Yes, quite a bit less. Rough rule of thumb for light delay through glass fiber is 5 nanoseconds/meter. That's about 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum.
Well, when they do a controlled deorbit, they typically aim it at the ocean which has a notable lack of dogs, houses, and people's heads. If it's out of control then it falls where it falls.
Most sats use solar but I suppose there may be a few with RTGs and maybe a handful with nuclear reactors. The RTGs are designed to survive reentry _intact_ so they don't spread radioactivity anywhere. I believe an RTG from a satellite launch accident in 1968 (Nimbus?) was actually recovered from the ocean and reused.
Now a nuclear reactor reentry might be more of a problem. I think the couple that are up there from the 60's are parked in orbits that won't decay for thousands of years.
They are not claiming that discs protected with this mechanism will play their contents in existing CD/DVD players, only that existing readers would be able to read the raw bits from the disk and interact with the smart card.
Additional hardware or software would be needed to exchange keys with the smart card and decrypt the contents. The smart card only provides the key, it doesn't decrypt the contents of the disk.
Think of a dongle integrated into the disk instead of hanging off your USB hub.
Re:And they just don't learn - or do they?
on
CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 1
Heck, you can make a microcontroller that logs all communication going through the ide pins!
While one could do that, one would only see the encrypted data as the decryption happens in the host, not on the reader.
Unless they are idiots, the key exchange between the host and the smart card will be encrypted too, so I doubt one could simply snoop the IDE bus to capture the key.
There's a third reason Apple doesn't ship OSX on PC hardware. Microsoft. Apple survives in its niche simply because they are no serious threat to Microsoft. Perhaps also as the token competition to keep the FTC off their backs.
Suppose that Apple ships OSX on a PC. If it stayed a niche on PC hardware, like BeOS, MS might tolerate it with an eye to the FTC. They might show some disapproval by not porting Office to OSX/x86. However, if it started to appear that it might be a serious threat, Microsoft could decide to discontinue Internet Explorer and Office for the Mac/PPC. And if that's not enough to humble Apple, Microsoft could run them into the ground on price competition. MS has so much money in the bank, they could probably give Windows and Office away for free, years on end, if necessary to protect their monopoly. Sure the FTC might get grumpy if they did this, but the gov. moves so slowly that the damage would be done before the first court hearing.
The only operating system that can compete with MS on their own turf is one that's free to begin with: Linux. Anyone who actually wanted to make some money and would be a serious threat to MS would be crushed.
Option 3, has been worked on before, to improve performance and to allow a denser vertical stacking of platters. It's still basically a one-headed drive, though, since no single surface has more than one rw head that can touch it. I don't believe they've ever been manufactured because of the cost.
Option 2 would make sense for this security application. The actuators are seperated so that they cannot collide. The big problem is the cost. It's almost two hard drives mashed together. Not having write on one side saves you basically nothing. You have to have two of everything expensive except platters: heads, actuator, voice coil motors, latches, preamps, read channels, servo controllers, host interfaces, etc.
The two-headed drive is nothing new. They've always died on the vine due to cost. Maybe this application could allow one to see the light of day, but only if web-server operators are willing to pay the premium.
Cheaper, but not quite as bullet-proof, would be to have standard mechanicals but two host interfaces with the read-only restriction on one of the interfaces enforced by firmware on the drive.
"catastrophic flood" is not the same thing as "global flood covering the Earth up to the mountain tops". I understand that there is quite a bit of evidence for various localized "catastrophic" floods on the Earth, like when a natural dam breaks, but none at all for a "global flood". Where'd all the water go anyway?
I certainly hope they sell my demographic information. As far as the NYT is concerned, I'm a 102 year-old female subscriber who is a homemaker with an income of less than $20K, living in Afghanistan.
Please, gulibility appears in every profession. Scientists fall victim to it as well, particularly when they venture out of their speciality. Remember those two fellows who were pretty good electrochemists but pretty lousy physicists? Something about fusion in a bottle.
Once we get that degree and become a guru in one field we sometimes forget that we really don't know everything.
"It's kind of cool - of all the space out there, literally, two (maybe the same one) has come through Earth. "
Interesting. Perhaps it is one strangelet which is orbiting the Earth where part of the orbit actually lies below the surface of the Earth. Were the orbit to decay, would the strangelet rumble around in the Earth's innards for a while, causing lots of quakes? Maybe there's a little blob of strange matter at the Earth's core where all these strange satellites have settled over the Earth's lifetime.
"Course I did mine completely in schematic entry -- VHDL code is for wimps;)"
Maybe so, but us wimps are getting a lot more sleep. Do you bang rocks together to start fires too? 8^)
I must admit that schematic entry does have a satisfying artsy-craftsy element that HDLs lack. But things are just getting too damn big these days to draw it all out.
"The best digital hardware design tool availible is Emacs."
The verilog mode in Emacs is pretty nice. I like how it figures out sensitivity lists, port maps, and such for you. On the other hand I absolutely hate Emacs. I've never understood how anyone would actually want to use it, given a choice. I pretty much use Emacs in batch mode to auto-verilog files and I never have to look at it or hit ctrl-x, ctrl-c, or whatever the heck that 12-stroke sequence was.
"But the whole point of this article is not issues such as cold fusion, rather it is such things are homepathic medicine, which has never had any serious studies."
About homeopathy. This is where the active ingredient is diluted to such a degree that a dose of the homeopathic concoction may not include a single atom of the active ingredient. They are selling what is essentially water as a cure for any number of problems.
I think chemistry can take over from here; it would be rather pointless to spend a lot of additional time studying the health properties of water.
More details at:
http://skepdic.com/homeo.html
Re:Ummm a little question
on
No More Rebooting?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Transistors ain't analog? You go down to a low enough level and everything's analog. The binary part just means there are two states we can map '1' and '0' to: two voltages, two current levels, two different resistor values, two different amounts of charge, etc. These magnatite thingies can probably be put in (at least) two states with different resistances. To sense it, they run a little bit of current through it and measure the voltage on the output. Or something like that.
I suppose an event horizon is possible without a singularity inside. If there were some state of matter so dense that the entire object would fit inside, and still not collapse, that would do it. Since we don't know of any such state -- and I'm not sure we would be able to tell the difference from the outside in either case -- we assume the collapse continues until a singularity forms. Of course, if gravistars (sp?) are for real then the things cannot collapse enough to form an event horizon.
>>> Government got involved just enough to make HDTV a collosal failure.
It seems that the bulk of the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the broadcasters. It was they who brought HDTV to Congress' attention back in the 80's in an effort to protect all of their unused spectrum from being reallocated. (It was being eye-balled by the land-mobile bunch at the time.) They claimed that yes, they weren't using the spectrum _now_, but soon it would be used for this wonderful, new high-definition thing. After succeeding in keeping their huge, free block of spectrum, they've pretty much spent the last 20 years fighting HDTV tooth and claw. This content-protection stuff is merely the latest salvo. From their point of view they make lots of money with the current technology so it would be insane to invest millions of dollars for something that is revenue neutral. Now the trick of muxing multiple channels into the same bandwidth interests them but there isn't any "HD" in that equation.
They made a bargain: free spectrum in exchange for HDTV. They're breaking the bargain so they should lose their free-ride on spectrum. January 1, 2006, all the unused analog TV spectrum should be auctioned off and every broadcaster should start paying annual fees for the spectrum they use.
...and thus accumulate legal bills at twice the rate they would have with only one lawsuit going on.
That's the whole point. These people would have, without a doubt, won and would have probably won nice, big awards in their countersuits IF they were able to afford to fight their way to the end of the gauntlet. They couldn't afford it so they settled.
Would you gamble your life-savings fighting a stupid lawsuit based on a message board argument about underwater plants?
It's disgusting that this is how our legal system works but basically, you get your money's worth. Those with the bucks can use the courts to abuse those without. I understand that other countries have a more enlightened approach to these kinds of civil cases: loser pays both side's legal bills.
"No. Any fertile annoying animals that may arise will not be disfavoured by selection compared to non-annoying fertile animals just because there are annoying sterile animals around."
But if the sterilized males were all "annoying", could not the females start choosing non-annoying males to avoid the sterilized ones? This way annoying males would be selected against, sterile or not, and the annoying trait might be eliminated.
Even if you are correct, which I doubt, have you ever heard of having a safety margin? Were we to populate every square centimeter of the land, ANY disruption would trigger catastrophe. When an inevitable problem occurs, say a crop failure due to some new disease, millions starve.
Anyway, who would want to live in such a place. Just imagine 2.5 billion people living in the U.S., packed in like sardines into our microscopic apartments, eating the most "efficient" food: soy-protein glop. Blech.
No, they don't. If they survive the clear-topping process they usually don't function as a hard drive (being able to read and write data reliably) for very long. They will still usually spin up and can seek without falling off cylinder too often...
They are cool to watch though. The actuator moves so quickly when they seek.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, quite a bit less. Rough rule of thumb for light delay through glass fiber is 5 nanoseconds/meter. That's about 2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum.
Well, when they do a controlled deorbit, they typically aim it at the ocean which has a notable lack of dogs, houses, and people's heads. If it's out of control then it falls where it falls.
Most sats use solar but I suppose there may be a few with RTGs and maybe a handful with nuclear reactors. The RTGs are designed to survive reentry _intact_ so they don't spread radioactivity anywhere. I believe an RTG from a satellite launch accident in 1968 (Nimbus?) was actually recovered from the ocean and reused.
Now a nuclear reactor reentry might be more of a problem. I think the couple that are up there from the 60's are parked in orbits that won't decay for thousands of years.
So what stops the adversary from posing as hordes of users that vote against servers that supply "good" files and for servers that supply bogus files?
Only a very tiny, microscopic spot right under the write head will be heated. The entire hard drive will not be any hotter than normal.
They are not claiming that discs protected with this mechanism will play their contents in existing CD/DVD players, only that existing readers would be able to read the raw bits from the disk and interact with the smart card.
Additional hardware or software would be needed to exchange keys with the smart card and decrypt the contents. The smart card only provides the key, it doesn't decrypt the contents of the disk.
Think of a dongle integrated into the disk instead of hanging off your USB hub.
While one could do that, one would only see the encrypted data as the decryption happens in the host, not on the reader.
Unless they are idiots, the key exchange between the host and the smart card will be encrypted too, so I doubt one could simply snoop the IDE bus to capture the key.
There's a third reason Apple doesn't ship OSX on PC hardware. Microsoft. Apple survives in its niche simply because they are no serious threat to Microsoft. Perhaps also as the token competition to keep the FTC off their backs.
Suppose that Apple ships OSX on a PC. If it stayed a niche on PC hardware, like BeOS, MS might tolerate it with an eye to the FTC. They might show some disapproval by not porting Office to OSX/x86. However, if it started to appear that it might be a serious threat, Microsoft could decide to discontinue Internet Explorer and Office for the Mac/PPC. And if that's not enough to humble Apple, Microsoft could run them into the ground on price competition. MS has so much money in the bank, they could probably give Windows and Office away for free, years on end, if necessary to protect their monopoly. Sure the FTC might get grumpy if they did this, but the gov. moves so slowly that the damage would be done before the first court hearing.
The only operating system that can compete with MS on their own turf is one that's free to begin with: Linux. Anyone who actually wanted to make some money and would be a serious threat to MS would be crushed.
"P.S. I've ALWAYS wondered why HD's didn't have read only switches on them, ..."
Actually, some do. Many SCSI drives, at least, have a write-disable jumper.
There would be no point in Option 1.
Option 3, has been worked on before, to improve performance and to allow a denser vertical stacking of platters. It's still basically a one-headed drive, though, since no single surface has more than one rw head that can touch it. I don't believe they've ever been manufactured because of the cost.
Option 2 would make sense for this security application. The actuators are seperated so that they cannot collide. The big problem is the cost. It's almost two hard drives mashed together. Not having write on one side saves you basically nothing. You have to have two of everything expensive except platters: heads, actuator, voice coil motors, latches, preamps, read channels, servo controllers, host interfaces, etc.
The two-headed drive is nothing new. They've always died on the vine due to cost. Maybe this application could allow one to see the light of day, but only if web-server operators are willing to pay the premium.
Cheaper, but not quite as bullet-proof, would be to have standard mechanicals but two host interfaces with the read-only restriction on one of the interfaces enforced by firmware on the drive.
"catastrophic flood" is not the same thing as "global flood covering the Earth up to the mountain tops". I understand that there is quite a bit of evidence for various localized "catastrophic" floods on the Earth, like when a natural dam breaks, but none at all for a "global flood". Where'd all the water go anyway?
I certainly hope they sell my demographic information. As far as the NYT is concerned, I'm a 102 year-old female subscriber who is a homemaker with an income of less than $20K, living in Afghanistan.
Please, gulibility appears in every profession. Scientists fall victim to it as well, particularly when they venture out of their speciality. Remember those two fellows who were pretty good electrochemists but pretty lousy physicists? Something about fusion in a bottle.
Once we get that degree and become a guru in one field we sometimes forget that we really don't know everything.
"Perhaps it is one strangelet which is orbiting the Earth..."
Well, OK, maybe not with a velocity of 900,000 mph. That's hyperbolic for sure; it aint coming back.
"It's kind of cool - of all the space out there, literally, two (maybe the same one) has come through Earth. "
Interesting. Perhaps it is one strangelet which is orbiting the Earth where part of the orbit actually lies below the surface of the Earth. Were the orbit to decay, would the strangelet rumble around in the Earth's innards for a while, causing lots of quakes? Maybe there's a little blob of strange matter at the Earth's core where all these strange satellites have settled over the Earth's lifetime.
"Course I did mine completely in schematic entry -- VHDL code is for wimps ;)"
Maybe so, but us wimps are getting a lot more sleep. Do you bang rocks together to start fires too? 8^)
I must admit that schematic entry does have a satisfying artsy-craftsy element that HDLs lack. But things are just getting too damn big these days to draw it all out.
"The best digital hardware design tool availible is Emacs."
The verilog mode in Emacs is pretty nice. I like how it figures out sensitivity lists, port maps, and such for you. On the other hand I absolutely hate Emacs. I've never understood how anyone would actually want to use it, given a choice. I pretty much use Emacs in batch mode to auto-verilog files and I never have to look at it or hit ctrl-x, ctrl-c, or whatever the heck that 12-stroke sequence was.
"But the whole point of this article is not issues such as cold fusion, rather it is such things are homepathic medicine, which has never had any serious studies."
About homeopathy. This is where the active ingredient is diluted to such a degree that a dose of the homeopathic concoction may not include a single atom of the active ingredient. They are selling what is essentially water as a cure for any number of problems.
I think chemistry can take over from here; it would be rather pointless to spend a lot of additional time studying the health properties of water.
More details at:
http://skepdic.com/homeo.html
Transistors ain't analog? You go down to a low enough level and everything's analog. The binary part just means there are two states we can map '1' and '0' to: two voltages, two current levels, two different resistor values, two different amounts of charge, etc. These magnatite thingies can probably be put in (at least) two states with different resistances. To sense it, they run a little bit of current through it and measure the voltage on the output. Or something like that.
I suppose an event horizon is possible without a singularity inside. If there were some state of matter so dense that the entire object would fit inside, and still not collapse, that would do it. Since we don't know of any such state -- and I'm not sure we would be able to tell the difference from the outside in either case -- we assume the collapse continues until a singularity forms. Of course, if gravistars (sp?) are for real then the things cannot collapse enough to form an event horizon.
>>>
Government got involved just enough to make HDTV a collosal failure.
It seems that the bulk of the blame can be laid squarely at the feet of the broadcasters. It was they who brought HDTV to Congress' attention back in the 80's in an effort to protect all of their unused spectrum from being reallocated. (It was being eye-balled by the land-mobile bunch at the time.) They claimed that yes, they weren't using the spectrum _now_, but soon it would be used for this wonderful, new high-definition thing. After succeeding in keeping their huge, free block of spectrum, they've pretty much spent the last 20 years fighting HDTV tooth and claw. This content-protection stuff is merely the latest salvo. From their point of view they make lots of money with the current technology so it would be insane to invest millions of dollars for something that is revenue neutral. Now the trick of muxing multiple channels into the same bandwidth interests them but there isn't any "HD" in that equation.
They made a bargain: free spectrum in exchange for HDTV. They're breaking the bargain so they should lose their free-ride on spectrum. January 1, 2006, all the unused analog TV spectrum should be auctioned off and every broadcaster should start paying annual fees for the spectrum they use.
"He should have countersued."
...and thus accumulate legal bills at twice the rate they would have with only one lawsuit going on.
That's the whole point. These people would have, without a doubt, won and would have probably won nice, big awards in their countersuits IF they were able to afford to fight their way to the end of the gauntlet. They couldn't afford it so they settled.
Would you gamble your life-savings fighting a stupid lawsuit based on a message board argument about underwater plants?
It's disgusting that this is how our legal system works but basically, you get your money's worth. Those with the bucks can use the courts to abuse those without. I understand that other countries have a more enlightened approach to these kinds of civil cases: loser pays both side's legal bills.
"No. Any fertile annoying animals that may arise will not be disfavoured by selection compared to non-annoying fertile animals just because there are annoying sterile animals around."
But if the sterilized males were all "annoying", could not the females start choosing non-annoying males to avoid the sterilized ones? This way annoying males would be selected against, sterile or not, and the annoying trait might be eliminated.
Monday: Apple ships OSX for Intel
Tuesday: Microsoft announces they will no longer support Office on MacOS.
As much as it gals, Office being the de facto standard makes it very important to have available.
Microsoft has always held this threat over Apple's head and that and fear of damaging their hardware sales will keep Apple from doing it.
Even if you are correct, which I doubt, have you ever heard of having a safety margin? Were we to populate every square centimeter of the land, ANY disruption would trigger catastrophe. When an inevitable problem occurs, say a crop failure due to some new disease, millions starve.
Anyway, who would want to live in such a place. Just imagine 2.5 billion people living in the U.S., packed in like sardines into our microscopic apartments, eating the most "efficient" food: soy-protein glop. Blech.
No, they don't. If they survive the clear-topping process they usually don't function as a hard drive (being able to read and write data reliably) for very long. They will still usually spin up and can seek without falling off cylinder too often...
They are cool to watch though. The actuator moves so quickly when they seek.
Iz