Letting the satellite re-enter atmosphere unbroken would be the only way to make sure it does NOT create a debris field.
I am not incredibly knowledgeable in this field, but isn't there at least one Way To Be Sure(tm) that the satellite is completely vapourized? Of course, that's banned by treaties at the moment.
What do you expect? That type of functionality requires an interface between your mail server and your cell service provider. IE it will cost them money - probably a lot of money. Yahoo is probably the only company willing to fork over for it, since MS wouldn't want to support users of anything other than Exchange and Google was working on Android. I wouldn't be surprised if Android supported having mail pushed to it from GMail, but from other providers? It seems unlikely to me. Anyway, is it even really that big of a deal? There are more important things than getting your email as soon as possible. If it's a time-critical notification, have it sent via SMS.
The BlackBerry has some points in its favour as a smartphone, but there are some serious gaps:
- The web browser is terrible (no support for the "display: none" and "visibility: hidden" properties in CSS? Abysmal HTML table support? What were they thinking?). There is a third-party alternative (Minuet) which is even worse in most ways. Opera Mini will run on it, but you are sending all of your data to Opera by using it and because it proxies all connections you can't use it to access intranet sites if you have your BlackBerry set up to communicate with a corporate BES. - Speaking of the BES, it's got a terrible architecture. Not the least of which is that all email is sent through RIM's servers, leading to the potential for the kind of half-of-the-world outage like what happened earlier this week. There are other problems too, like how the entire thing is written with a late-90s mentality where the only supported configuration involves all of the service accounts having Administrator/SA-type rights. Obviously this is not a concern for personal-only users. - There are very few free applications, and most of the commercial apps are crap and/or sold by companies that probably won't even exist in a year or two to support them.
The trackball on the newer models is awesome, and the UI is generally very easy to use (which is IMO where something like Windows Mobile falls on its face). However, the iPhone UI is better, and from the screenshots it looks like Android is going to be at least as user-friendly if not more so.
Actually, in a capitalist society, the people do own the means of production. Marx said that the means of production should be a public good, owned by the state.
My understanding is that "the people" is being used in the same sense as in the US Constitution - IE "everyone", not "a handful of people who happen to have accumulated a lot of money". So ideally, things like heavy punch presses and stereolithography systems would be shared and available for anyone to use, like parks or libraries. Of course, that's not really how it worked out in Communist countries, but it's a nice idea.
This isn't about "outsiders." Muslims have developed a reputation for terrorism and troublemaking (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be a Muslim is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
This isn't about "outsiders." Jews have developed a reputation for financial conspiracy and troublemaking (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be a Jew is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
This isn't about "outsiders." The Irish have developed a reputation for drunken violence and terrorism (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be Irish is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
This isn't about "outsiders." The Japanese and Germans have developed a reputation for covert operations on behalf of their homelands while living in the United States (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be Asian (it's too hard to tell the difference) or German is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
Isn't it common wisdom that physical access = game over?
Yes, but not everyone realizes that with a Windows domain, the "game over" is for everyone who has a domain password of less than fifteen characters, and the "physical access" includes "to any domain controller on the domain".
I did forget to mention that you can use an OphCrack boot CD in an attempt to crack the DSRM admin password (instead of resetting it) which is what I actually did in my simulated attack. However, it takes a lot longer and is not guaranteed to work, so someone in a hurry is better off resetting that one (very infrequently-used) password, then afterwards maybe damaging the drives to make the system unbootable so that it looks like it was caused by the power outage and no logs are ever read.
Where does this sort of stupidity come from ? Windows Vista, even in full-blown Aero mode, runs fine *right now* on machines 5+ years old (anything Ghz-class, with 1GB+ RAM and what is today US$30 video card has the performance to do so - so you can feasibly go back around 7 years, with a cheap video card upgrade).
That hasn't been my experience.
First of all, for some ridiculous reason ATI is refusing to release Vista-compatible drivers for their older cards (e.g. Radeon 7000) because they claim that they are not capable of supporting the Vista requirements. This is a load of crap, because the equally-old (DirectX-wise) NVidia card I have at home for my third monitor has a Vista-compatible driver. However, it does mean I can't run Vista on my PC at work (with its 3-4 year old video cards).
Second, I would hardly call its performance "fine" even on my current home PC (Athlon 3500+, 2GB RAM), let alone something in the range you describe. File copies are slow, working with zip files is slow, games are ludicrously slow. My main video card is a GeForce 7600GT, and Knights of the Old Repulic 2 - which should present no challenge to that card - often dropped down to framerates low enough to look like a flip-book.
There are a lot of nice touches that MS put in Vista, like the improved sort order for files, but it's just not worth it overall because of the performance losses.
What in the world is the alleged security benefit of a requirement for frequent password changes?
It's so that if your password is compromised, whoever else has it can only use it until you have to pick a new one. If your password never expires, then someone else can have access to whatever you do for as long as you use that system. This assumes of course that there is no easy way of obtaining your password. If it can be easily obtained, then there is no point in having it expire frequently.
A simple WordNumberWord combination can give you enough security as long as each login attempt is noted and tracked.
With a Windows-based network, the lack of salting of the domain password hashes means there is a much bigger vulnerability.
I performed a simulated attack against a Windows domain a few months ago. I started out with nothing other than physical access to a domain controller, and ended up with the domain password hashes which I was able to feed into OphCrack which cracked them offline without ever showing up in an auditing log. As long as you can get physical access to a domain controller, it's easy:
1 - Take the domain controller off of the network (not hard in environments with many distributed DCs, e.g. at remote locations with no on-site technical staff). 2 - Boot off a floppy or CD using the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor. 3 - Use the software to reset the "local" Administrator account's password (which is the Directory Services Restore Mode admin account on a DC). 4 - Boot the server in Directory Services Restore Mode and log on using the account you just reset the password of. 5 - Follow Sebastien Francois's instructions to create a Windows Service which will dump the domain account information at the next bootup. 6 - Reboot the server, letting it start up normally. Wait a few minutes for the service you just set up to do its job. 7 - Reboot the server back into Directory Services Restore Mode, and log on with the admin password from step 3. 8 - Copy the account/hash information file to a USB key or other portable device. 9 - Remove the service you added. 10 - Reboot the server, reconnect it to the network and let it power back up normally. 11 - Take your copy of the hashes home and run OphCrack against them. Depending on which set of rainbow tables you are using, you will get most or all passwords of less than 15 characters.
The only traces this attack leaves are the offline state (which can be blamed on a power outage), the reset DSRM admin password (which most people will just assume had been set to a nonstandard value by someone else when the server was built), and potentially the Security event log entries (which will roll off within a few hours to a few days depending on how many logon requests that particular DC handles).
Hmm, in my college physics class, we always used V for Voltages.
Possibly Mr2cents is old enough to have studied Ohm's law before the fall of the Roman Empire? Seriously though, apparently U is used in some areas.
I've been teaching myself electronics for the last six months or so, and the amount of "legacy" conventions are kind of frustrating. For example, using "E" to represent voltage because "E" stands for "Electromotive force", using "I" to represent current, that "conventional current" is still more or less the standard even though it's not how the electrons are actually moving, etc. I know it's a bit of a hassle to phase out things like that (standard versus metric in the US?), but at some point you just have to put your foot down. If it's a matter of favouring English over another modern language, pick some Greek characters or Cuneiform or Hieroglyphics or something.
The equation in this case is "take the numerological value of this variation of the word and divide it by the numerological value of the normal version of the word". There is no methodology for determining that other than trying a bunch of different combinations and finding one that sort of supports one's crackpot theory, like the GP commented.
But is that really a "sad thing" that makes any real difference, or just splitting hairs?
My understanding is that a true jet pack would be much more fuel-efficient. I believe it's accurate to say that a rocket pack/belt has to carry all of its reaction mass (in the form of whatever is blown out the nozzles), whereas a jet pack just has to spin the turbine and gets the reaction mass for thrust from the atmosphere. IANAAE, though.
I am thinking a good compromise might be a VTOL system with lightweight wings which are folded until it reaches the minimum flight level. Sort of like Hawk in the old Captain Power TV series, or a higher-powered version of the wingsuit guy with the scale jet turbines attached to his boots. Part of the reason I think a jetpack would be cool is that ability to take off and land without a runway (otherwise why not just use an ultralight?), but it does seem wasteful of fuel to not use wings in level flight.
I presume you're not distributing the PDFs you make, so why are you so concerned about documenting the legality of it? Are you worried that you might one day turn yourself into WotC or whoever owns the D&D franchise now?
Theoretically color film like that could be made, but it would be useless for consumer use
Actually, it is made. The two approaches are for it to be greyscale and only represent e.g. UV or IR, or to shift the colour channels (for example, UV = blue, Blue = green, Green = red, with actual red light not being represented in the photograph).
Well, okay, it's multi-touch instead of single touch, but it's still not *that* fancy.
There is a lot of interesting research into the kinds of UIs you can do with a multi-touch table interface that can't be done with a screen. My favourite was a video of some students (at MIT, I think?) who had built one that also detected the position of marked physical objects which acted as various components in a virtual sound synthesizer program (so you could e.g. put a plastic star which represented a lowpass filter on the table, put two plastic knobs next to it, and when the software detected you turning the knobs, it would adjust the cutoff frequency and resonance in the softsynth). While I like the keyboard/mouse interface for things like coding, I absolutely loathe it for anything musical, because it's basically going from having ten fingers to having one (the mouse pointer). I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes out of an interface as different as tables can be. It's not a huge *technological* leap forward, but I think it will be a huge leap forward in UI design.
If you messed with rear projection, then you'd suddenly need to either find a big glass table, or you'd need to lug one around with the projection system.
Use a collapsible table. It could be the modern equivalent of the roll-up movie/slide projection screens most families in the US used to have at home. The whole thing could collapse into a small-suitcase-type package, like I'm assuming the Hitachi device does.
a stealth plane could profit from being able to absorb radar beams.
Stealth planes *already* absorb radar. They have a two-layer skin. The first layer reflects about half of the radar waves. The second is spaced half a wavelength beneath the first, and reflects the rest, so they cancel each other out.
search youtube for the smart car road test hitting a brick wall at high speed with no cabin intrusion
I have yet to see any information that the Smart Car and similar designs have large enough (any?) crumple zones for their rigid inner cage to be much help. A quick google search gave me the unhelpful answer that that cage is "designed to trigger the crumple zones of the other car in a collision", or words to that effect. That's no use if the other car is also a Smart Car, the collision is with the side of the other car, or the collision is with something other than a car. F=MA, and no crumple zone means you are much more likely to have your insides turned into cat food by a near-instantaneous deceleration.
If you right-click on the animation and choose "zoom in", you can make out the blobs as being H(sub)2 (hydrogen gas) when floating between green areas and H+ (positive hydrogen ions) in the green areas. The description below is pretty good at getting across the concept.
Re:We need this type of thing done in the classroo
on
Hand-Made Vacuum Tubes
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· Score: 1
It is also useful for understanding more about what is going on physically with electronic devices (since tubes work differently than transistors), and where the terms for modern (or at least more modern) electronics come from. E.g "thyristor" comes from "thryatron" + "transistor". Understanding how we got to where we are today is always a good thing, and so is understanding what's going on at a low level in the systems one builds.
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Letting the satellite re-enter atmosphere unbroken would be the only way to make sure it does NOT create a debris field.
I am not incredibly knowledgeable in this field, but isn't there at least one Way To Be Sure(tm) that the satellite is completely vapourized? Of course, that's banned by treaties at the moment.
What do you expect? That type of functionality requires an interface between your mail server and your cell service provider. IE it will cost them money - probably a lot of money. Yahoo is probably the only company willing to fork over for it, since MS wouldn't want to support users of anything other than Exchange and Google was working on Android. I wouldn't be surprised if Android supported having mail pushed to it from GMail, but from other providers? It seems unlikely to me.
Anyway, is it even really that big of a deal? There are more important things than getting your email as soon as possible. If it's a time-critical notification, have it sent via SMS.
The BlackBerry has some points in its favour as a smartphone, but there are some serious gaps:
- The web browser is terrible (no support for the "display: none" and "visibility: hidden" properties in CSS? Abysmal HTML table support? What were they thinking?). There is a third-party alternative (Minuet) which is even worse in most ways. Opera Mini will run on it, but you are sending all of your data to Opera by using it and because it proxies all connections you can't use it to access intranet sites if you have your BlackBerry set up to communicate with a corporate BES.
- Speaking of the BES, it's got a terrible architecture. Not the least of which is that all email is sent through RIM's servers, leading to the potential for the kind of half-of-the-world outage like what happened earlier this week. There are other problems too, like how the entire thing is written with a late-90s mentality where the only supported configuration involves all of the service accounts having Administrator/SA-type rights. Obviously this is not a concern for personal-only users.
- There are very few free applications, and most of the commercial apps are crap and/or sold by companies that probably won't even exist in a year or two to support them.
The trackball on the newer models is awesome, and the UI is generally very easy to use (which is IMO where something like Windows Mobile falls on its face). However, the iPhone UI is better, and from the screenshots it looks like Android is going to be at least as user-friendly if not more so.
The world is NOT literally burning under our feet. Is this kind of hysterical hyperbole the best that human beings can do?
You must have missed Lord Dread initiating phase IV of project New Order.
Actually, in a capitalist society, the people do own the means of production. Marx said that the means of production should be a public good, owned by the state.
My understanding is that "the people" is being used in the same sense as in the US Constitution - IE "everyone", not "a handful of people who happen to have accumulated a lot of money". So ideally, things like heavy punch presses and stereolithography systems would be shared and available for anyone to use, like parks or libraries. Of course, that's not really how it worked out in Communist countries, but it's a nice idea.
In the analogue synthesizer era, it was common to use a Zener diode as a noise source. Here's an older writeup about a simple circuit with cryptography in mind. The A/D converter in this case is the one on the author's sound card.
This isn't about "outsiders." Muslims have developed a reputation for terrorism and troublemaking (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be a Muslim is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
This isn't about "outsiders." Jews have developed a reputation for financial conspiracy and troublemaking (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be a Jew is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
This isn't about "outsiders." The Irish have developed a reputation for drunken violence and terrorism (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be Irish is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
This isn't about "outsiders." The Japanese and Germans have developed a reputation for covert operations on behalf of their homelands while living in the United States (which is strictly their own fault). As a result, anyone who looks like they might be Asian (it's too hard to tell the difference) or German is subjected to extra scrutiny. It's just common sense.
Isn't it common wisdom that physical access = game over?
Yes, but not everyone realizes that with a Windows domain, the "game over" is for everyone who has a domain password of less than fifteen characters, and the "physical access" includes "to any domain controller on the domain".
I did forget to mention that you can use an OphCrack boot CD in an attempt to crack the DSRM admin password (instead of resetting it) which is what I actually did in my simulated attack. However, it takes a lot longer and is not guaranteed to work, so someone in a hurry is better off resetting that one (very infrequently-used) password, then afterwards maybe damaging the drives to make the system unbootable so that it looks like it was caused by the power outage and no logs are ever read.
Where does this sort of stupidity come from ? Windows Vista, even in full-blown Aero mode, runs fine *right now* on machines 5+ years old (anything Ghz-class, with 1GB+ RAM and what is today US$30 video card has the performance to do so - so you can feasibly go back around 7 years, with a cheap video card upgrade).
That hasn't been my experience.
First of all, for some ridiculous reason ATI is refusing to release Vista-compatible drivers for their older cards (e.g. Radeon 7000) because they claim that they are not capable of supporting the Vista requirements. This is a load of crap, because the equally-old (DirectX-wise) NVidia card I have at home for my third monitor has a Vista-compatible driver. However, it does mean I can't run Vista on my PC at work (with its 3-4 year old video cards).
Second, I would hardly call its performance "fine" even on my current home PC (Athlon 3500+, 2GB RAM), let alone something in the range you describe. File copies are slow, working with zip files is slow, games are ludicrously slow. My main video card is a GeForce 7600GT, and Knights of the Old Repulic 2 - which should present no challenge to that card - often dropped down to framerates low enough to look like a flip-book.
There are a lot of nice touches that MS put in Vista, like the improved sort order for files, but it's just not worth it overall because of the performance losses.
What in the world is the alleged security benefit of a requirement for frequent password changes?
It's so that if your password is compromised, whoever else has it can only use it until you have to pick a new one. If your password never expires, then someone else can have access to whatever you do for as long as you use that system.
This assumes of course that there is no easy way of obtaining your password. If it can be easily obtained, then there is no point in having it expire frequently.
A simple WordNumberWord combination can give you enough security as long as each login attempt is noted and tracked.
With a Windows-based network, the lack of salting of the domain password hashes means there is a much bigger vulnerability.
I performed a simulated attack against a Windows domain a few months ago. I started out with nothing other than physical access to a domain controller, and ended up with the domain password hashes which I was able to feed into OphCrack which cracked them offline without ever showing up in an auditing log. As long as you can get physical access to a domain controller, it's easy:
1 - Take the domain controller off of the network (not hard in environments with many distributed DCs, e.g. at remote locations with no on-site technical staff).
2 - Boot off a floppy or CD using the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor.
3 - Use the software to reset the "local" Administrator account's password (which is the Directory Services Restore Mode admin account on a DC).
4 - Boot the server in Directory Services Restore Mode and log on using the account you just reset the password of.
5 - Follow Sebastien Francois's instructions to create a Windows Service which will dump the domain account information at the next bootup.
6 - Reboot the server, letting it start up normally. Wait a few minutes for the service you just set up to do its job.
7 - Reboot the server back into Directory Services Restore Mode, and log on with the admin password from step 3.
8 - Copy the account/hash information file to a USB key or other portable device.
9 - Remove the service you added.
10 - Reboot the server, reconnect it to the network and let it power back up normally.
11 - Take your copy of the hashes home and run OphCrack against them. Depending on which set of rainbow tables you are using, you will get most or all passwords of less than 15 characters.
The only traces this attack leaves are the offline state (which can be blamed on a power outage), the reset DSRM admin password (which most people will just assume had been set to a nonstandard value by someone else when the server was built), and potentially the Security event log entries (which will roll off within a few hours to a few days depending on how many logon requests that particular DC handles).
Hmm, in my college physics class, we always used V for Voltages.
Possibly Mr2cents is old enough to have studied Ohm's law before the fall of the Roman Empire? Seriously though, apparently U is used in some areas.
I've been teaching myself electronics for the last six months or so, and the amount of "legacy" conventions are kind of frustrating. For example, using "E" to represent voltage because "E" stands for "Electromotive force", using "I" to represent current, that "conventional current" is still more or less the standard even though it's not how the electrons are actually moving, etc. I know it's a bit of a hassle to phase out things like that (standard versus metric in the US?), but at some point you just have to put your foot down. If it's a matter of favouring English over another modern language, pick some Greek characters or Cuneiform or Hieroglyphics or something.
never equations
The equation in this case is "take the numerological value of this variation of the word and divide it by the numerological value of the normal version of the word". There is no methodology for determining that other than trying a bunch of different combinations and finding one that sort of supports one's crackpot theory, like the GP commented.
But is that really a "sad thing" that makes any real difference, or just splitting hairs?
My understanding is that a true jet pack would be much more fuel-efficient. I believe it's accurate to say that a rocket pack/belt has to carry all of its reaction mass (in the form of whatever is blown out the nozzles), whereas a jet pack just has to spin the turbine and gets the reaction mass for thrust from the atmosphere. IANAAE, though.
I am thinking a good compromise might be a VTOL system with lightweight wings which are folded until it reaches the minimum flight level. Sort of like Hawk in the old Captain Power TV series, or a higher-powered version of the wingsuit guy with the scale jet turbines attached to his boots. Part of the reason I think a jetpack would be cool is that ability to take off and land without a runway (otherwise why not just use an ultralight?), but it does seem wasteful of fuel to not use wings in level flight.
I presume you're not distributing the PDFs you make, so why are you so concerned about documenting the legality of it? Are you worried that you might one day turn yourself into WotC or whoever owns the D&D franchise now?
Perhaps there is no problem... Or maybe you are the problem...
Seriously. Who cares? Maybe mbravo should demand a full refund of the price he's paying for email at his company due to the unsatisfactory service.
Theoretically color film like that could be made, but it would be useless for consumer use
Actually, it is made. The two approaches are for it to be greyscale and only represent e.g. UV or IR, or to shift the colour channels (for example, UV = blue, Blue = green, Green = red, with actual red light not being represented in the photograph).
Well, okay, it's multi-touch instead of single touch, but it's still not *that* fancy.
There is a lot of interesting research into the kinds of UIs you can do with a multi-touch table interface that can't be done with a screen. My favourite was a video of some students (at MIT, I think?) who had built one that also detected the position of marked physical objects which acted as various components in a virtual sound synthesizer program (so you could e.g. put a plastic star which represented a lowpass filter on the table, put two plastic knobs next to it, and when the software detected you turning the knobs, it would adjust the cutoff frequency and resonance in the softsynth).
While I like the keyboard/mouse interface for things like coding, I absolutely loathe it for anything musical, because it's basically going from having ten fingers to having one (the mouse pointer). I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes out of an interface as different as tables can be. It's not a huge *technological* leap forward, but I think it will be a huge leap forward in UI design.
If you messed with rear projection, then you'd suddenly need to either find a big glass table, or you'd need to lug one around with the projection system.
Use a collapsible table. It could be the modern equivalent of the roll-up movie/slide projection screens most families in the US used to have at home. The whole thing could collapse into a small-suitcase-type package, like I'm assuming the Hitachi device does.
The only way I can see that working is if the projector is off to one side and has massive keystone correction
Yes, that's exactly how it works in the video. I like the table better, although a front-projector probably results in better contrast and colour.
a stealth plane could profit from being able to absorb radar beams.
Stealth planes *already* absorb radar. They have a two-layer skin. The first layer reflects about half of the radar waves. The second is spaced half a wavelength beneath the first, and reflects the rest, so they cancel each other out.
search youtube for the smart car road test hitting a brick wall at high speed with no cabin intrusion
I have yet to see any information that the Smart Car and similar designs have large enough (any?) crumple zones for their rigid inner cage to be much help. A quick google search gave me the unhelpful answer that that cage is "designed to trigger the crumple zones of the other car in a collision", or words to that effect. That's no use if the other car is also a Smart Car, the collision is with the side of the other car, or the collision is with something other than a car. F=MA, and no crumple zone means you are much more likely to have your insides turned into cat food by a near-instantaneous deceleration.
If you right-click on the animation and choose "zoom in", you can make out the blobs as being H(sub)2 (hydrogen gas) when floating between green areas and H+ (positive hydrogen ions) in the green areas. The description below is pretty good at getting across the concept.
It is also useful for understanding more about what is going on physically with electronic devices (since tubes work differently than transistors), and where the terms for modern (or at least more modern) electronics come from. E.g "thyristor" comes from "thryatron" + "transistor". Understanding how we got to where we are today is always a good thing, and so is understanding what's going on at a low level in the systems one builds.