I think you hit the nail on the head. Most people I know don't use multiple services. They might maintain accounts on multiple services (say, Facebook and MySpace, probably the most common pairing I've seen) but usually devote most of their time to one profile or the other. Generally in time, the disused profile becomes basically a pointer to the more-used one.
Sometimes people might go back and forth, spending some time working on their Facebook profile and then a few months concentrating on their Myspace page, but I'd say this is more atypical. People generally migrate from one to the other depending on what service most of their friends at the time are using.
I think this closely mirrors the IM networks, because again there you have people usually using one, but occasionally migrating from one to the other depending on who they want to communicate with. People who have a need to talk across system boundaries end up using specialized software and maintain multiple accounts. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how you can create the "Gaim" of social networking sites; it's not quite as clear how you would translate a Myspace page into a Facebook profile (although you could probably go the other way; it's the unstructured-to-structured data conversion that'd be hard, I'd imagine). It's a much more complicated problem than IM, even if the psychology is the same.
I don't see any of this changing anytime soon. There's not going to be "one social network to rule them all" anytime soon. You're going to get different service preferences within different groups of people. All it takes is a 'critical mass' of people to start using a service in a particular (physical-world) community, and suddenly everyone has a reason to use it. What would be good is if there were easier ways to migrate data from one to the other, in the event that people do want to move, but as other people have pointed out, the service providers have an interest in making migrations as difficult as possible.
I can't speak for other social sites besides Facebook, because I can't stand them (too much dark-blue-on-black, and who thought embedding sounds in HTML was a feature?) but I think it's major function is just to act as distributed, collaborative address book. The demand for this sort of thing is pretty obvious and has been for some time -- the traditional finger command did some of it, including listing people's addresses (or office location), email, and other contact info. Unlike a static address book stored locally on your computer, the obvious advantage of a distributed system is that it doesn't require any effort to stay up-to-date.
Frankly, as Facebook has gotten further and further away from its core focus of just providing a quick and easy way to find people's contact info that I haven't seen in a while, it's become less interesting to me. The expansion of social websites, to the point where they try to do everything (how long until they fulfill some sort of website corollary to Zawinski's Law and begin offering email?) may in fact be their downfall. But I suppose it's hard to monetize a big distributed address book, or so they think.
Does Facebook have contact-list export capabilities back yet?
Back a few years ago, there was a brief time when Facebook let you export your friends contact information as a VCard file. It was awesome -- you could download all of your friends' info to one file, and from there import it into Address Book, or the PIM of your choice. From there, if you had an intelligent enough system, you could have all their birthdays added to your calendar, phone numbers downloaded to your mobile, etc.
They eliminated the feature pretty quickly after they implemented it -- I only got one data download out of it -- due to spam concerns, but I always thought that there had to be a way to balance spam resistance against the obvious benefits of such a system. (Of course, the obvious solution is to only 'friend' people you actually know and trust, and not just anybody who sends you a request...but any security method based on user intelligence is probably doomed to failure.)
If they've re-enabled anything like that, I'd be very impressed. Facebook is by far my favorite 'social networking' site (which isn't saying much, really it's akin to saying 'Facebook doesn't make me want to gouge out my own eyes'), but it could certainly be more useful if the data, both simple contact information and more complex relationship-derived metadata, was exportable for external use and analysis.
2a. Use their volume purchasing power and narrow margins to make profits,
This would make sense, if they were underselling the competition, WalMart-style. Except they're not. In most places I've been to, Starbucks actually charges more for an equivalent product than the independent shops.
I don't doubt that Starbucks probably is using their size to buy product in bulk, but they're evidently just absorbing that advantage as increased profit -- they're not using it as a selling point to draw in customers.
If you want to get into why Starbucks has been so successful in driving out the independent shops, you're going to have to look at some more subtle explanations than just buying in bulk and undercutting other stores based on price. Coffee isn't a fungible good; people shop for things other than price, and Starbucks understands this. In fact, they've succeeded despite being thoroughly uncompetitive both in terms of product quality and price.
I absolutely agree with you. However, I think it's worth pointing out that some things might have to change on the software side, if true "Linux friendly" hardware development is to take place.
There have been attempts made to produce hardware specifically for the Linux market, when there has been a perceived demand and a lack of products coming from the Windows side. Specifically, there is a company producing HDTV tuner cards specifically for Linux.
The company could be a model, I think, for the type of "open hardware" development that you're talking about. They went out and designed a card specifically to be compatible with Linux, including using parts that were well documented, working with manufacturers, writing open-source drivers, etc. The company's name is pcHDTV.
The result? It's a bit of a mess, actually. In fact, I've had people recommend to me that I use a Windows TV tuner card, rather than the pcHDTV one, because -- get this -- the drivers are better. That's right: the drivers produced by a company doing all the right things, and in good faith (as far as I can tell), are widely assumed to be worse than the reverse-engineered ones for undocumented Windows tuner cards. And in their defense, it's not really their fault. The open-source drivers they release do work at the time of their release, but tend to get broken in time, and the developers don't have the resources to keep up with the interface changes. Because the product is seen by the community as being 'commercially supported,' the drivers don't get the same attention by other parties as the reverse-engineered ones do, and the end result is they end up not working as well.
A comment made by one of the driver developers on their technical support Forum is telling:
While I completely agree with your reasons for being upset, I'm afraid Linux has made a very bad Catch22 for all hardware vendors out there. If pcHDTV had released a proprietary driver there would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about "open source". pcHDTV went with incorporating support into the Video for Linux open source project and now is at the mercy of kernel interface changes, distros that release "patched" kernels that will no longer compile the drivers, an open source community that refactors their code about as often as they sneeze, etc. etc.... As a vendor of hardware pcHDTV takes flack for every issue that belongs squarely at the feet of [the software it integrates with].... The difference is other vendors don't give a damn if your card doesn't work right under linux. A working windows driver doesn't need to be constantly refactored or tweaked but a working linux driver can't go a month without needing a modification somewhere; because someone else changed something.
I hesitate to quote this guy, because it's obvious he's responding to a frustrated user, and I don't want to get him in trouble, but I think the point he makes is an important one. Linux is widely perceived as a difficult platform not to develop on per se, but to maintain software on. Even with a company that's ideologically motivated to support Linux, working with the community can be very difficult.
There are a shortage of examples that you can really point to as models for Linux "open hardware" development. Before we can even think about making something as complex as a WLAN card, the basic issues at play here with pcHDTV need to be worked out. Nobody wants to develop hardware and promise to support it, for a platform that's constantly in flux. Users don't want to buy hardware that's not supported at least at a basic level with their chosen OS/distro. And so you have a chicken-and-egg problem.
"Open hardware" would definitely be a solution to the rapidly-closing world of commodity hardware, which promises to only cause more grief to alternative OSes in the future (barring some sort of governmental action, which seems unlikely); however, for th
Just out of curiosity, did it work with the madwifi drivers included in a mainline distro? Or did you have to go to CVS, or download an updated version?
I am looking for a wifi card that I can buy, today, from a big-box store and that will work 'out of the box' with a precompiled distro without tweaking or additional downloads (because if you don't have another network connection on the computer you're installing on, that can be rather tricky). So far I haven't found anything; a good percentage of the cards compatible with the common wlan drivers in most distros have been discontinued or are hard to find.
If the WGDTC is not one of the ones requiring driver-loaded firmware, and really does "just work," it would be a good find. I might have to buy half a dozen in that case.
I find it interesting that they're building engines like this, because it was my understanding that most new ships being constructed today are being built with diesel-electric systems. Inside the hull there's a turbine-driven electric generator, and then suspended below the hull are several "azipods," containing an electric motor connected to the propeller. The advantage over a conventional prop-shaft system is that there are fewer seals -- you don't have the big shaft going through the hull below the water line, just electrical connections -- and you don't need a rudder. Also, because you can rotate the azipods 90 degrees or more in each direction, you get more maneuverability than you do with a rudder; the azipod can basically act like a stern lateral thruster. In concert with bow thrusters, you can basically rotate a ship around on its axis, or pull it into a berth sideways without a tug. Also, I think that azipod systems take up less space inside the hull.
If this diesel really is the 60+% efficient that some people are quoting, I suppose it's probably more efficient than a turbine+generator+azipod system, but I'm surprised that the efficiency alone would be enough to make a designer give up the advantages of azimuth thrusters.
Well, the law says you are not allowed to copy it across the border, but you may be allowed to physically move a pre-existing copy across the border.
Can you cite a source on this? I'd be interested in reading about it, but I've never seen anything that would suggest this (to be fair, I've never seen anything that would disprove it, either). My understanding was that there was a dearth of case law on the subject.
This is pretty much exactly what's happening, but in some ways it's even worse than the WinModems. The WinModems moved most of the processing from hardware to software, producing "modems" that were really just "telephone interface cards" (and in fact, Apple's version of the 'Winmodem' was called the "Geoport Telecom Adaptor"), but the current trend is to move the processing not to the computer's CPU and userland (or system) software, but to general-purpose processors on the cards, running firmware that's loaded by the driver. This is in some ways a more serious problem than the Winmodem issue, since it limits the approach that a FOSS programmer can take to solve it.
If we imagine a spectrum, with "smart hardware, dumb software" on one end, and "dumb hardware, smart software," on the other -- so, real serial modems on one end, minimalist Winmodems on the other -- the new NICs and WL cards are sort of in the middle, but off to one side. They have hardware that is 'smart' in the sense of containing processing capacity and some specialized circuits (including radios), but they're 'dumb' because they don't store their own programming, and rely on drivers to activate them. If the hardware manufacturer doesn't allow a F/OSS distribution to redistribute the firmware blobs (and some of them don't), there's basically no legal way to use them in a plug-and-play manner.
Agreed. However, I don't think the people should ever passively accept classification of documents or withholding of information. Every decision in that direction should be actively questioned and debated. There should be a constant public push to declassify everything, because only when you have that impetus, will anything ever be declassified, particularly because you have a government with an obsession to act secretive and horde information.
The only legitimate reason for secrecy is when the disclosure of a document would result in direct and immediate harm to a U.S. national, ally, or key national interest. The classification of documents for "face saving" reasons is harmful and should be stopped. If we as a nation have made mistakes in the past we should be upfront with them to ourselves and move on.
On the other hand, Tor can be used by simply configuring the users application to use a known Tor entry point as a proxy server. This configuration can be removed when the user is done, leaving little or no tracks. In this way, Tor can be used by any system that supports TCP/IP and SSL.
This is slightly offtopic, but I didn't realize that you could use the TOR network in this way. Can you expand on this? I thought in order to use TOR, you had to install the TOR software package on the end-user's machine, and then point the web browser to use a SOCKS4a proxy on the localhost, running on some special port.
I always saw this as a weakness of TOR, because it meant that you couldn't use it from a public computer, or in an atmosphere that was hostile to the very idea of anonymity products in general.
Do you have to set up a special TOR node to accept external SOCKS connections, in order to use TOR without any software installed? Or can you just get a list of addresses somewhere that are known inputs into the TOR network, pop one into your proxy configuration, and surf away? (And in the latter case, where does a person get the addresses?)
Exactly; the OP seems to be doing whatever he can to make the situation more complicated than it needs to be.
The simplest solution would probably be just to use a webmail service on both machines, perhaps in concert with a POP interface to back up the messages from time to time, so that he wouldn't be totally at the mercy of the webmail provider for archiving and storage. Alternately, a mail provider that offers IMAP access directly to its servers could be selected -- it's not like these are really that hard to find these days. (It probably won't be free, but not outlandishly expensive.)
If for some reason that just can't happen, then the next thing would be to run an email server at home, and access it via IMAP from the road. Prior to the introduction of Gmail and its kin, I would have said this was probably the best method for someone who needed to routinely get their email from more than one machine, but now I think it's somewhat unnecessary. If this is the chosen route, the machine doesn't need to be very much -- an old Celeron (heck, and old 486) would do the trick, provided it and its networking equipment was connected to a UPS. But, recent outages nonwithstanding, I think most people will probably not be able to achieve the same level of uptime using a home server than a commercial service (like Gmail) offers, and running your own server can be a lot of work to do it right.
The third, and least attractive solution, is to have both machines querying the ISP's mailserver via POP, and then trying to keep them in sync. This just seems like it's asking for trouble. It's probably possible to do, if the client software is the same on both machines, using rsync, but I just don't think anyone would want to. It just seems to be the most complicated way possible to solve the problem.
Alternately, as long as we're tossing around impossible-to-implement solutions, how about one where people just stop churning out children quite so often, and then we wouldn't have problems feeding everyone? If there weren't so many mouths to feed, the relative inefficiency and land requirements of a carnivorous lifestyle wouldn't be nearly as damaging. It's only when you start trying to scale it to billions and billions of people that it becomes a problem.
I'd rather have fewer people eating and living what and where they want, than more people fighting over the scraps.
Not that I think this sort of thing is really going to become anything more than an interesting proof-of-concept anytime soon, but couldn't you combat this by having a local NTP server for your server farm, and then setting the servers to update from that server at frequent intervals (say every 5 sec or so)? It would waste cycles on the machines and generate some extra load on the network, but it would keep the clocks from ever drifting far, and it would narrow the window in which you'd be able to detect drift to something pretty small.
The majority of bulls destined to become meat are castrated well before breeding age, which means no offspring. If one of them turns out to be a prize specimen, you're SOL. With cloning, you can take a blood sample from the prize-winning bull and use it for breeding later.
Since castration is also common in race horses and working dogs, they would presumably also benefit.
Has anyone ever done any sort of an analysis of the HELLO WORLD trolls? I was always curious as to whether they're truly random, or whether they're some sort of encrypted or obfuscated text. Seems like if you could get enough of them, it might be possible to analyze them and get a better understanding of what they are. Or at least tell whether they're somebody's idea of a practical joke (some sort of weak cipher designed to be broken) or a modern cipher or one-time pad.
I was disappointed to note that they've removed the section about the HELLO WORLD troll (and most of the other interesting Slashdot phenomena) from the Wikipedia page, which used to have links to a bunch of them.
You definitely can, it's (as you stated) usually called "moonbounce" or EME, for Earth-Moon-Earth. I'm not sure that it's really a particularly useful form of communication, but that doesn't stop hams from doing it just for the hell of it. (Though I've wondered if there are some 'Mad Max' style disaster scenarios where EME would conceivably be useful...)
To do it right you need a very directional beam antenna. There are particular regions of VHF that are known to be good for EME, because of the way they penetrate the Earth's atmo/iono/magnetospheres. However, people have done it on virtually all bands, from 6m into the microwave. (There is a neat page on 6m EME here, he claims that as of 2002 only 30 or 40 people have ever had successful QSOs, so if you want to be on the bleeding edge of amateur radio, that's where you go.)
Not to mention the large stores of weaponized smallpox that the Soviet--I mean, Russians--are reported to have sitting around.
If you want to scare yourself silly sometime, you can read Ken Alibek's book on the subject ("Biohazard"). Or just Google "Biopreparat," which is the name of the Soviet agency responsible for the development of bioweapons (and of which Alibek was deputy director). They reportedly produced everything from smallpox and anthrax to Ebola and Machupo virus. (That they might have attempted to weaponize Ebola and Machupo is interesting, since it might suggest that they thought they had a way of controlling it; currently neither have human vaccines.)
That doesn't really reassure me. Anyone who's lived in a particularly cold climate can tell you that precipitation increases as it gets warmer (given sufficiently cold temperatures), and tends to lessen as it gets very cold, due to the air's inability to hold as much moisture at lower temperatures; it could be that the increased depth of the ice pack in the interior is a direct result of increased snowfall due to warmer atmospheric conditions. That would be rather consistent with increased snowfall in the interior (hence deepening of the ice) and melting at the edges.
I don't know for sure if that's the case, but the fact that the ice depth is increasing in the interior doesn't necessarily refute climate change. It's certainly not an open-and-shut case.
It's also worth mentioning that in addition to everything that you say (which I believe is correct, as it matches my understanding of Gmail's behavior) when you download a message via POP, Gmail removes it from the "Inbox" of the web interface, and puts it into the "All Mail" folder instead.
This is normally helpful, since it means if you use your POP reader for most of your mail, and then go on vacation or suddenly decide to use the web interface, you won't have thousands of messages in your Inbox. However, if you have your POP reader set up to check mail every 5 minutes, and are away from your computer and try to use the web interface, you will not see anything in your Inbox (if it's been more than 5 mins since the message arrived), because it will be automatically downloaded by the POP reader and shuffled off into All Mail.
You're right; Wikipedia says there were 842 lbs of samples collected in total by the Apollo program. I could have sworn though that the program I heard a few years ago said something about thousands of pounds of dust, but maybe they were engaging in a little poetic license.
Interestingly, WP states that almost 650 lbs of the original 842 is still in storage in Houston TX.
You're correct, but just in the interests of preventing confusion, the idea of what was a "long wave" in the early 20th century was very different from what an electrical engineer might think of today. What are today rather low frequencies for radio communication were at the time rather high, hence the term 'short waves.' The preferred frequencies for communication at the time are now barely used by anyone, with the possible exception of naval communication with submarines and the like. Their data-carrying capacity is just too low, and the antennas they require are obnoxiously large.
Of course, by calling things in the 1-30 MHz range "high frequency," those engineers forced us to use such terms as "very high frequency," and "ultra high frequency" when equipment finally became capable of transmitting at those wavelengths.
You joke, but I absolutely remember hearing this same thing a few years ago. I think it was possibly more than five or six years back. Probably it was on NPR.
I haven't read TFA, but in the story I remember hearing, NASA used to have literally thousands of pounds of moon rock and dust from the Apollo missions, but over the years it's been parceled out for various purposes (including being given to school kids, etc.) and now they only have a few pounds left. They want someone to come up with a simulated sand so they can test how it gets into bearings and stuff.
What I'd like to know is why is this still an issue? If it was a problem five or six years ago, you'd think they'd have gotten around to solving it by now. And yet it's still being discussed as if it was a new problem. Then again, I guess this is NASA we're talking about.
The last time I heard about this, the closest moon-dust simulacrum was some type of pulverized volcanic ash. My immediate question was whether you could really simulate the lunar surface using Earth gravity -- even if you were using real moon dust, it seems like its effects on equipment would be radically different on the moon, than it would be here. Here on Earth you have humidity and various atmospheric effects, plus gravity, that could affect how the dust gets into bearings and other components; all of these wouldn't exist on the moon. It seems like if you want to test parts for use on the moon, you'd need something that's not the same as moon dust here on earth.
I'm not disbelieving you in the slightest; while I haven't heard any numbers stations personally (although actually I have the equipment to do so, I've just never hunted around -- now maybe I will though), it makes sense that they'd be around. As a method of communication it makes quite a bit of sense, particularly given their pre-Internet origins.
However, I'm interested as to why you think it's specifically the CIA? It seems like the CIA would probably have more sophisticated methods of communication, via email or other methods, and would hardly need to rely on numbers stations anymore. Do you have some reason to actually think it's the CIA, or were you just being facetious?
My understanding was that most of the remaining numbers stations are broadcast by countries whose intelligence infrastructures probably are a bit behind the times technologically, and are still using older methods for communicating with their human assets. Given the U.S. focus on sigint and technology (even at the expense of humint) it seems odd that they would still be using numbers stations.
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I think you hit the nail on the head. Most people I know don't use multiple services. They might maintain accounts on multiple services (say, Facebook and MySpace, probably the most common pairing I've seen) but usually devote most of their time to one profile or the other. Generally in time, the disused profile becomes basically a pointer to the more-used one.
Sometimes people might go back and forth, spending some time working on their Facebook profile and then a few months concentrating on their Myspace page, but I'd say this is more atypical. People generally migrate from one to the other depending on what service most of their friends at the time are using.
I think this closely mirrors the IM networks, because again there you have people usually using one, but occasionally migrating from one to the other depending on who they want to communicate with. People who have a need to talk across system boundaries end up using specialized software and maintain multiple accounts. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how you can create the "Gaim" of social networking sites; it's not quite as clear how you would translate a Myspace page into a Facebook profile (although you could probably go the other way; it's the unstructured-to-structured data conversion that'd be hard, I'd imagine). It's a much more complicated problem than IM, even if the psychology is the same.
I don't see any of this changing anytime soon. There's not going to be "one social network to rule them all" anytime soon. You're going to get different service preferences within different groups of people. All it takes is a 'critical mass' of people to start using a service in a particular (physical-world) community, and suddenly everyone has a reason to use it. What would be good is if there were easier ways to migrate data from one to the other, in the event that people do want to move, but as other people have pointed out, the service providers have an interest in making migrations as difficult as possible.
I can't speak for other social sites besides Facebook, because I can't stand them (too much dark-blue-on-black, and who thought embedding sounds in HTML was a feature?) but I think it's major function is just to act as distributed, collaborative address book. The demand for this sort of thing is pretty obvious and has been for some time -- the traditional finger command did some of it, including listing people's addresses (or office location), email, and other contact info. Unlike a static address book stored locally on your computer, the obvious advantage of a distributed system is that it doesn't require any effort to stay up-to-date.
Frankly, as Facebook has gotten further and further away from its core focus of just providing a quick and easy way to find people's contact info that I haven't seen in a while, it's become less interesting to me. The expansion of social websites, to the point where they try to do everything (how long until they fulfill some sort of website corollary to Zawinski's Law and begin offering email?) may in fact be their downfall. But I suppose it's hard to monetize a big distributed address book, or so they think.
Does Facebook have contact-list export capabilities back yet?
Back a few years ago, there was a brief time when Facebook let you export your friends contact information as a VCard file. It was awesome -- you could download all of your friends' info to one file, and from there import it into Address Book, or the PIM of your choice. From there, if you had an intelligent enough system, you could have all their birthdays added to your calendar, phone numbers downloaded to your mobile, etc.
They eliminated the feature pretty quickly after they implemented it -- I only got one data download out of it -- due to spam concerns, but I always thought that there had to be a way to balance spam resistance against the obvious benefits of such a system. (Of course, the obvious solution is to only 'friend' people you actually know and trust, and not just anybody who sends you a request...but any security method based on user intelligence is probably doomed to failure.)
If they've re-enabled anything like that, I'd be very impressed. Facebook is by far my favorite 'social networking' site (which isn't saying much, really it's akin to saying 'Facebook doesn't make me want to gouge out my own eyes'), but it could certainly be more useful if the data, both simple contact information and more complex relationship-derived metadata, was exportable for external use and analysis.
2a. Use their volume purchasing power and narrow margins to make profits,
This would make sense, if they were underselling the competition, WalMart-style. Except they're not. In most places I've been to, Starbucks actually charges more for an equivalent product than the independent shops.
I don't doubt that Starbucks probably is using their size to buy product in bulk, but they're evidently just absorbing that advantage as increased profit -- they're not using it as a selling point to draw in customers.
If you want to get into why Starbucks has been so successful in driving out the independent shops, you're going to have to look at some more subtle explanations than just buying in bulk and undercutting other stores based on price. Coffee isn't a fungible good; people shop for things other than price, and Starbucks understands this. In fact, they've succeeded despite being thoroughly uncompetitive both in terms of product quality and price.
There have been attempts made to produce hardware specifically for the Linux market, when there has been a perceived demand and a lack of products coming from the Windows side. Specifically, there is a company producing HDTV tuner cards specifically for Linux.
The company could be a model, I think, for the type of "open hardware" development that you're talking about. They went out and designed a card specifically to be compatible with Linux, including using parts that were well documented, working with manufacturers, writing open-source drivers, etc. The company's name is pcHDTV.
The result? It's a bit of a mess, actually. In fact, I've had people recommend to me that I use a Windows TV tuner card, rather than the pcHDTV one, because -- get this -- the drivers are better. That's right: the drivers produced by a company doing all the right things, and in good faith (as far as I can tell), are widely assumed to be worse than the reverse-engineered ones for undocumented Windows tuner cards. And in their defense, it's not really their fault. The open-source drivers they release do work at the time of their release, but tend to get broken in time, and the developers don't have the resources to keep up with the interface changes. Because the product is seen by the community as being 'commercially supported,' the drivers don't get the same attention by other parties as the reverse-engineered ones do, and the end result is they end up not working as well.
A comment made by one of the driver developers on their technical support Forum is telling:
I hesitate to quote this guy, because it's obvious he's responding to a frustrated user, and I don't want to get him in trouble, but I think the point he makes is an important one. Linux is widely perceived as a difficult platform not to develop on per se, but to maintain software on. Even with a company that's ideologically motivated to support Linux, working with the community can be very difficult.
There are a shortage of examples that you can really point to as models for Linux "open hardware" development. Before we can even think about making something as complex as a WLAN card, the basic issues at play here with pcHDTV need to be worked out. Nobody wants to develop hardware and promise to support it, for a platform that's constantly in flux. Users don't want to buy hardware that's not supported at least at a basic level with their chosen OS/distro. And so you have a chicken-and-egg problem.
"Open hardware" would definitely be a solution to the rapidly-closing world of commodity hardware, which promises to only cause more grief to alternative OSes in the future (barring some sort of governmental action, which seems unlikely); however, for th
Just out of curiosity, did it work with the madwifi drivers included in a mainline distro? Or did you have to go to CVS, or download an updated version?
I am looking for a wifi card that I can buy, today, from a big-box store and that will work 'out of the box' with a precompiled distro without tweaking or additional downloads (because if you don't have another network connection on the computer you're installing on, that can be rather tricky). So far I haven't found anything; a good percentage of the cards compatible with the common wlan drivers in most distros have been discontinued or are hard to find.
If the WGDTC is not one of the ones requiring driver-loaded firmware, and really does "just work," it would be a good find. I might have to buy half a dozen in that case.
I find it interesting that they're building engines like this, because it was my understanding that most new ships being constructed today are being built with diesel-electric systems. Inside the hull there's a turbine-driven electric generator, and then suspended below the hull are several "azipods," containing an electric motor connected to the propeller. The advantage over a conventional prop-shaft system is that there are fewer seals -- you don't have the big shaft going through the hull below the water line, just electrical connections -- and you don't need a rudder. Also, because you can rotate the azipods 90 degrees or more in each direction, you get more maneuverability than you do with a rudder; the azipod can basically act like a stern lateral thruster. In concert with bow thrusters, you can basically rotate a ship around on its axis, or pull it into a berth sideways without a tug. Also, I think that azipod systems take up less space inside the hull.
If this diesel really is the 60+% efficient that some people are quoting, I suppose it's probably more efficient than a turbine+generator+azipod system, but I'm surprised that the efficiency alone would be enough to make a designer give up the advantages of azimuth thrusters.
Well, the law says you are not allowed to copy it across the border, but you may be allowed to physically move a pre-existing copy across the border.
Can you cite a source on this? I'd be interested in reading about it, but I've never seen anything that would suggest this (to be fair, I've never seen anything that would disprove it, either). My understanding was that there was a dearth of case law on the subject.
This is pretty much exactly what's happening, but in some ways it's even worse than the WinModems. The WinModems moved most of the processing from hardware to software, producing "modems" that were really just "telephone interface cards" (and in fact, Apple's version of the 'Winmodem' was called the "Geoport Telecom Adaptor"), but the current trend is to move the processing not to the computer's CPU and userland (or system) software, but to general-purpose processors on the cards, running firmware that's loaded by the driver. This is in some ways a more serious problem than the Winmodem issue, since it limits the approach that a FOSS programmer can take to solve it.
If we imagine a spectrum, with "smart hardware, dumb software" on one end, and "dumb hardware, smart software," on the other -- so, real serial modems on one end, minimalist Winmodems on the other -- the new NICs and WL cards are sort of in the middle, but off to one side. They have hardware that is 'smart' in the sense of containing processing capacity and some specialized circuits (including radios), but they're 'dumb' because they don't store their own programming, and rely on drivers to activate them. If the hardware manufacturer doesn't allow a F/OSS distribution to redistribute the firmware blobs (and some of them don't), there's basically no legal way to use them in a plug-and-play manner.
Agreed. However, I don't think the people should ever passively accept classification of documents or withholding of information. Every decision in that direction should be actively questioned and debated. There should be a constant public push to declassify everything, because only when you have that impetus, will anything ever be declassified, particularly because you have a government with an obsession to act secretive and horde information.
The only legitimate reason for secrecy is when the disclosure of a document would result in direct and immediate harm to a U.S. national, ally, or key national interest. The classification of documents for "face saving" reasons is harmful and should be stopped. If we as a nation have made mistakes in the past we should be upfront with them to ourselves and move on.
On the other hand, Tor can be used by simply configuring the users application to use a known Tor entry point as a proxy server. This configuration can be removed when the user is done, leaving little or no tracks. In this way, Tor can be used by any system that supports TCP/IP and SSL.
This is slightly offtopic, but I didn't realize that you could use the TOR network in this way. Can you expand on this? I thought in order to use TOR, you had to install the TOR software package on the end-user's machine, and then point the web browser to use a SOCKS4a proxy on the localhost, running on some special port.
I always saw this as a weakness of TOR, because it meant that you couldn't use it from a public computer, or in an atmosphere that was hostile to the very idea of anonymity products in general.
Do you have to set up a special TOR node to accept external SOCKS connections, in order to use TOR without any software installed? Or can you just get a list of addresses somewhere that are known inputs into the TOR network, pop one into your proxy configuration, and surf away? (And in the latter case, where does a person get the addresses?)
Exactly; the OP seems to be doing whatever he can to make the situation more complicated than it needs to be.
The simplest solution would probably be just to use a webmail service on both machines, perhaps in concert with a POP interface to back up the messages from time to time, so that he wouldn't be totally at the mercy of the webmail provider for archiving and storage. Alternately, a mail provider that offers IMAP access directly to its servers could be selected -- it's not like these are really that hard to find these days. (It probably won't be free, but not outlandishly expensive.)
If for some reason that just can't happen, then the next thing would be to run an email server at home, and access it via IMAP from the road. Prior to the introduction of Gmail and its kin, I would have said this was probably the best method for someone who needed to routinely get their email from more than one machine, but now I think it's somewhat unnecessary. If this is the chosen route, the machine doesn't need to be very much -- an old Celeron (heck, and old 486) would do the trick, provided it and its networking equipment was connected to a UPS. But, recent outages nonwithstanding, I think most people will probably not be able to achieve the same level of uptime using a home server than a commercial service (like Gmail) offers, and running your own server can be a lot of work to do it right.
The third, and least attractive solution, is to have both machines querying the ISP's mailserver via POP, and then trying to keep them in sync. This just seems like it's asking for trouble. It's probably possible to do, if the client software is the same on both machines, using rsync, but I just don't think anyone would want to. It just seems to be the most complicated way possible to solve the problem.
I knew there was a reason that my friends told me not to eat the tequila worm ... if only I had known.
Alternately, as long as we're tossing around impossible-to-implement solutions, how about one where people just stop churning out children quite so often, and then we wouldn't have problems feeding everyone? If there weren't so many mouths to feed, the relative inefficiency and land requirements of a carnivorous lifestyle wouldn't be nearly as damaging. It's only when you start trying to scale it to billions and billions of people that it becomes a problem.
I'd rather have fewer people eating and living what and where they want, than more people fighting over the scraps.
Not that I think this sort of thing is really going to become anything more than an interesting proof-of-concept anytime soon, but couldn't you combat this by having a local NTP server for your server farm, and then setting the servers to update from that server at frequent intervals (say every 5 sec or so)? It would waste cycles on the machines and generate some extra load on the network, but it would keep the clocks from ever drifting far, and it would narrow the window in which you'd be able to detect drift to something pretty small.
The real impetus behind cloning is castration.
The majority of bulls destined to become meat are castrated well before breeding age, which means no offspring. If one of them turns out to be a prize specimen, you're SOL. With cloning, you can take a blood sample from the prize-winning bull and use it for breeding later.
Since castration is also common in race horses and working dogs, they would presumably also benefit.
Has anyone ever done any sort of an analysis of the HELLO WORLD trolls? I was always curious as to whether they're truly random, or whether they're some sort of encrypted or obfuscated text. Seems like if you could get enough of them, it might be possible to analyze them and get a better understanding of what they are. Or at least tell whether they're somebody's idea of a practical joke (some sort of weak cipher designed to be broken) or a modern cipher or one-time pad.
I was disappointed to note that they've removed the section about the HELLO WORLD troll (and most of the other interesting Slashdot phenomena) from the Wikipedia page, which used to have links to a bunch of them.
You definitely can, it's (as you stated) usually called "moonbounce" or EME, for Earth-Moon-Earth. I'm not sure that it's really a particularly useful form of communication, but that doesn't stop hams from doing it just for the hell of it. (Though I've wondered if there are some 'Mad Max' style disaster scenarios where EME would conceivably be useful...)
To do it right you need a very directional beam antenna. There are particular regions of VHF that are known to be good for EME, because of the way they penetrate the Earth's atmo/iono/magnetospheres. However, people have done it on virtually all bands, from 6m into the microwave. (There is a neat page on 6m EME here, he claims that as of 2002 only 30 or 40 people have ever had successful QSOs, so if you want to be on the bleeding edge of amateur radio, that's where you go.)
Not to mention the large stores of weaponized smallpox that the Soviet--I mean, Russians--are reported to have sitting around.
If you want to scare yourself silly sometime, you can read Ken Alibek's book on the subject ("Biohazard"). Or just Google "Biopreparat," which is the name of the Soviet agency responsible for the development of bioweapons (and of which Alibek was deputy director). They reportedly produced everything from smallpox and anthrax to Ebola and Machupo virus. (That they might have attempted to weaponize Ebola and Machupo is interesting, since it might suggest that they thought they had a way of controlling it; currently neither have human vaccines.)
That doesn't really reassure me. Anyone who's lived in a particularly cold climate can tell you that precipitation increases as it gets warmer (given sufficiently cold temperatures), and tends to lessen as it gets very cold, due to the air's inability to hold as much moisture at lower temperatures; it could be that the increased depth of the ice pack in the interior is a direct result of increased snowfall due to warmer atmospheric conditions. That would be rather consistent with increased snowfall in the interior (hence deepening of the ice) and melting at the edges.
I don't know for sure if that's the case, but the fact that the ice depth is increasing in the interior doesn't necessarily refute climate change. It's certainly not an open-and-shut case.
It's also worth mentioning that in addition to everything that you say (which I believe is correct, as it matches my understanding of Gmail's behavior) when you download a message via POP, Gmail removes it from the "Inbox" of the web interface, and puts it into the "All Mail" folder instead.
This is normally helpful, since it means if you use your POP reader for most of your mail, and then go on vacation or suddenly decide to use the web interface, you won't have thousands of messages in your Inbox. However, if you have your POP reader set up to check mail every 5 minutes, and are away from your computer and try to use the web interface, you will not see anything in your Inbox (if it's been more than 5 mins since the message arrived), because it will be automatically downloaded by the POP reader and shuffled off into All Mail.
You're right; Wikipedia says there were 842 lbs of samples collected in total by the Apollo program. I could have sworn though that the program I heard a few years ago said something about thousands of pounds of dust, but maybe they were engaging in a little poetic license.
Interestingly, WP states that almost 650 lbs of the original 842 is still in storage in Houston TX.
You're correct, but just in the interests of preventing confusion, the idea of what was a "long wave" in the early 20th century was very different from what an electrical engineer might think of today. What are today rather low frequencies for radio communication were at the time rather high, hence the term 'short waves.' The preferred frequencies for communication at the time are now barely used by anyone, with the possible exception of naval communication with submarines and the like. Their data-carrying capacity is just too low, and the antennas they require are obnoxiously large.
Of course, by calling things in the 1-30 MHz range "high frequency," those engineers forced us to use such terms as "very high frequency," and "ultra high frequency" when equipment finally became capable of transmitting at those wavelengths.
You joke, but I absolutely remember hearing this same thing a few years ago. I think it was possibly more than five or six years back. Probably it was on NPR.
I haven't read TFA, but in the story I remember hearing, NASA used to have literally thousands of pounds of moon rock and dust from the Apollo missions, but over the years it's been parceled out for various purposes (including being given to school kids, etc.) and now they only have a few pounds left. They want someone to come up with a simulated sand so they can test how it gets into bearings and stuff.
What I'd like to know is why is this still an issue? If it was a problem five or six years ago, you'd think they'd have gotten around to solving it by now. And yet it's still being discussed as if it was a new problem. Then again, I guess this is NASA we're talking about.
The last time I heard about this, the closest moon-dust simulacrum was some type of pulverized volcanic ash. My immediate question was whether you could really simulate the lunar surface using Earth gravity -- even if you were using real moon dust, it seems like its effects on equipment would be radically different on the moon, than it would be here. Here on Earth you have humidity and various atmospheric effects, plus gravity, that could affect how the dust gets into bearings and other components; all of these wouldn't exist on the moon. It seems like if you want to test parts for use on the moon, you'd need something that's not the same as moon dust here on earth.
I'm not disbelieving you in the slightest; while I haven't heard any numbers stations personally (although actually I have the equipment to do so, I've just never hunted around -- now maybe I will though), it makes sense that they'd be around. As a method of communication it makes quite a bit of sense, particularly given their pre-Internet origins.
However, I'm interested as to why you think it's specifically the CIA? It seems like the CIA would probably have more sophisticated methods of communication, via email or other methods, and would hardly need to rely on numbers stations anymore. Do you have some reason to actually think it's the CIA, or were you just being facetious?
My understanding was that most of the remaining numbers stations are broadcast by countries whose intelligence infrastructures probably are a bit behind the times technologically, and are still using older methods for communicating with their human assets. Given the U.S. focus on sigint and technology (even at the expense of humint) it seems odd that they would still be using numbers stations.