To make my original point clear.... it is offensive to imply that all asians look like East Asians. It is a big continent and there are a lot of different races on the continent. Some of which have been persecuted because f their race in recent history and it is VERY culturally insensitive to marginalize them.
Do you still call people Mongoloids too? It's the 21st century gramps, try call an Asian that to his face and don't be surprised if he busts out the chop-suey and puts your old white ass in the hospital. Ok.. so there are lots of different races from Asia. Indians, Mongolians, Siberians, Turks, Arabs, etc. The use to the term 'Asian' to refer to people frm the far east is irksome/offensive to some Indians. To my mind it would be like calling whites, 'Americans'.
It's like the mis-use of the term African-American. African-American is a cultural distinction. Not all blacks are African-American some are from the Caribean, some are Pacific Islanders, some are African. The term 'black' is offensive very few people... and very useful in describing race and society.
But what do you do about Asian/Oriental? You could try to be specific on country of origin... but Chinese isn't very good as there are many different races/ethnicities from China. If you're going to distinguish between Han Chinese and Korean, you might as well distinguish Tibetan too.
My vote is to simplify skin color just like eye/hair color: Whites, Blacks, Browns, Yellows, and Reds.
oh... and for those of you on this thread who think 'oriental' is as bad as the n-word... you have not seen/experienced real full-force dehumanising racism if you can honestly claim that. There are racist terms equavalent to the n-word, but 'oriental' isn't one of them.
All code (and other documents, research, etc) written/created by government employees is, by law, public domain. There are a few exceptions (for privacy and national security), and contractors are exempt. What you say is very true... The space act which formed NASA compells it to release it's code. But I work for NASA/JPL which tries to keep its code from other NASA centers through tactics like: 1. not documenting the existence of certain tools 2. pretending tools are undocumented when they are released 3. forcing people who request code to be very specific... i.e. if someone just asks for a program... they will get junk like binaries for a UNIVAC (I'm not kidding).
Even internal to my NASA center, it's impossible to get source code... I fought for years to get source code to a part of a library that was broken and no one would pay to have it fixed... when I finally got the code it was only partial code and all of the comments had been stripped out.
I've also been told that I'm not allowed to contribute to open source projects in my spare time... I'm not even allowed to mail code snippets to mailing lists to answer questions without clearance from an intellectual property lawyer first. In their view, my intellect is their property.
This policy is such bullshit. Taxpayers pay for the software and grad students and people in industry should have access to it... that's why the constitution bars the government from owning copyrights. But JPL won't let academia, other NASA centers, contractors, etc have their software without a fight. Some people don't even let code get out to other sections at JPL.
Hmmm.... as has been pointed out several times above: AAC is an open format, AAC is technically superior to mp3, mp3 has patent parasites, and many players (including the Zune) already handle AAC. Shucks I thought all of this was common knowledge amoungst the folks who hang out here.
I gots to wonder is all of these AAC soft lock-in type posts are just paid trolls... the kind that always seem to pop up when there are discusions relate to a certain company's strategic interests... now where'd I put that tinfoil hat.
it says it has a camera... but strangely there are no pictures of the back... anyone else remember the apple patent on the 'telescreen', i.e. a display with light sensative pixels that could be used to take pictures:)
But can't you only encrypt directories where the user has write permission and leave the system files alone? If you are encrypting system files (that everyone has access to un-encrypted versions of) doesn't that make the encryption much easier to break.
Because software frequently puts sensitive data in files outside your home directory.
If users don't run as administrators this can't happen. And I don't know of any Linux app that puts stuff outside home... and only a few Macs app do (and none should)
Why full disk encryption and not just the home directory?? Maybe things are so mixed up on Windows that you need full disk, but on OS X, Linux, and other Unixes it should be sufficient to encrypt only the home directory of users.
Are they just concentrating on a Windows-only solution that will lock out OS X and Linux??
As a government employee, I know there are a lot of people where I work who want to keep their Macs.
I'm not mad... sorry if I messed up on the 'email tone' I just meant to respond to your post. Emily is entitled to her opinion, but I don't agree with what she wrote.
The Montgolfiere is the JPL concept... I was at the OPAG presentation a no one whistled. I also saw a poster on a Goddard hot air balloon at the DPS. As far as I know, both studies are going forward (with substantial funding). I am unaware of any current work on helium blimps at JPL or Goddard.... Since you have to carry an RTG, you're going to have a lot of waste heat which makes hot air a logical choice - if it works. No need to worry about running out of gass, and a much simpler way to control altitude. And I have no reason to doubt the feasibility studies done independantly at both JPL and Goddard, so I think it is feasible.
As for 'pie in the sky', the analysis presented at OPAG seemed no more pie in the sky to me than a Europa mission which is the current plan for JPL's next flagship. And it seemed considerably less 'pie in the sky' than JIMO.
A hot air balloon is one of NASA's leading concepts for future exploration of Titan. I've seen talks and posters on the concept from JPL and Goddard at OPAG and the DPS meeting a couple months ago. Heat loss through the envelope is not an issue, an MMRTG like on MSL would provide plenty of heat. The biggest issue is designing an envelope to withstand the extreme cold. Remember high school science demos where they put rubber in liquid nitrogen.... Titan is so cold, nitrogen is solid on the surface. So it is hard (but not impossible) to find materials that would work for balloons and blimps at such low temperatures.
but how do you get that steel is ok? you don't know how much thermal flux is needed to melt the surface and you don't how much heat is produced by a fictional colony. Huygens barely produced any heat (just a little from RHUs) and it boiled off methane that was either frozen or liquid. Calculating a thermal budget is a very complicated thing, and not something you can handwave on slashdot... especially when your results don't pass a smell test.
I chose carbon steel because it has a relatively high thermal conductivity
don't you want low thermal conductivity (e.g. aerogel)? You want to insulate the surface from your heat, not conduct it to the surface (that was the GP's point)
Mars is probably a smarter choice, but it would not be IMPOSSIBLE to set up a colony on Titan, at least not because of the heat issue.
It wouldn't be impossible to put a colony on Venus, or even Jupiter either (ala Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back)... just really, really hard.
You could radiate your heat into the atmosphere in such a way as to not heat up the atmosphere much or the ground barely at all. But to do so would be a major complexity... even if the surface was covered in diamonds as big as volkswagons, it probably wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Heck you could use some sort of aerogel... if you have the technology to put giant beams of 'carbon steel' on Titan, you should be able to come up with a high strength aerogel.
My original point is it would not be as easy as the first poster suggested. Nothing about Titan makes it a good place in the solar system to colonize. Mars is much better... even Earth's moon or asteroids would be easier.
They considered balloons (not hot air -- helium. Keeping air hot would use too much energy), blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and non-fixed wing aircraft. Power was assumed to be from an RTG (radiothermal generator).
If you're using an RTG for power, why not just use the waste heat to make your hot air? RTG's produce way more heat than power (they aren't very efficient)
You can insulate things so that the rate of heat loss is the same as the rate of heat that can be taken away by the wind. Effectively spreading your warmth over the whole planet and not just on the part under you. Still, this is not an easy thing to do.
Saturn's rings effectively neutralize most radiation at Saturn... it's not much of a hazard at all. What little radiation there is wouldn't get through Titan's atmosphere anyway.
The only two planets with substantial radiation belts are Jupiter and Earth (i.e. the Van Allen belts). At Jupiter Io and Europa are in the belts, Callisto is too far out, and Ganymede has its own magnetic field that would protect spacecraft near it from the radiation.
BTW, the sort of radiation in these belts are electrons and energetic ions of regular stuff like Hydrogen and Oxygen. Not neutrons.... which makes it a little easier to protect against.
Titan is not a good place to colonize because it is cold.... cold, cold, cold. Not only would you have to keep your colony on Xanadu warm from the cold, but you'd have to keep your warmth in or you would melt through the surface (which is 'rocks' made up of water ice). When Huygens landed it evaporated a cloud of frozen methane just from its measly heat... a whole colony would probably touch off a cryovolcano eruption.
Titan isn't a good place to live, but it is an awesome place to explore. Imagine a hot air balloon flying over these mountains and the lakes and rivers and the giant sand dune seas. Without UV from the sun to degrade the balloon's envelope and with plutonium to heat up the air inside such a balloon could last pretty much forever.... or at least until the plutonium is used up.
My mom pays $700/mo with a $2000/yr deductible. Because of her age, most insurance companies won't offer her any insurance at all. My aunt lost her job and can't find any insurance at all because of her age.
Tuition of $4000/yr or less can be found in many states ($333/mo) and student health insurance is often less than $100/mo.
So going back to school can be a big savings on health insurance
many state schools have cheap health insurance for students... so cheap that tuition+health insurance may be less than finding your own insurance:) You also might find someone called a 'health insurance broker' they can shop around multiple plans... in LA they're in the phone book.
Slashdot Mirror
To make my original point clear.... it is offensive to imply that all asians look like East Asians. It is a big continent and there are a lot of different races on the continent. Some of which have been persecuted because f their race in recent history and it is VERY culturally insensitive to marginalize them.
If white people insisted on being called "Americans" as their race label that would be incredibly offensive to non-white Americans.
It's like the mis-use of the term African-American. African-American is a cultural distinction. Not all blacks are African-American some are from the Caribean, some are Pacific Islanders, some are African. The term 'black' is offensive very few people... and very useful in describing race and society.
But what do you do about Asian/Oriental? You could try to be specific on country of origin... but Chinese isn't very good as there are many different races/ethnicities from China. If you're going to distinguish between Han Chinese and Korean, you might as well distinguish Tibetan too.
My vote is to simplify skin color just like eye/hair color: Whites, Blacks, Browns, Yellows, and Reds.
oh... and for those of you on this thread who think 'oriental' is as bad as the n-word... you have not seen/experienced real full-force dehumanising racism if you can honestly claim that. There are racist terms equavalent to the n-word, but 'oriental' isn't one of them.
Even internal to my NASA center, it's impossible to get source code... I fought for years to get source code to a part of a library that was broken and no one would pay to have it fixed... when I finally got the code it was only partial code and all of the comments had been stripped out.
I've also been told that I'm not allowed to contribute to open source projects in my spare time... I'm not even allowed to mail code snippets to mailing lists to answer questions without clearance from an intellectual property lawyer first. In their view, my intellect is their property.
This policy is such bullshit. Taxpayers pay for the software and grad students and people in industry should have access to it... that's why the constitution bars the government from owning copyrights. But JPL won't let academia, other NASA centers, contractors, etc have their software without a fight. Some people don't even let code get out to other sections at JPL.
how about: 'Whiney Mac Apologist' or 'Whiney Mac Audiohole' both of which shorten to 'WMA' and doubles the sting to the machead.
Hmmm.... as has been pointed out several times above: AAC is an open format, AAC is technically superior to mp3, mp3 has patent parasites, and many players (including the Zune) already handle AAC. Shucks I thought all of this was common knowledge amoungst the folks who hang out here.
I gots to wonder is all of these AAC soft lock-in type posts are just paid trolls... the kind that always seem to pop up when there are discusions relate to a certain company's strategic interests... now where'd I put that tinfoil hat.
Whatever else you might say about him, he hasn't yet had something blow up in his face and then repeated the exact same thing again
:)
and that is why he'll never be president
it says it has a camera... but strangely there are no pictures of the back... anyone else remember the apple patent on the 'telescreen', i.e. a display with light sensative pixels that could be used to take pictures :)
But can't you only encrypt directories where the user has write permission and leave the system files alone? If you are encrypting system files (that everyone has access to un-encrypted versions of) doesn't that make the encryption much easier to break.
Because software frequently puts sensitive data in files outside your home directory.
If users don't run as administrators this can't happen. And I don't know of any Linux app that puts stuff outside home... and only a few Macs app do (and none should)
Why full disk encryption and not just the home directory?? Maybe things are so mixed up on Windows that you need full disk, but on OS X, Linux, and other Unixes it should be sufficient to encrypt only the home directory of users.
Are they just concentrating on a Windows-only solution that will lock out OS X and Linux??
As a government employee, I know there are a lot of people where I work who want to keep their Macs.
I'm not mad... sorry if I messed up on the 'email tone' I just meant to respond to your post. Emily is entitled to her opinion, but I don't agree with what she wrote.
The hot air in this case would be Titan's ambient atmosphere. No oxygen or water vapour.
The Montgolfiere is the JPL concept... I was at the OPAG presentation a no one whistled. I also saw a poster on a Goddard hot air balloon at the DPS. As far as I know, both studies are going forward (with substantial funding). I am unaware of any current work on helium blimps at JPL or Goddard.... Since you have to carry an RTG, you're going to have a lot of waste heat which makes hot air a logical choice - if it works. No need to worry about running out of gass, and a much simpler way to control altitude. And I have no reason to doubt the feasibility studies done independantly at both JPL and Goddard, so I think it is feasible.
As for 'pie in the sky', the analysis presented at OPAG seemed no more pie in the sky to me than a Europa mission which is the current plan for JPL's next flagship. And it seemed considerably less 'pie in the sky' than JIMO.
A hot air balloon is one of NASA's leading concepts for future exploration of Titan. I've seen talks and posters on the concept from JPL and Goddard at OPAG and the DPS meeting a couple months ago. Heat loss through the envelope is not an issue, an MMRTG like on MSL would provide plenty of heat. The biggest issue is designing an envelope to withstand the extreme cold. Remember high school science demos where they put rubber in liquid nitrogen.... Titan is so cold, nitrogen is solid on the surface. So it is hard (but not impossible) to find materials that would work for balloons and blimps at such low temperatures.
but how do you get that steel is ok? you don't know how much thermal flux is needed to melt the surface and you don't how much heat is produced by a fictional colony. Huygens barely produced any heat (just a little from RHUs) and it boiled off methane that was either frozen or liquid. Calculating a thermal budget is a very complicated thing, and not something you can handwave on slashdot... especially when your results don't pass a smell test.
I chose carbon steel because it has a relatively high thermal conductivity
don't you want low thermal conductivity (e.g. aerogel)? You want to insulate the surface from your heat, not conduct it to the surface (that was the GP's point)
Mars is probably a smarter choice, but it would not be IMPOSSIBLE to set up a colony on Titan, at least not because of the heat issue.
It wouldn't be impossible to put a colony on Venus, or even Jupiter either (ala Cloud City in Empire Strikes Back)... just really, really hard.
You could radiate your heat into the atmosphere in such a way as to not heat up the atmosphere much or the ground barely at all. But to do so would be a major complexity... even if the surface was covered in diamonds as big as volkswagons, it probably wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Heck you could use some sort of aerogel... if you have the technology to put giant beams of 'carbon steel' on Titan, you should be able to come up with a high strength aerogel.
My original point is it would not be as easy as the first poster suggested. Nothing about Titan makes it a good place in the solar system to colonize. Mars is much better... even Earth's moon or asteroids would be easier.
They considered balloons (not hot air -- helium. Keeping air hot would use too much energy), blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and non-fixed wing aircraft. Power was assumed to be from an RTG (radiothermal generator).
If you're using an RTG for power, why not just use the waste heat to make your hot air? RTG's produce way more heat than power (they aren't very efficient)
You can insulate things so that the rate of heat loss is the same as the rate of heat that can be taken away by the wind. Effectively spreading your warmth over the whole planet and not just on the part under you. Still, this is not an easy thing to do.
Saturn's rings effectively neutralize most radiation at Saturn... it's not much of a hazard at all. What little radiation there is wouldn't get through Titan's atmosphere anyway.
The only two planets with substantial radiation belts are Jupiter and Earth (i.e. the Van Allen belts). At Jupiter Io and Europa are in the belts, Callisto is too far out, and Ganymede has its own magnetic field that would protect spacecraft near it from the radiation.
BTW, the sort of radiation in these belts are electrons and energetic ions of regular stuff like Hydrogen and Oxygen. Not neutrons.... which makes it a little easier to protect against.
Titan is not a good place to colonize because it is cold.... cold, cold, cold. Not only would you have to keep your colony on Xanadu warm from the cold, but you'd have to keep your warmth in or you would melt through the surface (which is 'rocks' made up of water ice). When Huygens landed it evaporated a cloud of frozen methane just from its measly heat... a whole colony would probably touch off a cryovolcano eruption.
Titan isn't a good place to live, but it is an awesome place to explore. Imagine a hot air balloon flying over these mountains and the lakes and rivers and the giant sand dune seas. Without UV from the sun to degrade the balloon's envelope and with plutonium to heat up the air inside such a balloon could last pretty much forever.... or at least until the plutonium is used up.
My mom pays $700/mo with a $2000/yr deductible. Because of her age, most insurance companies won't offer her any insurance at all. My aunt lost her job and can't find any insurance at all because of her age.
Tuition of $4000/yr or less can be found in many states ($333/mo) and student health insurance is often less than $100/mo.
So going back to school can be a big savings on health insurance
many state schools have cheap health insurance for students... so cheap that tuition+health insurance may be less than finding your own insurance :) You also might find someone called a 'health insurance broker' they can shop around multiple plans... in LA they're in the phone book.
Apple is a large corp that started at pretty much the same time as Microsoft. They seem to be going down a different path less choked by bureaucracy.