The only problem in this case is that it will be impossible to tow the refloated ship to India or some other country where they have a liberal view on labour safety. As far as I know, it will be towed to one of the nearby big harbours (Genua, Livorno or Civitavecchia?). I don't know how they will do the actual dismantling there.
This is the millionth time we see a post on Slashdot about people falling victim to a patent troll. If this is not yet done somewhere, someone should really make a wiki to meticulously document all these small cases, so that the next time you talk to a politician, you can show them the real damage of the current patent system.
I know about all the religious arguments pro or against whitespace as syntax. Personally, I am a happy user of python and I actually like the forced indentation, YMMV. But please slashdot, why do you screw up the indentation when the inventor of a whitespace-as-syntax-language gives a code example? This will be too easy for anyone arguing against the use whitespace of syntax.
Long haul fiber optical signals are amplified using optical amplification these days. Basically, a small section of fiber is doped with some fluorescent molecules, which are pumped with a different color of light generated by a laser diode. The data never leaves the fiber. I guess the only way to intercept the data is to physically cut the fiber and slice in your secret box. This will be noticed.
Yes, you probably need to cut them. Go read about single-mode fibers: most of the light is contained in a guided mode inside the ~10 micrometer core of the fiber, while its amplitude decays exponentially inside the 125 micrometer diameter cladding, so no light reaches the outer surface of the fiber.
I presume that in the old days, they used electrical signals along those lines. With modern-day fiber-optic cables, you would have to cut open the cable, physically cut each fiber and splice in your secret device on the bottom of the ocean. With fibers currently porting more than one color of light and cables containing hundreds of fibers, you would probably need to leave several racks full of equipment to tap everything.
That was my thought too, but apparently they do exist already with magnetic bearings, for example this one. But problems with gyros/reaction wheels seem an old problem, wasn't Hubble stranded once for a few months with not enough gyros?
Award this year's peace-prize jointly to Manning and Snowden! Guaranteed to piss of the US big time and make the rest of the world smile. And we will forgive you for ever awarding it to Obama and Gore...
They already hit the first million in just a few hours since the story hit the big media. Refreshing a few times, they seem to do about 200k$ per hour right now, so I guess they might easily sell the first 5000 phones at the reduced price. It was probably a good idea to trigger some people into a quick decision by lowering the price on the first day, so that they can realease a press release tomorrow saying they hit their first target. It will be hard to keep the same pace in the next 30 days, though...
A) they deployed an initial version of stuxnet which did not do any damage, but which just reported all the connected equipment back to HQ.
B) After they had an initial idea about the equipment via A) or other intelligence, the suppliers of equiment (Siemens) got a visit from the CIA (or their german counterpart) and they figured out all the components they ordered (probably via intermediates). Ordering 1000 PLCs with 1000 motor controllers must show up on some radar...
Dear opposition parties of all involved countries (France, Spain, Austria,...), please drag the responsible ministers to parliament and have them explain every detail of the closure of the airspace as soon as possible. I don't know how it is organized exactly in those countries, but in the political system I know (Netherlands), all ministers are forced to respond to any question posed by members of parliament. The sillier questions can be answered by mail within a few weeks deadline, but I guess that for more important issues like this one, they can have any minister get his ass in parliament with a few days notice. Willfully giving wrong answers is political suicide via a 'motion of no confidence'. In the more likely case that the relevant ministers are supported by the leading majority, they can still be forced to make some embarrassing statements (yes, Obama did call us to close the airspace...), which could lead to ridicule in the press and losses in the polls.
Congrats to orbital, even though launching a new rocket assembled from parts built by Russians by a company that is already working in the space business for many years seems a small accomplishment compared to what SpaceX pulled off. As is common on a first flight, the main payload is an instrumented dead weight. The coolest thing about this mission is IMO some small cubesats they launched as secondary payloads. These are some super cheap phonesats built by NASA, which are powered by a Nexus One or Nexus S. Data packets that could be received via amateur radio should hopefully appear here soon.
Neat plots, but I find the real-time and historic plots of actual GPS tracks shown at Flightradar24 much more fascinating. Most European flights have an ADS-B transponder on board, which basically is a radio beacon that transmits a GPS position. These signals can be received by anyone with a cheap USB receiver over a few 100 km. For these planes, the position is plotted online with a delay of only 10 seconds or so. American planes seem to lagging behind with adoption of this system. I can watch this site for hours to see what airplane flies over my house, to see how airplane are holding in case of bad weather, to see when I have to pick up friends from the airport,...
The EU has many issues, but prosecution of anti-competitive behavior is one of the areas where they shine. I bought a big Philips 'flatscreen' (i.e. the front is flat, it sticks out half a meter on the backside) for around 1200 euro circa 2001, so can I now claim some of my money back?
(Related bonus question, since this is Slashdot: A somewhat obsolute piece of electronics weighing 50 kg is collecting dust in my living room. It is still working perfectly, but has only scart and analog coax inputs. Resolution is also on the low side, it is not HD. Any useful project it can be used for, other than throwing it out of the window to kill my neighbour's cat?)
Exactly, came here to say the same. I have a Dell Latitude 5420 running mainly ubuntu, which cost me around 1000 euro total. During ordering, you can customize it a bit: I went for one of the cheaper I3 processors, but upgraded the screen from standard 1200x800 or so to 1600x900 without even thinking. The 50 euro for the upgrade of the screen is very good value for money. Having some pixels to spare is essential when you want to open 2 editors side-by side. It looks pretty good compared to my colleague's non-retina last generation's macbook.
They should add more fine-grained permission, so that for example an application would only require 'access to add-server' instead of full network access. And please make some clear policy that gets enforced, i.e. applications that do ask more permissions than they need get banned until the problem is fixed.
That is BS. IANARS, but the orbit that supply- or crew-vehicles sent to the ISS are launched on is probably the equivalent of a Geostationary Transfer Orbit, except that you want to end up in the low-earth-orbit of the ISS instead of the geostationary one. This means that they are launched more or less on an elliptic orbit, with the high point of the ellipse intersecting with ISS's circular orbit. At this high point, you do a 'circularization burn', after which you are at the same height and same speed as the ISS. I am for sure skipping over some details, such as orbital inclination, but there is no fundamental reason why you can not launch at exactly the right time so that you are really close to the ISS just after this burn.
One reason why it takes several days might be due to launch inaccuracy: there are always small errors in the orbital parameters just after launch, so you probably want to allow for some time to adjust the orbit with small burns. Another reason might be procedural, you might want to do some potentially dangerous checks of your vehicle before you come close to the ISS. As an example of how short a rendezvous can be, the Russians recently launched and docked a Progress freighter in six hours (instead of the usual 2 days), they plan on doing this in future with the manned Soyuz.
Optics guy here too. I don't know a lot about spectroscopy, but I had to assemble a spectrometer for my thesis project. It was a pretty fancy imaging spectrometer (main element was a concave mirror and grating combined in one) and used a LN-cooled CCD as the sensor. This was not cheap stuff (~5000eu for the spectrometer and probably > 20000eu for the camera), but the operating principle is exactly the same as the DVD + webcam. The resolution was limited to around 1 nm due to the input slit, not sure if they could improve things by using a slit in this home-built device. I had to calibrate it from scratch, which was actually pretty easy: I borrowed some spectral lamps from the 1st year lab course and also used a HeNe-laser we had laying around. Choose a few of the big lines (which should all be known to better than 1 nm) and for each write down the pixel position of the line on the CCD. Perform low order (e.g. quadratic) polynomial fit and you are done calibrating. I don't know if there are some cheap spectral lamps that you could use at home, there is at least the yellow lines from the Sodium (?) street lightning. I agree with others that the resolution of these home built devices is probably too low to identify materials, but it is for sure a fun project.
Maybe just point it at Mars? The diffraction limit is your friend: with a wavelength around one cm, a 100 meter dish has the a diffraction limit (~wavelength/telescope diameter) about one order of magnitude worse than your 50 euro plastic telescope for kids (which might just resolve some white spot at its poles). From back of the envelope calculation, I would guess that the width of the radio-beam is pretty similar to the diameter of mars itself.
Slashdot Mirror
The only problem in this case is that it will be impossible to tow the refloated ship to India or some other country where they have a liberal view on labour safety. As far as I know, it will be towed to one of the nearby big harbours (Genua, Livorno or Civitavecchia?). I don't know how they will do the actual dismantling there.
Next versions: Lollypop, M&M/Mars, Nougat, , . Seems that Google's marketing department has already posted this question disguised as a mother.
This is the millionth time we see a post on Slashdot about people falling victim to a patent troll. If this is not yet done somewhere, someone should really make a wiki to meticulously document all these small cases, so that the next time you talk to a politician, you can show them the real damage of the current patent system.
I know about all the religious arguments pro or against whitespace as syntax. Personally, I am a happy user of python and I actually like the forced indentation, YMMV. But please slashdot, why do you screw up the indentation when the inventor of a whitespace-as-syntax-language gives a code example? This will be too easy for anyone arguing against the use whitespace of syntax.
Relevant XKCD here.
Long haul fiber optical signals are amplified using optical amplification these days. Basically, a small section of fiber is doped with some fluorescent molecules, which are pumped with a different color of light generated by a laser diode. The data never leaves the fiber. I guess the only way to intercept the data is to physically cut the fiber and slice in your secret box. This will be noticed.
Yes, you probably need to cut them. Go read about single-mode fibers: most of the light is contained in a guided mode inside the ~10 micrometer core of the fiber, while its amplitude decays exponentially inside the 125 micrometer diameter cladding, so no light reaches the outer surface of the fiber.
I presume that in the old days, they used electrical signals along those lines. With modern-day fiber-optic cables, you would have to cut open the cable, physically cut each fiber and splice in your secret device on the bottom of the ocean. With fibers currently porting more than one color of light and cables containing hundreds of fibers, you would probably need to leave several racks full of equipment to tap everything.
That was my thought too, but apparently they do exist already with magnetic bearings, for example this one. But problems with gyros/reaction wheels seem an old problem, wasn't Hubble stranded once for a few months with not enough gyros?
Award this year's peace-prize jointly to Manning and Snowden! Guaranteed to piss of the US big time and make the rest of the world smile. And we will forgive you for ever awarding it to Obama and Gore ...
They already hit the first million in just a few hours since the story hit the big media. Refreshing a few times, they seem to do about 200k$ per hour right now, so I guess they might easily sell the first 5000 phones at the reduced price. It was probably a good idea to trigger some people into a quick decision by lowering the price on the first day, so that they can realease a press release tomorrow saying they hit their first target. It will be hard to keep the same pace in the next 30 days, though ...
Looks like Boeing went down about 7% when the news broke ...
Chapeau! Got to praise the French for defending their language against foreign bytes ...
Dear opposition parties of all involved countries (France, Spain, Austria, ...), please drag the responsible ministers to parliament and have them explain every detail of the closure of the airspace as soon as possible. I don't know how it is organized exactly in those countries, but in the political system I know (Netherlands), all ministers are forced to respond to any question posed by members of parliament. The sillier questions can be answered by mail within a few weeks deadline, but I guess that for more important issues like this one, they can have any minister get his ass in parliament with a few days notice. Willfully giving wrong answers is political suicide via a 'motion of no confidence'. In the more likely case that the relevant ministers are supported by the leading majority, they can still be forced to make some embarrassing statements (yes, Obama did call us to close the airspace ...), which could lead to ridicule in the press and losses in the polls.
Congrats to orbital, even though launching a new rocket assembled from parts built by Russians by a company that is already working in the space business for many years seems a small accomplishment compared to what SpaceX pulled off. As is common on a first flight, the main payload is an instrumented dead weight. The coolest thing about this mission is IMO some small cubesats they launched as secondary payloads. These are some super cheap phonesats built by NASA, which are powered by a Nexus One or Nexus S. Data packets that could be received via amateur radio should hopefully appear here soon.
Maybe they could put the processor on a separate daughterboard and call it Group-Hug, as in yesterday's story.
Neat plots, but I find the real-time and historic plots of actual GPS tracks shown at Flightradar24 much more fascinating. Most European flights have an ADS-B transponder on board, which basically is a radio beacon that transmits a GPS position. These signals can be received by anyone with a cheap USB receiver over a few 100 km. For these planes, the position is plotted online with a delay of only 10 seconds or so. American planes seem to lagging behind with adoption of this system. I can watch this site for hours to see what airplane flies over my house, to see how airplane are holding in case of bad weather, to see when I have to pick up friends from the airport, ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmvdeNa67E
Must be his half brother ...
The EU has many issues, but prosecution of anti-competitive behavior is one of the areas where they shine. I bought a big Philips 'flatscreen' (i.e. the front is flat, it sticks out half a meter on the backside) for around 1200 euro circa 2001, so can I now claim some of my money back? (Related bonus question, since this is Slashdot: A somewhat obsolute piece of electronics weighing 50 kg is collecting dust in my living room. It is still working perfectly, but has only scart and analog coax inputs. Resolution is also on the low side, it is not HD. Any useful project it can be used for, other than throwing it out of the window to kill my neighbour's cat?)
Exactly, came here to say the same. I have a Dell Latitude 5420 running mainly ubuntu, which cost me around 1000 euro total. During ordering, you can customize it a bit: I went for one of the cheaper I3 processors, but upgraded the screen from standard 1200x800 or so to 1600x900 without even thinking. The 50 euro for the upgrade of the screen is very good value for money. Having some pixels to spare is essential when you want to open 2 editors side-by side. It looks pretty good compared to my colleague's non-retina last generation's macbook.
They should add more fine-grained permission, so that for example an application would only require 'access to add-server' instead of full network access. And please make some clear policy that gets enforced, i.e. applications that do ask more permissions than they need get banned until the problem is fixed.
One reason why it takes several days might be due to launch inaccuracy: there are always small errors in the orbital parameters just after launch, so you probably want to allow for some time to adjust the orbit with small burns. Another reason might be procedural, you might want to do some potentially dangerous checks of your vehicle before you come close to the ISS. As an example of how short a rendezvous can be, the Russians recently launched and docked a Progress freighter in six hours (instead of the usual 2 days), they plan on doing this in future with the manned Soyuz.
Optics guy here too. I don't know a lot about spectroscopy, but I had to assemble a spectrometer for my thesis project. It was a pretty fancy imaging spectrometer (main element was a concave mirror and grating combined in one) and used a LN-cooled CCD as the sensor. This was not cheap stuff (~5000eu for the spectrometer and probably > 20000eu for the camera), but the operating principle is exactly the same as the DVD + webcam. The resolution was limited to around 1 nm due to the input slit, not sure if they could improve things by using a slit in this home-built device. I had to calibrate it from scratch, which was actually pretty easy: I borrowed some spectral lamps from the 1st year lab course and also used a HeNe-laser we had laying around. Choose a few of the big lines (which should all be known to better than 1 nm) and for each write down the pixel position of the line on the CCD. Perform low order (e.g. quadratic) polynomial fit and you are done calibrating. I don't know if there are some cheap spectral lamps that you could use at home, there is at least the yellow lines from the Sodium (?) street lightning. I agree with others that the resolution of these home built devices is probably too low to identify materials, but it is for sure a fun project.
Maybe just point it at Mars? The diffraction limit is your friend: with a wavelength around one cm, a 100 meter dish has the a diffraction limit (~wavelength/telescope diameter) about one order of magnitude worse than your 50 euro plastic telescope for kids (which might just resolve some white spot at its poles). From back of the envelope calculation, I would guess that the width of the radio-beam is pretty similar to the diameter of mars itself.