Even considering advances in fossil fuel power efficiency and the fact that concentrating power generations outside the population centers improves air quality where people are living, electric cars in America do not significantly improve the situation globally : any way you look at it, coal and oil are ugly sources of energy.
Hydroelectric, solar and wind energy are nearly perfect, but unfortunately they do not scale very well : almost all dam sites have already been exploited, and solar and wind electricity generation infrastructure take vast amounts of space that make them suitable only for sparsely populated areas. Geothermal energy is also a winner, but suitable sites are rare.
Today, the only clean source of energy is nuclear energy. The FUD that has been spread about it is similar to what people believe about airplanes : people know how terrible an accident would be, but they forget the paranoid SOP and the enormous amounts of money and effort spent into making sure everything is securely run. But for now, more people have died early because of pollution related diseases than from exposure to accidental radioactivity release.
So as a matter of fact, in France where 80% of electricity production is nuclear, electric cars make sense. In fact, many utility services in urban environments are beginning to use them on a large scale. In Paris for example, trash trucks are electric.
But two problems remain :
- Nobody really knows how much nuclear energy cost. The reason is that nobody has yet dismantled nuclear power plants on a large scale. Provisions for end of life are being put aside on the electricity producer?s balance sheet, but the cost of doing the job properly remains a worrying prospect.
- Transporting electricity on long distances is inefficient. Lots of energy are wasted in the grid. As mainframe computing now coexists with distributed computing, it is likely that electricity generation to be truly efficient will need to use the input of smaller plants spread across the network. As when comparing ASP to in house solutions, ASP are more efficient, but the network costs makes them less competitive : small power plants produce more expensive electricity, but closer to the consumer and therefore with less waste and less distribution costs. Deregulation will soon boost this trend. And this leads us to...
The best candidate for future power may not be the holy grail of commercial fusion power but rather the more inconspicuous fuel cells : clean distributed power !
Unfortunately, not every place has SSH. And sometimes SSH is simply overkill. If I just want to check my email, I don't care too much if someone along the pipe sees me deleting 10 messages on how to "make money fast!", but I don't want them sniffing my password. Sure, but there is value in just adding to the encrypted traffic : if you only encrypt the valuable data, then encrypted traffic is an obvious target for attack, but if you encrypt everything, you burden the potential attacker with plenty of decoys.
Like many vehicle, a spaceship's cost stem in a large part from life support and security systems. Developping a reasonably safe vehicle to carry humans will take time because we want to limit the risks incured to human life. And we need a fast ship also because of the limitations of humans. Cargo does not require as much care and so much constraints. So while we are busy developping human transport, why not preposition cargo ? Prepositionned materials and equipment in orbit and on Mars surface would just wait for personnel to arrive and find ressources and support not as scarce as if they had been limited to what they brought in with them. Nothing revolutionnary yet (orbital castles and other concepts have already mentionned that idea), but my suggestion would be to push it further : the space industry is at an artisanal stage, and this is what drives costs up. Mass producing and prepositionning standardized automated one-way cargo ships would enable favorable conditions for a future human mission at a much lower cost. The critical path in this project is the human part, but once it is possible, we can avoid further delay by being ready at the right time.
A few technical details that are not mentioned in the article : the infrastructure will be mostly copper with DSL equipment at the ends. Technology will be brought by Dr. Jhunjhunwala's company (Tenet) and Satyam may be the partner ISP. If successful, the concept may be rapidly extended to other sections of the Vijaywada - Guntur line. My experience about India is a study I conducted during a few weeks there back in February. I conducted face to face interviews with the CEO and top execs from MTNL in Delhi, with execs from Tata Teleservices in Hyderabad, and also with various actors of the Indian telecommunications industry. I found that India is full of incredibly ingenious people that learn faster than you imagine (in the technical domain, marketing is another story entirely...) and will kick the butt of those who don't evolve as fast, but India is also full of experts in the art of crafting propaganda in the form of thundering press releases that will make Microsoft's own look like reasonable technical information. When Andra Pradesh's chief minister's IT advisor assured me that videoconference facilities were available in selected post offices, I was excited, but when I got there to check it out, all I found after half an hour wandering from one clueless employee to the other was a PC with a 33 kbit/s modem : there had been two customers in six months and the employee could even remember the date the last one came ! I suggested that videoconference over a plain PC with a modem was stretching it a bit, and they told me that it was adequate, and even proposed to demo it, but at this very moment the lights went out (dry season came early and electricity is scarce when the dams are empty) and I decided I had seen enough. Just an example... The reason lies in the political stakes that lie in the technological development of the country : half of India's 600000 villages still do not have phone and bringing basic information services there is a national priority. But instead of being pragmatic, politicians promise optical fiber every village, virtual universities for the masses and other grandiose expressions of demagogy, and they count on the private sector to implement their vision. the In return, private sector companies that collaborate in raising the hype get a better attitude from the administration. A while ago, a story ran on Slashdot mentioning that Worldtel aimed at deploying hundreds of Internet cafes in Tamil Nadu. I read that the company even mentioned extending the project into Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. The facts are they did nothing like that and that all that remains is a shady national backbone project like what everyone else in India is planning. My opinion is that this was a gross ploy to get subsidies from a government honestly eager to foster the development of anything that can get the information age to the masses. This is a good example of things that happen on a regular basis in India. But the strategy followed by the government is schizophrenic : the heavy regulation that burdens the telecommunications industry is intended to let incumbent take advantage of high tariffs to fund the development of basic telephony infrastructure in rural India. This is a good thing. Promoting new innovative projects from the private sector is also a good thing. But both are totally incompatible with each other and produce an incoherent quagmire : maintaining the tariff's stability is nonsense in the context of the structural changes that the industry is to go through while riding the technological wave; it is merely feet dragging from heavily lobbying incumbents reluctant to change. To conclude on a positive note, I must say that I believe that this particular project is real and may be successful because it is reasonable in scope. Just beware of Indian hype : it is at least as bad as what you've got at home !
I'm French, people of my family were taken by the Nazis, never to be seen again. I really have no sympathy whatsoever toward the ideals of the Third Reich.
But why won't my government let me analyze the political ideas on my own, listen to the debates and make my opinions ?
Censors seems to look down on the populace and consider them unable to make any decisions. Anything remotely relating to the German occupation of France is taboo and it seems that people in power will always dismiss any debate as being the seeds of hate : they decided that because Nazism is bad to us, there is nothing more to debate. The Truth is set in stone and anybody daring to defy it is catalogued as a revisionist defending Nazi ideas.
Please, it is precisely because I do not tolerate hate that I want it to be exposed. No one can understand how much nonsense the Nazi doctrine is until they are confronted with the reality of neo-nazi organizations. Let them express themselves if they want, let the debate happen again and my humble opinion is that the world will see once more that Nazi ideas are Hell and that revisionist arguments do not stand for even a second against the mass of collected evidence.
As someone once put it, "sunshine is the best disinfectant".
And if Nazi memorabilia can help people realize that Hell really happened and is not just a virtual propaganda construct, then it is even useful to the collective memory.
Satellite operators such as http://www.ihug.net/bandwidth.html routinely associate satellite downlink with terrestrial uplink to provide asymetrical service. I do not know how thy manage the routing, but this might be an interesting track to follow.
http://varinfo.direcpc.com/what/work.html Direcpc uses an application level proxy using push methods : "The process in detail: When a customer requests a URL, the request gets delivered by modem to the ISP. However, before that request leaves the customer's PC, the DirecPC software attaches a tunneling code to the URL. That code instructs the ISP to forward the URL request to the DirecPC Network Operations Center (NOC). Once HNS receives the request, the tunneling code is stripped away and the request is forwarded to the appropriate site from which the desired content is retrieved. The NOC then uploads the information to the Hughes satellite, which beams it down to the customer's DirecPC dish and into his or her PC."
http://hypercable.net/satellite/isp/body_isp.htm gives more precisions.
If you do not want to proxy at application level, I would say that unless you have a host somewhere up in the Cloud, that you can tunnel both your connexion to (why not using specially load balanced multilink ppp over pptp) and let do the splitting, there is no way a connexion is going to originate somewhere and come back around another way.
A few weeks ago I simply configured my Squid proxy not to let anything from Doubleclick.net go through. It's totally transparent to my users and I spared 1.5% of my total HTTP traffic (that's what Doubleclick.net was costing me before...).
"The proposed project will create a very large, complex and inter-connected region of cyberspace that will be inoculated with digital organisms which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural selection. The objective is to set off a digital analog to the Cambrian explosion of diversity, in which multi-cellular digital organisms (parallel processes) will spontaneously increase in diversity and complexity. If successful, this evolutionary process will allow us to find the natural form of parallel and distributed processes, and will generate extremely complex digital information processes that fully utilize the capacities inherent in our parallel and networked hardware. The project will be funded through the donation of spare CPU cycles from thousands of machines connected to the net, by running the reserve as a low priority background process on participating nodes." (Taken from http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/pubs/reserves/node1. html ).
Tierra http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tierra/tierra.html really looked awesomely exciting, but it seems to have remained confined to a relatively small group of researchers.
Avida http://www.krl.caltech.edu/~charles/avida/manual/i ntro.html claims to have taken over the concept, but I miss the distributed computing that Tierra ambitionned.
Slashdot Mirror
Clean distributed power !
Here is how we come to it :
Even considering advances in fossil fuel power efficiency and the fact that concentrating power generations outside the population centers improves air quality where people are living, electric cars in America do not significantly improve the situation globally : any way you look at it, coal and oil are ugly sources of energy.
Hydroelectric, solar and wind energy are nearly perfect, but unfortunately they do not scale very well : almost all dam sites have already been exploited, and solar and wind electricity generation infrastructure take vast amounts of space that make them suitable only for sparsely populated areas. Geothermal energy is also a winner, but suitable sites are rare.
Today, the only clean source of energy is nuclear energy. The FUD that has been spread about it is similar to what people believe about airplanes : people know how terrible an accident would be, but they forget the paranoid SOP and the enormous amounts of money and effort spent into making sure everything is securely run. But for now, more people have died early because of pollution related diseases than from exposure to accidental radioactivity release.
So as a matter of fact, in France where 80% of electricity production is nuclear, electric cars make sense. In fact, many utility services in urban environments are beginning to use them on a large scale. In Paris for example, trash trucks are electric.
But two problems remain :
- Nobody really knows how much nuclear energy cost. The reason is that nobody has yet dismantled nuclear power plants on a large scale. Provisions for end of life are being put aside on the electricity producer?s balance sheet, but the cost of doing the job properly remains a worrying prospect.
- Transporting electricity on long distances is inefficient. Lots of energy are wasted in the grid. As mainframe computing now coexists with distributed computing, it is likely that electricity generation to be truly efficient will need to use the input of smaller plants spread across the network. As when comparing ASP to in house solutions, ASP are more efficient, but the network costs makes them less competitive : small power plants produce more expensive electricity, but closer to the consumer and therefore with less waste and less distribution costs. Deregulation will soon boost this trend. And this leads us to...
The best candidate for future power may not be the holy grail of commercial fusion power but rather the more inconspicuous fuel cells : clean distributed power !
echo -n "Adjust timer to prevent ssh and telnet session timeout" ipchains -M -S 144000 60 3600 echo "done"
Unfortunately, not every place has SSH. And sometimes SSH is simply overkill. If I just want to check my email, I don't care too much if someone along the pipe sees me deleting 10 messages on how to "make money fast!", but I don't want them sniffing my password. Sure, but there is value in just adding to the encrypted traffic : if you only encrypt the valuable data, then encrypted traffic is an obvious target for attack, but if you encrypt everything, you burden the potential attacker with plenty of decoys.
Like many vehicle, a spaceship's cost stem in a large part from life support and security systems. Developping a reasonably safe vehicle to carry humans will take time because we want to limit the risks incured to human life. And we need a fast ship also because of the limitations of humans. Cargo does not require as much care and so much constraints. So while we are busy developping human transport, why not preposition cargo ? Prepositionned materials and equipment in orbit and on Mars surface would just wait for personnel to arrive and find ressources and support not as scarce as if they had been limited to what they brought in with them. Nothing revolutionnary yet (orbital castles and other concepts have already mentionned that idea), but my suggestion would be to push it further : the space industry is at an artisanal stage, and this is what drives costs up. Mass producing and prepositionning standardized automated one-way cargo ships would enable favorable conditions for a future human mission at a much lower cost. The critical path in this project is the human part, but once it is possible, we can avoid further delay by being ready at the right time.
A few technical details that are not mentioned in the article : the infrastructure will be mostly copper with DSL equipment at the ends. Technology will be brought by Dr. Jhunjhunwala's company (Tenet) and Satyam may be the partner ISP. If successful, the concept may be rapidly extended to other sections of the Vijaywada - Guntur line.
My experience about India is a study I conducted during a few weeks there back in February. I conducted face to face interviews with the CEO and top execs from MTNL in Delhi, with execs from Tata Teleservices in Hyderabad, and also with various actors of the Indian telecommunications industry.
I found that India is full of incredibly ingenious people that learn faster than you imagine (in the technical domain, marketing is another story entirely...) and will kick the butt of those who don't evolve as fast, but India is also full of experts in the art of crafting propaganda in the form of thundering press releases that will make Microsoft's own look like reasonable technical information.
When Andra Pradesh's chief minister's IT advisor assured me that videoconference facilities were available in selected post offices, I was excited, but when I got there to check it out, all I found after half an hour wandering from one clueless employee to the other was a PC with a 33 kbit/s modem : there had been two customers in six months and the employee could even remember the date the last one came ! I suggested that videoconference over a plain PC with a modem was stretching it a bit, and they told me that it was adequate, and even proposed to demo it, but at this very moment the lights went out (dry season came early and electricity is scarce when the dams are empty) and I decided I had seen enough. Just an example...
The reason lies in the political stakes that lie in the technological development of the country : half of India's 600000 villages still do not have phone and bringing basic information services there is a national priority. But instead of being pragmatic, politicians promise optical fiber every village, virtual universities for the masses and other grandiose expressions of demagogy, and they count on the private sector to implement their vision. the In return, private sector companies that collaborate in raising the hype get a better attitude from the administration.
A while ago, a story ran on Slashdot mentioning that Worldtel aimed at deploying hundreds of Internet cafes in Tamil Nadu. I read that the company even mentioned extending the project into Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra. The facts are they did nothing like that and that all that remains is a shady national backbone project like what everyone else in India is planning. My opinion is that this was a gross ploy to get subsidies from a government honestly eager to foster the development of anything that can get the information age to the masses. This is a good example of things that happen on a regular basis in India.
But the strategy followed by the government is schizophrenic : the heavy regulation that burdens the telecommunications industry is intended to let incumbent take advantage of high tariffs to fund the development of basic telephony infrastructure in rural India. This is a good thing. Promoting new innovative projects from the private sector is also a good thing. But both are totally incompatible with each other and produce an incoherent quagmire : maintaining the tariff's stability is nonsense in the context of the structural changes that the industry is to go through while riding the technological wave; it is merely feet dragging from heavily lobbying incumbents reluctant to change.
To conclude on a positive note, I must say that I believe that this particular project is real and may be successful because it is reasonable in scope. Just beware of Indian hype : it is at least as bad as what you've got at home !
I'm French, people of my family were taken by the Nazis, never to be seen again. I really have no sympathy whatsoever toward the ideals of the Third Reich.
But why won't my government let me analyze the political ideas on my own, listen to the debates and make my opinions ?
Censors seems to look down on the populace and consider them unable to make any decisions. Anything remotely relating to the German occupation of France is taboo and it seems that people in power will always dismiss any debate as being the seeds of hate : they decided that because Nazism is bad to us, there is nothing more to debate. The Truth is set in stone and anybody daring to defy it is catalogued as a revisionist defending Nazi ideas.
Please, it is precisely because I do not tolerate hate that I want it to be exposed. No one can understand how much nonsense the Nazi doctrine is until they are confronted with the reality of neo-nazi organizations. Let them express themselves if they want, let the debate happen again and my humble opinion is that the world will see once more that Nazi ideas are Hell and that revisionist arguments do not stand for even a second against the mass of collected evidence.
As someone once put it, "sunshine is the best disinfectant".
And if Nazi memorabilia can help people realize that Hell really happened and is not just a virtual propaganda construct, then it is even useful to the collective memory.
Satellite operators such as http://www.ihug.net/bandwidth.html routinely associate satellite downlink with terrestrial uplink to provide asymetrical service. I do not know how thy manage the routing, but this might be an interesting track to follow.
m gives more precisions.
http://varinfo.direcpc.com/what/work.html
Direcpc uses an application level proxy using push methods :
"The process in detail: When a customer requests a URL, the request gets delivered by modem to the ISP. However, before that request leaves the customer's PC, the DirecPC software attaches a tunneling code to the URL. That code instructs the ISP to forward the URL request to the DirecPC Network Operations Center (NOC). Once HNS receives the request, the tunneling code is stripped away and the request is forwarded to the appropriate site from which the desired content is retrieved. The NOC then uploads the information to the Hughes satellite, which beams it down to the customer's DirecPC dish and into his or her PC."
http://hypercable.net/satellite/isp/body_isp.ht
If you do not want to proxy at application level, I would say that unless you have a host somewhere up in the Cloud, that you can tunnel both your connexion to (why not using specially load balanced multilink ppp over pptp) and let do the splitting, there is no way a connexion is going to originate somewhere and come back around another way.
A few weeks ago I simply configured my Squid proxy not to let anything from Doubleclick.net go through. It's totally transparent to my users and I spared 1.5% of my total HTTP traffic (that's what Doubleclick.net was costing me before...).
http://www.inf.bme.hu/~dancsi/USE!/index.html
Very informative and detailed. Graphs of outputs give a more objective view.
"The proposed project will create a very large, complex and inter-connected region of cyberspace that will be inoculated with digital organisms which will be allowed to evolve freely through natural selection. The objective is to set off a digital analog to the Cambrian explosion of diversity, in which multi-cellular digital organisms (parallel processes) will spontaneously increase in diversity and complexity. If successful, this evolutionary process will allow us to find the natural form of parallel and distributed processes, and will generate extremely complex digital information processes that fully utilize the capacities inherent in our parallel and networked hardware. The project will be funded through the donation of spare CPU cycles from thousands of machines connected to the net, by running the reserve as a low priority background process on participating nodes." (Taken from http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/pubs/reserves/node1. html ).
i ntro.html claims to have taken over the concept, but I miss the distributed computing that Tierra ambitionned.
Tierra http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~ray/tierra/tierra.html really looked awesomely exciting, but it seems to have remained confined to a relatively small group of researchers.
Avida http://www.krl.caltech.edu/~charles/avida/manual/