So, they put the Ent-draught back in, eh? Now _that's_ good news. Merry and Pippin becoming unusually large for hobbits was only of any significance when they returned to the Shire and cleared out Saruman and his shambolic mob. Which suggests that the Scouring of the Shire will be left in the Return of the King - at least in the extended DVD, if not the cinema release.
I doubt there'll be any good excuse for the monstrous character assassination they committed on Faramir, though.
I was too quick. A proper karma whore would have posted the question, waited to score a couple of 'Interesting' mods, then posted the answer to collect on the 'Informative'.
Oops, careless of me: I should RTFFAQ before posting silly questions:-)
Q: Why the name 'Theora?'
A: Like other Xiph.org Foundation codec projects such as Vorbis or Tarkin, Theora is named after a fictional character. Theora Jones was the name of Edison Carter's 'controller' on the television series Max Headroom. She was played by Amanda Pays.
Nintendo cancelling the SNES CD and leaving Sony holding a half-finished CD-ROM superconsole. Which they promptly decided to finish by themselves, and used to thoroughly brutalise everyone else and take over most of the console market.
The point of quantum cryptography is that you never have to reuse a key. I can generate a one-time pad, perhaps using a radioactive source to provide randomness, and transmit it over the quantum link. The advantage of this is that I can be certain it has reached my correspondent without being intercepted, and I can now encode my _real_ message and send it over conventional channels.
You only use the quantum link for key exchange, not for sending the actual messages. If one of the keys is compromised, you'll know about it, and not use it - assuming you're not quite monumentally stupid, which can't be ruled out.
The only way to defeat quantum cryptography would be to have a spy at the other end.
Who Galadriel is? (she's pretty much the oldest Elf there, actually).
Cirdan is older. Galadriel was born in Aman in the days of the Two Trees, and after the Darkening of Valinor she crossed into Middle-earth across the Helcaraxe with Fingolfin, having been marooned in Araman by Feanor. Yes, she's extremely ancient - and hardcore, too, to have made that journey.
But Cirdan began his life at Cuivienen under the Stars, and reached the western shores of Beleriand with the march of the Teleri; there he remained throughout the First Age until the destruction after the battle of Tears Unnumbered, at which point he moved to the isle of Balar and became a leader of the Elvish enclave around the mouth of Sirion. After the downfall of Beleriand he established himself at the Grey Havens west of what became the Shire, where he remained to the end of the Third Age.
The only people older than Cirdan in Middle-earth, to my knowledge, are the Maiar - Sauron, the Balrog, and the Wizards - the oldest Ents, Fangorn and perhaps Finglas and Fladrif - and Tom Bombadil.
Chernobyl... 1986, I believe. As far as spaceflight is concerned, American safety systems didn't exactly cover themselves in glory that year either.
It's probably pork-barrel politics. NASA have to spend their money on American kit to please American politicians by giving jobs to American voters. And since a large part of their purpose is to inflate American prestige internationally, they have to showcase US technology. Buying in Russian designs, even if they can be built and assembled in the US, just doesn't do that. Sure, it will get them to the Moon and beyond much more cheaply and efficiently, but since when were NASA about space exploration?
- Develop an expendable launcher that can lift *really heavy* items into a useful orbit (which can be ISS orbit, geostationary, or some escape orbit). Russia's Energia would be a good starting point, as would the shuttle launch stack (they are related anyway). This would be the heavy workhorse for orbital construction.
NASA are considering cloning the Energia: it's called Magnum.
Why they don't just use Energia itself I don't know... probably politics.
Ariane rockets are run by Arianespace, technically a private organisation, though its main shareholders are various European governments, mainly the French. ESA is a separate organisation, and if the Russians or Americans can launch their payloads more cheaply than Arianespace then there's no reason why ESA shouldn't go with them.
Wonder if NASA ever heard of "economies of scale".
Actually, yes, they did. The basic Mariner design was modified and reused for many of NASA's planetary missions; ESA's reuse of the Express design for Mars and Venus is certainly nothing new.
I wish the Beagle 2 in particular the very best of luck. Britain has never really pulled its weight in ESA, leaving France, Germany and Italy to pay for most things; a successful Mars lander bearing the Union flag could well change all that. Mars Express as a whole was done on a small budget, and Beagle was hacked together from the money that could be found down the back of the national sofa; if they succeed, imagine what could be achieved with some _real_ money...
If Microsoft take over Google and start abusing its power, then they'll inevitably destroy the very reason we use it. They'd MSNalise it, put crappy and intrusive ads all over the place, and start taking money to rig search results. Its usage would collapse in a nanosecond...
New Amsterdam was a decent port of convenience once, but these days it's a sprawling megalopolis. I doubt you'd find haven from the laws of the USA there.
Most people tend to pick somewhere like Panama for their flags of convenience. Liberia's popular too, as are a variety of island states.
Seriously, if you're a minor country 'build or buy' is a serious issue. Building a carrier is bloody expensive, but if you do so you give at least one of your port cities a major employment boost and at the end of it you get a shiny modern carrier. Buying someone else's cast-offs is far cheaper, but you'll have to accept that it's a fixer-upper and pay for refits and awful maintenance bills.
The original owner of this carrier is currently starting work on two really _big_ carriers as part of a scheme to switch from a military geared to fight World War 3 on the Rhine to a highly mobile force capable of dropping in on people at short notice and spoiling their day. Consequently, three Falklands-vintage carriers will soon be on the market for any dictator on good enough terms with London... So if anyone's planning to buy this carrier, do remember that in a couple of years your neighbour could be planning to buy a whole fleet;-)
Releasing oxygen is not pollution, and it won't have any terrible effects; the Earth's atmosphere is about 20% oxygen anyway. Also, remember that every oxygen molecule you put out into the atmosphere at your hydrogen refinery will eventually be taken back by an engine burning your hydrogen, so it evens out anyway.
The main problem is that oxygen is an extreme fire hazard. If your installation goes wrong, your home could find its atmosphere enriched in oxygen, and then it wouldn't take much to set the place ablaze.
If it's a conspiracy, yes, I imagine so... But if it's simply a large number of people all coming to the conclusion that SCO is doomed, and trying to profit from others' misfortune?
Suppose I notice that anyone appearing on FuckedCompany is likely to drop in share price shortly afterwards; suppose, then, that I short-sell anything that appears there, and I make money doing this. Illegal conspiracy, or legitimate business? Fine, surely... I'm just reading the news and making decisions based on that, like everyone else.
Now suppose that I tell others about this easy-money method, and many people start copying me. Is it now a conspiracy? Or have I just pointed people to a news site that's a good indicator of business trends? Still fine, I would think, though I may be wrong.
Suppose now that enough people start shorting based on FuckedCompany that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Conspiracy yet? Well, perhaps we're getting into some trouble.
Now suppose someone at FC notices what I'm up to, and decides to get in on the action themselves. They first sell a lot of stock in a successful company, then post it to their site so that the mob can cut it to pieces. That one, I think, would surely be going too far.
IANAL, and I know exactly bugger all about stock market regulations, but I would guess that it would all be legal until someone tried to abuse it. So that last scenario would certainly be a fraud. But in the SCO case, well, we've all seen their position - they're a company that's fucked so hard they'll have to get a Christmas Island domain name.
It is an interesting thought, though. The Slashdot Effect has blasted countless servers off the net over the years, and AFAIK so far there have been no legal consequences, even though it's a bigger DDOS than most script kiddies could ever hope to muster. We've seen what happened when the Slashdot Effect turned on Ralsky. And so when I saw a few posts concerning the direction of SCO's share price recently, the idea was obvious... is this the first stockmarket slashdotting? What responsibilities does, say, CmdrTaco have to restrain this? Could the Slashdot effect actually bankrupt people?
Personally I doubt it... most Slashdotters are happy enough to click away at links and incidentally melt someone's server, and many will subscribe a spammer to a mailing list with unholy joy, but the majority probably don't play quite so lightly with the markets. Now, if someone posted a 'Click Here to Short-Sell SCO' link in the article, _that_ might well be illegal...
I seem to remember hearing that the high-tech bubble was partly driven by online daytraders and the BBS rumour mills... 'buy this', 'buy that', they say on the chatrooms, and *clickety-click* it comes true. It might not be a good idea to spark a bear-market mirror image of that;-)
One more thought: let's assume that my original post sparks a Slashdot-wide attack on SCO's share price, it is found to be illegal, and a warrant is put out for my arrest. Three people modded that up - are they equally guilty? Personally, I'm not trading anything, I've made no profit but karma. But suppose someone shorted SCO and then modded up my message - fraud?
With all these posts charting the decline and fall of SCO... I wonder how many slashdotters are short-selling their stock? They're doomed, we all know it, there's profit to be had...
Now that would be the most devastating/.ing ever. Have we ever slashdotted someone's share price before?
Any word yet on whether or not they'll have representatives aboard the probe to setup an appropriate IP embargo and become the sole distribution channel of Earth's music and movies to a whole new captive audience?
Hint: I know it's an unmanned probe - it's a joke...
Or so you thought. In fact the Beagle 2 is carrying a Blur music track and a Damien Hirst spot painting: one for testing the communications link home and the other for calibrating the cameras. All good publicity, of course, and that's vital to a mission that had to scrape around the country to try to raise its money. But it does mean that they have to send along some lawyers to make sure that, if they DO discover life, it doesn't try to pirate the valuable intellectual property aboard the probe.
Q: will it be a violation of EMI's copyright for anyone other than ESA to listen in to the transmissions from Mars during the Beagle mission?
I've also had very little (read: none) experience with TV tuner cards on PCs -- I'd have to buy one of those, but I'm always been leery (for no particular reason) of television signal from cable on a PC.
I have a TV tuner card, and it is great. However, in the UK multichannel TV is mostly done via digital transmissions, either terrestrial or by satellite; cable has never really taken off. That means having a set-top box on my PC, and that's just deeply wrong (and I think they require a SCART connection anyway).
I'm very tempted by Hauppage's WinTV Nova digital TV card. Expensive, though...
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt there'll be any good excuse for the monstrous character assassination they committed on Faramir, though.
Patience, that's the key :-)
Q: Why the name 'Theora?'
A: Like other Xiph.org Foundation codec projects such as Vorbis or Tarkin, Theora is named after a fictional character. Theora Jones was the name of Edison Carter's 'controller' on the television series Max Headroom. She was played by Amanda Pays.
So... who's Theora? I know Vorbis was head torturer of the Omnian Inquisition in Small Gods, but I don't know a Theora...
Nintendo cancelling the SNES CD and leaving Sony holding a half-finished CD-ROM superconsole. Which they promptly decided to finish by themselves, and used to thoroughly brutalise everyone else and take over most of the console market.
Can you imagine what would happen to a spambot crawling through this?
The point of quantum cryptography is that you never have to reuse a key. I can generate a one-time pad, perhaps using a radioactive source to provide randomness, and transmit it over the quantum link. The advantage of this is that I can be certain it has reached my correspondent without being intercepted, and I can now encode my _real_ message and send it over conventional channels.
You only use the quantum link for key exchange, not for sending the actual messages. If one of the keys is compromised, you'll know about it, and not use it - assuming you're not quite monumentally stupid, which can't be ruled out.
The only way to defeat quantum cryptography would be to have a spy at the other end.
Cirdan is older. Galadriel was born in Aman in the days of the Two Trees, and after the Darkening of Valinor she crossed into Middle-earth across the Helcaraxe with Fingolfin, having been marooned in Araman by Feanor. Yes, she's extremely ancient - and hardcore, too, to have made that journey. But Cirdan began his life at Cuivienen under the Stars, and reached the western shores of Beleriand with the march of the Teleri; there he remained throughout the First Age until the destruction after the battle of Tears Unnumbered, at which point he moved to the isle of Balar and became a leader of the Elvish enclave around the mouth of Sirion. After the downfall of Beleriand he established himself at the Grey Havens west of what became the Shire, where he remained to the end of the Third Age.
The only people older than Cirdan in Middle-earth, to my knowledge, are the Maiar - Sauron, the Balrog, and the Wizards - the oldest Ents, Fangorn and perhaps Finglas and Fladrif - and Tom Bombadil.
www.goa...
It's probably pork-barrel politics. NASA have to spend their money on American kit to please American politicians by giving jobs to American voters. And since a large part of their purpose is to inflate American prestige internationally, they have to showcase US technology. Buying in Russian designs, even if they can be built and assembled in the US, just doesn't do that. Sure, it will get them to the Moon and beyond much more cheaply and efficiently, but since when were NASA about space exploration?
NASA are considering cloning the Energia: it's called Magnum.
Why they don't just use Energia itself I don't know... probably politics.
Ariane rockets are run by Arianespace, technically a private organisation, though its main shareholders are various European governments, mainly the French. ESA is a separate organisation, and if the Russians or Americans can launch their payloads more cheaply than Arianespace then there's no reason why ESA shouldn't go with them.
Actually, yes, they did. The basic Mariner design was modified and reused for many of NASA's planetary missions; ESA's reuse of the Express design for Mars and Venus is certainly nothing new.
I wish the Beagle 2 in particular the very best of luck. Britain has never really pulled its weight in ESA, leaving France, Germany and Italy to pay for most things; a successful Mars lander bearing the Union flag could well change all that. Mars Express as a whole was done on a small budget, and Beagle was hacked together from the money that could be found down the back of the national sofa; if they succeed, imagine what could be achieved with some _real_ money...
Now that was really, _really_ low...
If Microsoft take over Google and start abusing its power, then they'll inevitably destroy the very reason we use it. They'd MSNalise it, put crappy and intrusive ads all over the place, and start taking money to rig search results. Its usage would collapse in a nanosecond...
Most people tend to pick somewhere like Panama for their flags of convenience. Liberia's popular too, as are a variety of island states.
The original owner of this carrier is currently starting work on two really _big_ carriers as part of a scheme to switch from a military geared to fight World War 3 on the Rhine to a highly mobile force capable of dropping in on people at short notice and spoiling their day. Consequently, three Falklands-vintage carriers will soon be on the market for any dictator on good enough terms with London... So if anyone's planning to buy this carrier, do remember that in a couple of years your neighbour could be planning to buy a whole fleet ;-)
The main problem is that oxygen is an extreme fire hazard. If your installation goes wrong, your home could find its atmosphere enriched in oxygen, and then it wouldn't take much to set the place ablaze.
Good point... remember, everyone, the price of shares may go up as well as down!
Suppose I notice that anyone appearing on FuckedCompany is likely to drop in share price shortly afterwards; suppose, then, that I short-sell anything that appears there, and I make money doing this. Illegal conspiracy, or legitimate business? Fine, surely... I'm just reading the news and making decisions based on that, like everyone else.
Now suppose that I tell others about this easy-money method, and many people start copying me. Is it now a conspiracy? Or have I just pointed people to a news site that's a good indicator of business trends? Still fine, I would think, though I may be wrong.
Suppose now that enough people start shorting based on FuckedCompany that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Conspiracy yet? Well, perhaps we're getting into some trouble.
Now suppose someone at FC notices what I'm up to, and decides to get in on the action themselves. They first sell a lot of stock in a successful company, then post it to their site so that the mob can cut it to pieces. That one, I think, would surely be going too far.
IANAL, and I know exactly bugger all about stock market regulations, but I would guess that it would all be legal until someone tried to abuse it. So that last scenario would certainly be a fraud. But in the SCO case, well, we've all seen their position - they're a company that's fucked so hard they'll have to get a Christmas Island domain name.
It is an interesting thought, though. The Slashdot Effect has blasted countless servers off the net over the years, and AFAIK so far there have been no legal consequences, even though it's a bigger DDOS than most script kiddies could ever hope to muster. We've seen what happened when the Slashdot Effect turned on Ralsky. And so when I saw a few posts concerning the direction of SCO's share price recently, the idea was obvious... is this the first stockmarket slashdotting? What responsibilities does, say, CmdrTaco have to restrain this? Could the Slashdot effect actually bankrupt people?
Personally I doubt it... most Slashdotters are happy enough to click away at links and incidentally melt someone's server, and many will subscribe a spammer to a mailing list with unholy joy, but the majority probably don't play quite so lightly with the markets. Now, if someone posted a 'Click Here to Short-Sell SCO' link in the article, _that_ might well be illegal...
I seem to remember hearing that the high-tech bubble was partly driven by online daytraders and the BBS rumour mills... 'buy this', 'buy that', they say on the chatrooms, and *clickety-click* it comes true. It might not be a good idea to spark a bear-market mirror image of that ;-)
One more thought: let's assume that my original post sparks a Slashdot-wide attack on SCO's share price, it is found to be illegal, and a warrant is put out for my arrest. Three people modded that up - are they equally guilty? Personally, I'm not trading anything, I've made no profit but karma. But suppose someone shorted SCO and then modded up my message - fraud?
1) nmap - locate machine
2) sshnuke - exploit buggy ssh daemon
3) login and shutdown - save Neo's arse
I think the nmapping had already been done, but Trinity used the sshnuke program and then shut down the machine.
You'd think the Agents would have patched their server, really...
With all these posts charting the decline and fall of SCO... I wonder how many slashdotters are short-selling their stock? They're doomed, we all know it, there's profit to be had... Now that would be the most devastating /.ing ever. Have we ever slashdotted someone's share price before?
Any word yet on whether or not they'll have representatives aboard the probe to setup an appropriate IP embargo and become the sole distribution channel of Earth's music and movies to a whole new captive audience?
Hint: I know it's an unmanned probe - it's a joke...
Or so you thought. In fact the Beagle 2 is carrying a Blur music track and a Damien Hirst spot painting: one for testing the communications link home and the other for calibrating the cameras. All good publicity, of course, and that's vital to a mission that had to scrape around the country to try to raise its money. But it does mean that they have to send along some lawyers to make sure that, if they DO discover life, it doesn't try to pirate the valuable intellectual property aboard the probe.
Q: will it be a violation of EMI's copyright for anyone other than ESA to listen in to the transmissions from Mars during the Beagle mission?
I have a TV tuner card, and it is great. However, in the UK multichannel TV is mostly done via digital transmissions, either terrestrial or by satellite; cable has never really taken off. That means having a set-top box on my PC, and that's just deeply wrong (and I think they require a SCART connection anyway).
I'm very tempted by Hauppage's WinTV Nova digital TV card. Expensive, though...