I remember their press-releases at the time... They were deploying these things to large commercial users first (US Post Office, warehouses, etc.) because it gave them a more controlled environment in which to test and tweak. I'm glad they didn't just start cranking them out by the thousands and selling them at Walmart.
(Manned) space travel and exploration has not followed anything even close to moore's law.
So what. Neither has agriculture, medicine, the automotive industry, fast-food production, or just about anything but microelectronics.
If you want manned spacecraft to become half the size and twice the speed every 18 months then start building humans that shrink in size and mass at the same rate.
We're doing far more exploits into "space" now than we were in the 60's. Many of them are unmanned, because we can build inter-planetary spacecraft that can operate almost by themselves. We sent humans to the moon, rather than just limiting the trips to unmanned ships, for political reasons as much as scientific reasons. Want to send humans back to the moon? Start writing your congressman.
Telemetry data was probably recorded for the most part onto magnetic tape as it was received. Any part that was even remotely usefull has long since been transcribed to good old-fashioned paper. As for the blueprints, schematics & source code needed to build the spacecraft, they're slumbering peacefully at Johnson Space Center on microfilm. Plain, still useable for 100's of years, microfilm. Don't forget, these beasts weren't created with Autocad and then stored on some fruity floppy disk. They were design by men; manly men; on paper, the kind made from real trees, with T squares and triangles and circle templates and 2H graphite pencils.
Besides, if they wanted to go to the moon again, the last thing they would want to do is rebuild another Saturn V using the original plans. Do you really think the companies provided the various solenoids & valves & muffler bearings are still in business?
The saddest thing of all is that if NASA had the money and motivation to return to the moon, I doubt we'd be able to do it before 2015, since most of the engineers that worked on the Apollo missions have long since retired or died. I'm pretty young myself (24), and I don't mind saying that without the requisite experience base, all the technology we throw at the problem is utterly USELESS.
Huh?? Do you think that everything we learned about space travel was just locked up inside the brains of all those engineers and never written down? Or, do you think that since the Saturn V rocket was physically the biggest one ever made that it must have been the most advanced one as well? The knowledge learned from previous missions doesn't just get ignored. We have a far greater "experience base" now then we did right after the Apollo program ended. How do you think we went on to create stuff like the Space Shuttle, Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars Rover, etc., etc.
Even though our more recent space missions did not send men to the moon, they are still far more technically advanced then Apollo ever was.
If I remember correctly, the Internal Revenue Service was one of the first really big adopters of Adobe PDF. Since pretty much 100% of all USA folks are loyal customers of the IRS, and government agencies aren't known for changing anything very quickly, I don't think PDF is going away any time soon.
OK, maybe there were some glitches with electronic betting. No big deal, it's only gambling on horses.
Fortunately, such a thing could never happen with electronic voting machines.
Does that mean I can sue everyone out there that has the NIMBDA virus? After all, they're all illegally attempting to hack into my computer by trying to access/scripts/..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe, even though I never provided a link to that page.
First computer I actually laid my hands on? A DEC PDP-8, precursor to the more famous PDP-11. The PDP-8 was a 12-bit machine (forget hexadecimal, we're talking octal here.) After powering it up you had to hand enter your code using a row of 12 toggle switches on the front panel, entering one word at a time. The current memory contents were read out with a corresponding row of 12 light bulbs, any 1 or 2 of which were burnt out at any given time (LEDs?, not invented yet.) Had to keep the lab windows open, even in the winter time, to keep the beast from crashing.
First Computer I actually owned? A 1MHz 8080, wire-wrapped by hand on an S100 board in my last year of college (Z80's were stilly pretty pricey at that time.) 1Kbyte EPROM, just barely enough to hold a simple monitor program to be able to connect to the remote terminal. 1Kbyte RAM, using 8 2102 static RAM chips (1000 *bits* each). Your entire application had to fit into that 1Kbyte space. The "remote terminal" was a ASR33 teletype (no electronics, entirely mechanical), running at 110 baud through a current loop interface (RS-232 was just too new-fangled.) Later we started doing code development with a real Intel in-circuit emulator that had an actual CRT terminal and a 8-inch floppy drive to store your code.
My first PC wasn't until 1986. An 8MHz 8086, complete with a 20MByte hard drive, 25x80 character VGA display, and an Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer. I think I was running DOS 3.0 at the time, spending most of my time playing Infocom games.
I also had to walk to school through the snow, up hill both ways.
I've never found a site that doesn't work with Mozilla. I'm a Mozilla convert now, and I find that maybe 1% of all web sites have a noticable problem with Mozilla and not with IE. However, I am more than happy to just send a nice email to their webmaster stating my concerns, rather than switching back to IE AND THOSE G*D-D*MN POPUPS.
Ahh, but there really are canals on Venus, along with landing strips, power plants, and anything else that this kookwas able to imagine in a bunch of really bad JPG images.
Is that, with CCD jamming in place, the best way to pirate the on screen movie will be via a 16mm analogue film camera and then teleciné to digital back at base! So you're going to sneak a 16mm film camera and 2 hours worth of magazines & batteries into the theatre? Maybe if your buddy works in the projection booth you could set it up on a tripod for decent framing and record audio directly from their sound system. Of course changing magazines would be tough, since the movie doesn't stop and wait for you. Then, after lab costs($$), you run it all back through telecine ($$) to get a perfect digital clone of a shitty 16mm copy. Somehow I don't see this technique as being much of a threat.
Here in California we vote using punch cards. There are some problems with this system, from people punching more than one hole for a particular office to the famous hanging chads.
What makes this system hard to beat is its inherent security, anonymity, and accountability.
If I'm really concerned about the ballots getting corrupted at my local polling place, I'm free to spend the entire day there if I wish to do so. I can plant myself on a chair near the ballot box, making sure that the polling place workers put each completed ballot into the box, and I can keep an eye on the box to make sure that nothing happens to it before it gets counted. I can also alert the people in charge if I see that crazy neighbor of mine trying to vote more than once, since each voter must physically be present to vote. [Security].
Each punch card is the same, so there is no possible way to trace a vote back to a particular voter [Anonymity].
Even though the cards are counted by machine, they are still physical records that can be recounted at a later time, by either a machine or by human beings (if I don't trust the machine)[Accountability].
I realize that few people would make the effort to spend their day making sure their ballot was counted, but I take confort in the fact that I could if I so wanted. All these features are received at minimal cost to the county (who has to pay for whatever voting process is used), is simple to understand by both the voters and the polling place workers, and is flexible to accomodate even California's goofy elections.
I fear the day when our elections are controlled by a corporation that has a vested interest in the outcome (which they always do), with no means for me to verify that they didn't cheat(which they also always do.)
Yeah, these laws are universal, except for the special case in which a coil is wound in just the right manner using just the perfect alloy of copper combined with the a Dynamic Flux Vector using Inverse Isobars(tm). This self-taught inventor from Tennessee, with a stock car driver providing celebrity endorsements, is the only one who truly grasps the concept. The rest of us are just too steeped in dogma from all those years of being brainwashed by the Secret World Order, but soon it will be possible to reveal the secret and save Humanity. They can't reveal the secret just yet, of course, so keep sending him money. It will be ready, he promises, any day now.
Tesla did some interesting work, but he never "sucked power out of the environment" without spending far more energy than he ever got back. The reason we Nerds poo-poo these stories is simply because they defy the laws of thermodynamics. This inventor shows all the usual symptoms of a perpetual-energy kook:
"The Government/Big Oil/Big Auto knows that this really works, but they're trying to suppress it."
They create mumbo-jumbo terms like "electromagnetic vacuum", that sound plausible to the average sucker investor that never bothered to take a high-school physics class, but are nothing but a bunch of crap.
They're constantly stalling, while promising that their invention will be ready after "just a few more tweaks."
When they are asked to demonstrate it under controlled conditions, they'll always come up with a story about "bad vibes from all these skeptics", or in this case "we've just got some bearing problems."
Anyone that invests in this company deserves to lose every penny they own.
You obviously didn't look at the pictures that showed what was involved in just getting to the bearings to inspect them. This isn;t something that can be found by just walking around your grandpa's tractor with a grease gun.
Their web site also has a bunch of reports about cattle mutilations, complete with pretty questionable eyewitness reports.
This alone puts them well into the Kook zone.
I'll second that. An addition to our family web site, I also host picture sites for our kid's Little League team, Boy Scout troops, etc. It's all running on my home machine using Gallery, Sambar web server and a cable modem. I liked the program enough to actually make a cash donation to its authors. How often do any of us do that?
Adaptability to different input formats was also designed in from the start. The larger DLP projectors can adapt to high definition video in varying color spaces, they can upconvert standard definition video, and they can handle verying frame rates. This allows the future use of a single projector for those local advertisements before the lights dim, the trailers, the feature itself, as well as the occasional pay-per-view boxing match beamed from satellite.
Whether you're seeing Episode II on film or on a DLP projector, it's always 24 frames per second. The image refresh rate, however, can vary. Film projectors have a bladed shutter wheel that exposes each film frame twice, giving a 48fps refresh rate. This allows them to get rid of flicker without having to consume twice as much film. DLP projectors don't have a shutter, so each frame is effectivly shown for the entire 1/24th of a second.
I really wouldn't care if the networks were aware of what I was watching right now. Unfortunately, they wouldn't just leave it at that. My TV viewing history would be stored, possibly sold to third parties, and might eventually come back to bite me in the ass.
"Sorry Mr. Lehmann, but our records show that you watched 'The Spring Break Bikini Babes / Alien Autopsy Special' on Fox back in 1994. We wouldn't want types like you in this organization. Have a nice day"
I could hold a 1 volt 300000 amp power supply's leads all day and not be hurt. The reason is Ohms law.
You won't be electrocuted by the 1 Volt supply. Just don't accidentally drop a wrench across the terminals. Even if you do manage to get your hearing back after the explosion, you'll still have to content with the burns from the flying globs of molten metal, not to mention the effects of the sulfuric acid sprayed throughout the room when the batteries explode.
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I remember their press-releases at the time... They were deploying these things to large commercial users first (US Post Office, warehouses, etc.) because it gave them a more controlled environment in which to test and tweak. I'm glad they didn't just start cranking them out by the thousands and selling them at Walmart.
So what. Neither has agriculture, medicine, the automotive industry, fast-food production, or just about anything but microelectronics.
If you want manned spacecraft to become half the size and twice the speed every 18 months then start building humans that shrink in size and mass at the same rate.
We're doing far more exploits into "space" now than we were in the 60's. Many of them are unmanned, because we can build inter-planetary spacecraft that can operate almost by themselves. We sent humans to the moon, rather than just limiting the trips to unmanned ships, for political reasons as much as scientific reasons.
Want to send humans back to the moon? Start writing your congressman.
Besides, if they wanted to go to the moon again, the last thing they would want to do is rebuild another Saturn V using the original plans. Do you really think the companies provided the various solenoids & valves & muffler bearings are still in business?
These kids today... no sense of history.
Huh?? Do you think that everything we learned about space travel was just locked up inside the brains of all those engineers and never written down? Or, do you think that since the Saturn V rocket was physically the biggest one ever made that it must have been the most advanced one as well? The knowledge learned from previous missions doesn't just get ignored. We have a far greater "experience base" now then we did right after the Apollo program ended. How do you think we went on to create stuff like the Space Shuttle, Galileo, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Mars Rover, etc., etc.
Even though our more recent space missions did not send men to the moon, they are still far more technically advanced then Apollo ever was.
If I remember correctly, the Internal Revenue Service was one of the first really big adopters of Adobe PDF. Since pretty much 100% of all USA folks are loyal customers of the IRS, and government agencies aren't known for changing anything very quickly, I don't think PDF is going away any time soon.
Fortunately, such a thing could never happen with electronic voting machines.
Right?
Does that mean I can sue everyone out there that has the NIMBDA virus? After all, they're all illegally attempting to hack into my computer by trying to access /scripts/..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe, even though I never provided a link to that page.
First Computer I actually owned? A 1MHz 8080, wire-wrapped by hand on an S100 board in my last year of college (Z80's were stilly pretty pricey at that time.) 1Kbyte EPROM, just barely enough to hold a simple monitor program to be able to connect to the remote terminal. 1Kbyte RAM, using 8 2102 static RAM chips (1000 *bits* each). Your entire application had to fit into that 1Kbyte space. The "remote terminal" was a ASR33 teletype (no electronics, entirely mechanical), running at 110 baud through a current loop interface (RS-232 was just too new-fangled.) Later we started doing code development with a real Intel in-circuit emulator that had an actual CRT terminal and a 8-inch floppy drive to store your code.
My first PC wasn't until 1986. An 8MHz 8086, complete with a 20MByte hard drive, 25x80 character VGA display, and an Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer. I think I was running DOS 3.0 at the time, spending most of my time playing Infocom games.
I also had to walk to school through the snow, up hill both ways.
I've never found a site that doesn't work with Mozilla.
I'm a Mozilla convert now, and I find that maybe 1% of all web sites have a noticable problem with Mozilla and not with IE. However, I am more than happy to just send a nice email to their webmaster stating my concerns, rather than switching back to IE AND THOSE G*D-D*MN POPUPS.
Ahh, but there really are canals on Venus, along with landing strips, power plants, and anything else that this kookwas able to imagine in a bunch of really bad JPG images.
Is that, with CCD jamming in place, the best way to pirate the on screen movie will be via a 16mm analogue film camera and then teleciné to digital back at base!
So you're going to sneak a 16mm film camera and 2 hours worth of magazines & batteries into the theatre? Maybe if your buddy works in the projection booth you could set it up on a tripod for decent framing and record audio directly from their sound system. Of course changing magazines would be tough, since the movie doesn't stop and wait for you. Then, after lab costs($$), you run it all back through telecine ($$) to get a perfect digital clone of a shitty 16mm copy. Somehow I don't see this technique as being much of a threat.
What makes this system hard to beat is its inherent security, anonymity, and accountability.
If I'm really concerned about the ballots getting corrupted at my local polling place, I'm free to spend the entire day there if I wish to do so. I can plant myself on a chair near the ballot box, making sure that the polling place workers put each completed ballot into the box, and I can keep an eye on the box to make sure that nothing happens to it before it gets counted. I can also alert the people in charge if I see that crazy neighbor of mine trying to vote more than once, since each voter must physically be present to vote. [Security].
Each punch card is the same, so there is no possible way to trace a vote back to a particular voter [Anonymity].
Even though the cards are counted by machine, they are still physical records that can be recounted at a later time, by either a machine or by human beings (if I don't trust the machine)[Accountability].
I realize that few people would make the effort to spend their day making sure their ballot was counted, but I take confort in the fact that I could if I so wanted. All these features are received at minimal cost to the county (who has to pay for whatever voting process is used), is simple to understand by both the voters and the polling place workers, and is flexible to accomodate even California's goofy elections.
I fear the day when our elections are controlled by a corporation that has a vested interest in the outcome (which they always do), with no means for me to verify that they didn't cheat(which they also always do.)
Yeah, these laws are universal, except for the special case in which a coil is wound in just the right manner using just the perfect alloy of copper combined with the a Dynamic Flux Vector using Inverse Isobars(tm). This self-taught inventor from Tennessee, with a stock car driver providing celebrity endorsements, is the only one who truly grasps the concept. The rest of us are just too steeped in dogma from all those years of being brainwashed by the Secret World Order, but soon it will be possible to reveal the secret and save Humanity. They can't reveal the secret just yet, of course, so keep sending him money. It will be ready, he promises, any day now.
"The Government/Big Oil/Big Auto knows that this really works, but they're trying to suppress it."
They create mumbo-jumbo terms like "electromagnetic vacuum", that sound plausible to the average sucker investor that never bothered to take a high-school physics class, but are nothing but a bunch of crap.
They're constantly stalling, while promising that their invention will be ready after "just a few more tweaks."
When they are asked to demonstrate it under controlled conditions, they'll always come up with a story about "bad vibes from all these skeptics", or in this case "we've just got some bearing problems."
Anyone that invests in this company deserves to lose every penny they own.
You obviously didn't look at the pictures that showed what was involved in just getting to the bearings to inspect them. This isn;t something that can be found by just walking around your grandpa's tractor with a grease gun.
http://www.apollosaturn.com/crawler/crawl.htm
Their web site also has a bunch of reports about cattle mutilations, complete with pretty questionable eyewitness reports. This alone puts them well into the Kook zone.
I'll second that. An addition to our family web site, I also host picture sites for our kid's Little League team, Boy Scout troops, etc. It's all running on my home machine using Gallery, Sambar web server and a cable modem. I liked the program enough to actually make a cash donation to its authors. How often do any of us do that?
Adaptability to different input formats was also designed in from the start. The larger DLP projectors can adapt to high definition video in varying color spaces, they can upconvert standard definition video, and they can handle verying frame rates. This allows the future use of a single projector for those local advertisements before the lights dim, the trailers, the feature itself, as well as the occasional pay-per-view boxing match beamed from satellite.
Whether you're seeing Episode II on film or on a DLP projector, it's always 24 frames per second. The image refresh rate, however, can vary. Film projectors have a bladed shutter wheel that exposes each film frame twice, giving a 48fps refresh rate. This allows them to get rid of flicker without having to consume twice as much film.
DLP projectors don't have a shutter, so each frame is effectivly shown for the entire 1/24th of a second.
I really wouldn't care if the networks were aware of what I was watching right now. Unfortunately, they wouldn't just leave it at that. My TV viewing history would be stored, possibly sold to third parties, and might eventually come back to bite me in the ass. "Sorry Mr. Lehmann, but our records show that you watched 'The Spring Break Bikini Babes / Alien Autopsy Special' on Fox back in 1994. We wouldn't want types like you in this organization. Have a nice day"
You won't be electrocuted by the 1 Volt supply. Just don't accidentally drop a wrench across the terminals. Even if you do manage to get your hearing back after the explosion, you'll still have to content with the burns from the flying globs of molten metal, not to mention the effects of the sulfuric acid sprayed throughout the room when the batteries explode.
It's basically the urine.
This is slightly offtopic, but do you ever wonder why the TV industry doesn't launch an ad campaign against the use of PVR's like the ReplayTV 4000?
Why? Because every viewer that hasn't heard about ReplayTV will think "You mean I can get a box that lets me skip commercials? Where do I sign up?"
Mandatory shutters? (maybe to keep them from decoding the glow of our CRTs.) I shudder just thinking about it.