long-term buying patterns, and then sell that information to someone else who has no business with it in the first place.
The technology allows for far greater scale of privacy invasion, and provided an opportunity for data about you to persist in ways you couldn't even conceive of.
Think of it as Big Brother, but operated by commercial interests.
Maybe the U.S. will then start some patent reform if they see millions leaving its tax coffers. Hurt them in the pocketbook, and people change *real* quick.
No, they'll issue a "special watch" or some such against New Zealand as a place without adequate protection for intellectual property.
They'll apply diplomatic and economic pressure. They'll try to hit the bottom line of NZ companies by applying tariffs or banning the import of software from there.
They will not simply accept that NZ has the right to disallow software patents. The US is far too dependent on its vision of "Intellectual Property" to not push back against this. I'm sure they'll beat them with the ACTA stick and whatever else they can get.
I applaud the New Zealand government for taking this stance. But, I'm skeptical that it is over even if this law passes. The corporate interests will not be silenced, and the US is entirely going to champion the cause of corporate interests.
Maybe the egg with the hard shell came with the chicken. As I recall crocodilian eggs are somewhat leathery as opposed to brittle -- which seems to be what they're identifying here, the evolution of an egg with harder shell.
But, yes, the 'egg' way predates the chicken. Seriously stupid article.
TFA doesn't explain what an "eFuse" is, but if it's anything like an actual fuse, then shorting it should be easy enough.
If you follow the link in the story to here, it says:
The eFuse is coded with information that it either looks for or is passed to it from the bootloader. The bootloader is loaded with information it looks for when it begins the boot-up process. (I have seen the sbf file look for a certain bootloader when it begins so its safe to assume that this is the process).
Once the the eFuse verifies that the information it is looking for or that has been passed through to it by the bootloader is correct then the boot process continues. What type of information is written to the bootloader? So far i've been able to verify that the firmware information (what we call ROMS), the kernel information, and the bootloader version.
If the eFuse failes to verify this information then the eFuse receives a command to "blow the fuse" or "trip the fuse". This results in the booting process becoming corrupted and resulting in a permanent bricking of the Phone. This FailSafe is activated anytime the bootloader is tampered with or any of the above three parts of the phone has been tampered with.
Basically, they've added trusted computing to a phone.
The eFuse is the gatekeeper -- if it detects that you've done something they haven't approved, it causes the phone to self destruct.
So far, it doesn't seem like this is an easy thing to work around.
Not to defend a company which builds stuff which will brick your phone if you mod it, but...
Might there be legitimate reasons why Motorola would be required to do this? Patents they've licensed? Covering their asses against the RIAA et al? Perhaps Verizon wanted this?
Or, is this truly a case of a company taking an open platform and buggering it up by locking it? It sounds shifty, but there might actually be strong reasons why they did it in the first place.
Is this because NASA is using some COTS electronics on this mission? In the 'old days', we saw hardened electronics being used. Or is it a unique mission requirement, beyond what the old probes did?
From TFA..
For the 15 months Juno orbits Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to withstand the equivalent of more than 100 million dental X-rays
It's going to see hella radiation, so it needs some pretty beefy shielding. They're also using hardened components developed for Mars missions.
Without its protective shield, or radiation vault, Juno's brain would get fried on the very first pass near Jupiter
1 meter = 3.2808399 feet. Wouldn't that make it ~3.2 Square feet?
No, each square foot is a 1'x1' area, which is the standard unit of measure. There would be nine in a 1 meter tile.
Three foot square would describe an square area measuring 3 feet on a side, but people don't like the math. Wherever possible, the "^2" is removed so people don't need to do the calculation. So, the "9 square feet" is how it's usually described -- already multiplied. The single square foot is the base unit of measure when doing area -- it would never be 5ft^2, but 25 square feet.
If you want real fun, look at how construction is done here in North America (including Canada even though we're officially metric). All measurements are based on imperial since the industry never changed. AFAIK, all of the building codes and standards are still using those measures. Metric is almost completely excluded since the trades don't use it.
As someone who grew up with in the transition to metric -- my height and weight is in feet/inches and pounds. My speed is in kilometers. My measuring tape handles both. Baking uses cups, but gasoline is bought in liters. Beer is in pints. It really is complicated.:-P
Make ANY tablet able to function as a Wacom or Cintiq, including the pressure sensitivity. You will lock in the Internet Comic business almost instantly.
Ummm... is the Internet Comic business sufficiently large as to cause any large corporation to factor it into its demographics when designing a mass-appeal product?
It sounds a little like "left handed goat herders who program in scheme".
but creating a niche product that has been requested by pretty much everyone in the industry would certainly be a smart move
RIM doesn't want a 'niche product'. They want something as many people as possible will buy. The internet comics crowd? Maybe not so much.
Slashdot Mirror
*laugh* One? I've got my Tom Tom and my iPod. My cell speaks to my car stereo via Bluetooth.
It's like central command when I'm on a road trip. :-P
What I really like it for is the 'unguided and unplanned meandering drive'. Turn on the GPS, drive around and take random roads you'd never take if you were worried about getting lost. Go ahead, get lost. Navigate by the sun or follow a river.
Eventually, tell it to take you home. It's actually a pretty decent way to explore your area.
I think it depends on where you live, and what the roads are like.
In my experience, a lot of rural places have a lot of smaller criss-cross roads and dirt roads that may or may not go anyplace. There's way more than two routes to almost anywhere. Then there's the "old highway" and the "new highway" in a lot of places, with the old highway being the scenic route.
If there are no other roads, then maybe what you say is true. If there's lots of roads spread out over a large area, I'd say that's when a GPS is at it's best. For any sufficiently long drive, or any drive to places where I don't know very well ... I've found a GPS to be an incredibly useful thing.
My mother still has to program the destination for my father's GPS, but he can tell it to get him home. For them it's a godsend, since he travels to place that are several hours drive away and that he's never been to before -- quite often actually for an old guy. They find the GPS gets them where they're going, and my father has decided he really likes to see exactly where he's going and know how far until the next turn.
Hell, even in town I find I can read the street signs on my Tom Tom before I can even see the physical street signs. For me, I'll stick with having the GPS.
Metallic Hydrogen? Man, from the article you linked, I see the words "alkali metal" and "superconductor, up to room temperature".
Man, is science ever cool. :-P
Cheers
Which is more than I knew.
Thanks for the info.
You know, what's actually kind of scary about what you've written is just how damned frequently the gas giants have been getting hit by comets.
We tend to think of the solar system as mostly static with much of the major disruptions mostly sorted out millions if no billions of years ago.
That many observations in just 200 years means there's still loads of rocky-bits out there waiting to bump into things.
Kinda makes you think the likelihood of getting splatted by a stray chunk is higher than one might think. That, or the gas giants are doing a bang-up job and deserve a raise. :-P
[ And, in a totally off-topic question ... what exactly would happen to a rock that falls into Jupiter? Crushed? Vaporized? Turned to diamond? Suddenly it occurs to me that I've no idea what would happen. ]
I think it would be interesting to see the results. I'm not so sure if it would be 'fun'.
But, personally I'd not be willing to twist the tiger's tail. And, until they respond, you really don't know what they could charge you under. You could find yourself in a good deal more trouble than you anticipated.
Intentionally raising the ire of the security people can be a really bad choice.
Well, if the coating is ablative, then after an exceedingly short period of time, the laser is now hitting the real surface and doing damage, no?
I'm not a high-energy physicist, but I get the impression that at the energy levels in question, any gas etc out in front is going to just burn off.
Hmmm ... getting millions of toy balloons into the same area where your missile is likely to be striking in time to be a diversion before the missile arrives ... I can't see that being difficult to pull off. :-P
Heck, in 1983 everyone was living in a heightened fear that could cause people to scramble jets and whatnot. I'm sure Germany being squeezed in between the west and the Soviet felt it quite keenly. Heck, at the time we were fairly convinced the world would blow itself to shit at any time.
I bet if you launched 100 mylar balloons near a US airforce base, you'd get a pretty swift response.
The usual response here on Slashdot is that since most of the mirror surfaces you're likely to get are irregular/imperfect, the heat from the laser would likely ablate (burn off) any mirror coating you have before it would do what you're thinking. In the case of chrome, it's not a perfect mirror, and it wouldn't work.
I think you would need a very perfect mirror surface, and even then I get the impression it wouldn't have the desired effect.
The Nerdy 0xC?
*sigh* If only it was that easy to get a chance to sleep with Uma Thurman.
I'm just sayin'. :-P
I think you've just described the plot of Live Free or Die Hard. :-P
And yet, we have this, which says:
So, there will be at least one visitor there overnight.
I'd like to know how the rest of the world can stop this.
From my perspective, this is basically an export of a law the US already has -- the DMCA.
I feel that far too many things that are already legal for many of us (fair use for example) is being stripped to cater to the interests of the MPAA and RIAA -- who are largely formed of multinationals who have a vested interest in getting every country to settle on the most draconian of laws.
As to the legalities, who knows. We're talking about a treaty being done in secret with no room for public input. For reasons I've never understood, all of the information about the content and process of this needs to be kept secret -- likely because people would realize how badly they're getting railroaded all in the name of protecting US movies from being copied.
Easy, because a human can't automatically upload an image of your face to a database, correlate your movements with all of your credit card purchases, make inferences about your long-term buying patterns, and then sell that information to someone else who has no business with it in the first place.
The technology allows for far greater scale of privacy invasion, and provided an opportunity for data about you to persist in ways you couldn't even conceive of.
Think of it as Big Brother, but operated by commercial interests.
Only if it happens in that really cool cartoon way where the termites come out, and immediately eat all of the wood and things collapse.
Otherwise, it just sort of fizzles and isn't nearly as hilarious. :-P
No, they'll issue a "special watch" or some such against New Zealand as a place without adequate protection for intellectual property.
They'll apply diplomatic and economic pressure. They'll try to hit the bottom line of NZ companies by applying tariffs or banning the import of software from there.
They will not simply accept that NZ has the right to disallow software patents. The US is far too dependent on its vision of "Intellectual Property" to not push back against this. I'm sure they'll beat them with the ACTA stick and whatever else they can get.
I applaud the New Zealand government for taking this stance. But, I'm skeptical that it is over even if this law passes. The corporate interests will not be silenced, and the US is entirely going to champion the cause of corporate interests.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
Maybe the egg with the hard shell came with the chicken. As I recall crocodilian eggs are somewhat leathery as opposed to brittle -- which seems to be what they're identifying here, the evolution of an egg with harder shell.
But, yes, the 'egg' way predates the chicken. Seriously stupid article.
If you follow the link in the story to here, it says:
Basically, they've added trusted computing to a phone.
The eFuse is the gatekeeper -- if it detects that you've done something they haven't approved, it causes the phone to self destruct.
So far, it doesn't seem like this is an easy thing to work around.
Termite? Methinks maybe thermite?
Not to defend a company which builds stuff which will brick your phone if you mod it, but ...
Might there be legitimate reasons why Motorola would be required to do this? Patents they've licensed? Covering their asses against the RIAA et al? Perhaps Verizon wanted this?
Or, is this truly a case of a company taking an open platform and buggering it up by locking it? It sounds shifty, but there might actually be strong reasons why they did it in the first place.
From TFA ..
It's going to see hella radiation, so it needs some pretty beefy shielding. They're also using hardened components developed for Mars missions.
So, yes, it's a unique mission requirement.
I say we call it ZZ Top. :-P
No, each square foot is a 1'x1' area, which is the standard unit of measure. There would be nine in a 1 meter tile.
Three foot square would describe an square area measuring 3 feet on a side, but people don't like the math. Wherever possible, the "^2" is removed so people don't need to do the calculation. So, the "9 square feet" is how it's usually described -- already multiplied. The single square foot is the base unit of measure when doing area -- it would never be 5ft^2, but 25 square feet.
If you want real fun, look at how construction is done here in North America (including Canada even though we're officially metric). All measurements are based on imperial since the industry never changed. AFAIK, all of the building codes and standards are still using those measures. Metric is almost completely excluded since the trades don't use it.
As someone who grew up with in the transition to metric -- my height and weight is in feet/inches and pounds. My speed is in kilometers. My measuring tape handles both. Baking uses cups, but gasoline is bought in liters. Beer is in pints. It really is complicated. :-P
Ummm ... is the Internet Comic business sufficiently large as to cause any large corporation to factor it into its demographics when designing a mass-appeal product?
It sounds a little like "left handed goat herders who program in scheme".
RIM doesn't want a 'niche product'. They want something as many people as possible will buy. The internet comics crowd? Maybe not so much.