Uh, between the batteries you'll need to keep the GPS running any great length of time while out and about, and the electrical cord plugged into the wall
when you're not, it'll be like wearing a ball
and chain, eh?
(Or have GPS receivers gotten vastly more thrifty since the last time I looked?)
Interesting. That page to which you linked says that impact speed will always be at least 11.2km/sec if you try to give it a lower number than that.
I couldn't find anywhere the speed of 2004 FH at it's nearest approach.
A web page said it will take 31 hours to pass completely cross the moon's orbital path. Moon orbits at 384,000km radius, I think. Simple math for that yields 6.9 km/sec, I think. So, that's a rough lower bound. (2004 FH might not travel a full moon diameter. On the other hand, as it falls toward earth, it speeds up, then slows down as it leaves. The 6.9 km/sec is obviously an average across moon's orbit.) So, at what erm tangential speed will it pass, and if we'd moved it over the needed 4 earth diameters, how fast would it be moving then at impact? (I.e., what number should I plug into that web page?) The remaining variable is the composition of the asteroid. Wooo, maybe it's made or iron!
Although we can be reasonably well-assured that the computers were state-of-the-art at the time
Actually, the one computer that I thought I recognized in the video was an Apple II. That would have hardly been "state-of-the-art" by 1984, though probably it was appropriate technology (i.e. rugged, cheap, well-understood).
According to The Inquirer, in a strange
move, IBM has patented a method for paying open source volunteers.
My lawyers will be contacting you shortly regarding your use of the term "volunteers" to refer to people who are paid. I've already applied for the patent on that extension of the normal meaning of "volunteer".
Look at how new those valleys look! Virtually free of craters. I suppose that determines their age, within some bounds, to some probability.
And eventually, we'll find out if the flat bottoms of the valleys are indeed accumulated dust/talus, or ? I notice that the wallpaper colors them rather whitish, as if they were icy. Is this just wishful thinking on the part of the wallpaper renderer?
It has to start somewhere, and here comes the best thing to help that along, and all you can do is bitch
Okay, no bitching, just constructive criticism:
If it is going to start at all, this type of "vision" thing should start at the beginning of a president's term, preferably during his inaugural speech, rather than shortly before an election.
If it is going to start at all, it will need money. The increase in funding should actually be enough to overcome the influence of inflation and the weakening dollar.
If it is going to start at all, since it is proposed to be a manned space mission, its funding should not be obtained by the scrapping of our only man-rated space vehicle, followed by a deliberately scheduled four year gap before our next man-rated space vehicle might perhaps be available.
If the ultimate goal is a mission to Mars, then the International Space Station, and/or whatever space station replaces it, is in a better position than the moon for a staging area to launch the mission, with respect to gravity wells and launch costs. (Please do us all a favor and do not reply saying that we will have spaceship factories on the moon.)
Ah, you understood my point. What I was replying to purported to be a description (cf. the subject "What carnivore does"). Instead, the text was much more interested in saying "The FBI is perfectly justified in doing this Carnivore thing". So, you should ask yourself, why did the author of those words go to the trouble, in three separate ways, of self-justifying the existence and use of Carnivore? Really, think about it.
You also seem to have missed my point that it is not the FBI who is empowered to decide if Carnivore follows the search and seizure rules laid out by the laws, courts, and Constitution. The FBI may try (or not) to follow these rules. It may say that it is following these rules. It may believe that it is following these rules. But it does not get to decide that it has followed these rules. Has Carnivore been subjected to Supreme Court scrutiny yet?
I understand how a web bug would work, if indeed that was how the information was obtained in this case; you needn't explain that to me.
Finally, I think you misunderstand how this Carnivore thing likely works. I really don't think it's a box that gets installed on the special occasion of a approval of a "wiretap". I think it is multiple taps, permanently installed in multiple locations, whose configuration is changed to glean and retain or not information as desired/ordered. (I could be mistaken.) If in fact Carnivore works this way, able to listen to many things not ordered by a court but perhaps only saving what pops out of its configurable filter, it is rather different than a wire tap, and so should not automatically be assumed (by you, or by the FBI) to be in the same category with respect to law and the Constitution.
Boy, the spin doctors at the FBI sure worked hard on that blurb on Carnivore!
Carnivore is [...], which the FBI has developed to [...] lawfully conduct electronic surveillance[...]. [..] It enables the FBI, in compliance with the Constitution and the Federal electronic surveillance laws, to properly conduct [...]
Interesting that in the description of Carnivore, they spend so much time telling us that they aren't breaking the law, nor trashing the Constitution. And it's so NICE to hear that THEY have figured out for us that it's all legit. Funny, I thought it was the job of the COURTS to decide what was lawful, what is in compliance with the Constitution, and ultimately how to properly proper conduct surveillance. But no, we've apparently left that up to the FBI and its developers.
My coworker could end up paying for two phones indeffinately.
Obviously, the ability for the old company to keep feeding at the trough is what allows the problem to continue.
The old phone company should be eating all the costs incurred on your coworker's old phone, on the unported number. Until it completes its part of the change, it doesn't get its phone back. It doesn't get to charge for calls to/from that phone. It doesn't get to charge for squat 24 hours (or whatever short time) after the change request is filed.
Heck, maybe after a short amount of time (another 24 hours), the old phone company should be required to start paying your coworker a daily lease payment ($1? $2? $5?) for holding the phone number hostage. Then let the old company take all the time they want.
Of course, the inevitable finger pointing. Maybe the new phone company doesn't get to charge your coworker either, if the old company alleges (in writing) that the fault lies with the new company?
I have read most of the top-rated posts, and none of them have bothered to mention that in your car, there typically is a master brake cylinder behind the pedal, and a slave cylinder at each wheel. (I'm unsure if this nomenclature holds for power and power-assist brakes.) And for cars with manual transmission, there can be a similar arrangement for the clutch. Maybe this naming is for other uses of hydraulics?
So, all the stores selling auto parts, repairing autos, selling repair manuals, etc., should change their inventory software, parts catalogs, repair catalogs,...?
Yes, I also did the mental calculation to convert the "NEW, IMPROVED, 10X AS FAST!" to the rather modest speed of 5mph. (Er, that roaring top speed is about 8kph for the rest of the world.)
But, compared to the speed of ocean currents, it makes all the difference in the world. I think the Gulf Stream is only 4mph. At 1/2 mph, your glider needs to take care to avoid being plankton. At 5 mph, care is good, but you can get headlong into a modest current if you feel the need.
And to think that all these years they've been trying to use silver iodide to influence the weather, when they should have been using high-energy protons! Who knew?
Anyhow, great to hear you've got a clear view of the sky. Uh, you did remember to wear your ray-bans when you were outside looking up, didn't you?
"In time, 64-bit PCs could change the face of desktop computing. A 64-bit chip can run longer, more complex instructions than a 32-bit one, improving performance of data-intensive tasks such as audio and video encoding, advanced engineering design apps, and, naturally, games."
How delightful that PCWorld has chosen to make things nice and easy to read for any small children who might happen to accidentally read this article! It's a pity that actual facts and content had to be discarded to make this possible.
The instructions run by 64-bit processors are for the most part identical to those run by 32-bit processors.
It makes no sense.
Why would the COO of Symantec want there to be fewer viruses, fewer virus writers, etc.? As a good capitalist, why wouldn't he want his market to increase? Why wouldn't he want the demand for his product to increase?
My conclusion is that he's just posturing. Responsible legislators should ignore him.
I hope they do.
Yeah, the "more than 50%" and "almost 100%" claims of efficiency reek of fish. I think they used some kind of marketroid math to come up with these. Take a solar cell, put it outside at high noon. Let's say you get 10 watts out of it. Let's say it's a 25% efficient chip, so we could have gotten 40 watts if only somebody could build a 100% efficient photovoltaic.
Here is what I think they did to come up with ">50%" and "~100%". Take the same cell, put it behind a Fresnel lens with the chip at the focus. Put that assembly behind an office window. The lens focuses the meager transmitted light from a.25 square meter onto the chip, and the chip emits 40 watts of power. Poof, we declare it to be 100% efficient, never mind that the collection area is not some small number of square millimeters, but rather 250000 mm^2.
So, under this scheme, % efficiencies of the chip become meaningless, and we have to instead talk about the efficiency of the system, cost of the system, Return On Investment of the whole. And these are squishier numbers, and more mind-numbing, and easier to fudge.
Putting a cheap Fresnel in front of an expensive chip _is_ interesting. You can use refraction to separate the concentrated light by color; your chip probably only cares about a small range of the rainbow, and blasting it with concentrated sunlight from colors that it doesn't convert probably just shortens its life. So sending that light somewhere else is good. (A Japanese company was making very expensive systems that did something like this, but instead of sending the color-filtered light to a photovoltaic, they sent it through a light pipe into your home/office/etc. They were interested in discarding ultraviolet and/or infrared. Don't know if they're still in business - they seemed very "boutique".)
"Overhyped laptop fuel cells"? That is right on the money. The first market for small fuel cells is not in laptop computers. There are too many places where you can plug in a laptop to (a) avoid using the batteries and (b) recharge your batteries. People will be willing to stop by Computers-R-Us to pick up another 10-pack of methanol capsules, when instead they can just plug in just about anywhere? No way.
I predict that the first and best market for small fuel cells, and where the technology will incubate until it is ready to spread wider, is in hand tools for construction workers (e.g. house framers). They already use tools that chew through multiple battery packs in a workday. They also already have tools (nailers) that are both battery powered and have small fuel tanks that are used to generate small explosions. They are ready and willing to deal with fuel cells that might be noisy, hot, smelly, and perhaps even slightly dangerous. I'm sure they would welcome a tool that chewed through cheapy single-use methanol tanks, rather than having to carefully rotate through an assortment of battery packs every day, sometimes at a site without electrical service.
While I agree with your distaste for obvious patents of such rather ostensibly obvious techniques, the problems is that Microsoft seems to have done the completely wrong thing.
They should have used their army of lawyers and their enormous piles of money to attack the patents. Or used their enormous piles of money to purchase enough senators to get patent law or policy changed.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, between the batteries you'll need to keep the GPS running any great length of time while out and about, and the electrical cord plugged into the wall when you're not, it'll be like wearing a ball and chain, eh? (Or have GPS receivers gotten vastly more thrifty since the last time I looked?)
Or maybe here..., without so much punctuation and spaces: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimed ia/pia07229.html
Here's an explanation of what descent pictures will be taken: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimed ia/pia07229.html/
Interesting.
That page to which you linked says that impact speed will always be at least 11.2km/sec if you try to give it a lower number than that.
I couldn't find anywhere the speed of 2004 FH at it's nearest approach.
A web page said it will take 31 hours to pass completely cross the moon's orbital path. Moon orbits at 384,000km radius, I think. Simple math for that yields 6.9 km/sec, I think. So, that's a rough lower bound. (2004 FH might not travel a full moon diameter. On the other hand, as it falls toward earth, it speeds up, then slows down as it leaves. The 6.9 km/sec is obviously an average across moon's orbit.) So, at what erm tangential speed will it pass, and if we'd moved it over the needed 4 earth diameters, how fast would it be moving then at impact? (I.e., what number should I plug into that web page?)
The remaining variable is the composition of the asteroid. Wooo, maybe it's made or iron!
Eh, it's probably on par with tobacco and alcohol.
It's the cord from a telephone handset.
Now why didn't they think of that decades ago?
Oh, wait, they did.
Nevermind.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It's FLAT. So maybe they've reinvented ramen noodles?
Actually, the one computer that I thought I recognized in the video was an Apple II. That would have hardly been "state-of-the-art" by 1984, though probably it was appropriate technology (i.e. rugged, cheap, well-understood).
My lawyers will be contacting you shortly regarding your use of the term "volunteers" to refer to people who are paid. I've already applied for the patent on that extension of the normal meaning of "volunteer".
Look at how new those valleys look!
Virtually free of craters.
I suppose that determines their age, within some bounds, to some probability.
And eventually, we'll find out if the flat bottoms of the valleys are indeed accumulated dust/talus, or ? I notice that the wallpaper colors them rather whitish, as if they were icy. Is this just wishful thinking on the part of the wallpaper renderer?
Okay, no bitching, just constructive criticism:
If it is going to start at all, this type of "vision" thing should start at the beginning of a president's term, preferably during his inaugural speech, rather than shortly before an election.
If it is going to start at all, it will need money. The increase in funding should actually be enough to overcome the influence of inflation and the weakening dollar.
If it is going to start at all, since it is proposed to be a manned space mission, its funding should not be obtained by the scrapping of our only man-rated space vehicle, followed by a deliberately scheduled four year gap before our next man-rated space vehicle might perhaps be available.
If the ultimate goal is a mission to Mars, then the International Space Station, and/or whatever space station replaces it, is in a better position than the moon for a staging area to launch the mission, with respect to gravity wells and launch costs. (Please do us all a favor and do not reply saying that we will have spaceship factories on the moon.)
Ah, you understood my point. What I was replying to purported to be a description (cf. the subject "What carnivore does"). Instead, the text was much more interested in saying "The FBI is perfectly justified in doing this Carnivore thing". So, you should ask yourself, why did the author of those words go to the trouble, in three separate ways, of self-justifying the existence and use of Carnivore? Really, think about it.
You also seem to have missed my point that it is not the FBI who is empowered to decide if Carnivore follows the search and seizure rules laid out by the laws, courts, and Constitution. The FBI may try (or not) to follow these rules. It may say that it is following these rules. It may believe that it is following these rules. But it does not get to decide that it has followed these rules. Has Carnivore been subjected to Supreme Court scrutiny yet?
I understand how a web bug would work, if indeed that was how the information was obtained in this case; you needn't explain that to me.
Finally, I think you misunderstand how this Carnivore thing likely works. I really don't think it's a box that gets installed on the special occasion of a approval of a "wiretap". I think it is multiple taps, permanently installed in multiple locations, whose configuration is changed to glean and retain or not information as desired/ordered. (I could be mistaken.) If in fact Carnivore works this way, able to listen to many things not ordered by a court but perhaps only saving what pops out of its configurable filter, it is rather different than a wire tap, and so should not automatically be assumed (by you, or by the FBI) to be in the same category with respect to law and the Constitution.
Carnivore is [...], which the FBI has developed to [...] lawfully conduct electronic surveillance[...]. [..] It enables the FBI, in compliance with the Constitution and the Federal electronic surveillance laws, to properly conduct [...]
Interesting that in the description of Carnivore, they spend so much time telling us that they aren't breaking the law, nor trashing the Constitution. And it's so NICE to hear that THEY have figured out for us that it's all legit. Funny, I thought it was the job of the COURTS to decide what was lawful, what is in compliance with the Constitution, and ultimately how to properly proper conduct surveillance. But no, we've apparently left that up to the FBI and its developers.
* One headphone cord is red, the other black. :-)
(with an alligator clip at the end of each, ouch!)
Obviously, the ability for the old company to keep feeding at the trough is what allows the problem to continue. The old phone company should be eating all the costs incurred on your coworker's old phone, on the unported number. Until it completes its part of the change, it doesn't get its phone back. It doesn't get to charge for calls to/from that phone. It doesn't get to charge for squat 24 hours (or whatever short time) after the change request is filed.
Heck, maybe after a short amount of time (another 24 hours), the old phone company should be required to start paying your coworker a daily lease payment ($1? $2? $5?) for holding the phone number hostage. Then let the old company take all the time they want.
Of course, the inevitable finger pointing. Maybe the new phone company doesn't get to charge your coworker either, if the old company alleges (in writing) that the fault lies with the new company?
I have read most of the top-rated posts, and none of them have bothered to mention that in your car, there typically is a master brake cylinder behind the pedal, and a slave cylinder at each wheel. (I'm unsure if this nomenclature holds for power and power-assist brakes.) And for cars with manual transmission, there can be a similar arrangement for the clutch. Maybe this naming is for other uses of hydraulics?
...?
So, all the stores selling auto parts, repairing autos, selling repair manuals, etc., should change their inventory software, parts catalogs, repair catalogs,
Riiiigght.
Yes, I also did the mental calculation to convert the "NEW, IMPROVED, 10X AS FAST!" to the rather modest speed of 5mph. (Er, that roaring top speed is about 8kph for the rest of the world.)
But, compared to the speed of ocean currents, it makes all the difference in the world. I think the Gulf Stream is only 4mph. At 1/2 mph, your glider needs to take care to avoid being plankton. At 5 mph, care is good, but you can get headlong into a modest current if you feel the need.
And to think that all these years they've been trying to use silver iodide to influence the weather, when they should have been using high-energy protons! Who knew?
Anyhow, great to hear you've got a clear view of the sky. Uh, you did remember to wear your ray-bans when you were outside looking up, didn't you?
How delightful that PCWorld has chosen to make things nice and easy to read for any small children who might happen to accidentally read this article! It's a pity that actual facts and content had to be discarded to make this possible.
The instructions run by 64-bit processors are for the most part identical to those run by 32-bit processors.
Hmmm, sounds like he should have left that cellphone in his other pants...
Sharks with fricken lasers would be more high-tech.
My conclusion is that he's just posturing. Responsible legislators should ignore him. I hope they do.
Here is what I think they did to come up with ">50%" and "~100%". Take the same cell, put it behind a Fresnel lens with the chip at the focus. Put that assembly behind an office window. The lens focuses the meager transmitted light from a .25 square meter onto the chip, and the chip emits 40 watts of power. Poof, we declare it to be 100% efficient, never mind that the collection area is not some small number of square millimeters, but rather 250000 mm^2.
So, under this scheme, % efficiencies of the chip become meaningless, and we have to instead talk about the efficiency of the system, cost of the system, Return On Investment of the whole. And these are squishier numbers, and more mind-numbing, and easier to fudge.
Putting a cheap Fresnel in front of an expensive chip _is_ interesting. You can use refraction to separate the concentrated light by color; your chip probably only cares about a small range of the rainbow, and blasting it with concentrated sunlight from colors that it doesn't convert probably just shortens its life. So sending that light somewhere else is good. (A Japanese company was making very expensive systems that did something like this, but instead of sending the color-filtered light to a photovoltaic, they sent it through a light pipe into your home/office/etc. They were interested in discarding ultraviolet and/or infrared. Don't know if they're still in business - they seemed very "boutique".)
I predict that the first and best market for small fuel cells, and where the technology will incubate until it is ready to spread wider, is in hand tools for construction workers (e.g. house framers). They already use tools that chew through multiple battery packs in a workday. They also already have tools (nailers) that are both battery powered and have small fuel tanks that are used to generate small explosions. They are ready and willing to deal with fuel cells that might be noisy, hot, smelly, and perhaps even slightly dangerous. I'm sure they would welcome a tool that chewed through cheapy single-use methanol tanks, rather than having to carefully rotate through an assortment of battery packs every day, sometimes at a site without electrical service.
They should have used their army of lawyers and their enormous piles of money to attack the patents. Or used their enormous piles of money to purchase enough senators to get patent law or policy changed.
Instead, look where they are now...
Red Hat's lawyers have said "Prove it, fart-butt!".