As any EE student knows, tossing someone a charged capacitor has its charms. If you were to fire it at a useful velocity, however, chances are the projectile would embed itself in the target, making it not-so-nonlethal.
You'd have to generate an awesome magnetic field to disrupt electronic equipment, if that is even possible. Consider what happens when you have a magnet near a computer: magnetic media get corrupted, and CRT tubes go wonky as the beam is deflected, but otherwise they'll continue to function normally.
Compasses are a bit easier, but won't be used as much now that GPS is here.
Not quite. EADS was the 2001 link-up of German DaimlerChrysler Aerospace AG, the French Aerospatiale Matra S.A. and Construcciones Aeronáuticas S.A./CASA of Spain. More history here. Airbus is now part of EADS, but has existed for a lot longer than EADS. Airbus history
TidBITS sounds similar: a Web magazine staffed by a small number of paid journalists/editors. On their site, and in various magazine articles (e.g. the ones about their subscription model) they explain in a fair amount of detail how they finance their operation.
Only if the 'plaintext' is not something that can be checked with a dictionary.
If the plaintext really is plain text, IIRC the probability of a random key producing a plausible plaintext decreases with the length of the message. If the message is long enough (a few hundred characters), there's only one key that'll yield a plausible plaintext. I'd have to check the source (Simon Singh, 'The code book') though.
Bandwidth requirements are easy. They already work with Akamai to serve parts of apple.com, so this is essentially a solved problem.
The difficult part is getting 42 bazillion drivers written and tested. Whether Apple writes those drivers, or gets the device manufactures to do them, is irrelevant. The effort will have to be expended, not just for new devices, but for boatloads of legacy devices as well.
Basically, this is no different than the current situation. Some device supplier build Mac OS drivers, some don't, based on their prognosis of Mac OS market share. Getting more suppliers to build Mac OS drivers is a chicken-and-egg situation: the effort has to be expended before market share rises. Companies don't like doing this.
Hell, most car designs don't last half that long, and they are much simpler.
Most car designs don't last half that long because they are much simpler. Aircraft designs typically last much longer than car designs; this is simple economics.
Oh, and isn't it ironic that many of the people who say it's time to move on from the Shuttle, advocate a return of the Saturn V?
This is one of a number of languages/scripts we can't read. Studying them requires disciplines as diverse as archaeology, linguistics, and cryptology. Definitely a job for The Librarian
Why would anybody bother to develop or port games for Mac when it will be so easy for Mac gamers to use Windows,
One of the major reasons I use a Mac is that I won't have to use Windows. There's no way in hell I'm going to spend time installing and maintaining that POS OS just to play games. If a game isn't available for OS X, then I won't buy it. MacTel won't change that.
Basic physics: the only possible geostationary orbit is 36000 km up. That's the only altitude where the speed necessary to maintain the orbit matches Earth's rotation speed. LEO is never geostationary. Astra satellites are geostationary, and orbit at 36000 km.
t must be only an attempt to capture all the radio traffic in Japan from a single dish and use credits dedicated to Research for 'national security'. Oh puhleeze. That would have been much easier to accomplish with a series of ground-based stations. And if they were planning to use a satellite, they sure as hell wouldn't be announcing it 10 years in advance.
In LEO, one orbit takes about 90 minutes and gives ~9 minutes of coverage at any given point (numbers pulled from memory, so give or take 20%), so you'd need 10 satellites. Would that be worth it to eliminate the 0.2 s latency?
If WWP for Word is like WWP for FrameMaker, it relies on paragraph styles to decide on output formatting so it'll only create usable output if the Word document is well-formatted. The company I work for has developed a tool that can reformat Word documents based on paragraph properties. You can use this to convert a document where every paragraph is style 'Normal' with some overrides into a document where every paragraph has a named style assigned to it and no overrides.
My A/V receiver can draw something like 400 W, and it has no problem being halfway up a stack. It only uses passive cooling, too. 19" rackmounted computers have no problem being in a stack either. Hush Technologies can do an A/V formfactor PC case, so why not Zalman?
It makes reuse harder because everything gets contaminated with salt water, damage is more likely, and you have to use parachutes to land, which is nontrivial if your spacecraft weight 100 tons.
Even with the visual on the shuttle the whole way down, nitpick: they were down to at 30 km (100 kft) altitude (can't say exactly when, I got called away from my computer when Discovery was at ~30 km - argh!) or lower before they went from CGI to visual.
1. Even before the jet-age expansion, the aviation industry was vastly more widespread than the space industry is now. Dozens of plane manufacturers, hundreds of airlines etc. This because the cost of entry was lower for aviation than for spaceflight. At the end of WW1, you could buy surplus military aircraft for a few hundred dollars. Or you could build your own in a bike shed.
2. World War 2 happened, and with it came faster advances in science/technology than ever before. This was caused by a combination of throwing money at the problem, a sense of urgency and the right time having come for many ideas at once (with one development feeding off another).
'To assume' has multiple meanings. in this case, this applies: to take on titles, offices, duties, responsibilities; "When will the new President assume office?"
That should be easy enough to remedy. Just launch a booster into orbit, hook it up to ISS and use that.
Even developing a new man-rated booster would be worth it. Copy the Shuttle OMS (or whatever else they use to push ISS into higher orbit) design, and build the hardware into a Progress airframe.
Slashdot Mirror
As any EE student knows, tossing someone a charged capacitor has its charms. If you were to fire it at a useful velocity, however, chances are the projectile would embed itself in the target, making it not-so-nonlethal.
If they were public they'd be useless for authentication, genius.
You'd have to generate an awesome magnetic field to disrupt electronic equipment, if that is even possible. Consider what happens when you have a magnet near a computer: magnetic media get corrupted, and CRT tubes go wonky as the beam is deflected, but otherwise they'll continue to function normally.
Compasses are a bit easier, but won't be used as much now that GPS is here.
Not quite. EADS was the 2001 link-up of German DaimlerChrysler Aerospace AG, the French Aerospatiale Matra S.A. and Construcciones Aeronáuticas S.A./CASA of Spain. More history here. Airbus is now part of EADS, but has existed for a lot longer than EADS. Airbus history
TidBITS sounds similar: a Web magazine staffed by a small number of paid journalists/editors. On their site, and in various magazine articles (e.g. the ones about their subscription model) they explain in a fair amount of detail how they finance their operation.
Huh. Disregard parent, my brain was out for lunch.
Only if the 'plaintext' is not something that can be checked with a dictionary.
If the plaintext really is plain text, IIRC the probability of a random key producing a plausible plaintext decreases with the length of the message. If the message is long enough (a few hundred characters), there's only one key that'll yield a plausible plaintext. I'd have to check the source (Simon Singh, 'The code book') though.
Bandwidth requirements are easy. They already work with Akamai to serve parts of apple.com, so this is essentially a solved problem.
The difficult part is getting 42 bazillion drivers written and tested. Whether Apple writes those drivers, or gets the device manufactures to do them, is irrelevant. The effort will have to be expended, not just for new devices, but for boatloads of legacy devices as well.
Basically, this is no different than the current situation. Some device supplier build Mac OS drivers, some don't, based on their prognosis of Mac OS market share. Getting more suppliers to build Mac OS drivers is a chicken-and-egg situation: the effort has to be expended before market share rises. Companies don't like doing this.
Hell, most car designs don't last half that long, and they are much simpler.
Most car designs don't last half that long because they are much simpler. Aircraft designs typically last much longer than car designs; this is simple economics.
Oh, and isn't it ironic that many of the people who say it's time to move on from the Shuttle, advocate a return of the Saturn V?
This is one of a number of languages/scripts we can't read. Studying them requires disciplines as diverse as archaeology, linguistics, and cryptology.
Definitely a job for The Librarian
Why would anybody bother to develop or port games for Mac when it will be so easy for Mac gamers to use Windows,
One of the major reasons I use a Mac is that I won't have to use Windows. There's no way in hell I'm going to spend time installing and maintaining that POS OS just to play games. If a game isn't available for OS X, then I won't buy it. MacTel won't change that.
Basic physics: the only possible geostationary orbit is 36000 km up. That's the only altitude where the speed necessary to maintain the orbit matches Earth's rotation speed.
LEO is never geostationary. Astra satellites are geostationary, and orbit at 36000 km.
That only works up to a point. If the poles are too far apart, the cable will break under its own weight. Hence the zigzag strategy.
Count on 100 Mbit/s per channel. Current comsats provide up to 45 Gbit/s total throughput.
t must be only an attempt to capture all the radio traffic in Japan from a single dish and use credits dedicated to Research for 'national security'.
Oh puhleeze. That would have been much easier to accomplish with a series of ground-based stations. And if they were planning to use a satellite, they sure as hell wouldn't be announcing it 10 years in advance.
In LEO, one orbit takes about 90 minutes and gives ~9 minutes of coverage at any given point (numbers pulled from memory, so give or take 20%), so you'd need 10 satellites. Would that be worth it to eliminate the 0.2 s latency?
Same way they do current satellites: by folding all the sticky-outy crap, including the dish, so it fits inside the rocket fairing.
If WWP for Word is like WWP for FrameMaker, it relies on paragraph styles to decide on output formatting so it'll only create usable output if the Word document is well-formatted.
The company I work for has developed a tool that can reformat Word documents based on paragraph properties. You can use this to convert a document where every paragraph is style 'Normal' with some overrides into a document where every paragraph has a named style assigned to it and no overrides.
My A/V receiver can draw something like 400 W, and it has no problem being halfway up a stack. It only uses passive cooling, too. 19" rackmounted computers have no problem being in a stack either.
Hush Technologies can do an A/V formfactor PC case, so why not Zalman?
17" is 44 cm (just about), genius.
It makes reuse harder because everything gets contaminated with salt water, damage is more likely, and you have to use parachutes to land, which is nontrivial if your spacecraft weight 100 tons.
Even with the visual on the shuttle the whole way down,
nitpick: they were down to at 30 km (100 kft) altitude (can't say exactly when, I got called away from my computer when Discovery was at ~30 km - argh!) or lower before they went from CGI to visual.
1. Even before the jet-age expansion, the aviation industry was vastly more widespread than the space industry is now. Dozens of plane manufacturers, hundreds of airlines etc. This because the cost of entry was lower for aviation than for spaceflight.
At the end of WW1, you could buy surplus military aircraft for a few hundred dollars. Or you could build your own in a bike shed.
2. World War 2 happened, and with it came faster advances in science/technology than ever before. This was caused by a combination of throwing money at the problem, a sense of urgency and the right time having come for many ideas at once (with one development feeding off another).
'To assume' has multiple meanings. in this case, this applies:
to take on titles, offices, duties, responsibilities; "When will the new President assume office?"
That should be easy enough to remedy. Just launch a booster into orbit, hook it up to ISS and use that.
Even developing a new man-rated booster would be worth it. Copy the Shuttle OMS (or whatever else they use to push ISS into higher orbit) design, and build the hardware into a Progress airframe.