Well, there actually already is an approach that bypasses the "light speed barrier". It's called wormholes. Before you flame, remember I am talking about wormholes as described by Steven Hawking, where time travel is not possible, and you have to wait the usual amount of time to set the wormholes up.
(a) if the organization is truly, REALLY important then you would pay or manually add the sender to the whitelist yourself.
(b) A lot of these organizations are jerks about these things, and demand your email. Even "good" organizations like churches can abuse the priviledge.
And presumably, this company offers an alternate "payment" scheme if you just want to send an email to an individual user. By registering for the whitelist, you fill out some sort of captcha, and it must cap you to sending emails to just a few people in that ISP.
Spam is so horribly inefficient a form of advertising that even a tiny cost in time or money per email sent is enough to completely wipe it out.
Heck, ISPs could go back to accepting email from places where the incoming email is almost all spam, like China. A legitimate business in China with American customers would just pay that quarter of a cent cost.
Honestly, I don't see what the problem is. Charging some sort of cost - whether it be responding to a whitelist request, paying in CPU cycles to complete a hash, or just flat out paying a quarter of a cent - is the only practical way to fight spam. Spamfilters always have a small false postive and false negative error rate, while charging money or a cost does not. A quarter of a cent is many times the expected monetary return on a pure spam.
Since it costs money to set up an infrastructure to accept a cost of any type (reliable servers, an organization, ect) charging actual money rather than hash cycles or CAPTCHAs makes the most sense, and is also the only practical way for a big organization to send emails to a bunch of users.
Uhh..I only have "media files" (mostly video and game images) and I've already gobbled up 400 gigs in about 6 weeks. Some of it is downloaded, some from disks that I own, and some recorded from OTA.
Yes, I could burn my games to dvds...but I have found that this is a total PITA and not worth it. It's only slightly more expensive these days to just buy more hard drives.
A high definition movie is 20 gigabytes alone, and also a PITA to go hunt for the disk. It's a lot easier to store a decrypted image. Reencoding is totally impractical : not only would it probably take dozens of hours on my 3.2 ghz core2duo system, but there is always some small quality loss. It would be stupid to reencode a high def movie when the entire point is to have quality dramatically better than a dvd.
So, if band X is played on an internet radio station, will the royalties from that performance actually GO to that band? Or vanish into the black hole of "soundexchange", with a pittance going to the actual creator of the song?
This article seems force itself to make up reasons why this new service could be a bad thing. Whatever. Google may not be the second coming, but they offer some of the most reliable software I've ever used. It also works quickly and seamlessly : gmail and google are both faster than trying to do email and search using applications on my own computer!
The gmail spam filter is also a marvel. For some reason, it isn't talked about much : but in my experience, the spam filter is almost bulletproof. It has caught thousands of spam, with maybe one or 2 false positives that I have noticed. Maybe 10 spam have leaked through in the 2 years I have had gmail.
The charging of isps for this service only makes sense : google needs to have other revenue sources than advertising to be healthy, and they offer a more space than free gmail, which has ads.
This is a good thing. A very good thing. The only potential negative is portable of email addresses : but the ISP is google's customer. Not the end user. If the ISP doesn't want their email to be portable, then google will cater to that. (and the isp owns the domain, in any case)
Yeah, only reason I pay the big bucks is that I have downloaded 700 gigs in the last 3 months, and most of the time my connection is idle. At times, I'll have a sustained (for a few hours) download at 40 megabits.
Haha... "reengage society". Yeah, learning that useless symbolic physics crap for your gibberish "prove this" tests is really getting a life. It's really partying it up - I'm sure it'll teach me to get the ladies. They're all over guys who get an A in physics.
It's already pretty trivial. Welcome to my living room. I use giganews, a pay usenet service that gives phenomenal throughput. I'm able to download at a sustained, average speed of 10-15mbps to my university internet connection, for any file on usenet. Giganews has 120 day retention, so just about any episode of a popular tv show in the last year can usually be found. Almost any popular movie can be found as well, and you can download it in minutes.
Since it is a pay service, with an SSL protected link to my HTPC that downloads this stuff, I am unlikely to be sued. Only giganews knows what I download, and they claim to not keep records. No third parties (such as RIAA/MPAA sniffers) can tell what I am downloading. This is vastly superior to bittorrent and other P2P services. As much as I download, there's a significant chance I could have been sued by now had I used the "free" P2P services.
Yes, I am technically a pirate. Usually, however, I download TV shows that I *could* have seen on my fuzzy analog cable. Instead, I get an HDTV rip made from someone's computer who lives in an area where this show is broadcast in HD.
I get things that I CAN'T pay for : for instance, the last 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica were shown in High Definition on a Canadian TV station. I was able to download these.
Stargate Atlantis is also available in High Def (the sci-fi channel is NOT, even on satellite or premium cable packages) including 10 episodes that are unaired in the United States.
While you may find fault in my taste in TV, the quality is incredible - the PC is connected to a large 1080p HDTV via a digital HDMI cable.
There's a TRIVIAL way to rearchitect a network to stop DDoS cold. At a major backbones would be located simple logon scripts that only route packets that come from verified users of the website in question. To become a verified user, the user might have to answer a captcha or something simple, just enough to make a bot army attack impractical. Only users that pass this test would have their packets routed farther in.
A physical wall is different. No matter what materials are used, weapons exist that could cut through it. A digital wall can be absolutely impregnable.
Computer "attacks" are a made up boogeyman. They're bullshit. As most slashdotters know, computer "attacks" ALWAYS depend on flaws, usually bugs, in the target system. A computer system that has airtight data handling cannot be hacked. Period. Even DDoS attacks depend on flaws in the network, as well as zombie computers that could only be taken over because they are running insecure software.
The Estonians need to shut up and fix their systems.
A cyber attack is no more an act of war than a few eggs thrown over a fence.
I honestly have no idea how this is even a practical technique, much less a breakthrough. Rather than this dodgy "aerogel" technique, you could use the molecules that nature has used for millenia : antibodies. All you need is an antibody against an epitope of the virus (a unique molecular pattern somewhere on it's surface), and then you bind the antibodies to a medium. Or, there's a way to generate the membrane bound antibodies present in B cells, and to adhere those to a surface. In any case, such a "filter" has existed for years, though as far as I know, this technique hasn't been used to filter the blood of a living patient.
Then again, neither have these researchers : they are just claiming it is practical.
Still feel like centuries? Obviously, if we can make this sort of acceleration happen at all, we'll have the technology to adjust our perception of time and our patience.
High level mode of thinking - integrating ideas at a higher level than is normally possible. Nothing unlike the way you or I already think, just using more knowledge than would normally be feasible. What sort of parallels and ideas would you be able to come up with if you could search for common themes from reading every single book in the library of Congress on a particular subject? I don't know, and no human has a practical way of finding out.
What sort of skill would you gain after performing the equivalent of man centuries of engineering work? Again, we don't know, but it's easy to specualate that after a while, one's thinking would be very different from that of a stock human being.
Further, what would it be like thinking as a collective of merged personalities? Again, this IS a different mode of thought, and it IS possible.
WHY would a rich man do engineering? POWER. Rich people who are self-made seek money because it gives them power. They gain power far, far quicker in today's world by wheeling and dealing and ordering others to do work.
But breakthrough technology would grant power and wealth far more readily than telling any number of humans what to do. After all, technology itself would give birth to more technology - the person wouldn't need human beings anymore to accomplish things. Upgrading his army of bots would be more effective.
1. Evolution is horribly sloppy and messy.
2. Genetic engineering is to eugenics as surgery is to butchery with dirty knives.
3. The person wouldn't be wired just to the internet. Their brain itself would use a computer to do portions of it's thinking. The computer would simulate many trillions of additional neurons being attached to their brain, allowing them vastly more memory, higher level modes of thinking, and thinking speed. The person would be able to perform man centuries of engineering and technological development work in a matter of weeks. They would be able to control multiple, probably hundreds, of telepresense robots at the same time.
I think the Western World will win any conceivable contest, anyway, because of technology.
Technology in key areas is a few generations from making this entire people breeding contest moot.
1. Genetic engineering : while creating outlandish things will not be possible for many years, OPTIMIZING humans so that the children that these "secular" folks have pack the IDEAL traits for everything would give them a huge advantage in quality, if not quantity.
There's genes that control how thick the myelin sheaths are around every neuron : adjust these, and the resulting human would have quicker reflexes and faster thinking for everything. There's more, yet unknown, that control how readily the neurons interconnect : tweak these, and their brain will have extra folds and be capable of higher level reasoning more easily.
Further, gene by gene manipulation isn't always necessary : we can create a probabilistic map comparing the genomes of people with various traits, and then assign gene versions to our designer embryo for each gene or gene set that has a high probability of something.
Basically, the result would be EVERY kid would have the intelligence of a prodigy and the athletic ability of a professional athlete, as well as being 6'6" for high self confidence.
2. Artificial intellgence : this might be a long time away. It might be 50 to 100 years. But once machines are smarter than any conceivable person, it's game over. Whoever controls the machines, wins. Again, Western societies would have a few of their members who could afford to have the expensive surgeries to wire themselves directly to these thinking machines. They would be able to out-compete everyone else on earth.
You would think that. But it actually isn't the issue. And, in any case, if power generation were the main limit, the navy could always install a fission reactor in a rail-gun packing destroyer.
You might be interested to know that this isn't actually the case. A few hundred kilowatts of generating capacity is sufficient to fire rail guns. Why? Calculate the total energy content of 2 tons of explosives. That's how much kinetic energy a rail-gun shot might yield, and it isn't actually very much energy. (just released all at once : is why the rail-gun power supply would need to have massive accumulators of some type)
The thing is, only hardware credit cards with internal key generators are a plausible solution. I just yawn whenever a credit card breach is mentioned, because ANY store that accepts credit cards ANYWHERE could have a breach. It's a waste of time to say "X store should have been secure". There must be tens of thousands of places those numbers could be grabbed from. After all, just ONE store with WEP turned on (it wasn't totally unsecure in the minds of the managers of the store, they felt they had locked it) was enough to steal all these numbers.
Now the only problem with hardware cards is if someone steals the private key for your card from the bank. Only your bank needs this key, so it is far more plausible to secure.
The only way I can see to secure this key is the bank needs a BLACK BOX server. This would be a machine that stores the private keys, in a secure room. It would run an embedded operating system (VERY simple) and it would programmed to never give up the private keys, just confirm or deny access requests.
The keys would be stored on files in the machine's memory (probably FLASH drivers. Thirty gig off the shelf models, mirrored 4 times, would be fine), and the keys themselves would be encrypted by another key in the ROM of the machine. So, even administrators who back-up this system would not know what this key was, unless they desoldered the ROM on their own server.
Each server would be sold already containing enough randomly generated keys for as many cards as a bank could ever plausibly issue. A bank would be sold several of these servers, each with identical contents, for redundancy. Each would go in a secure location. At the plant where the cards were made, a key server with a different ROM would be the only one that would give up a key to a card that has NOT been issued, ONE TIME, in order to program a new card.
The basic idea is each server is as simple as it can be engineered to do it's job, with non-reprogrammable software and no updates EVER intended.
I thought it was all satellite mapping. (for one, the copyright notices usually say 'telesat'). The fact that a lot of it is aerial never occurred to me. However, it makes more sense that the high res photos, at least, are taken from other platforms than satellites.
1. Solar power has already dropped in price 16 fold since 1976. Unlike nuclear, it does not have cost breaking waste and skilled worker demands. It's as reasonable an assumption as in 10 years, computers will be at least 16-32 times faster. Not a given, but I would put money on it.
2. That's pathetically easy. 2 hydroelectric dams, one lower than the other. Pump water from the lower lake to the upper one in the daytime. Let it drain to the lower one at night. May I have my Nobel, please?
3. Google earth shows there is a big enough chunk of the state, which is mostly wasteland, to fit the array. This was an EXAMPLE : in reality, such an array would be distributed in lots of places. I just wanted to show conclusively that there IS enough land.
Umm, no. None of the energy would be stored with lead acid batteries. They are too expensive, and don't last long enough. Rather, giant underground flywheels would be spun up to store energy.
Or, hydroelectric dams run in reverse (would be ironic, wouldn't it, if they ended up using our hydroelectric dams as mostly an energy storage reservoir. See, 2 giant dams, one lower than the other, would be used. During the day, giant amounts of water would be sucked up and put in the upper dam, lowering the lake by hundreds of feet temporarily. During the night the process would run in reverse.
You'd never exceed the velocity of the pebbles because the top speed of the ship would be 0.8 or 0.9c. This is fast enough that the actual amount of travel time, in the frame of reference of the universe, would be about as low as practical, yet it cuts down on the blue shifting effect and Lorentz mass increases relativistic speeds involve.
For interstellar journeys you'd need a double sized spacecraft or to use antimatter.
One method would be during deceleration some of the smart pebbles would contain chunks of antimatter. A very dramatic engine would burn them, crushing them in a magnetic field and releasing energy from both fusion and anti-matter annihilation. So to slow down, this is how you would produce thrust in the opposite direction.
The other way is throw half the spacecraft away. The thrown away half continues to catch pebbles and fling them back the other way...and the decelerating portion uses this momentum transfer to slow down to enter the target star system. So half the spacecraft continues to hurtle into the void, going faster and faster while the other half gets to stop.
Same idea as throwing away a reflecting mirror for a light sail slowdown. I think my idea is incomparably better than a light sail, however, for the following reasons.
1. Thrust would be very, very low relative to the mass of the sail. Would take forever to get up to speed with a light sail
2. ENORMOUS surface area of the sail...every portion vulnerable to micrometeorites and blue-shifted photons. I think it would never work for this reason alone : sail would fall apart at 0.9c. My idea uses a very very long (maybe a kilometer) stack of superconducting magnets. The surface area of the spacecraft facing the direction of travel might be less than a square meter.
3. The nasty 1/r^2 law that means near the journey's end, almost all the energy sent by the launching star system is wasted. Energy might be plentiful by the time a society can think about interstellar travel...but not unlimited.
For the reasons, I think a light sail is about as practical as a cannon for manned expedition to mars. I think it'll never happen, nor even be considered when our society actually has the resources to mount an expedition like this.
Hmm. I sorta figured that with enough demand, a 10 or 100 fold increase in production would let the price plummet. Since it is just silicon and energy, a really big purification plant could make vats of the stuff at a time.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there actually already is an approach that bypasses the "light speed barrier". It's called wormholes. Before you flame, remember I am talking about wormholes as described by Steven Hawking, where time travel is not possible, and you have to wait the usual amount of time to set the wormholes up.
Don't see the problem.
(a) if the organization is truly, REALLY important then you would pay or manually add the sender to the whitelist yourself.
(b) A lot of these organizations are jerks about these things, and demand your email. Even "good" organizations like churches can abuse the priviledge.
And presumably, this company offers an alternate "payment" scheme if you just want to send an email to an individual user. By registering for the whitelist, you fill out some sort of captcha, and it must cap you to sending emails to just a few people in that ISP.
Spam is so horribly inefficient a form of advertising that even a tiny cost in time or money per email sent is enough to completely wipe it out.
Heck, ISPs could go back to accepting email from places where the incoming email is almost all spam, like China. A legitimate business in China with American customers would just pay that quarter of a cent cost.
Honestly, I don't see what the problem is. Charging some sort of cost - whether it be responding to a whitelist request, paying in CPU cycles to complete a hash, or just flat out paying a quarter of a cent - is the only practical way to fight spam. Spamfilters always have a small false postive and false negative error rate, while charging money or a cost does not. A quarter of a cent is many times the expected monetary return on a pure spam.
Since it costs money to set up an infrastructure to accept a cost of any type (reliable servers, an organization, ect) charging actual money rather than hash cycles or CAPTCHAs makes the most sense, and is also the only practical way for a big organization to send emails to a bunch of users.
Uhh..I only have "media files" (mostly video and game images) and I've already gobbled up 400 gigs in about 6 weeks. Some of it is downloaded, some from disks that I own, and some recorded from OTA.
Yes, I could burn my games to dvds...but I have found that this is a total PITA and not worth it. It's only slightly more expensive these days to just buy more hard drives.
A high definition movie is 20 gigabytes alone, and also a PITA to go hunt for the disk. It's a lot easier to store a decrypted image. Reencoding is totally impractical : not only would it probably take dozens of hours on my 3.2 ghz core2duo system, but there is always some small quality loss. It would be stupid to reencode a high def movie when the entire point is to have quality dramatically better than a dvd.
So, if band X is played on an internet radio station, will the royalties from that performance actually GO to that band? Or vanish into the black hole of "soundexchange", with a pittance going to the actual creator of the song?
This article seems force itself to make up reasons why this new service could be a bad thing. Whatever. Google may not be the second coming, but they offer some of the most reliable software I've ever used. It also works quickly and seamlessly : gmail and google are both faster than trying to do email and search using applications on my own computer!
The gmail spam filter is also a marvel. For some reason, it isn't talked about much : but in my experience, the spam filter is almost bulletproof. It has caught thousands of spam, with maybe one or 2 false positives that I have noticed. Maybe 10 spam have leaked through in the 2 years I have had gmail.
The charging of isps for this service only makes sense : google needs to have other revenue sources than advertising to be healthy, and they offer a more space than free gmail, which has ads.
This is a good thing. A very good thing. The only potential negative is portable of email addresses : but the ISP is google's customer. Not the end user. If the ISP doesn't want their email to be portable, then google will cater to that. (and the isp owns the domain, in any case)
Yeah, only reason I pay the big bucks is that I have downloaded 700 gigs in the last 3 months, and most of the time my connection is idle. At times, I'll have a sustained (for a few hours) download at 40 megabits.
Haha... "reengage society". Yeah, learning that useless symbolic physics crap for your gibberish "prove this" tests is really getting a life. It's really partying it up - I'm sure it'll teach me to get the ladies. They're all over guys who get an A in physics.
It's already pretty trivial. Welcome to my living room. I use giganews, a pay usenet service that gives phenomenal throughput. I'm able to download at a sustained, average speed of 10-15mbps to my university internet connection, for any file on usenet. Giganews has 120 day retention, so just about any episode of a popular tv show in the last year can usually be found. Almost any popular movie can be found as well, and you can download it in minutes.
Since it is a pay service, with an SSL protected link to my HTPC that downloads this stuff, I am unlikely to be sued. Only giganews knows what I download, and they claim to not keep records. No third parties (such as RIAA/MPAA sniffers) can tell what I am downloading. This is vastly superior to bittorrent and other P2P services. As much as I download, there's a significant chance I could have been sued by now had I used the "free" P2P services.
Yes, I am technically a pirate. Usually, however, I download TV shows that I *could* have seen on my fuzzy analog cable. Instead, I get an HDTV rip made from someone's computer who lives in an area where this show is broadcast in HD.
I get things that I CAN'T pay for : for instance, the last 10 episodes of Battlestar Galactica were shown in High Definition on a Canadian TV station. I was able to download these.
Stargate Atlantis is also available in High Def (the sci-fi channel is NOT, even on satellite or premium cable packages) including 10 episodes that are unaired in the United States.
While you may find fault in my taste in TV, the quality is incredible - the PC is connected to a large 1080p HDTV via a digital HDMI cable.
There's a TRIVIAL way to rearchitect a network to stop DDoS cold. At a major backbones would be located simple logon scripts that only route packets that come from verified users of the website in question. To become a verified user, the user might have to answer a captcha or something simple, just enough to make a bot army attack impractical. Only users that pass this test would have their packets routed farther in. A physical wall is different. No matter what materials are used, weapons exist that could cut through it. A digital wall can be absolutely impregnable.
Computer "attacks" are a made up boogeyman. They're bullshit. As most slashdotters know, computer "attacks" ALWAYS depend on flaws, usually bugs, in the target system. A computer system that has airtight data handling cannot be hacked. Period. Even DDoS attacks depend on flaws in the network, as well as zombie computers that could only be taken over because they are running insecure software.
The Estonians need to shut up and fix their systems.
A cyber attack is no more an act of war than a few eggs thrown over a fence.
I honestly have no idea how this is even a practical technique, much less a breakthrough. Rather than this dodgy "aerogel" technique, you could use the molecules that nature has used for millenia : antibodies. All you need is an antibody against an epitope of the virus (a unique molecular pattern somewhere on it's surface), and then you bind the antibodies to a medium. Or, there's a way to generate the membrane bound antibodies present in B cells, and to adhere those to a surface. In any case, such a "filter" has existed for years, though as far as I know, this technique hasn't been used to filter the blood of a living patient.
Then again, neither have these researchers : they are just claiming it is practical.
Still feel like centuries? Obviously, if we can make this sort of acceleration happen at all, we'll have the technology to adjust our perception of time and our patience.
High level mode of thinking - integrating ideas at a higher level than is normally possible. Nothing unlike the way you or I already think, just using more knowledge than would normally be feasible. What sort of parallels and ideas would you be able to come up with if you could search for common themes from reading every single book in the library of Congress on a particular subject? I don't know, and no human has a practical way of finding out.
What sort of skill would you gain after performing the equivalent of man centuries of engineering work? Again, we don't know, but it's easy to specualate that after a while, one's thinking would be very different from that of a stock human being.
Further, what would it be like thinking as a collective of merged personalities? Again, this IS a different mode of thought, and it IS possible.
WHY would a rich man do engineering? POWER. Rich people who are self-made seek money because it gives them power. They gain power far, far quicker in today's world by wheeling and dealing and ordering others to do work.
But breakthrough technology would grant power and wealth far more readily than telling any number of humans what to do. After all, technology itself would give birth to more technology - the person wouldn't need human beings anymore to accomplish things. Upgrading his army of bots would be more effective.
1. Evolution is horribly sloppy and messy. 2. Genetic engineering is to eugenics as surgery is to butchery with dirty knives. 3. The person wouldn't be wired just to the internet. Their brain itself would use a computer to do portions of it's thinking. The computer would simulate many trillions of additional neurons being attached to their brain, allowing them vastly more memory, higher level modes of thinking, and thinking speed. The person would be able to perform man centuries of engineering and technological development work in a matter of weeks. They would be able to control multiple, probably hundreds, of telepresense robots at the same time.
Your argument is all correct.
I think the Western World will win any conceivable contest, anyway, because of technology.
Technology in key areas is a few generations from making this entire people breeding contest moot.
1. Genetic engineering : while creating outlandish things will not be possible for many years, OPTIMIZING humans so that the children that these "secular" folks have pack the IDEAL traits for everything would give them a huge advantage in quality, if not quantity.
There's genes that control how thick the myelin sheaths are around every neuron : adjust these, and the resulting human would have quicker reflexes and faster thinking for everything. There's more, yet unknown, that control how readily the neurons interconnect : tweak these, and their brain will have extra folds and be capable of higher level reasoning more easily.
Further, gene by gene manipulation isn't always necessary : we can create a probabilistic map comparing the genomes of people with various traits, and then assign gene versions to our designer embryo for each gene or gene set that has a high probability of something.
Basically, the result would be EVERY kid would have the intelligence of a prodigy and the athletic ability of a professional athlete, as well as being 6'6" for high self confidence.
2. Artificial intellgence : this might be a long time away. It might be 50 to 100 years. But once machines are smarter than any conceivable person, it's game over. Whoever controls the machines, wins. Again, Western societies would have a few of their members who could afford to have the expensive surgeries to wire themselves directly to these thinking machines. They would be able to out-compete everyone else on earth.
uhh...because the key sent over the wire is a temporary transaction code only good for 1 minute.
You would think that. But it actually isn't the issue. And, in any case, if power generation were the main limit, the navy could always install a fission reactor in a rail-gun packing destroyer.
You might be interested to know that this isn't actually the case. A few hundred kilowatts of generating capacity is sufficient to fire rail guns. Why? Calculate the total energy content of 2 tons of explosives. That's how much kinetic energy a rail-gun shot might yield, and it isn't actually very much energy. (just released all at once : is why the rail-gun power supply would need to have massive accumulators of some type)
The thing is, only hardware credit cards with internal key generators are a plausible solution. I just yawn whenever a credit card breach is mentioned, because ANY store that accepts credit cards ANYWHERE could have a breach. It's a waste of time to say "X store should have been secure". There must be tens of thousands of places those numbers could be grabbed from. After all, just ONE store with WEP turned on (it wasn't totally unsecure in the minds of the managers of the store, they felt they had locked it) was enough to steal all these numbers.
Now the only problem with hardware cards is if someone steals the private key for your card from the bank. Only your bank needs this key, so it is far more plausible to secure.
The only way I can see to secure this key is the bank needs a BLACK BOX server. This would be a machine that stores the private keys, in a secure room. It would run an embedded operating system (VERY simple) and it would programmed to never give up the private keys, just confirm or deny access requests.
The keys would be stored on files in the machine's memory (probably FLASH drivers. Thirty gig off the shelf models, mirrored 4 times, would be fine), and the keys themselves would be encrypted by another key in the ROM of the machine. So, even administrators who back-up this system would not know what this key was, unless they desoldered the ROM on their own server.
Each server would be sold already containing enough randomly generated keys for as many cards as a bank could ever plausibly issue. A bank would be sold several of these servers, each with identical contents, for redundancy. Each would go in a secure location. At the plant where the cards were made, a key server with a different ROM would be the only one that would give up a key to a card that has NOT been issued, ONE TIME, in order to program a new card.
The basic idea is each server is as simple as it can be engineered to do it's job, with non-reprogrammable software and no updates EVER intended.
I thought it was all satellite mapping. (for one, the copyright notices usually say 'telesat'). The fact that a lot of it is aerial never occurred to me. However, it makes more sense that the high res photos, at least, are taken from other platforms than satellites.
1. Solar power has already dropped in price 16 fold since 1976. Unlike nuclear, it does not have cost breaking waste and skilled worker demands. It's as reasonable an assumption as in 10 years, computers will be at least 16-32 times faster. Not a given, but I would put money on it.
2. That's pathetically easy. 2 hydroelectric dams, one lower than the other. Pump water from the lower lake to the upper one in the daytime. Let it drain to the lower one at night. May I have my Nobel, please?
3. Google earth shows there is a big enough chunk of the state, which is mostly wasteland, to fit the array. This was an EXAMPLE : in reality, such an array would be distributed in lots of places. I just wanted to show conclusively that there IS enough land.
Umm, no. None of the energy would be stored with lead acid batteries. They are too expensive, and don't last long enough. Rather, giant underground flywheels would be spun up to store energy.
Or, hydroelectric dams run in reverse (would be ironic, wouldn't it, if they ended up using our hydroelectric dams as mostly an energy storage reservoir. See, 2 giant dams, one lower than the other, would be used. During the day, giant amounts of water would be sucked up and put in the upper dam, lowering the lake by hundreds of feet temporarily. During the night the process would run in reverse.
Losses might be 20%.
Umm, I think so. Look up "smart pebbles".
You'd never exceed the velocity of the pebbles because the top speed of the ship would be 0.8 or 0.9c. This is fast enough that the actual amount of travel time, in the frame of reference of the universe, would be about as low as practical, yet it cuts down on the blue shifting effect and Lorentz mass increases relativistic speeds involve.
For interstellar journeys you'd need a double sized spacecraft or to use antimatter.
One method would be during deceleration some of the smart pebbles would contain chunks of antimatter. A very dramatic engine would burn them, crushing them in a magnetic field and releasing energy from both fusion and anti-matter annihilation. So to slow down, this is how you would produce thrust in the opposite direction.
The other way is throw half the spacecraft away. The thrown away half continues to catch pebbles and fling them back the other way...and the decelerating portion uses this momentum transfer to slow down to enter the target star system. So half the spacecraft continues to hurtle into the void, going faster and faster while the other half gets to stop.
Same idea as throwing away a reflecting mirror for a light sail slowdown. I think my idea is incomparably better than a light sail, however, for the following reasons.
1. Thrust would be very, very low relative to the mass of the sail. Would take forever to get up to speed with a light sail
2. ENORMOUS surface area of the sail...every portion vulnerable to micrometeorites and blue-shifted photons. I think it would never work for this reason alone : sail would fall apart at 0.9c. My idea uses a very very long (maybe a kilometer) stack of superconducting magnets. The surface area of the spacecraft facing the direction of travel might be less than a square meter.
3. The nasty 1/r^2 law that means near the journey's end, almost all the energy sent by the launching star system is wasted. Energy might be plentiful by the time a society can think about interstellar travel...but not unlimited.
For the reasons, I think a light sail is about as practical as a cannon for manned expedition to mars. I think it'll never happen, nor even be considered when our society actually has the resources to mount an expedition like this.
Hmm. I sorta figured that with enough demand, a 10 or 100 fold increase in production would let the price plummet. Since it is just silicon and energy, a really big purification plant could make vats of the stuff at a time.