Reagan's Mars schedule, like the "Star Wars" SDI plan, was always less of a viable technology than a plan to grind the cash-strapped Soviet Union into oblivion through outspending.
It's not hard to conjecture that this current plan is similar, only with a different country playing the Evil Communists. In the '80s, it was Russia. Now, it's China.
I see this as Bush taking a page out of Reagan's playbook to use against the Chinese. Get some sort of a new space race going by sending people to the moon (which is technically feasible), then bankrupt the competition with pie-in-the-sky plans for habitations on Mars.
Will it work? I have no idea. But there are certainly some signs that Bush wouldn't mind a showdown with Red China similar to the endgame of the Cold War--after all, it worked once for Reagan, why not do it again? You're right that Reagan is a figurehead for modern Republicans, so it's not surprising that Bush would attempt to emulate one of his greater triumphs.
So...how many divisions does the "lunar embassy" have?
Yeah, I thought not.
But seriously, they should look up the phrase 'open and notorious possession' sometime. Their rights of ownership aren't going to last very long, once someone else is sitting on their supposed real estate.
Just to nitpick...what you're paying for is the pro version of Quicktime Player, which is the included movie-player program, not the Quicktime architecture itself.
Quicktime (the architecture) supports full-screen video regardless of whether you upgrade the Player to the Pro version or not. If you don't want to pay to use Apple's QT Player, just use a different player program (mplayer, etc.). They're just different front-ends on the same 'guts,' and the guts are free.
No. If anything, Sony would sue you for violating their patent.
It's not Apple's battery, it's Sony's, and it has nothing to do with the DMCA--which as the name, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, implies, concerns copyright, not patents. I don't like it any more than you do, but at least understand what you're criticizing.
I'm not sure about mirror film, because I've never used it....but if you go to a specialty glass and mirror store (not the kind where they sell lamps and all that other crap, the kind where they cut pieces of glass from big sheets) you might be able to find actual one-way glass. Sometimes people install them into the windows near doorways to keep people from looking in, etc. If you had enough clearance and wanted to be really cheap, you could put it in front of a CRT...would work just as well as an LCD.
Alternately, you could always try this recipe for DIY one-way glass...but it seems vaguely reminiscent of the old recipes for gunpowder and plastique you used to find in the Jolly Roger's Cookbook...interesting in the academic sense, but not worth the fingers/limbs it might take to test out.
The idea here -- and I know this won't make any sense to a lot of people on Slashdot, but bear with me -- is to take a $3000 piece of technology, and make it look like a $10 piece of yardsale junk.
It's the same sort of motivation that drives people to put their TV inside an armoire in their living room. A whole lot of people really hate staring at hardware and feel that its mere presence is an intrusion on their lives, except when they're actively using it. The rest of the time, they would rather it not be there.
This device is designed to cater specifically to that desire. When in use, it's a flatscreen TV. When it's not, it's a mirror. 'Unobtrusive' is the key word here.
And just think of what you could do, as an advertiser, if these things were widespread. The screen is located behind a pane of one-way glass, which is transparent when it is backlit, and reflective when it is not.
So all you'd have to do to make the audience see their own reflection, was transmit a black screen for a few seconds.
Picture of a beautiful person cuts abruptly to your own reflection: "Just look at yourself. You're ugly. Go buy our product, it'll make you less ugly." All while staring at your own face...on television. Of course that's heavyhanded...I'm exaggerating. But you get the idea. The people down on Madison Avenue would go crazy for something like this.
Don't think it wouldn't happen, either. Ads are getting more and more creative all the time -- just think of those Orkin pest-control ads that ran during the Super Bowl a few years back; the ones where it showed some innocent fabric softener ad, then made it look like a cockroach was crawling up your TV screen? Put a mirror in front of the TV, and there'd be all sorts of new and different things to play with.
Stands for Short Message Service, or Short Message System, I can't remember which. It's a service, very popular in Europe and Asia, for sending short text messages between cellphones as an alternative to voice calls. You type in a message on your phone, send it, and the other guy's phone beeps and displays the message.
Using it is sort of like a cross between AIM and email, but (unless you have one of those new phones with the nifty keyboards) with a hideously annoying and slow input method.
Most carriers also offer some sort of a bridge between SMS and internet email--you can send email from your phone, and people can also email you at [yourphone'snumber]@[yourcellphonecarrier].com. This last thing is where the problem with spam has been happenning...email spammers have started to send messages into the SMS networks, generally by just sending thousands of messages with random-number addresses and hoping that a few will get through to real phones.
Actually, I'd be in favor of a system where there is a nominal (read: very low) fee to receive messages. This would help to prevent spam, because it would make a cellphone more like a fax machine, and less like email.
Fax machine spam ("junk faxes") is illegal, because there is a hard and quantifiable cost to receiving a fax. Email spam isn't illegal (yet, in most places) because it's difficult to quantify the cost involved.
A fee to receive messages would make SMS spam instantly illegal in the U.S. (and probably everywhere else) because it would be offloading the cost of the message to the receiver.
On the system I currently use, Verizion, messages are 10Â to send and either 1Â or 5Â to receive. It's low enough so that I don't care if my friends send me messages, or if I forward my email to my phone for a day. But it's just enough to make the end-user cost of a spamming operation significant -- enough to justify a class-action lawsuit, for example.
It's odd...I swear I heard about a system like that, but for fixed payphones, years ago on NPR. It was right at the beginning of the Age of the Cellphone, as companies were starting to eliminate payphones. It was one scheme somebody was experimenting with in order to try and keep them around.
The issue with mobile-phone spam is that customers will simply have the feature turned off if the signal to noise ratio gets too high. I've heard that this was happening in Japan, and was what motivated the big carriers to take steps to block the flow of unsolicited messages.
Many people are going to buy their first SMS-capable phone in the next upgrade cycle, and if the first few messages that they receive are spam rather than actual ones from colleagues, they're just going to have it turned off completely. Phone companies, not wanting to sacrifice the revenue that SMS means, will do anything to keep this from happening.
Cellular spam is one case where I think the big corporations may be on our side.
This service looks quite interesting, however since it's being compared to Apple's Rendezvous message service, I thought one thing is worth pointing out: Rendezvous is true peer-to-peer discovery and messaging. This service is not. Whenever you walk into a WiFi hot zone, or plug in to a network, the software transmits your location to a central server. And while I'm sure this isn't much of a security risk since you are choosing to enable the service, it does represent a critical difference in the network architecture. Rendezvous is an open-standards, decentralized architecture. This is not.
I'm not making a particular value judgment one way or another, but I think it should be made clear that the two services are quite different, even if they effectively accomplish the same thing.
I've tried Equation Editor...it's effective but very slow. Definitely too slow to take notes with in class.
If for some odd reason you felt absolutely compelled to take math notes on a computer in class, the only thing that I can think of that would be fast enough would be LaTeX. It's totally text driven, no futzing for the mouse, so if you were a good typist you might be able to handle it.
Still...I've had some professors I could barely keep up with on pen and paper, I'm not sure I'd want to try it.
I would suggest a spiral bound notebook, one per class. I use 100-pagers because I take copious notes, although some people get away with the 80-page ones and write small. I use two-pocket folders for handouts, again one per class.
Leave the laptop in your room, at least at my school, it's considered really turkey (not cool, gauche) to open one in class. Hitting keys creates a lot more noise than using a pen, and people will glare at you. Some people use Palm organizers, although I personally still use a DayTimer type thing.
The biggest thing is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- lose the cellphone in class. I've only ever seen two cellphones ring in class, and both times the reaction of the professor was fierce enough to make me never, ever, want to be that person. If you're an introverted person, I can only imagine that it would probably do permanent psychological damage.
My college isn't the most tech-savvy...I'm sure at more technology-oriented schools, everyone has laptops for notes. But in my experience, they really only exist to be moved from the dorm to the library (and maybe on the quad, when the weather's nice) and back. Still, they are very nice for that.
I personally use an Apple iBook, the 12" (smallest) one, and like it. It fits nicely in my backpack, so I don't have to go wandering around with a laptop bag. The only other thing I've learned is that, if you're going to take notes for 5 or 6 hours a day, get a good brand of pens. Those Bic things cramp my hands--I use Pilot P-700s, but that's a personal choice.
Absolutely correct. To say that P2P traffic is a "waste" of bandwith is laughable. Each transfer on Gnutella (or Morpheus, or whatever) is a result of a human-triggered request. When an end-user requests that a file be sent across the network, and that user is paying for the bandwith they are using, I hardly thing this qualifies as "waste."
What I think are a huge waste of bandwith (aside from spam, the obvious choice) are banner ads, pop-ups, and especially flash-based interstitials. The end user doesn't really request them (at least in the consious sense), they just get sent out anyway. Yes, they can be turned off, but my point is that if nobody is complaining about advertising being a "waste" of bandwith, they should stop whining about file transfers.
File sharing services sell broadband accounts. The service providers know this, and will build their networks accordingly. In the end, I think this will probably be a Good Thing, making the networks more robust for all users.
Two points: first, I have to question this statement:
"helium which can the be reused or even burnt"
Exactly how do you propose to burn helium? Helium is a noble gas--it does not oxidize, therefore it cannot burn. You can fuse it into (I believe) Lithium, but I have no idea what the temperature required to do it is. I believe that it only occurs in the cores of white dwarf stars, and is hardly the sort of thing one casually writes off as "burning."
Secondly, one point I think needs to be raised whenever the concept of hydrogen fusion as an energy source comes up is (and I do not take credit for this, although I cannot cite the source, I did read it somewhere) if we as a species found a cheap and viable source of energy, there could be long-term enviromental consecquences, even if the production was emissionless in the traditional sense.
What I mean is, although the "global warming" which concerns many people now is due to greenhouse gasses from the combustion of fossil fuels, a cheap and limitless source of electrical energy could begin a new type of global warming; one caused simply by the amount of energy we are adding to our planet as a basically closed system.
For comparison, the energy density of the sun's rays is 1.4 kW/m^2. Multiplying that by half of the surface area of the earth, 2.55E14 m^2 gives us approximately 3.57E14 kW. That's 357000 Terawatts coming in from the sun. Compared to that, all the energy we extract from fossil fuels is insignificant. But if fusion were available as a practically limitless source of power, it's not hard to imagine producing a sizable percentage of that amount within a short (geologically speaking) amount of time.
Whenever you "produce" (release from storage, either in hydrocarbon chains, or in inter-atomic forces) energy and transform it into electricity, it will eventually end up as heat. Even if you go fusion-electricity-hydrogen gas-mechanical energy... the eventual result is heat.
Correct--and that's why Speedpass is relatively safe. By only transmitting an account number, there is an extra layer of "insulation" between what could possibly get stolen or 'cloned' (the key fob) and your credit card.
If you had contactless credit cards, there would be no such 'insulating' layer--the credit card would have to by definition transmit your credit card number in a usable form.
I've seen some of the specs on the home hydrogen-generation systems. Very cool. There's a part of me that really likes the idea of being able to produce my own fuel, even if it is a bit more expensive then what you'd be able to buy at the pump, industrially manufactured.
It's a bit like the old electric-car model--you get home, plug your car into some box in the back of the garage, turn out the lights, and leave it alone. Next morning, it's all ready to go. Only, instead of the 90 or so miles that people were getting out of electric cars, you'd have a few hundred. I personally like the idea, although I wonder whether everyone generating H2 at home is really as efficient as making it all at once in a cracking tower and then distributing it in pure form.
The whole discussion about making Hydrogen reminds me of another technology from a while back that consumed huge amounts of power--aluminium refining. Getting metallic Al out of oxides requires high temperatures which are generally obtained by running vast electric currents through the ore. Back in the 40s and 50s, there wasn't the infrastructure to deliver this kind of power to the factories economically, nor the generating capacity. So, companies like ALCOA signed contracts saying they would buy a certain amount of power at a fixed rate, if a hydroelectric station were built--with the aluminium refineries right next door. This is how a bunch of big hydro stations were financed/built, and although you can argue about the environmental impact of them, they work and are a lot less obnoxious than coal-fired plants.
The point I'm trying to make is that, instead of concentrating on how to bring the power to the hydrogen refineries, it is also possible to bring the hydrogen refinery to wherever you have a good source of power, like ALCOA did with the hydro dams. For example, Iceland has geothermal power--maybe they want to get into the business.
Speedpass is one use of the same technology. In New England we have several (competing, non-standardized) systems for paying tolls on the interstates. You put a box about the size of a pack of cigarettes on your windshield, and then you can just drive through a special lane at the tollbooth without stopping. A light on the booth tells you that it has "talked" to your box and you're free to keep going. Very popular with truckers, commercial drivers, etc.
In both cases, Speedpass and the toll system, the heart of the device is a small radio transmitter that is actually powered by an RF field in the vicinity of either the gas pump or the toll booth. When bombarded with enough RF, a chip in the transponder sends back its serial number. The difference between the mini ones for Speedpass and the big ones at the toll booths are that the toll ones have to work much further away from the tx/rx antennas. I've never taken one apart, but I expect the antennas are much larger.
The problem with using a system like this for a credit card is that the transponder is dumb--it doesn't know what it's transmitting to, or whether it is appropriate to transmit your credit card number at that moment. If it gets hit with enough RF to energize the circuit, it transmits your account number. This would be very dangerous, for obvious reasons.
If I were building them, I would put a little 'fail-safe' on the top of the card: two metallic patches separated by a few millimeters, that you have to cover/connect with your thumb in order for the card to transmit. I'm not sure how complicated the circuit would be, but I have personally seen devices that have metal bars like that and use the capacitance to know whether a human hand is touching it or whether it's brushed up against an inanimate object.
Actually, you're incorrect, it can. The specification (PDF file) says 45W, that's 1.5A at 30V. But that depends on the connector--the draft specification seems to talk about several different types of cables and connectors (much like how there are both 4-pin mini and 6-pin standard Firewire 400 connectors), some carry power and some do not. The connectors are completely different from the current FW400 ones. In order to plug a FW400 device into a FW800 port, you need an adapter. Currently shipping computers from Apple have both ports on the back of the mobo.
Using the FW800 connectors which Apple is putting on its computers and matching cables, I think you can have cable runs of several hundred feet (claimed: 100m) and still get data through--I'm not sure whether the resistance of the cable at 30VDC would permit power at that length, though. The data transmission is possible because the data is carried on glass optical fiber.
I'm getting this all from the white paper at the link above--if anyone has any better information, feel free to correct me.
It would certainly suck to be in that position, but I'm sure that in the future you would be a lot more careful buying equipment. In general it might not be a bad thing--if stolen computer equipment started to be recovered in large numbers, without refunds made to the purchasers, the effect would be to reduce the demand for stolen equipment.
Many people wouldn't hesitate to buy a computer off of eBay with no other information then the specs, but would never buy a stereo off of the back of a truck in an alley, even though the two may be coming from the same place. While we need to make efforts to catch criminals before they can pass the goods on to someone else, people also need to be aware of where their equipment may be coming from. That laptop with a corporate ID sticker on it may be surplus--or it may be stolen. As a buyer, it's your responsibility to be confident that you aren't buying hot gear.
The advantage of the Phoenix system is that it's in the BIOS, not even in the boot sector. So even if a halfway-intelligent criminal (or fence, more likely) swapped out the hard drive with a new one from Pricewatch, the theft protection would still be there.
Of course, if your main reason for using a system is data security, having a system that still works even if the hard drive is removed is a little pointless, isn't it?
Personally, I like the whole idea, except for the fact that it reports back to Phoenix's servers--if you could have it ping back to your own server, or to some trustworthy third party of your choosing, it would be a lot more attractive.
I wonder if you could combine it with some sort of real self-destruct mechanism...ten or twenty grams of thermite ought to do the trick. Not that I personally have anything worth that much, really, but if anyone ever stole my laptop, there's a part of me that would enjoy knowing that it was melting into a pile of slag.:)
It would be a lot harder than you think. OS X is a lot more than FreeBSD with a cute GUI... just because a program will run under OS X doesn't mean it's easily portable to any UNIX variant. OS X's system architecture is quite complicated.
OS X has Darwin (FreeBSD with Mach kernel) at its core, but above that are layers and layers of Mac-specific stuff (Cocoa, Carbon). The net effect is that although OS X can run a lot of BSD software with relative ease, going the other way would be a big problem--the UNIX system wouldn't have any of the APIs that a complicated app like MS Office uses. (And the API layers in between the software and Darwin are the parts which are not open-source.)
I don't disagree with your overall point--I think that a large part of MS's support for the Mac is just to keep some competition around, but saying that MS Office or MSIE could be ported to UNIX/Linux/BSD easily is untrue.
Actually the ink used to print the serial numbers on some US bills will smudge when wet/oily...I once worked at a grocery store and was sure I had a fake bill, only it turned out to be genuine, the ink just smudged anyway.
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It's not hard to conjecture that this current plan is similar, only with a different country playing the Evil Communists. In the '80s, it was Russia. Now, it's China.
I see this as Bush taking a page out of Reagan's playbook to use against the Chinese. Get some sort of a new space race going by sending people to the moon (which is technically feasible), then bankrupt the competition with pie-in-the-sky plans for habitations on Mars.
Will it work? I have no idea. But there are certainly some signs that Bush wouldn't mind a showdown with Red China similar to the endgame of the Cold War--after all, it worked once for Reagan, why not do it again? You're right that Reagan is a figurehead for modern Republicans, so it's not surprising that Bush would attempt to emulate one of his greater triumphs.
Yeah, I thought not.
But seriously, they should look up the phrase 'open and notorious possession' sometime. Their rights of ownership aren't going to last very long, once someone else is sitting on their supposed real estate.
Quicktime (the architecture) supports full-screen video regardless of whether you upgrade the Player to the Pro version or not. If you don't want to pay to use Apple's QT Player, just use a different player program (mplayer, etc.). They're just different front-ends on the same 'guts,' and the guts are free.
It's not Apple's battery, it's Sony's, and it has nothing to do with the DMCA--which as the name, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, implies, concerns copyright, not patents. I don't like it any more than you do, but at least understand what you're criticizing.
Alternately, you could always try this recipe for DIY one-way glass...but it seems vaguely reminiscent of the old recipes for gunpowder and plastique you used to find in the Jolly Roger's Cookbook...interesting in the academic sense, but not worth the fingers/limbs it might take to test out.
It's the same sort of motivation that drives people to put their TV inside an armoire in their living room. A whole lot of people really hate staring at hardware and feel that its mere presence is an intrusion on their lives, except when they're actively using it. The rest of the time, they would rather it not be there.
This device is designed to cater specifically to that desire. When in use, it's a flatscreen TV. When it's not, it's a mirror. 'Unobtrusive' is the key word here.
So all you'd have to do to make the audience see their own reflection, was transmit a black screen for a few seconds.
Picture of a beautiful person cuts abruptly to your own reflection: "Just look at yourself. You're ugly. Go buy our product, it'll make you less ugly." All while staring at your own face...on television. Of course that's heavyhanded...I'm exaggerating. But you get the idea. The people down on Madison Avenue would go crazy for something like this.
Don't think it wouldn't happen, either. Ads are getting more and more creative all the time -- just think of those Orkin pest-control ads that ran during the Super Bowl a few years back; the ones where it showed some innocent fabric softener ad, then made it look like a cockroach was crawling up your TV screen? Put a mirror in front of the TV, and there'd be all sorts of new and different things to play with.
Using it is sort of like a cross between AIM and email, but (unless you have one of those new phones with the nifty keyboards) with a hideously annoying and slow input method.
Most carriers also offer some sort of a bridge between SMS and internet email--you can send email from your phone, and people can also email you at [yourphone'snumber]@[yourcellphonecarrier].com. This last thing is where the problem with spam has been happenning...email spammers have started to send messages into the SMS networks, generally by just sending thousands of messages with random-number addresses and hoping that a few will get through to real phones.
Fax machine spam ("junk faxes") is illegal, because there is a hard and quantifiable cost to receiving a fax. Email spam isn't illegal (yet, in most places) because it's difficult to quantify the cost involved.
A fee to receive messages would make SMS spam instantly illegal in the U.S. (and probably everywhere else) because it would be offloading the cost of the message to the receiver.
On the system I currently use, Verizion, messages are 10Â to send and either 1Â or 5Â to receive. It's low enough so that I don't care if my friends send me messages, or if I forward my email to my phone for a day. But it's just enough to make the end-user cost of a spamming operation significant -- enough to justify a class-action lawsuit, for example.
It's odd...I swear I heard about a system like that, but for fixed payphones, years ago on NPR. It was right at the beginning of the Age of the Cellphone, as companies were starting to eliminate payphones. It was one scheme somebody was experimenting with in order to try and keep them around.
Many people are going to buy their first SMS-capable phone in the next upgrade cycle, and if the first few messages that they receive are spam rather than actual ones from colleagues, they're just going to have it turned off completely. Phone companies, not wanting to sacrifice the revenue that SMS means, will do anything to keep this from happening.
Cellular spam is one case where I think the big corporations may be on our side.
I'm not making a particular value judgment one way or another, but I think it should be made clear that the two services are quite different, even if they effectively accomplish the same thing.
If for some odd reason you felt absolutely compelled to take math notes on a computer in class, the only thing that I can think of that would be fast enough would be LaTeX. It's totally text driven, no futzing for the mouse, so if you were a good typist you might be able to handle it.
Still...I've had some professors I could barely keep up with on pen and paper, I'm not sure I'd want to try it.
You must be an American Cultural Studies major....
Nobody else has that much free time.
Leave the laptop in your room, at least at my school, it's considered really turkey (not cool, gauche) to open one in class. Hitting keys creates a lot more noise than using a pen, and people will glare at you. Some people use Palm organizers, although I personally still use a DayTimer type thing.
The biggest thing is -- and I cannot stress this enough -- lose the cellphone in class. I've only ever seen two cellphones ring in class, and both times the reaction of the professor was fierce enough to make me never, ever, want to be that person. If you're an introverted person, I can only imagine that it would probably do permanent psychological damage.
My college isn't the most tech-savvy...I'm sure at more technology-oriented schools, everyone has laptops for notes. But in my experience, they really only exist to be moved from the dorm to the library (and maybe on the quad, when the weather's nice) and back. Still, they are very nice for that.
I personally use an Apple iBook, the 12" (smallest) one, and like it. It fits nicely in my backpack, so I don't have to go wandering around with a laptop bag. The only other thing I've learned is that, if you're going to take notes for 5 or 6 hours a day, get a good brand of pens. Those Bic things cramp my hands--I use Pilot P-700s, but that's a personal choice.
And ditto on the beer. Lots of beer.
What I think are a huge waste of bandwith (aside from spam, the obvious choice) are banner ads, pop-ups, and especially flash-based interstitials. The end user doesn't really request them (at least in the consious sense), they just get sent out anyway. Yes, they can be turned off, but my point is that if nobody is complaining about advertising being a "waste" of bandwith, they should stop whining about file transfers.
File sharing services sell broadband accounts. The service providers know this, and will build their networks accordingly. In the end, I think this will probably be a Good Thing, making the networks more robust for all users.
"helium which can the be reused or even burnt"
Exactly how do you propose to burn helium? Helium is a noble gas--it does not oxidize, therefore it cannot burn. You can fuse it into (I believe) Lithium, but I have no idea what the temperature required to do it is. I believe that it only occurs in the cores of white dwarf stars, and is hardly the sort of thing one casually writes off as "burning."
Secondly, one point I think needs to be raised whenever the concept of hydrogen fusion as an energy source comes up is (and I do not take credit for this, although I cannot cite the source, I did read it somewhere) if we as a species found a cheap and viable source of energy, there could be long-term enviromental consecquences, even if the production was emissionless in the traditional sense.
What I mean is, although the "global warming" which concerns many people now is due to greenhouse gasses from the combustion of fossil fuels, a cheap and limitless source of electrical energy could begin a new type of global warming; one caused simply by the amount of energy we are adding to our planet as a basically closed system.
For comparison, the energy density of the sun's rays is 1.4 kW/m^2. Multiplying that by half of the surface area of the earth, 2.55E14 m^2 gives us approximately 3.57E14 kW. That's 357000 Terawatts coming in from the sun. Compared to that, all the energy we extract from fossil fuels is insignificant. But if fusion were available as a practically limitless source of power, it's not hard to imagine producing a sizable percentage of that amount within a short (geologically speaking) amount of time.
Whenever you "produce" (release from storage, either in hydrocarbon chains, or in inter-atomic forces) energy and transform it into electricity, it will eventually end up as heat. Even if you go fusion-electricity-hydrogen gas-mechanical energy
Just something to think about...
If you had contactless credit cards, there would be no such 'insulating' layer--the credit card would have to by definition transmit your credit card number in a usable form.
It's a bit like the old electric-car model--you get home, plug your car into some box in the back of the garage, turn out the lights, and leave it alone. Next morning, it's all ready to go. Only, instead of the 90 or so miles that people were getting out of electric cars, you'd have a few hundred. I personally like the idea, although I wonder whether everyone generating H2 at home is really as efficient as making it all at once in a cracking tower and then distributing it in pure form.
The whole discussion about making Hydrogen reminds me of another technology from a while back that consumed huge amounts of power--aluminium refining. Getting metallic Al out of oxides requires high temperatures which are generally obtained by running vast electric currents through the ore. Back in the 40s and 50s, there wasn't the infrastructure to deliver this kind of power to the factories economically, nor the generating capacity. So, companies like ALCOA signed contracts saying they would buy a certain amount of power at a fixed rate, if a hydroelectric station were built--with the aluminium refineries right next door. This is how a bunch of big hydro stations were financed/built, and although you can argue about the environmental impact of them, they work and are a lot less obnoxious than coal-fired plants.
The point I'm trying to make is that, instead of concentrating on how to bring the power to the hydrogen refineries, it is also possible to bring the hydrogen refinery to wherever you have a good source of power, like ALCOA did with the hydro dams. For example, Iceland has geothermal power--maybe they want to get into the business.
In both cases, Speedpass and the toll system, the heart of the device is a small radio transmitter that is actually powered by an RF field in the vicinity of either the gas pump or the toll booth. When bombarded with enough RF, a chip in the transponder sends back its serial number. The difference between the mini ones for Speedpass and the big ones at the toll booths are that the toll ones have to work much further away from the tx/rx antennas. I've never taken one apart, but I expect the antennas are much larger.
The problem with using a system like this for a credit card is that the transponder is dumb--it doesn't know what it's transmitting to, or whether it is appropriate to transmit your credit card number at that moment. If it gets hit with enough RF to energize the circuit, it transmits your account number. This would be very dangerous, for obvious reasons.
If I were building them, I would put a little 'fail-safe' on the top of the card: two metallic patches separated by a few millimeters, that you have to cover/connect with your thumb in order for the card to transmit. I'm not sure how complicated the circuit would be, but I have personally seen devices that have metal bars like that and use the capacitance to know whether a human hand is touching it or whether it's brushed up against an inanimate object.
Using the FW800 connectors which Apple is putting on its computers and matching cables, I think you can have cable runs of several hundred feet (claimed: 100m) and still get data through--I'm not sure whether the resistance of the cable at 30VDC would permit power at that length, though. The data transmission is possible because the data is carried on glass optical fiber.
I'm getting this all from the white paper at the link above--if anyone has any better information, feel free to correct me.
Many people wouldn't hesitate to buy a computer off of eBay with no other information then the specs, but would never buy a stereo off of the back of a truck in an alley, even though the two may be coming from the same place. While we need to make efforts to catch criminals before they can pass the goods on to someone else, people also need to be aware of where their equipment may be coming from. That laptop with a corporate ID sticker on it may be surplus--or it may be stolen. As a buyer, it's your responsibility to be confident that you aren't buying hot gear.
Of course, if your main reason for using a system is data security, having a system that still works even if the hard drive is removed is a little pointless, isn't it?
Personally, I like the whole idea, except for the fact that it reports back to Phoenix's servers--if you could have it ping back to your own server, or to some trustworthy third party of your choosing, it would be a lot more attractive.
I wonder if you could combine it with some sort of real self-destruct mechanism...ten or twenty grams of thermite ought to do the trick. Not that I personally have anything worth that much, really, but if anyone ever stole my laptop, there's a part of me that would enjoy knowing that it was melting into a pile of slag.
OS X has Darwin (FreeBSD with Mach kernel) at its core, but above that are layers and layers of Mac-specific stuff (Cocoa, Carbon). The net effect is that although OS X can run a lot of BSD software with relative ease, going the other way would be a big problem--the UNIX system wouldn't have any of the APIs that a complicated app like MS Office uses. (And the API layers in between the software and Darwin are the parts which are not open-source.)
I don't disagree with your overall point--I think that a large part of MS's support for the Mac is just to keep some competition around, but saying that MS Office or MSIE could be ported to UNIX/Linux/BSD easily is untrue.
Actually the ink used to print the serial numbers on some US bills will smudge when wet/oily...I once worked at a grocery store and was sure I had a fake bill, only it turned out to be genuine, the ink just smudged anyway.