If you really want to make the USA into a Space Faring Nation again, we should put our money into
space elevators.
In just 2 decades, this idea has gone from being impossible to far-out to
design studies.
By comparison, the ISS is a waste and the Moon would be an expensive diversion. Space elevators would really open the solar system up for human - not just robot - exploration.
Windows Media does not support standards compliant MPEG-4. What Microsoft calls MPEG-4 is their version of a early draft of the standard with their own transport mechanism.
These rovers were far from secret - they even carried a joint experiment with the French, a set of
retroreflectors for
Lunar Laser Ranging, which (together with similar retroreflectors installed by the Apollo astronauts) are still used for a variety of fundamental measurements in celestial dynamics.
I worked (from MIT) with Viking Lander data, not camera data, but I followed all of this closely at the time and had
lots of discussions with people at JPL about this and other topics.
The Viking landers used a scanning (spot) camera, which was slow but which was also one of the first really good scientific cameras sent on a space probe. It was designed to provide a very repeatible color readout of what it saw, but, like most such cameras, was subject to drift, so color calibration targets were included on top of each lander.
When Viking Lander 1 landed, the first color pictures released had a blue sky. These were done with the color balance adjusted "by eye" at JPL. When they had time to analyze the color targets, they released that they had made a mistake, and that the sky was red.
I specifically remember hearing that they had adjusted the color balance in the first release image, and had to adjust it back to get true color.
They had no reason to lie and were a little embarassed to have made the initial mistake.
The
letter entropy in the Voynich MS is quite different from Latin or English, with the first character having less entropy, the second a lot less. and the third and fourth a lot more entropy
(more entropy means less predictability).
I do not see how grill gibberesh could easily do this, and note that the Nature paper explicitly did not consider letter entropy.
it seems to me that where the burden lies is not so clear. If I found a 4+ century old manuscript in an unknown language, I would assume it to be real, unless proven otherwise.
Here is what is known about the manuscript
It is not a moden hoax, as old letters have been found after its rediscovery that refer to it.
It has 234 pages (plenty long enough for statistical analysis) and appears to have been copied by a professional. It also has a number of images of various sorts, with "labels" and the words used in the labels also appear in the text near the images.
(BTW, I do not see how you get that in a "grill" system hoax.)
There are, however, no apparent images of the usual alchemical signs, occult signs, etc. - the sort of stuff that might impress an occult minded royal buyer.
It appears to have been written in (at least) two langauges or dialects or jargons, based on word use, with each page being in only one "language"
Here is a plot showing the correlation of word usage between pages in the manuscript - color coded with red meaning more words in common, black meaning the fewest, with page one in the upper left hand corner.
I would expect a grill method to produce a random version of this image - which is clearly not random.
The text follows roughly the 1st. and 2nd.
Zipf's laws of word frequencies.
The word length distribution is very different from Latin, German, English, French or Italian, and, in fact, is similar to various Asian languages like
Chinese - words are uniformly short.
Again, I don't see why a grill method would do this.
The 2nd. order entropy is too low for an European language using a simple substitution cipher, and the third and fourth are
too high. (Also, download this
pdf.)
What does this mean ? It means that the second character of a word in the manuscript is more predictable than in a typical European language, and that the
third and fourth characters are _less_ predictable.
It is very hard for me to see how this could come from the grill method.
So, regardless of where the burden of proof lies, I, for one, am not convinced.
The "Cryptonomicom" has an obvious liguisitic similarity to the "Necronomicon" of H.P. Lovecraft. Colin Wilson later wrote sci-fi / horror stories that included Lovecraft and which stated that the Voynich Manuscript was actually one copy of the Necronomicon.
I have no idea if Stephanson knew this, but given the similarity of names, I would suspect so.
This is ridiculous, and I for one cannot believe that
Prof. Pillinger keeps saying it.
Unlike the NASA orbiter, which might conceivably not be able to understand the Beagle's transmission, Jodrell Bank is looking for its radio carrier (i.e., just for the existence of a transmission at all). It should be able to see it. That's what radio telescopes do, after all - and Jodrell Bank has been looking at space probes since the 1960's.
Moreover, all of Mars is well within a Jodrell Bank beamwidth at 500 MHz, so it doesn't matter where the thing is on Mars - Jodrell Bank should see it. And it's too much to believe that operators at
Jodrell Bank, Westerbork and Stanford all screwed up such
a simple measurement.
This spacecraft is almost certainly lost; I would rate it's chance of recovery at much less than one per cent.
This is one of the weirdest things I have heard of -
- Both astronauts heard it
- By this point they should be pretty familar with the noises the station makes - for example, the thermal expansion / contraction as you go through the terminator.
- It did not sound like an explosion (typical velocities of space debris impacts is 5 kilometers per second or so - and meteorites impact at even higher velocities), so it probably wasn't a piece of random junk.
- They got out the mobile camera and couldn't see anything damaged.
So what was it ? Let's hope it wasn't some valve or other part failing, but I suspect we will hear more of this.
Following this line of reasoning, MS
needs product placement on The Soprano's, and
maybe a story line about how Tony wants to expand
from cartage into software license enforement, but
is scared off by the aggressive tactics of the
Business Software Alliance.
At technical meetings, like the IETF, pretty much everyone has 802.11 connectivity and it is very common to send emails or IM about what the speaker is saying.
I think overall that this tends to improve things, however, in a classroom it might be too distracting and I can see Professors banning it.
Well, we (http://www.americafree.tv) webcast MPEG4 video at 340kbps. At that rate, 3 GB is 20 hours per month, which is more than most people watch on-line (us, at least).
BTW, I have COX and routinely upload 10 GB or so per month and have not been limited _yet_.
This is an application of
open brick, a really cool Linux based appliance. I
think that the tiny market (Japanese in France) is not such an issue - more that
this has the potential of leading to the commoditification of Linux and open source - not on the desktop, but as cheap single use hardware apps.
Not so silly. They are actually calibrated against themselves.
Satellite (GPS & SLR) and VLBI measurements are all used
to determine the relative movements of different points on the Earth (where the lasers or receivers are). The reference frame is then constructed from these point to point measurements using a "no-net rotation" constraint - any rotation of all of the stations is assumed to be a rotation of the Earth.
It is not perfect, but it is the best we've got.
This is coordinated by the
IERS, the International Earth Rotation Service, in Paris.
Sea level changes are dominated by thermal effects such as global warming (very roughly, a centimeter per degree C), so it is not a good reference.
The axis of the Earth moves too (AKA Polar Motion) at the 10 meter level so it is no good for this either.
Vertical motions are referenced against the center of mass of the Earth, which the satellite based techniques can "see".
The LA basin is about 1 to 30 kilometers of rubble on top of a very active basement of solid rock which is riddled with active faults like a piece of dropped china is riddled with cracks. All of the rubble (alluvium) makes it hard to see active faults as they are buried deep.
Basically every big earthquake that LA has experienced (with the exception of the large one the San Andreas fault in the 1840's) has been on a previously unknown fault.
So, earthquakes happen, but our ability to tell exactly where they will be is near nil.
The first application of DNA computing was to (very simple) traveling salemen problems. The traveling salesmen problem is NP-complete - if you can solve it in polynomial time, you can solve in principle all other NP-complete problems, such as factoring a large number. All public key systems that I know of relie on the NP-completeness of some calculation, such as factoring.
So, the potential for breaking public keys has been shown, it's just a matter of reducing it to practice.
These DNA computers can solve NP complete problems in polynomial time (because they can try combinatorially huge numbers of solutions simultaneously), and if either they or quantum computers ever become practical, public key cryptography will be crackable.
Suppose you have corporate offices, an office on the other coast, and locations in 5 Colo's.
With this, you could set up a distributed backup so that important files are distributed over all 7 sites. Since all these sites are yours, security is not such an issue.
The biggest problem I see is that you have to put
files in a specific directory to back them up. You'd have to write scripts to, say, back up a rarely changing database stored on a 15 disk RAID 10.
QUESTIONS :
1.) What level of RAID equivalent is this ?
I.e., how many sites can die and still enable you
to get your data back ? (This had better be more than one _in addition to the data source_ for this to be worthwhile.)
2.) Can this be used to _mirror_ data - i.e., can I do a distributed backup and mirror the data seamlessly on another site?
3.) Does all of the bandwidth for my files come from me, or is that distributed too in a peer to peer fashion ?
Neptune's system has clearly been disturbed in the past - both of the major satellites have big inclinations and one has an eccentric orbit. Theories that have been introduced to explain this do include the capture of Triton, maybe at the time of losing an earlier satellite - maybe Pluto. I doubt we will know the answer in my lifetime:(
I was, or course, referring to the normal run of satellites of the Gas Giants, which is large and small moons close in in flat, equatorial orbits, and a host of small moons further out, in widely scattered orbits. It's the latter that are almost certainly "recent" captures.
Slashdot Mirror
If you really want to make the USA into a Space Faring Nation again, we should put our money into space elevators.
In just 2 decades, this idea has gone from being impossible to far-out to design studies.
By comparison, the ISS is a waste and the Moon would be an expensive diversion. Space elevators would really open the solar system up for human - not just robot - exploration.
Windows Media does not support standards compliant MPEG-4. What Microsoft calls MPEG-4 is their version of a early draft of the standard with their own transport mechanism.
Envivio used to offer a MPEG-4 plug in for WM, but no more (or at least not for free).
I wish people would not perpetuate this confusion.
These rovers were far from secret - they even carried a joint experiment with the French, a set of retroreflectors for Lunar Laser Ranging, which (together with similar retroreflectors installed by the Apollo astronauts) are still used for a variety of fundamental measurements in celestial dynamics.
I worked (from MIT) with Viking Lander data, not camera data, but I followed all of this closely at the time and had lots of discussions with people at JPL about this and other topics.
The Viking landers used a scanning (spot) camera, which was slow but which was also one of the first really good scientific cameras sent on a space probe. It was designed to provide a very repeatible color readout of what it saw, but, like most such cameras, was subject to drift, so color calibration targets were included on top of each lander.
When Viking Lander 1 landed, the first color pictures released had a blue sky. These were done with the color balance adjusted "by eye" at JPL. When they had time to analyze the color targets, they released that they had made a mistake, and that the sky was red.
I specifically remember hearing that they had adjusted the color balance in the first release image, and had to adjust it back to get true color.
They had no reason to lie and were a little embarassed to have made the initial mistake.
So I regard thiis article as being without merit.
The letter entropy in the Voynich MS is quite different from Latin or English, with the first character having less entropy, the second a lot less. and the third and fourth a lot more entropy (more entropy means less predictability).
I do not see how grill gibberesh could easily do this, and note that the Nature paper explicitly did not consider letter entropy.
it seems to me that where the burden lies is not so clear. If I found a 4+ century old manuscript in an unknown language, I would assume it to be real, unless proven otherwise.
Here is what is known about the manuscript
It is not a moden hoax, as old letters have been found after its rediscovery that refer to it.
It has 234 pages (plenty long enough for statistical analysis) and appears to have been copied by a professional. It also has a number of images of various sorts, with "labels" and the words used in the labels also appear in the text near the images.
(BTW, I do not see how you get that in a "grill" system hoax.)
There are, however, no apparent images of the usual alchemical signs, occult signs, etc. - the sort of stuff that might impress an occult minded royal buyer.
It appears to have been written in (at least) two langauges or dialects or jargons, based on word use, with each page being in only one "language"
Here is a plot showing the correlation of word usage between pages in the manuscript - color coded with red meaning more words in common, black meaning the fewest, with page one in the upper left hand corner.
I would expect a grill method to produce a random version of this image - which is clearly not random.
The text follows roughly the 1st. and 2nd. Zipf's laws of word frequencies.
The word length distribution is very different from Latin, German, English, French or Italian, and, in fact, is similar to various Asian languages like Chinese - words are uniformly short.
Again, I don't see why a grill method would do this.
The 2nd. order entropy is too low for an European language using a simple substitution cipher, and the third and fourth are too high. (Also, download this pdf.)
What does this mean ? It means that the second character of a word in the manuscript is more predictable than in a typical European language, and that the third and fourth characters are _less_ predictable.
It is very hard for me to see how this could come from the grill method.
So, regardless of where the burden of proof lies, I, for one, am not convinced.
The "Cryptonomicom" has an obvious liguisitic similarity to the "Necronomicon" of H.P. Lovecraft. Colin Wilson later wrote sci-fi / horror stories that included Lovecraft and which stated that the Voynich Manuscript was actually one copy of the Necronomicon.
I have no idea if Stephanson knew this, but given the similarity of names, I would suspect so.
More details can be found here .
This is ridiculous, and I for one cannot believe that Prof. Pillinger keeps saying it.
Unlike the NASA orbiter, which might conceivably not be able to understand the Beagle's transmission, Jodrell Bank is looking for its radio carrier (i.e., just for the existence of a transmission at all). It should be able to see it. That's what radio telescopes do, after all - and Jodrell Bank has been looking at space probes since the 1960's.
Moreover, all of Mars is well within a Jodrell Bank beamwidth at 500 MHz, so it doesn't matter where the thing is on Mars - Jodrell Bank should see it. And it's too much to believe that operators at Jodrell Bank, Westerbork and Stanford all screwed up such a simple measurement.
This spacecraft is almost certainly lost; I would rate it's chance of recovery at much less than one per cent.
This is one of the weirdest things I have heard of -
- Both astronauts heard it
- By this point they should be pretty familar with the noises the station makes - for example, the thermal expansion / contraction as you go through the terminator.
- It did not sound like an explosion (typical velocities of space debris impacts is 5 kilometers per second or so - and meteorites impact at even higher velocities), so it probably wasn't a piece of random junk.
- They got out the mobile camera and couldn't see anything damaged.
So what was it ? Let's hope it wasn't some valve or other part failing, but I suspect we will hear more of this.
Rendezvous is an Apple trade name for ZeroConf, or Zero Configuration, a new IETF standard that Apple had a leading role in.
The whole point is, you do _not_ have to have a network setup - it figures out what's out there, and makes the necessary adjustments.
You don't even have to be running DHCP (although it recognizes it and works with it).
Come on - if this was done in Burma or Chechnya, it would be all over the papers. Thank God at least Wired still has some guts.
What do you want to bet that Diebold wins the contract to do any upcoming Iraqi elections ?
Following this line of reasoning, MS needs product placement on The Soprano's, and maybe a story line about how Tony wants to expand from cartage into software license enforement, but is scared off by the aggressive tactics of the Business Software Alliance.
At technical meetings, like the IETF, pretty much everyone has 802.11 connectivity and it is very common to send emails or IM about what the speaker is saying.
I think overall that this tends to improve things, however, in a classroom it might be too distracting and I can see Professors banning it.
Re: Question 2:
Well, we (http://www.americafree.tv) webcast MPEG4 video at 340kbps. At that rate, 3 GB is 20 hours per month, which is more than most people watch on-line (us, at least).
BTW, I have COX and routinely upload 10 GB or so per month and have not been limited _yet_.
This is an application of open brick, a really cool Linux based appliance. I think that the tiny market (Japanese in France) is not such an issue - more that this has the potential of leading to the commoditification of Linux and open source - not on the desktop, but as cheap single use hardware apps.
Not so silly. They are actually calibrated against themselves.
Satellite (GPS & SLR) and VLBI measurements are all used to determine the relative movements of different points on the Earth (where the lasers or receivers are). The reference frame is then constructed from these point to point measurements using a "no-net rotation" constraint - any rotation of all of the stations is assumed to be a rotation of the Earth.
It is not perfect, but it is the best we've got.
This is coordinated by the IERS, the International Earth Rotation Service, in Paris.
Sea level changes are dominated by thermal effects such as global warming (very roughly, a centimeter per degree C), so it is not a good reference. The axis of the Earth moves too (AKA Polar Motion) at the 10 meter level so it is no good for this either.
Vertical motions are referenced against the center of mass of the Earth, which the satellite based techniques can "see".
This is silly - if not FUD for grant money.
The LA basin is about 1 to 30 kilometers of rubble on top of a very active basement of solid rock which is riddled with active faults like a piece of dropped china is riddled with cracks. All of the rubble (alluvium) makes it hard to see active faults as they are buried deep.
Basically every big earthquake that LA has experienced (with the exception of the large one the San Andreas fault in the 1840's) has been on a previously unknown fault.
So, earthquakes happen, but our ability to tell exactly where they will be is near nil.
Sheesh - I see a headline like ./ had a scoop from the SETI
Institute.
"Galactic Civilizations Coming Soon"
and I thought
Alas, it was just a game...
I'll be sad to see them go - they rocked!
I thhought they were much more informative than Wired.
They were getting rather thin towards the end, though.
No, potentially to hours.
The first application of DNA computing was to (very simple) traveling salemen problems. The traveling salesmen problem is NP-complete - if you can solve it in polynomial time, you can solve in principle all other NP-complete problems, such as factoring a large number. All public key systems that I know of relie on the NP-completeness of some calculation, such as factoring.
So, the potential for breaking public keys has been shown, it's just a matter of reducing it to practice.
These DNA computers can solve NP complete problems in polynomial time (because they can try combinatorially huge numbers of solutions simultaneously), and if either they or quantum
computers ever become practical, public key
cryptography will be crackable.
You have been warned...
Rendezvous is not just an Apple product - it is on the way to being an Internet standard, with an IETF working group and two Internet drafts in progress - one on Auto configuration of hosts and the other on the Dynamic configuration of IP Addresses.
At the ZeroConf WG meetings I have been to, Microsoft was very much present, so I assume that they are well aware of this technology.
... to an enterprise with multiple locations.
Suppose you have corporate offices, an office on the other coast, and locations in 5 Colo's.
With this, you could set up a distributed backup so that important files are distributed over all 7 sites. Since all these sites are yours, security is not such an issue.
The biggest problem I see is that you have to put files in a specific directory to back them up. You'd have to write scripts to, say, back up a rarely changing database stored on a 15 disk RAID 10.
QUESTIONS :
1.) What level of RAID equivalent is this ?
I.e., how many sites can die and still enable you to get your data back ? (This had better be more than one _in addition to the data source_ for this to be worthwhile.)
2.) Can this be used to _mirror_ data - i.e., can I do a distributed backup and mirror the data seamlessly on another site?
3.) Does all of the bandwidth for my files come from me, or is that distributed too in a peer to peer fashion ?
No - you may be thinking about trademarks.
Don't use a trademark or object to an infringing use that you knew of and you might lose it.
This is not true for patents.
Ah, yes, very perceptive.
:(
Neptune's system has clearly been disturbed in the past - both of the major satellites have big inclinations and one has an eccentric orbit. Theories that have been introduced to explain this do include the capture of Triton, maybe at the time of losing an earlier satellite - maybe Pluto. I doubt we will know the answer in my lifetime
I was, or course, referring to the normal run of satellites of the Gas Giants, which is large and small moons close in in flat, equatorial orbits, and a host of small moons further out, in widely scattered orbits. It's the latter that are almost certainly "recent" captures.