Since you say "we", I can only assume you haven't been reading the papers? I was referring to the proposals to schedule blackouts days and weeks in advance on the theory that this would be somehow less disruptive than only doing them as actually "needed" (Which is starting to be defined as not only when the distribution infrastructure is overloaded, but also when the price of electricity goes higher than the state wants to pay for it). In other words, less reliable power than, say, Malaysia.
If anyone thinks this wouldn't result in both those prescheduled blackouts plus about as many additional ones as would have occurred anyway, I have a slightly stale CA "deregulation" plan to sell you.
Granted, there has been less talk of those plans, in recent weeks due to mild weather so far - and there is always the chance that the weather will continue to cooperate by being unusually mild - but clearly state officials are notably depending on virtually nothing unexpected happening - it is being assumed climate is going to occur instead of weather, and that citizens will heed frankly moronic pleas to only use air conditioning when the weather isn't hot enough to require it.
Meanwhile, our state governor is doing his best to prevent enough energy being available by trying to force the federal government to put price controls on electricity, ala President Jimmy Carter's debacle that nearly forced gas rationing, and the state's powerful environmental wacko lobby is gearing up to enforce their BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) ideas to prevent as much new generating capacity from being built as they can manage.
As for your "seceding" troll - it could be nothing else - you seem to be forgetting the large quantity of energy CA is leeching off the rest of the United States. Sure, the Peoples Republic of California might be able to build some tanks - but they aren't going to get very far trying to take over the energy supplies in Mexico and the states to the north they'll need with the Sierra Club telling the tank engines to run on "conservation". Expect everyone in the new "country" will pull together and share resources? Maybe you should rent and watch the movie "Chinatown". While your TV still works.
Isn't the anticipated switch to an "electricity for part of the day" third-world infrastructure (and the contention by the idea's promoters that this would be a good thing!), and the discovery of the populace there that they can vote themselves subsidized electricity out of the state budget, evidence enough?
Sigh, Yes, this is redundant, and I have no objection to it being marked down here - I accidently reposted the same stuff twice, rather than what I wanted to reply here.
Hazard of editing in a different window and then pasting. After too many hours and no sleep.
I fear that with all the - admittedly necessary - concentration on privacy about information that really does matter, credit card numbers, and other personal info, the kneejerk reaction against virtually any information being provided from the client end other than a URL - and probably some think a server knowing what IP asked for that is too much -is going to utterly cripple and prohibit what otherwise could be great advances in internet functionality. Near panic results from gathering information that reveals only things much less important than which URL was used by what IP - yes, this includes what Doubleclick gathers, all of it as far as I can tell. Just witness complaints about such basic functionality as being able to display image content from another site, and attempts to disable it - Duh! This is what the WWW was invented to do!
A server has to collect "doubleclick-like" information if it is to, for example, learn how it can sort out which, of a gazillion possible pages that "sort of match" a nonexpert user's request, are really the important ones for that user. Or other users that could use the automatic rating info, donating theirs in return.
I can just imagine the FUD that would be spread if a WWW client sent info back to a server like "Mouse was moved over and things selected on this page such and such an amount, page was in focus X seconds, the screen is at so big a size and Y percent full" et cetra, to help a user get what they are looking for. Again even though this reveals less than what the URL does in the first place - and yet would be invaluable to sift the gems of content from the mass of data out on the internet.
It just can't all be done effectively on the client, or without aggregating the metadata about internet use by many users - the FUD speculation about what mysterious info can somehow be inferred by DoubleClick, and others, goes beyond the stupidity of saying a heart attack victim shouldn't be driven to the hospital because of the danger of an auto accident on the way - to something closer to using as an excuse the fear that the cellphone in a momentarily passing car might risk giving the dying victim brain cancer many yearslater.
On a little different note - why, now, can't you simply select not just one of Microsoft's new "smart tags", but any word or content on a page and with a mouse button selection be able to say "search for stuff like this"? Is it just because it would cause asinine complaints from web page authors (fearing their own page's relative uselessness) that this this violated their copyright by letting someone use the page for what the author rather than the user wanted it used for (and who wanted to pretend this is different than letting someone copy those words and manually enter them into a search engine)?
Hello! This is not a pyramid scheme, because we say so!
Simply follow these instructions: Duplicate the enclosed genetic material using a polymerase chain reaction. Incubate one copy of the resulting DNA of the PCR reaction for 10 seconds in a in an accelerated artificial womb set to a ratio of 2,371,680:1, then decant. Email the resulting organism (a "human") to the name at the top of the list attached below (using standard MIME matter encoding and transmission protocols.) Delete the email address at the top of the list, and add your own at the bottom. Send as many copies of this letter, along with copies of the PCR-duplicated DNA, to as many of your friends, znarmates, and for that matter complete strangers as you can. By the miracle of geometric progression, in no time at all THOUSANDS of "humans" will come your way. BUT: Don't break the chain! Fribnar-belzapsle of Barnard's Star II broke the chain, and was promptly diced by a malfunctioning frebble. Threequietchimes of Lalande 21185 IX broke the chain and was voted to be that week's consumption member of his local colony group. For that matter, brainnode 0x3f2b9877d of epsilon Eridani VI broke the chain, and their entire planet was promptly turned to grey goo by runaway nanomachines. But I followed the instructions, and in less than 30 kiloseconds I was the proud owner of over 300 extremely musical, fertilizer-producing, delectably-regurgitating young humans! So act now! Here is the list, make sure you add names:
Hello! This is not a pyramid scheme, because we say so!
Simply follow these instructions: Duplicate the enclosed genetic material using a polymerase chain reaction. Incubate one copy of the resulting DNA of the PCR reaction for 10 seconds in a in an accelerated artificial womb set to a ratio of 2,371,680:1, then decant. Email the resulting organism (a "human") to the name at the top of the list attached below (using standard MIME matter encoding and transmission protocols.) Delete the email address at the top of the list, and add your own at the bottom. Send as many copies of this letter, along with copies of the PCR-duplicated DNA, to as many of your friends, znarmates, and for that matter complete strangers as you can. By the miracle of geometric progression, in no time at all THOUSANDS of "humans" will come your way. BUT: Don't break the chain! Fribnar-belzapsle of Barnard's Star II broke the chain, and was promptly diced by a malfunctioning frebble. Threequietchimes of Lalande 21185 IX broke the chain and was voted to be that week's consumption member of his local colony group. For that matter, brainnode 0x3f2b9877d of epsilon Eridani VI broke the chain, and their entire planet was promptly turned to grey goo by runaway nanomachines. But I followed the instructions, and in less than 30 kiloseconds I was the proud owner of over 300 extremely musical, fertilizer-producing, delectably-regurgitating young humans! So act now! Here is the list, make sure you add names:
I can see it... the vote over who the next incarnation of The Doctor is going to be resulting in it being a member of the latest "Spice Girls"-type sensation.
Or one of the TeleTubbies, if the remotes aren't kept out of toddlers' hands.
As implied licenses to used unenclosed lands promoted the settlement of the West, a implied licenses to use computer resources and data stored on computers presumed from an absence of preventative technical measures promotes use of Internet. The article will return to comparing the Internet to the unsettled American West when it considers the application of the metaphor to specific laws.
First, I gather the lawyer involved has never traveled west of the Missisippi River, if he is under the impression that settlement has eliminated open range practices; there is still a considerable area where this applies and is still useful.
Equally he might consider hunting/fishing related common law in much of the USA, which often does not require a sportsman to assume that the mere presence of a fence is meant to prohibit him crossing same; or that in the UK which allows use of private property for casual hikers, indeed prohibits farmers from generally denying access.
Generally I gathered from reading the article that the writer believes invoking the "fence" metaphor would be a valuable way for courts to treat the internet. IMHO this is unsupportable garbage.
Imagine the chaos resulting from the ability of a person to physically fence off his property from that generally open, with a "fence" which was invisible and could cause the invocation of legal sanctions by the mere attempt to detect it - much less cross it - while others allowed and even needed people crossing those fences into their space to maintain their livelihoods. And to arbitrarily invoke those sanctions against specific access by persons left-handed, with long hair (or using nmap, et cetra), with no way for a person to know they were of a forbidden class, and the landowner having no duty to inform them.
This would be a closer analogy to the real dispute over port scanning with nmap and the like, and would cause legal risk for anyone attempting to use any area of the "open range" or those areas which though fenced are not forbidden, or known-fenced areas where their use probably would be accepted, but where it is uncertain.
The fence analogy sucks because in the real world there are only some places and situations where a fence means you are forbidden access, and fences are almost always visible. What exists on on the Internet is more like carefully hidden nets of underground sensors designed to detect intruders but invisible to the naked eye.
Even where fences exist, therefore, there is often a requirement that trespassing only occurs if the owner of a property has posted "no trespassing" signs, or those forbidding certain uses (hunting, for instance) conspicuously enough that a person is indeed informed of what the rules are (and other places with different rules, but the internet is effectively too global to allow such divisions).
Therefore, what I propose is this: an access-allowed checking protocol. A method by which an internet-connected node can, if it wishes, indicate that certain uses are forbidden.
Perhaps a TCP port which can be accessed with no fear of liability which could return data indicating "Ports A, B, and D are meant for public use, but port C is private, don't twiddle with it". Maybe add further info about just what use is allowed beyond that, such as allowing HTTP access for browser use but not by data-mining spiders.
This would place a burden on both the public whose programs would have to check the access first, and the owner of the node who would have to put up the "no trespassing" signs. It would not cure the problem, but would at least allow both sides recourse to something which would allow them to know they are acting legally or which would enforce their desired restrictions
Perhaps there are uses which the assumption would still be "allowed" or "forbidden" despite no check for the "sign" being required or no posting of it needed, but in general with no way to check for or advertise the "fence" one side or the other is going to be screwed.
Doing a port scan of port 80 is minimal intrusion compared to connecting to it and performing a get request. Using the fence analogy, it is like forbidding someone to jump the fence but at the same time allowing them to jump the fence if they wish to use an automobile you generously keep there for public use.
I think (except for the ratio being backwards, brain fart on my part) that you're stating what I was trying to say in clearer terms, and correcting the person I was responding to's assumption that larger size would be a big help.
I was aiming to avoid someone being confused between the effective and real weight (former obviously being around zero when the airship is at neutral bouyancy) when I noted that mass should be used, and trying to make the point with the mouse-size versus elephant-sized balloon comparison that the rationale being offered wouldn't help large airships.
Note I was assuming the envelope's strength was mainly used to enclose the higher partial pressure needed to keep it "rigid" against the wind, engine-enduced forces, and so on rather than to support the weight hanging from it, the every-point-of-a-rope factor becoming every-horizontal-portion-of-a-sheet with the support structure attached.
I don't know the relative numbers, I think it would be related to how much of the blimp was attached to the support structure underneath that lifts the cargo too (a longer sheet of the same material would support more weight of course, if evenly attached along its bottom), but yes, the size advantage looks like it is eaten by needing a thicker envelope.
It also occurs to me on reading your analysis that a larger object would be flatter over a given area, increasing the drag coefficient, but I could be wrong too - my fluid dynamics knowledge is likely less than yours.
The larger the dirigible, the greater the ratio of mass to surface area, the less it should be affected by wind. This is going to be a very, very big dirigible.
You mean "lower the ratio", I think. Square-cube law, sort of?
That would fit better if the interior of the airship were the same density as the rest of it, instead of a much denser skin containing a mass of helium rather less dense than the air surrounding. If you simplify the math to a sphere, the real ratio would be between R^2:R^3 (square-cube) and PiR^2:4PiR^2 (area of a circle:surface area of a sphere), twiddled for drag coefficient and so on - if I'm not mistaken the square-cube law would only apply to the mass (not weight) of the helium enclosed.
Not the difference between the square of the wind velocity exerting force to blow away an elephant or a mouse, but to blow away an elephant-sized balloon versus a mouse-sized balloon.
As long as the airflow is not turbulent, an airship can survive arbitrary large winds by just floating with them. When the airship moves with the same velocity as the wind, the relative velocity is zero. Of course you would not try to *land* in a hurricane.
Not convinced? Well, weather baloons routinely cross the jet stream which has a velocity of more than 200km/h without damage.
Umm, yes. "As long as the airflow is not turbulent". I'm afraid you are kind of making my point for me - lets's see one of these behemoths lumber its way out of one of these.
And your weather balloon analogy is rather weak - the airship would operate considerably closer to the ground, and at far greater stakes than the potential loss of a cheap radiosonde. Floating along with the wind sounds fine as long as there aren't high tension lines in the way, and as long as the idea isn't currently to stay tethered. In which case this would tend to happen.
That the show's producers didn't make him wear a mask (surgically attached perhaps) during the show to prevent him being recruited by another television program.
Although blimps are certainly an attractive idea for unmanned armed forces surveillance balloons, lifting logs out of areas where sustainable lumbering is being done but roads are impractical or undesirable, and other applications where they can be tethered to the ground as well as their cargo, they are notoriously prone to being damaged or destroyed by unforseen winds and weather conditions, or simply thrown out of control and blown away.
There are good reasons why they are not used for passenger or military service otherwise, repeated attempts to use them have resulted in loss of the airships and their crews, for reasons totally unrelated to the Hindenberg - Bringing up their relative nonflammability is largely a straw-man argument in their favor.
Yes, they can be made to work in average weather and winds - but expecting this to keep them safe is about as intelligent as expecting building a seaside house at the same level as the average high tide and expecting it to therefore stay dry - and tides are considerably more predictable than sudden changes in the weather.
Pardon me, but I would greatly prefer these potential juggernauts to stay downwind of wherever I am when loaded down with the buildings, locomotives, et cetra the article envisions - if at all, considering again that the wind direction may change.
When are the going to "lay" it out in three dimensions?
Probably when they develop a 4-dimensional projector that will allow them to project a solid shadow of a 3-D mask into the inside of a block of silicon, and a teleportation device to get the dopant atoms inside.
IBM does a marvellous research work, but maybe their press releases are coming too early, they give us fale hopes.
Depends.
Sometimes IBM manages to get stuff out fairly quickly(like copper interconnects on chips).
OTOH, I think it's been about a decade since I watched on CNN a demo of IBM voice-recognition software that was supposed to eliminate the need for keyboards, and allow you to easily dictate in documents, where synonyms ("to", "too", "2", et cetra) were corrected based on context and so on.
I couldn't help but notice however, how in the demo the software kept getting ahead of the demonstrator, "correctly predicting" and displaying things like a specific noun in a sentence before it was uttered, evidently based merely on her having begun the sentence with the word "The"...
...and I'd like to see it happen (if this is real), but for all they show off about low time-to-market, I doubt we'll be seeing these too soon, more's the pity:-(
Don't be too discouraged. Copper interconnects in IBM's chips didn't take nearly as long as I saw some people predicting.
So how is it that some Netscape browsers manage to work fine with the wildcard type certificates so few CAs are willing to issue?
Just curious...
-- Sirus Cybernetics Corporation Products-it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words-- and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded--their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Sirus Cybernetics Corporation Marketing Division: A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. - ibid.
Is the bizarre assumption made by the initial connection protocol that there is a one-to-one relationship between IP address:port, hostname, and certificate. When in fact a web server should be able to serve a variety of virtual hostnames, and for that matter, a host name should be able to refer to more than one IP address.
In fact, the way the certificates are designed, only one IP:port may be used for a given hostname, without using bizarre port redirection schemes or (possibly) features found in expensive SSL accelerators (Certs issued by some authorities with wildcards only work for the few using Netscape browsers, and other CAs just won't issue such certificates).
Unfortunately, no commercial site can tolerate having an address that has to specify a port number, not least because firewalls often will not pass traffic to nonstandard SSL ports for security reasons both real and imagined by sysadmins writing firewalling rules. Often the only alternative is to use multiple Internet-addressable IP addresses aliased on a box - this is a total pain in the butt that unnecessarily devours IP space and cripples server farm functionality, and one which by report the SSL working group has obstinately refused to fix, and that is largely responsible for the IANA having to withdraw its proposal that multiple-real-IP virtual servers be replaced with the IP-address saving virtual hostname method, rendered nonfunctional by SSL.
Evidently preserving the cash cow that is represented by the guarantee that a certificate will have to be bought for each and every IP and each and every hostname (or that an SSL accelerator board will be purchased) is considered more important than either functionality or the problems with address congestion.
I'm not saying "Flikx sucks, U of U rules." I can see it from the university's perspective, though. If JonKatz started posting Slashdot articles about how stupid Linux is, you can be that he wouldn't be around for long. He has a right to say those things, on his own time, on his own server.
This doesn't make sense. The University is claiming the content belongs to them - how can they punish him for maintaining their content on their server?
Slashdot Mirror
If anyone thinks this wouldn't result in both those prescheduled blackouts plus about as many additional ones as would have occurred anyway, I have a slightly stale CA "deregulation" plan to sell you.
Granted, there has been less talk of those plans, in recent weeks due to mild weather so far - and there is always the chance that the weather will continue to cooperate by being unusually mild - but clearly state officials are notably depending on virtually nothing unexpected happening - it is being assumed climate is going to occur instead of weather, and that citizens will heed frankly moronic pleas to only use air conditioning when the weather isn't hot enough to require it.
Meanwhile, our state governor is doing his best to prevent enough energy being available by trying to force the federal government to put price controls on electricity, ala President Jimmy Carter's debacle that nearly forced gas rationing, and the state's powerful environmental wacko lobby is gearing up to enforce their BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) ideas to prevent as much new generating capacity from being built as they can manage.
As for your "seceding" troll - it could be nothing else - you seem to be forgetting the large quantity of energy CA is leeching off the rest of the United States. Sure, the Peoples Republic of California might be able to build some tanks - but they aren't going to get very far trying to take over the energy supplies in Mexico and the states to the north they'll need with the Sierra Club telling the tank engines to run on "conservation". Expect everyone in the new "country" will pull together and share resources? Maybe you should rent and watch the movie "Chinatown". While your TV still works.
Isn't the anticipated switch to an "electricity for part of the day" third-world infrastructure (and the contention by the idea's promoters that this would be a good thing!), and the discovery of the populace there that they can vote themselves subsidized electricity out of the state budget, evidence enough?
Hazard of editing in a different window and then pasting. After too many hours and no sleep.
A server has to collect "doubleclick-like" information if it is to, for example, learn how it can sort out which, of a gazillion possible pages that "sort of match" a nonexpert user's request, are really the important ones for that user. Or other users that could use the automatic rating info, donating theirs in return.
I can just imagine the FUD that would be spread if a WWW client sent info back to a server like "Mouse was moved over and things selected on this page such and such an amount, page was in focus X seconds, the screen is at so big a size and Y percent full" et cetra, to help a user get what they are looking for. Again even though this reveals less than what the URL does in the first place - and yet would be invaluable to sift the gems of content from the mass of data out on the internet.
It just can't all be done effectively on the client, or without aggregating the metadata about internet use by many users - the FUD speculation about what mysterious info can somehow be inferred by DoubleClick, and others, goes beyond the stupidity of saying a heart attack victim shouldn't be driven to the hospital because of the danger of an auto accident on the way - to something closer to using as an excuse the fear that the cellphone in a momentarily passing car might risk giving the dying victim brain cancer many yearslater.
On a little different note - why, now, can't you simply select not just one of Microsoft's new "smart tags", but any word or content on a page and with a mouse button selection be able to say "search for stuff like this"? Is it just because it would cause asinine complaints from web page authors (fearing their own page's relative uselessness) that this this violated their copyright by letting someone use the page for what the author rather than the user wanted it used for (and who wanted to pretend this is different than letting someone copy those words and manually enter them into a search engine)?
Simply follow these instructions: Duplicate the enclosed genetic material using a polymerase chain reaction. Incubate one copy of the resulting DNA of the PCR reaction for 10 seconds in a in an accelerated artificial womb set to a ratio of 2,371,680:1, then decant. Email the resulting organism (a "human") to the name at the top of the list attached below (using standard MIME matter encoding and transmission protocols.) Delete the email address at the top of the list, and add your own at the bottom. Send as many copies of this letter, along with copies of the PCR-duplicated DNA, to as many of your friends, znarmates, and for that matter complete strangers as you can. By the miracle of geometric progression, in no time at all THOUSANDS of "humans" will come your way. BUT: Don't break the chain! Fribnar-belzapsle of Barnard's Star II broke the chain, and was promptly diced by a malfunctioning frebble. Threequietchimes of Lalande 21185 IX broke the chain and was voted to be that week's consumption member of his local colony group. For that matter, brainnode 0x3f2b9877d of epsilon Eridani VI broke the chain, and their entire planet was promptly turned to grey goo by runaway nanomachines. But I followed the instructions, and in less than 30 kiloseconds I was the proud owner of over 300 extremely musical, fertilizer-producing, delectably-regurgitating young humans! So act now! Here is the list, make sure you add names:
belzar@massquan.com.wolf359b iz .eta -cassiopeiae
m cc affrey
colonysegment-alpha-14@qwr.edu.ev-lacertae
napkinnumeratordrone376@workcubiclemegafarm452.
snat@frelb.org.yzceti
439angstroms@bluelight.com.rigel
duckmouthfence@picosquish.com.vega
ratpizzle@goatse.ax-microscopium
10010100111101001@001110100100.1001.binar
powersthatbe@overusedsentientplanetformula.com.
Simply follow these instructions: Duplicate the enclosed genetic material using a polymerase chain reaction. Incubate one copy of the resulting DNA of the PCR reaction for 10 seconds in a in an accelerated artificial womb set to a ratio of 2,371,680:1, then decant. Email the resulting organism (a "human") to the name at the top of the list attached below (using standard MIME matter encoding and transmission protocols.) Delete the email address at the top of the list, and add your own at the bottom. Send as many copies of this letter, along with copies of the PCR-duplicated DNA, to as many of your friends, znarmates, and for that matter complete strangers as you can. By the miracle of geometric progression, in no time at all THOUSANDS of "humans" will come your way. BUT: Don't break the chain! Fribnar-belzapsle of Barnard's Star II broke the chain, and was promptly diced by a malfunctioning frebble. Threequietchimes of Lalande 21185 IX broke the chain and was voted to be that week's consumption member of his local colony group. For that matter, brainnode 0x3f2b9877d of epsilon Eridani VI broke the chain, and their entire planet was promptly turned to grey goo by runaway nanomachines. But I followed the instructions, and in less than 30 kiloseconds I was the proud owner of over 300 extremely musical, fertilizer-producing, delectably-regurgitating young humans! So act now! Here is the list, make sure you add names:
belzar@massquan.com.wolf359
colonysegment-alpha -14@qwr.edu.ev-lacertae
napkinnumeratordrone376@w orkcubiclefarm452.biz.eta -cassiopeiae
snat@frelb.org.yzceti
439angstroms@ bluelight.com.rigel
duckmouthfence@picosquish.com .vega
ratpizzle@goatse.ax-microscopium
100101001 11101001@001110100102.1001.binar
powersthatbe@ove rusedsentientplanetformula.com.mcc affrey
Would the above have been on topic if it mentioned The Boys from Brazil?
Or one of the TeleTubbies, if the remotes aren't kept out of toddlers' hands.
First, I gather the lawyer involved has never traveled west of the Missisippi River, if he is under the impression that settlement has eliminated open range practices; there is still a considerable area where this applies and is still useful.
Equally he might consider hunting/fishing related common law in much of the USA, which often does not require a sportsman to assume that the mere presence of a fence is meant to prohibit him crossing same; or that in the UK which allows use of private property for casual hikers, indeed prohibits farmers from generally denying access.
Generally I gathered from reading the article that the writer believes invoking the "fence" metaphor would be a valuable way for courts to treat the internet. IMHO this is unsupportable garbage.
Imagine the chaos resulting from the ability of a person to physically fence off his property from that generally open, with a "fence" which was invisible and could cause the invocation of legal sanctions by the mere attempt to detect it - much less cross it - while others allowed and even needed people crossing those fences into their space to maintain their livelihoods. And to arbitrarily invoke those sanctions against specific access by persons left-handed, with long hair (or using nmap, et cetra), with no way for a person to know they were of a forbidden class, and the landowner having no duty to inform them.
This would be a closer analogy to the real dispute over port scanning with nmap and the like, and would cause legal risk for anyone attempting to use any area of the "open range" or those areas which though fenced are not forbidden, or known-fenced areas where their use probably would be accepted, but where it is uncertain.
The fence analogy sucks because in the real world there are only some places and situations where a fence means you are forbidden access, and fences are almost always visible. What exists on on the Internet is more like carefully hidden nets of underground sensors designed to detect intruders but invisible to the naked eye.
Even where fences exist, therefore, there is often a requirement that trespassing only occurs if the owner of a property has posted "no trespassing" signs, or those forbidding certain uses (hunting, for instance) conspicuously enough that a person is indeed informed of what the rules are (and other places with different rules, but the internet is effectively too global to allow such divisions).
Therefore, what I propose is this: an access-allowed checking protocol. A method by which an internet-connected node can, if it wishes, indicate that certain uses are forbidden.
Perhaps a TCP port which can be accessed with no fear of liability which could return data indicating "Ports A, B, and D are meant for public use, but port C is private, don't twiddle with it". Maybe add further info about just what use is allowed beyond that, such as allowing HTTP access for browser use but not by data-mining spiders.
This would place a burden on both the public whose programs would have to check the access first, and the owner of the node who would have to put up the "no trespassing" signs. It would not cure the problem, but would at least allow both sides recourse to something which would allow them to know they are acting legally or which would enforce their desired restrictions
Perhaps there are uses which the assumption would still be "allowed" or "forbidden" despite no check for the "sign" being required or no posting of it needed, but in general with no way to check for or advertise the "fence" one side or the other is going to be screwed.
Doing a port scan of port 80 is minimal intrusion compared to connecting to it and performing a get request. Using the fence analogy, it is like forbidding someone to jump the fence but at the same time allowing them to jump the fence if they wish to use an automobile you generously keep there for public use.
I was aiming to avoid someone being confused between the effective and real weight (former obviously being around zero when the airship is at neutral bouyancy) when I noted that mass should be used, and trying to make the point with the mouse-size versus elephant-sized balloon comparison that the rationale being offered wouldn't help large airships.
Note I was assuming the envelope's strength was mainly used to enclose the higher partial pressure needed to keep it "rigid" against the wind, engine-enduced forces, and so on rather than to support the weight hanging from it, the every-point-of-a-rope factor becoming every-horizontal-portion-of-a-sheet with the support structure attached.
I don't know the relative numbers, I think it would be related to how much of the blimp was attached to the support structure underneath that lifts the cargo too (a longer sheet of the same material would support more weight of course, if evenly attached along its bottom), but yes, the size advantage looks like it is eaten by needing a thicker envelope.
It also occurs to me on reading your analysis that a larger object would be flatter over a given area, increasing the drag coefficient, but I could be wrong too - my fluid dynamics knowledge is likely less than yours.
They don't mention "profiting from", just "all revenues related to".
You mean "lower the ratio", I think. Square-cube law, sort of?
That would fit better if the interior of the airship were the same density as the rest of it, instead of a much denser skin containing a mass of helium rather less dense than the air surrounding. If you simplify the math to a sphere, the real ratio would be between R^2:R^3 (square-cube) and PiR^2:4PiR^2 (area of a circle:surface area of a sphere), twiddled for drag coefficient and so on - if I'm not mistaken the square-cube law would only apply to the mass (not weight) of the helium enclosed.
Not the difference between the square of the wind velocity exerting force to blow away an elephant or a mouse, but to blow away an elephant-sized balloon versus a mouse-sized balloon.
Umm, yes. "As long as the airflow is not turbulent". I'm afraid you are kind of making my point for me - lets's see one of these behemoths lumber its way out of one of these.
And your weather balloon analogy is rather weak - the airship would operate considerably closer to the ground, and at far greater stakes than the potential loss of a cheap radiosonde. Floating along with the wind sounds fine as long as there aren't high tension lines in the way, and as long as the idea isn't currently to stay tethered. In which case this would tend to happen.
That the show's producers didn't make him wear a mask (surgically attached perhaps) during the show to prevent him being recruited by another television program.
There are good reasons why they are not used for passenger or military service otherwise, repeated attempts to use them have resulted in loss of the airships and their crews, for reasons totally unrelated to the Hindenberg - Bringing up their relative nonflammability is largely a straw-man argument in their favor.
Yes, they can be made to work in average weather and winds - but expecting this to keep them safe is about as intelligent as expecting building a seaside house at the same level as the average high tide and expecting it to therefore stay dry - and tides are considerably more predictable than sudden changes in the weather.
Pardon me, but I would greatly prefer these potential juggernauts to stay downwind of wherever I am when loaded down with the buildings, locomotives, et cetra the article envisions - if at all, considering again that the wind direction may change.
Probably when they develop a 4-dimensional projector that will allow them to project a solid shadow of a 3-D mask into the inside of a block of silicon, and a teleportation device to get the dopant atoms inside.
Depends.
Sometimes IBM manages to get stuff out fairly quickly(like copper interconnects on chips).
OTOH, I think it's been about a decade since I watched on CNN a demo of IBM voice-recognition software that was supposed to eliminate the need for keyboards, and allow you to easily dictate in documents, where synonyms ("to", "too", "2", et cetra) were corrected based on context and so on.
I couldn't help but notice however, how in the demo the software kept getting ahead of the demonstrator, "correctly predicting" and displaying things like a specific noun in a sentence before it was uttered, evidently based merely on her having begun the sentence with the word "The"...
Don't be too discouraged. Copper interconnects in IBM's chips didn't take nearly as long as I saw some people predicting.
That would kind of make overclockers shoot themselves in the foot.
So how is it that some Netscape browsers manage to work fine with the wildcard type certificates so few CAs are willing to issue?
Just curious...
--
Sirus Cybernetics Corporation Products-it is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words-- and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation's Galaxywide success is founded--their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws. - Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Sirus Cybernetics Corporation Marketing Division: A bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. - ibid.
Sorry, that should have been ARIN, not the IANA.
My bad.
In fact, the way the certificates are designed, only one IP:port may be used for a given hostname, without using bizarre port redirection schemes or (possibly) features found in expensive SSL accelerators (Certs issued by some authorities with wildcards only work for the few using Netscape browsers, and other CAs just won't issue such certificates).
Unfortunately, no commercial site can tolerate having an address that has to specify a port number, not least because firewalls often will not pass traffic to nonstandard SSL ports for security reasons both real and imagined by sysadmins writing firewalling rules. Often the only alternative is to use multiple Internet-addressable IP addresses aliased on a box - this is a total pain in the butt that unnecessarily devours IP space and cripples server farm functionality, and one which by report the SSL working group has obstinately refused to fix, and that is largely responsible for the IANA having to withdraw its proposal that multiple-real-IP virtual servers be replaced with the IP-address saving virtual hostname method, rendered nonfunctional by SSL.
Evidently preserving the cash cow that is represented by the guarantee that a certificate will have to be bought for each and every IP and each and every hostname (or that an SSL accelerator board will be purchased) is considered more important than either functionality or the problems with address congestion.
I prefer Google for search. But I tend to use Yahoo for maps and financial market checks.