No, but you don't need to. For a 10m asteroid impact the damage would be localized (a Tunguska or Hiroshima sized event), all you need to do is get out of the way.
Rather depends what it is made of and how much makes it down to a low altitude. Rather larger space stations have been deorbited without such low level explosions. Nor did the crash of Columbia create any large explosions, even though substantial parts of the vehicle did hit the ground.
Actually, the article says "At CES, the device's battery, which I believe was precharged with Wi-Fi power, was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes." Note the "which I believe was PRECHARGED" part. So they managed to charge a Blackberry from a pre-charged external battery in 90 minutes. Yay. But they never actually said how long it takes to charge the battery in the Airnergy device via wi-fi signals - probably for a good reason, because that would take probably a couple hundred days or more.
How long would it take to charge the same device from a car battery? How many could you charge at one time even without running the engine:)
Much earlier than the mythbusters a german tv-show for kids, the "Sendung mit der Maus" ("program with the mouse") made the point: they held up a neon tube next to a state radio-transmitter and it began to glow. And they explained to the kids, that it will work next to such a high energy radio transmitter, but it is also robbery according to german law.
Is totally gonna charge up your battery and run your cell phone for days.
Why not have a phone which works like self winding/powered watches? Something which extracts mechanical energy from body movement. Indeed with a phone such a mechanism could be put entirely inside the "battery" so no need to modify anything else.
The inverse square law and dBm being a logarithmic unit can all go to hell.
You might do better by covering the thing in photovoltaic cells. Given that there are likely to be more visible light photons around to capture.
One time, um, I read this trilogy of books by Timothy Zahn called Conqueror's Pride, and the aliens in it were susceptible to radio waves. So they thought the humans were attacking them, but really we were just communicating with radio waves, but it was hurting them so a war started.
Actually things were even worst from the alien's POV, since the human ships were all fitted with radar too.
If you're sitting next to a solid block of Tritium, your largest problem is going to be hypothermia, as it'd be -257degC. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, a gas at STP.
Or alternativly asphyxiation if it's at much higher temperature due to the formally solid tritium subliming rapidly enough to drive away the air.
Also, comparing Tritium to Plutonium is pretty weak sauce as well. They are only alike in that they're both radioactive.
One beta decays to stable helium 3, the other alpha decays to unstable uranium.
The vast majority of said windows malware actually takes advantage of the user combined with the fact that user typically runs all his code as an admin.. Unix/Mac don't give you elevated privileges by default, and provide a well understood mechanism by which you can elevate your privileges which *should* make you think...
Such elevation can also be applied on a per program basis. If there is an equivalent of setuid/sudo/etc in Windows it dosn't appear to be that well understood. To the point where "give the user admin privs" is considered an acceptable way to deal with poorly written programs. (Even though changing the permissions on a few files and/or registry keys is probably all that is actually needed.).
There is also worm type malware which attacks open network services, windows ships with several services on by default, even on a workstation install, which cannot easily be turned off and are usually just hidden behind a software firewall...
There are also quite a few which are on by default, but rarely needed. As well as some very odd service dependences, e.g. an MS Office update which requires the task schedular service to be running.
The issue with unpatched software, while a concern for all platforms, is simply worse on windows platforms... While Linux distros typically have a centralised package manager which will update all of your software through a single consistent interface and all at the same time, windows has a mechanism for updating the core os, and then each application you install may or may not have its own separate update mechanism which might run in the background (wasting resources), might run when you try to use the program, might require you to explicitly run the update program, or it might not have any update mechanism whatsoever and thus require you to manually check the website for updates.
There's also the situation of a program not being upgradable. You explicitally need to first uninstall the older version. As well as version checkers which can't cope with the concept of a newer version being present.
The game console makers prevent the attack just by requiring all executables to have been signed by the console maker and putting a policy in place that software from a one-man outfit won't get signed.
Which can still be defeated by exploitings bugs in approved software. The effect is more to restrict who can write for the platform. Even to attempt to control what the owner can do with their machine.
2) Antivirus vendors are now trying to police what you can and can't do. Look at the numerous reports of false positives for programs that are legally grey (or black) but aren't viruses.
They don't even have to be questionable. VNC manages to generate plenty of false positives, IME.
4) The products are often so badly written that they cause as many problems as they solve. A bad update here or there can (and has in the past) caused irrevocable system damage that has required a reinstall or restore from backup for users. What's the point of an antivirus that does this.
Not helped if these programs are over complex and fragile. The ultimate apparently being Norton which now has it's own special uninstall utility.
There's also another device: Nettalk TK6000, which looks quite a bit like MagicJack, but without the USB connector. It doesn't require a PC at all.
This looks like a standard ATA, bundled with a VoIP provider. These are fairly common. The clever bit with the MagicJack is using GSM rather than wired phones. Though it requires a computer running Windows and the article dosn't address issues like using more than one handset at once.
but storebought tapes weren't that great quality to begin with. Remember, this was an analog tape medium, and it was in the manufacturers' interests to duplicate them for as low cost as possible. Often this meant they were made from low-quality materials and were duplicated on high-speed equipment.
Higher quality tape going into tapes for recording, presumably. Though the E-240 tapes needed thinner tape to physically fit in the cassette. High speed duplication is likely to be rather tricky considering the tape has both linear and helical scan tracks.
People did buy laserdiscs, though, and those collectors were among the first to jump on the DVD-buying bandwagon. When regular people got word that DVDs gave you picture quality comparable to laserdiscs without all the disc flipping and swapping, DVD sales exploded.
The big advantage a disk has over tape is random access, even on a VCR which uses the control track for positioning it can take quite a bit of time to get to a specific place.
my mom worked at a video rental store for a bit and I'd loiter around a lot.
$75 was norm--up to 150 for big time releases. The tapes would then go on sale for 15-$20 after they've made enough money on rentals or when the tapes were played so much that quality started to wane. I think producing the videos on linear media took a significant block of time, even after the progression of the technology. Probably why the prices remained high even after years of use.
Tapes are are rather more fragile than plastic disks. Magnetic media can be affected by stray magnetic fields, also the tape physically touches the heads and tape guides in operation.
One day I saw what they do to "fix" bad tracking sections on the tape. They just cut it out. 2 seconds of bad tracking was like 10 feet of tape. I got a kick out of how they could chop this out and no one would notice.
Film prints could also shrink too. Since quite often they'd be spliced in order to be shown, when it came time to return the print it might be easiest to chop a frame or two either side of each splice. At least with film you can see where you are splicing (and 16mm typically only has 1 hole per frame).
Paying for digital copies is the great boondoggle of the 21st century. Mostly because the prices are too high. I'll pay $0.10 for an mp3 but not $0.99. That's just nuts - it's probably cheaper to get the CD. With the artwork. And the CD itself. And the packaging. And the receipt. And the experience of going to the store.
As well as the costs of it getting to the store and being put on the shelf so you can find it.
I don't know... seems to work pretty well for the diamond industry.
Diamonds are physical objects. It's quite expensive to either dig they out of the ground or manufacture them. That being said IIRC a good part of "A diamond is forever" is because if "secondhand" gems were to be sold the bottom would soon drop out of the market.
It's not a just dead-body-numbers game. Of those "5 times as many Amercians" murdered, how much capital did they take out of the US and world economy? In a single day, 20 some odd yahoos cost the US economy several hundred billions of dollars. This doesn't include Afghanistan and Iraq.
Afghanistan and Iraq are things which the US did to itself.
What we need to do now is to accept that airline travel is not safe, and can never be safe.
It's considerably safer than just about every other form of transport.
Everything in life that has the best rewards also has the greatest risks. Why can't we just factor risk into airline travel for the reward of being a timezone away in an hour? I would still fly. And those who wouldn't would push for a transcontinental high-speed train (Mag-Lev?) which would have a lower risk/reward, but just as cost effective.
The risks with trains are always going to be much higher than with aircraft. Because the track is a critical component of the system subject to all sorts of possible failures, including malicious ones.
Thing is that the person in question did not depart from either a UK or a US airport. Schiphol Arirport already had 15 such scanners and both the Airport's management and the Dutch Interior Minister announced yesterday they intend to get 60 more this year. Also it needs to be remembered that any kind of "screening" can be defeated by an "inside man". At least two other passengers noticed the terrorist in the company of an unknown man who claimed the Nigerian was from Sudan and had no passport. Such strange behaviour should at least have warrented checking with the flight crew, if not having both people arrested. Instead the witnesses say that the ticket agent refered them to a manager.
Interpol does NOT have a police force, it does not conduct criminal investigations, and it does not make arrests. It acts as a data manager of sorts, for any member nations, coordinating information, passing warrants as needed from one member country to another, etc. They are basically an administration/secretarial service on an international scale.
In Which case why do they need any special rights in the first place? "Diplomatic immunity" is granted by treaty, which treaty is involved here?
These are the same standard rights that are granted to some 70+ other international organizations.
Do such rights make sense in any of these cases? Even if some are justified does it make sense to have a "one size fits all" approach.
These additional rights were not granted to Interpol because it did not have a local office on US soil at the time.
Which presumably means there are people to whom these special protections apply.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't a man-made space objet, like a satellite, much easier to detect than a piece of rock because it's all metally and shiny
Natural objects can be made of the likes of iron. Not much oxygen in space to cause this to rust.
No, but you don't need to. For a 10m asteroid impact the damage would be localized (a Tunguska or Hiroshima sized event), all you need to do is get out of the way.
Rather depends what it is made of and how much makes it down to a low altitude. Rather larger space stations have been deorbited without such low level explosions. Nor did the crash of Columbia create any large explosions, even though substantial parts of the vehicle did hit the ground.
Actually, the article says "At CES, the device's battery, which I believe was precharged with Wi-Fi power, was able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% power to full power in about 90 minutes." Note the "which I believe was PRECHARGED" part. So they managed to charge a Blackberry from a pre-charged external battery in 90 minutes. Yay. But they never actually said how long it takes to charge the battery in the Airnergy device via wi-fi signals - probably for a good reason, because that would take probably a couple hundred days or more.
:)
How long would it take to charge the same device from a car battery? How many could you charge at one time even without running the engine
Much earlier than the mythbusters a german tv-show for kids, the "Sendung mit der Maus" ("program with the mouse") made the point: they held up a neon tube next to a state radio-transmitter and it began to glow. And they explained to the kids, that it will work next to such a high energy radio transmitter, but it is also robbery according to german law.
AFAIK "crystal" sets are legal in Germany...
Not necessarily, frequency is just as important as voltage and current.
:)
In the case of a power line the frequency is likely to be 50, 60 or 0 Hz. Which there not being that many which are DC
Is totally gonna charge up your battery and run your cell phone for days.
Why not have a phone which works like self winding/powered watches? Something which extracts mechanical energy from body movement. Indeed with a phone such a mechanism could be put entirely inside the "battery" so no need to modify anything else.
The inverse square law and dBm being a logarithmic unit can all go to hell.
You might do better by covering the thing in photovoltaic cells. Given that there are likely to be more visible light photons around to capture.
One time, um, I read this trilogy of books by Timothy Zahn called Conqueror's Pride, and the aliens in it were susceptible to radio waves. So they thought the humans were attacking them, but really we were just communicating with radio waves, but it was hurting them so a war started.
Actually things were even worst from the alien's POV, since the human ships were all fitted with radar too.
If you're sitting next to a solid block of Tritium, your largest problem is going to be hypothermia, as it'd be -257degC. Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen, a gas at STP.
Or alternativly asphyxiation if it's at much higher temperature due to the formally solid tritium subliming rapidly enough to drive away the air.
Also, comparing Tritium to Plutonium is pretty weak sauce as well. They are only alike in that they're both radioactive.
One beta decays to stable helium 3, the other alpha decays to unstable uranium.
The vast majority of said windows malware actually takes advantage of the user combined with the fact that user typically runs all his code as an admin.. Unix/Mac don't give you elevated privileges by default, and provide a well understood mechanism by which you can elevate your privileges which *should* make you think...
Such elevation can also be applied on a per program basis. If there is an equivalent of setuid/sudo/etc in Windows it dosn't appear to be that well understood. To the point where "give the user admin privs" is considered an acceptable way to deal with poorly written programs. (Even though changing the permissions on a few files and/or registry keys is probably all that is actually needed.).
There is also worm type malware which attacks open network services, windows ships with several services on by default, even on a workstation install, which cannot easily be turned off and are usually just hidden behind a software firewall...
There are also quite a few which are on by default, but rarely needed. As well as some very odd service dependences, e.g. an MS Office update which requires the task schedular service to be running.
The issue with unpatched software, while a concern for all platforms, is simply worse on windows platforms... While Linux distros typically have a centralised package manager which will update all of your software through a single consistent interface and all at the same time, windows has a mechanism for updating the core os, and then each application you install may or may not have its own separate update mechanism which might run in the background (wasting resources), might run when you try to use the program, might require you to explicitly run the update program, or it might not have any update mechanism whatsoever and thus require you to manually check the website for updates.
There's also the situation of a program not being upgradable. You explicitally need to first uninstall the older version. As well as version checkers which can't cope with the concept of a newer version being present.
The game console makers prevent the attack just by requiring all executables to have been signed by the console maker and putting a policy in place that software from a one-man outfit won't get signed.
Which can still be defeated by exploitings bugs in approved software. The effect is more to restrict who can write for the platform. Even to attempt to control what the owner can do with their machine.
2) Antivirus vendors are now trying to police what you can and can't do. Look at the numerous reports of false positives for programs that are legally grey (or black) but aren't viruses.
They don't even have to be questionable. VNC manages to generate plenty of false positives, IME.
4) The products are often so badly written that they cause as many problems as they solve. A bad update here or there can (and has in the past) caused irrevocable system damage that has required a reinstall or restore from backup for users. What's the point of an antivirus that does this.
Not helped if these programs are over complex and fragile. The ultimate apparently being Norton which now has it's own special uninstall utility.
There's also another device: Nettalk TK6000, which looks quite a bit like MagicJack, but without the USB connector. It doesn't require a PC at all.
This looks like a standard ATA, bundled with a VoIP provider. These are fairly common.
The clever bit with the MagicJack is using GSM rather than wired phones. Though it requires a computer running Windows and the article dosn't address issues like using more than one handset at once.
but storebought tapes weren't that great quality to begin with. Remember, this was an analog tape medium, and it was in the manufacturers' interests to duplicate them for as low cost as possible. Often this meant they were made from low-quality materials and were duplicated on high-speed equipment.
Higher quality tape going into tapes for recording, presumably. Though the E-240 tapes needed thinner tape to physically fit in the cassette. High speed duplication is likely to be rather tricky considering the tape has both linear and helical scan tracks.
People did buy laserdiscs, though, and those collectors were among the first to jump on the DVD-buying bandwagon. When regular people got word that DVDs gave you picture quality comparable to laserdiscs without all the disc flipping and swapping, DVD sales exploded.
The big advantage a disk has over tape is random access, even on a VCR which uses the control track for positioning it can take quite a bit of time to get to a specific place.
my mom worked at a video rental store for a bit and I'd loiter around a lot.
$75 was norm--up to 150 for big time releases. The tapes would then go on sale for 15-$20 after they've made enough money on rentals or when the tapes were played so much that quality started to wane. I think producing the videos on linear media took a significant block of time, even after the progression of the technology. Probably why the prices remained high even after years of use.
Tapes are are rather more fragile than plastic disks. Magnetic media can be affected by stray magnetic fields, also the tape physically touches the heads and tape guides in operation.
One day I saw what they do to "fix" bad tracking sections on the tape. They just cut it out. 2 seconds of bad tracking was like 10 feet of tape. I got a kick out of how they could chop this out and no one would notice.
Film prints could also shrink too. Since quite often they'd be spliced in order to be shown, when it came time to return the print it might be easiest to chop a frame or two either side of each splice. At least with film you can see where you are splicing (and 16mm typically only has 1 hole per frame).
Paying for digital copies is the great boondoggle of the 21st century. Mostly because the prices are too high. I'll pay $0.10 for an mp3 but not $0.99. That's just nuts - it's probably cheaper to get the CD. With the artwork. And the CD itself. And the packaging. And the receipt. And the experience of going to the store.
As well as the costs of it getting to the store and being put on the shelf so you can find it.
I don't know ... seems to work pretty well for the diamond industry.
Diamonds are physical objects. It's quite expensive to either dig they out of the ground or manufacture them. That being said IIRC a good part of "A diamond is forever" is because if "secondhand" gems were to be sold the bottom would soon drop out of the market.
"The studio is hoping that the four-week window will push consumers interested in watching movies at home to... pirate the movie instead."
Or not bother with watching the movie, another "lost sale". Or they will wait the 28 days.
It's not a just dead-body-numbers game. Of those "5 times as many Amercians" murdered, how much capital did they take out of the US and world economy? In a single day, 20 some odd yahoos cost the US economy several hundred billions of dollars. This doesn't include Afghanistan and Iraq.
Afghanistan and Iraq are things which the US did to itself.
Luckily for me, I have no place I need to go that is more than 500 miles away, and driving is probably faster and cheaper anyway...
But also more dangerous than flying, even with the "terrorists"...
What we need to do now is to accept that airline travel is not safe, and can never be safe.
It's considerably safer than just about every other form of transport.
Everything in life that has the best rewards also has the greatest risks. Why can't we just factor risk into airline travel for the reward of being a timezone away in an hour? I would still fly. And those who wouldn't would push for a transcontinental high-speed train (Mag-Lev?) which would have a lower risk/reward, but just as cost effective.
The risks with trains are always going to be much higher than with aircraft. Because the track is a critical component of the system subject to all sorts of possible failures, including malicious ones.
Unless they have nukes or something, terrorists are not much of a threat to the country.
They'd also need ability to actually use such a weapon. The vast majority of "Islamic terrorists" have proven to be utterly inept.
I suggest we are having a wave of terrorism to change the subject from the collapse of copenhagen.
Or even to stop people "forgetting" about the "threat".
Some psych warfare.
That would certainly explain the sense of sticking a "suicide bomber" with a rather ineffective bomb on a passenger plane.
That there were no dead bodies or a mile-wide debris trail in downtown Detroit is trivial -- because there COULD have been.
If this bomber had been sucessful in blowing up the plane it would most likely be the TSB/BST looking at the remains.
They've already used this technique successfully to kill someone.
That someone being the suicide bomber. Who was the only person killed in the blast.
Yes, but 2010 is election year here in the UK.
Thing is that the person in question did not depart from either a UK or a US airport. Schiphol Arirport already had 15 such scanners and both the Airport's management and the Dutch Interior Minister announced yesterday they intend to get 60 more this year.
Also it needs to be remembered that any kind of "screening" can be defeated by an "inside man". At least two other passengers noticed the terrorist in the company of an unknown man who claimed the Nigerian was from Sudan and had no passport. Such strange behaviour should at least have warrented checking with the flight crew, if not having both people arrested. Instead the witnesses say that the ticket agent refered them to a manager.
Interpol does NOT have a police force, it does not conduct criminal investigations, and it does not make arrests. It acts as a data manager of sorts, for any member nations, coordinating information, passing warrants as needed from one member country to another, etc. They are basically an administration/secretarial service on an international scale.
In Which case why do they need any special rights in the first place? "Diplomatic immunity" is granted by treaty, which treaty is involved here?
These are the same standard rights that are granted to some 70+ other international organizations.
Do such rights make sense in any of these cases? Even if some are justified does it make sense to have a "one size fits all" approach.
These additional rights were not granted to Interpol because it did not have a local office on US soil at the time.
Which presumably means there are people to whom these special protections apply.