This does sound like the perfect use-case for the cloud (of the 'rent a VM' type of cloud, such as AWS or Azure) - both for short term access to vastly more CPU, RAM or storage than you would reasonably want to be sharing a room with and also for the huge network bandwidth to the rest of the internet typically available from a cloud datacentre (AWS as an example capping out at 224GB RAM or 42TB or local storage).
However this is E.S.R. we are talking about so, aside from the possible issues with whether any of the cloud providers are compatible with his larger philsophical aims, who knows what other interesting ideas he might come up with given access to much more powerful personal computer hardware rather than having his creativity shackled by the limitations of his current systems.
Some of this showed through in her leadership style - trying to do the logical thing for the best long term results (at least in her analysis) rather than trying to win the popularity contest and appealing to the masses. Sometimes this worked out (surely everyone can at least agree that earning the nickname 'iron lady' is pretty cool? and my memories of the 80s are that most peoples standard of living improved significantly) but in other cases it contributed to her downfall - e.g. the per-person 'poll tax' vs. a property-based tax for local services (such as rubbish/refuse collection) surely makes some logical sense to many slashdot readers? but unfortunately it made a larger number of people pay more tax than those unaffected / getting a a tax reduction so it was a political disaster.
Otherwise the more food and water an area can provide in a perfect scenario the greater the end suffering will be when some inevitable problems occurs and the now larger population's demand's exceed what the land can supply : either due to war, drought/crop-failure or just the feedback delay between successfully increasing child survival rate and there being a baby-boomers population spike in high-consumption adults.
Maybe Education can help with that, but even in '1st-world' countries we still seem to have a problem with some people having many more children than they have the means to support themselves (currently a bit of a hot political topic in the UK with the government wanting to try and reduce the cost of supporting people on 'benefits')
Are we part way through a transition from shops being where you both browse / research products and purchase them, to separating these two phases of the shopping process.
The way I see it there is still a need for bricks & morter 'showrooms' where you can go and compare products side-by-side or even try them out in real life : e.g when buying a netbook / laptop, I always go to the local PC world or similar to try out the different keyboards and see how the displays look.
However to make the purchase, it is clearly more efficient and therefore cheaper to sell through either giant mail-order only warehouses (e.g. order from amazon, or order direct from the manufacturer) or something like Argos for when you want to be able to collect it yourself same-day.
The problem is how the showrooms get payed for? will we move instead to individual manfactures paying for showpiece storefronts (maybe Apple stores already are this? do they expect to make a profit on on-store sales, or are they just giant adverts driving their sales through other channels?)
The current middle-ground that retailers seem to be using is the online 'reserve and collect' - but they still tend to be keeping the much of their stock on the shelves rather than having it all more efficiently stacked away in a warehouse out the back.
You must NOT be able to prove your vote was counted correctly for a specific candidate. That leads to bribes/threats...
Here you've highlighted probably the biggest problem to overcome : how to allow voters to verify that their own vote has been correctly counted (and be able to prove that the vote was rigged if not), but in an anonymous and deniable way (to avoid coercion) : it may not be possible to have both at the same time (but I'm not an expert on the subject : maybe the unreadable-article has an answer).
OTOH if we live in a society where you may later be threatened in to proving how you voted (showing your hash-receipt, revealing your private crypto-key or password, revealing what secret mark / signature you put on your ballot paper etc. depending on how any such verification system is implemented), democracy would seem to have failed us anyway and the actual results of any such sham election probably irrelevant.
There are ways to do this and meet your requirements, but there is more to it than the 3 you listed.
Indeed, it is a tricky problem - I was trying to keep it simple and just answer the parent's post about what such a system might offer over and above today's sytems : I was hoping it was implied that it would also include existing features such as anonymity (and telling you how many votes each candidate / option received)
The BBC news article on this ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11632944 ) has a selection of comments from other people in the industry too - I think this one sums it up better for me than the quotes from Broughton (re-quoting from bbc article):
Mr Carrivick, of BAR UK [.....] said airport security seemed to be a "layered approach".
He added: "Every time there is a new security scare, an extra layer is added on to procedures.
"We need to step back and have a look at the whole situation. Standards change fairly regularly and this puts pressure on airports and airlines. We need to decide what we are trying to do and how best to do it."
1 : put the windows-taskbar (or linux desktop equivilent) on the side(s) of the screen - ideally the left side otherwise it slows down the time taken to hit the scroll bar or window-close buttons with the mouse. You'll have to make it a bit wider than it normally is tall and learn to live with only viewing the 1st few letters of the window titles.
2 : combine as many menus or toolbars together as possible - eg. in Firefox have the menu, back/fwd buttons and URL location all on the same line. Not all windows apps seem to allow you to put toolbar buttons on the same line as the menus, but wherever that feature exists you should use it.
3 : Remove all the other toolbars / excess status-bars - use the menus or learn keyboard shortcuts for your favourite applications (using the keyboard shortcuts is vastly more productive than hunting the toolbar buttons)
4 : Modify the window theme to make the fonts and icons for menus, window-titles, scroll-bars and min/max/close buttons as small as possible that you can still read them / click on them.
5 : (this one I have more problems with) - try using auto-hiding menus / panes / taskbar (notably in visual-studio which has many many panes of useful info). This one I'm not so keen on because it slows me down considerably, having to first move the mouse to make a pane show, then move the mouse to select the item of interest. Similarly you can try to use full-screen mode in apps that have it available and you don't need to view multiple apps concurrently.
You are right (but somehow got marked as 'Troll') - I should have worded it as you suggest : "patents can, at least in some circumstances, stifle innovation"
Mind you this is Slashdot and where would we be without spelling mistakes, uninformed opinions and sweeping generalisations?
I was at the london science museum last week and saw something interesting on the information board regarding one of the steam engines on display. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photograph / transcribe it, but this blog gives a summary: http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2006/08/engineering-parallels-at-the-s.php
To quote the blog's transcription of the caption:
In 1769, James Watt had taken out a patent that allowed him to dominate steam-engine design and improvement. As a result, other engineers were prevented by law from developing new, alternative designs."
When the patent expired other engineers were able to innovate again, particularly Richard Trevithick. He experimented with using steam under a much higher pressure, and as a result was able to build smaller and more powerful engines, which enabled him to build the first locomotive railway engine capable of hauling a load.
So even the science museum is suggesting that patent's stiffle innovation, and have been doing so for over 200 years
In a few years presumably some even higher bandwidth specification will come along - no problem if they used version-numbers, but once you have labelled the first generation "standard" and the current generation "High Speed" what're you going to be left with to use next and not end up looking stupid?
"new higher speed", "max speed", "ultimate speed", "super more ultimate than ultimate speed", "I Can't believe its not high speed... speed"?
Floppy disk drives (0.1 to 3MB), ZIP drives (100 to 750MB) have been totally replaced now by solid-state drives (in the form of USB memory sticks) - and re-writable CDs and re-writable DVDs are pretty much dead except for specialist cases (maybe medium-term archiving or transfering data to other devices like DVD-players or CD music players ; but for data-transfer an 8GB USB stick is far more convenient than burning a DVD).
Read-Only media for mass distribution is another matter entirely : physically stamping out the data in disks that can be spun past the reading mechanism like in a CD or DVD is unlikely to be superceded by something without moving parts for a while - although it is not unfeasible to imagine something like a CD but with the media stationary and the reader moving / directing its reading mechanism / beam accross it in 2 (or 3...) dimensions its a lot simpler / cheaper currently just to spin the disk around to provide one dimension of scanning (Simplifying the complicated / expensive movement of the heads to just one dimension while still allowing access to the whole 2D surface)
The team used meta-analytic procedures -- the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature -- to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors,
* I accept that the occasional overview / review of the current state of the literature has its place, but attempting to draw conclusions in this manner is treading a dangerous path fraught with possibilities of inadvertant bias (through cherry-picking of _which_ previous literature to include) and statistical noise amplification by recycling a limited set of original measurements (ie. if the results of this 'research' are considered in future meta-analysis in addition to the original publications) : see for example http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
re: > a kilowatt for 5 minutes or so at a time, and can sustain 500W practically indefinitely.
You've probably been mislead by much exercise equipment being (deliberately?) vague about whether they are measuring power output / mechanical work done, or 'equivilent food energy burnt'.
A typical assumption used is that the human body is only 20% to 25% efficient, so if you output 150W of mechanical power for 1 hour on a bike you've supplied 540KJ of energy (129 kCal), but the chances are your heart-rate-monitor, bike computer or whatever is going to tell you that you've offset the consumption of more like 2.4MJ or 600 kCal of food-intake (or a equivilent fuel intake to over 600W if you work back the other way through the calculation)
Some generous exercise equipment may also include your BMR in their display of calories-burnt, which is another 100W or so of power output but entirely lost as heat not mechanical power.
Reminds me of something I've not yet found the answer to: Why don't we have ground-based GPS transmitters in addition to the satellites? - wouldn't this give improved reliabilty / accuracy / easier-maintenance in places where you need it (ie. near ports) with standard GPS receiver equipment (rather than needing extra equipment like for differential-GPS)
This is the RSA algorithm. It hasn't been broken in the last 30 years by the smartest people. Either that, or the govt.(NSA) knows how to break it and is keeping it under wraps.
The algorithm in mark-t's post is not the one described on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA : I read it as a varient that (using the wikipedia page's notation) is making {p,q} public instead of {n,e}, with a corresponding adjustment to the messages that need to be exchanged.
this relies on the discrete logarithm of (d6=d5^Ys mod C) being difficult to solve from step-6 (with d6,d5 and C being known to an eavesdropper : Ys being what you need to figure out to break the encryption) - compared to the wikipedia articles RSA algorithm that more directly relies on factorising n being the difficult step.
3.The source and destination then compute Ys and Yd, respectively, such that their own X*Y is congruent to 1 mod (A*B). They do not share this information.
Should that be 1 mod ((A-1)*(B-1))?
I'm not that convinced that relying on the discrete logarithm problem (at the cost of 4x as much network communication) rather than directly on the factoring problem (like more commonly discussed PK based systems) has any additional security : aren't the 2 problems of identical complexity?
The cause appears to be a known issue with the Google search engine, in which the pages of defunct web sites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone
This makes it sound like the issue is with google's search engine and makes light of the real issue which is that at some point this information was published for all the world to see (or search engines to index) and anyone to cache (or write-down, or memorize).
Insisting on search engines removing removing this information from their indexes and remove it from their caches is just sweeping the problem under the rug : you or I taking a quick peek on the internet to see if our credit-card infomation has been published anywhere would get a false sense of security if the search engines pretended it wasn't there and that security breaches had never happened.
*tin-foil-hat-time* It seems analogous to re-writing history books to cover up prior misdeeds.
Its very difficult to compare as in typing speed measurements one will either be limited to different people as well as different keyboard layouts, or at least different amounts of exposure to each layout. And what about some control cases of randomly generated layouts or alphabetical layouts?
An interesting hypothesis to test would be that any keyboard layout might have similar typing speeds (say give a factor of 2 or so) once a user has enough experience with it - for things that can be typed with single key presses.
I _do_ have some personal experience with the (standard 2-hand) dvorak keyboard layout which anyone can try by selecting that layout in their OS's keyboard settings (irrespective of their physical keyboard), a side effect of this is that you will be forced to learn to touch-type as obviously the letters written on your standard keyboard will have no relation to what comes out on the screen any more!
Speaking entirely qualitatively - it was suprising how easy it was to learn, and a few times since I abandoned it I've gone back and found that it can be picked up again within an hour or two once learnt (just like riding a bike?). And as a few other posters have already mentioned (for typing normal English) it feels more comfortable as less finger movement is required on average.
However (and this is the reason I've abandoned using it) - the dvorak layout is inappropriate for most uses apart from simply typing English - such as computer programming, working with spreadsheets, linux command line usage etc.
This is because by arranging the characters by their frequency in standard english, many non-alphanumeric characters which are rarely used in standard english but now very frequently used for other tasks on a computer are placed in very awkard positions requiring you to type with the little finger (or even worse, shift + little-finger). Here are some examples ':' - used a lot in C++, is where shift-'z' is on qwerty. '{' and '}' - are shift-'-' and shift-'=' on qwerty. '\'' and '"' - are q and shift-'q' on qwerty.
Things that should be a single authoritative site
on
Web Singletons?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There are quite a few situations where life would be simpler if there were just one definitive instance of something - mostly indexes / official repositories of some kind, but sadly at the moment we have a multitude of these things with no single instance providing 100% coverage :
- Airline flight schedules : presumably every airline has planned its timetable months in advance, but there is no obvious place to search across all of them (cf. www.nationalrail.co.uk which I think does have the authoritative timetable across all mainline railways)
- List of all properties for sale in the country; in the UK the seller has to choose which estate agents to list with, and the buyer then has to go around a load of different agents to find out what's available. It'd seem obvious for this to instead be a nationalized thing - what added value do estate agents / letting introduction agencies provide anyway? (as distinct from letting agencies that also do some property management)
- Web Search : there is scope for different search-engines to provide fundamentally different types of search (ie. text, image, audio etc) : but why do we need more than one of each type?
- Scientific Journals : pre-print servers (arXiv.org) are starting to solve this problem, but lots of papers still get published in obscure / less-popular journals and if your university library doesn't subscribe to that one then you can't easily read it - and once you leave university they become pretty much unavailable to the average member of the public.
Pretty much all the things I can think of that would be better as a single instance have the problem that they are run commercially - so there are problems with monopolies if we ever get just one of them, and the tin-foil-hat brigade might have something to say if they were nationalized (and in many cases could just be right too : imagine if our primary news outlet were government controlled)
Free stuff seems to find its own level of singleton-like-ness, some keeping just one instance :
- IMDB, CPAN, w3c.org,.... others forking to meet differing preferences like linux distributions, tech news website etc.
Short term fluctuations in power generation and consumption are compensated at both ends of the chain - the clever part being the combination of (very inefficient but reasonably fast starting) distributed 'standing reserve' generators in conjunction with the automatic switching off of appliances called the Frequency Service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Use_of_the_Reserve_Service_and_Frequency_Service_in_practice and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Frequency_Service ) The nice part is that the consumers using the frequency service automatically detect the discrepancy in supply / demand from the power supply itself and can be automatically switched off with logic purely on the consumer's premises (cf. the generators which need to be told from a central control when to start / stop)
There is also of course hydro / pumped-storage generation that can be switched on / off at pretty short notice (though the wikipedia article doesn't mention how that works in conjunction the diesel generators)
As our supply changes to incorporate more unsteady sources (wind, solar, tidal-stream etc) this system will have to be extended by rolling out frequency-service to smaller consumers (though there are not that many things it can be applied to in its current large-scale industrial form - theoretically it could work on as small a scale as the domestic fridge/freezer) and building more of the efficient energy storage systems - although we've already built reservoirs in most of the obvious locations, many of them are currently only used for the supply of drinking water.
Power strips exist that have individual on-off switches for each socket (though they seem uncommon).
As an aside - the situation does seem to be improving with more manufacturers implementing charging over USB (eg. Sony playstation controllers, Garmin GPS units). I assume that the additional cost of an internal DC-DC converter (if required) is offset a little by not having to have separate connectors for data-transfer and battery charging : and once enough different devices use USB they won't need to include a charger bundled with every item (more savings for the manufacturer)
Slashdot Mirror
This does sound like the perfect use-case for the cloud (of the 'rent a VM' type of cloud, such as AWS or Azure) - both for short term access to vastly more CPU, RAM or storage than you would reasonably want to be sharing a room with and also for the huge network bandwidth to the rest of the internet typically available from a cloud datacentre (AWS as an example capping out at 224GB RAM or 42TB or local storage).
However this is E.S.R. we are talking about so, aside from the possible issues with whether any of the cloud providers are compatible with his larger philsophical aims, who knows what other interesting ideas he might come up with given access to much more powerful personal computer hardware rather than having his creativity shackled by the limitations of his current systems.
Another good suggestion for Asimov is his short story "The Last Question" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... which succinctly covers a vast timespan.
re:
PS. How is this News for Nerds? Why isn't the story tagged "troll"?
Unusually these days for a politician she was originally a science graduate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher#Early_life_and_education ) rather than coming in as a career politician or purely legal background (although she did switch track and become a barrister)
Some of this showed through in her leadership style - trying to do the logical thing for the best long term results (at least in her analysis) rather than trying to win the popularity contest and appealing to the masses. Sometimes this worked out (surely everyone can at least agree that earning the nickname 'iron lady' is pretty cool? and my memories of the 80s are that most peoples standard of living improved significantly) but in other cases it contributed to her downfall - e.g. the per-person 'poll tax' vs. a property-based tax for local services (such as rubbish/refuse collection) surely makes some logical sense to many slashdot readers? but unfortunately it made a larger number of people pay more tax than those unaffected / getting a a tax reduction so it was a political disaster.
for 1-4, In parallel we really need to solve the much more difficult http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law problem first re: overpopulation.
Otherwise the more food and water an area can provide in a perfect scenario the greater the end suffering will be when some inevitable problems occurs and the now larger population's demand's exceed what the land can supply : either due to war, drought/crop-failure or just the feedback delay between successfully increasing child survival rate and there being a baby-boomers population spike in high-consumption adults.
Maybe Education can help with that, but even in '1st-world' countries we still seem to have a problem with some people having many more children than they have the means to support themselves (currently a bit of a hot political topic in the UK with the government wanting to try and reduce the cost of supporting people on 'benefits')
The battery gives unlimited cycles*
--
*fair use policy applies.
Are we part way through a transition from shops being where you both browse / research products and purchase them, to separating these two phases of the shopping process.
The way I see it there is still a need for bricks & morter 'showrooms' where you can go and compare products side-by-side or even try them out in real life : e.g when buying a netbook / laptop, I always go to the local PC world or similar to try out the different keyboards and see how the displays look.
However to make the purchase, it is clearly more efficient and therefore cheaper to sell through either giant mail-order only warehouses (e.g. order from amazon, or order direct from the manufacturer) or something like Argos for when you want to be able to collect it yourself same-day.
The problem is how the showrooms get payed for? will we move instead to individual manfactures paying for showpiece storefronts (maybe Apple stores already are this? do they expect to make a profit on on-store sales, or are they just giant adverts driving their sales through other channels?)
The current middle-ground that retailers seem to be using is the online 'reserve and collect' - but they still tend to be keeping the much of their stock on the shelves rather than having it all more efficiently stacked away in a warehouse out the back.
You must NOT be able to prove your vote was counted correctly for a specific candidate. That leads to bribes/threats ...
Here you've highlighted probably the biggest problem to overcome : how to allow voters to verify that their own vote has been correctly counted (and be able to prove that the vote was rigged if not), but in an anonymous and deniable way (to avoid coercion) : it may not be possible to have both at the same time (but I'm not an expert on the subject : maybe the unreadable-article has an answer).
OTOH if we live in a society where you may later be threatened in to proving how you voted (showing your hash-receipt, revealing your private crypto-key or password, revealing what secret mark / signature you put on your ballot paper etc. depending on how any such verification system is implemented), democracy would seem to have failed us anyway and the actual results of any such sham election probably irrelevant.
There are ways to do this and meet your requirements, but there is more to it than the 3 you listed.
Indeed, it is a tricky problem - I was trying to keep it simple and just answer the parent's post about what such a system might offer over and above today's sytems : I was hoping it was implied that it would also include existing features such as anonymity (and telling you how many votes each candidate / option received)
and how much better is it than marking a circle with a pen and having someone scan the ballot into a machine?
In an ideal system, anybody should be able to independantly verify the following (which currently can't be done in a simple paper based ballot)
Unfortunately I can't RTFA to see how many of these ideals the proposed system achieves, as it seems to be a video rather than a text based article.
The BBC news article on this ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11632944 ) has a selection of comments from other people in the industry too - I think this one sums it up better for me than the quotes from Broughton (re-quoting from bbc article):
Mr Carrivick, of BAR UK [.....] said airport security seemed to be a "layered approach".
He added: "Every time there is a new security scare, an extra layer is added on to procedures.
"We need to step back and have a look at the whole situation. Standards change fairly regularly and this puts pressure on airports and airlines. We need to decide what we are trying to do and how best to do it."
1 : put the windows-taskbar (or linux desktop equivilent) on the side(s) of the screen - ideally the left side otherwise it slows down the time taken to hit the scroll bar or window-close buttons with the mouse. You'll have to make it a bit wider than it normally is tall and learn to live with only viewing the 1st few letters of the window titles.
2 : combine as many menus or toolbars together as possible - eg. in Firefox have the menu, back/fwd buttons and URL location all on the same line. Not all windows apps seem to allow you to put toolbar buttons on the same line as the menus, but wherever that feature exists you should use it.
3 : Remove all the other toolbars / excess status-bars - use the menus or learn keyboard shortcuts for your favourite applications (using the keyboard shortcuts is vastly more productive than hunting the toolbar buttons)
4 : Modify the window theme to make the fonts and icons for menus, window-titles, scroll-bars and min/max/close buttons as small as possible that you can still read them / click on them.
5 : (this one I have more problems with) - try using auto-hiding menus / panes / taskbar (notably in visual-studio which has many many panes of useful info). This one I'm not so keen on because it slows me down considerably, having to first move the mouse to make a pane show, then move the mouse to select the item of interest. Similarly you can try to use full-screen mode in apps that have it available and you don't need to view multiple apps concurrently.
You are right (but somehow got marked as 'Troll') - I should have worded it as you suggest : "patents can, at least in some circumstances, stifle innovation"
Mind you this is Slashdot and where would we be without spelling mistakes, uninformed opinions and sweeping generalisations?
I was at the london science museum last week and saw something interesting on the information board regarding one of the steam engines on display. Unfortunately I didn't think to take a photograph / transcribe it, but this blog gives a summary: http://www.currybet.net/cbet_blog/2006/08/engineering-parallels-at-the-s.php
To quote the blog's transcription of the caption:
In 1769, James Watt had taken out a patent that allowed him to dominate steam-engine design and improvement. As a result, other engineers were prevented by law from developing new, alternative designs."
When the patent expired other engineers were able to innovate again, particularly Richard Trevithick. He experimented with using steam under a much higher pressure, and as a result was able to build smaller and more powerful engines, which enabled him to build the first locomotive railway engine capable of hauling a load.
So even the science museum is suggesting that patent's stiffle innovation, and have been doing so for over 200 years
In a few years presumably some even higher bandwidth specification will come along - no problem if they used version-numbers, but once you have labelled the first generation "standard" and the current generation "High Speed" what're you going to be left with to use next and not end up looking stupid?
"new higher speed", "max speed", "ultimate speed", "super more ultimate than ultimate speed", "I Can't believe its not high speed... speed"?
Floppy disk drives (0.1 to 3MB), ZIP drives (100 to 750MB) have been totally replaced now by solid-state drives (in the form of USB memory sticks) - and re-writable CDs and re-writable DVDs are pretty much dead except for specialist cases (maybe medium-term archiving or transfering data to other devices like DVD-players or CD music players ; but for data-transfer an 8GB USB stick is far more convenient than burning a DVD).
Read-Only media for mass distribution is another matter entirely : physically stamping out the data in disks that can be spun past the reading mechanism like in a CD or DVD is unlikely to be superceded by something without moving parts for a while - although it is not unfeasible to imagine something like a CD but with the media stationary and the reader moving / directing its reading mechanism / beam accross it in 2 (or 3...) dimensions its a lot simpler / cheaper currently just to spin the disk around to provide one dimension of scanning (Simplifying the complicated / expensive movement of the heads to just one dimension while still allowing access to the whole 2D surface)
Is this the beginning of what Asimov predicted in his Foundation series : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Foundation_series_characters#Lord_Dorwin
from the article:
The team used meta-analytic procedures -- the statistical methods used to analyze and combine results from previous, related literature -- to test the effects of violent video game play on the behaviors,
* I accept that the occasional overview / review of the current state of the literature has its place, but attempting to draw conclusions in this manner is treading a dangerous path fraught with possibilities of inadvertant bias (through cherry-picking of _which_ previous literature to include) and statistical noise amplification by recycling a limited set of original measurements (ie. if the results of this 'research' are considered in future meta-analysis in addition to the original publications) : see for example http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
re:
> a kilowatt for 5 minutes or so at a time, and can sustain 500W practically indefinitely.
You've probably been mislead by much exercise equipment being (deliberately?) vague about whether they are measuring power output / mechanical work done, or 'equivilent food energy burnt'.
A typical assumption used is that the human body is only 20% to 25% efficient, so if you output 150W of mechanical power for 1 hour on a bike you've supplied 540KJ of energy (129 kCal), but the chances are your heart-rate-monitor, bike computer or whatever is going to tell you that you've offset the consumption of more like 2.4MJ or 600 kCal of food-intake (or a equivilent fuel intake to over 600W if you work back the other way through the calculation)
Some generous exercise equipment may also include your BMR in their display of calories-burnt, which is another 100W or so of power output but entirely lost as heat not mechanical power.
using static ground stations like LORAN,
Reminds me of something I've not yet found the answer to: Why don't we have ground-based GPS transmitters in addition to the satellites? - wouldn't this give improved reliabilty / accuracy / easier-maintenance in places where you need it (ie. near ports) with standard GPS receiver equipment (rather than needing extra equipment like for differential-GPS)
oops - I should have read more closely...
because the source and destination can pick new X and Y values with every transmission
I see now that _that_ is what you gain for the additional bandwidth cost
This is the RSA algorithm. It hasn't been broken in the last 30 years by the smartest people. Either that, or the govt.(NSA) knows how to break it and is keeping it under wraps.
The algorithm in mark-t's post is not the one described on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA : I read it as a varient that (using the wikipedia page's notation) is making {p,q} public instead of {n,e}, with a corresponding adjustment to the messages that need to be exchanged.
this relies on the discrete logarithm of (d6=d5^Ys mod C) being difficult to solve from step-6 (with d6,d5 and C being known to an eavesdropper : Ys being what you need to figure out to break the encryption) - compared to the wikipedia articles RSA algorithm that more directly relies on factorising n being the difficult step.
3.The source and destination then compute Ys and Yd, respectively, such that their own X*Y is congruent to 1 mod (A*B). They do not share this information.
Should that be 1 mod ((A-1)*(B-1))?
I'm not that convinced that relying on the discrete logarithm problem (at the cost of 4x as much network communication) rather than directly on the factoring problem (like more commonly discussed PK based systems) has any additional security : aren't the 2 problems of identical complexity?
From both the article and the summary re:
The cause appears to be a known issue with the Google search engine, in which the pages of defunct web sites containing sensitive directories remain cached and available to anyone
This makes it sound like the issue is with google's search engine and makes light of the real issue which is that at some point this information was published for all the world to see (or search engines to index) and anyone to cache (or write-down, or memorize).
Insisting on search engines removing removing this information from their indexes and remove it from their caches is just sweeping the problem under the rug : you or I taking a quick peek on the internet to see if our credit-card infomation has been published anywhere would get a false sense of security if the search engines pretended it wasn't there and that security breaches had never happened.
*tin-foil-hat-time* It seems analogous to re-writing history books to cover up prior misdeeds.
Its very difficult to compare as in typing speed measurements one will either be limited to different people as well as different keyboard layouts, or at least different amounts of exposure to each layout. And what about some control cases of randomly generated layouts or alphabetical layouts?
An interesting hypothesis to test would be that any keyboard layout might have similar typing speeds (say give a factor of 2 or so) once a user has enough experience with it - for things that can be typed with single key presses.
I _do_ have some personal experience with the (standard 2-hand) dvorak keyboard layout which anyone can try by selecting that layout in their OS's keyboard settings (irrespective of their physical keyboard), a side effect of this is that you will be forced to learn to touch-type as obviously the letters written on your standard keyboard will have no relation to what comes out on the screen any more!
Speaking entirely qualitatively - it was suprising how easy it was to learn, and a few times since I abandoned it I've gone back and found that it can be picked up again within an hour or two once learnt (just like riding a bike?). And as a few other posters have already mentioned (for typing normal English) it feels more comfortable as less finger movement is required on average.
However (and this is the reason I've abandoned using it) - the dvorak layout is inappropriate for most uses apart from simply typing English - such as computer programming, working with spreadsheets, linux command line usage etc.
This is because by arranging the characters by their frequency in standard english, many non-alphanumeric characters which are rarely used in standard english but now very frequently used for other tasks on a computer are placed in very awkard positions requiring you to type with the little finger (or even worse, shift + little-finger). Here are some examples
':' - used a lot in C++, is where shift-'z' is on qwerty.
'{' and '}' - are shift-'-' and shift-'=' on qwerty.
'\'' and '"' - are q and shift-'q' on qwerty.
There are quite a few situations where life would be simpler if there were just one definitive instance of something - mostly indexes / official repositories of some kind, but sadly at the moment we have a multitude of these things with no single instance providing 100% coverage :
- Airline flight schedules : presumably every airline has planned its timetable months in advance, but there is no obvious place to search across all of them (cf. www.nationalrail.co.uk which I think does have the authoritative timetable across all mainline railways)
- List of all properties for sale in the country; in the UK the seller has to choose which estate agents to list with, and the buyer then has to go around a load of different agents to find out what's available. It'd seem obvious for this to instead be a nationalized thing - what added value do estate agents / letting introduction agencies provide anyway? (as distinct from letting agencies that also do some property management)
- Web Search : there is scope for different search-engines to provide fundamentally different types of search (ie. text, image, audio etc) : but why do we need more than one of each type?
- Scientific Journals : pre-print servers (arXiv.org) are starting to solve this problem, but lots of papers still get published in obscure / less-popular journals and if your university library doesn't subscribe to that one then you can't easily read it - and once you leave university they become pretty much unavailable to the average member of the public.
Pretty much all the things I can think of that would be better as a single instance have the problem that they are run commercially - so there are problems with monopolies if we ever get just one of them, and the tin-foil-hat brigade might have something to say if they were nationalized (and in many cases could just be right too : imagine if our primary news outlet were government controlled)
Free stuff seems to find its own level of singleton-like-ness, some keeping just one instance : ....
- IMDB, CPAN, w3c.org,
others forking to meet differing preferences like linux distributions, tech news website etc.
Don't know how the distribution system in the US works, but a fair bit of deatil on the UK's national grid is available on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK) and pages referenced from there.
Short term fluctuations in power generation and consumption are compensated at both ends of the chain - the clever part being the combination of (very inefficient but reasonably fast starting) distributed 'standing reserve' generators in conjunction with the automatic switching off of appliances called the Frequency Service ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Use_of_the_Reserve_Service_and_Frequency_Service_in_practice and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_the_National_Grid_(UK)#Frequency_Service )
The nice part is that the consumers using the frequency service automatically detect the discrepancy in supply / demand from the power supply itself and can be automatically switched off with logic purely on the consumer's premises (cf. the generators which need to be told from a central control when to start / stop)
There is also of course hydro / pumped-storage generation that can be switched on / off at pretty short notice (though the wikipedia article doesn't mention how that works in conjunction the diesel generators)
As our supply changes to incorporate more unsteady sources (wind, solar, tidal-stream etc) this system will have to be extended by rolling out frequency-service to smaller consumers (though there are not that many things it can be applied to in its current large-scale industrial form - theoretically it could work on as small a scale as the domestic fridge/freezer) and building more of the efficient energy storage systems - although we've already built reservoirs in most of the obvious locations, many of them are currently only used for the supply of drinking water.
Power strips exist that have individual on-off switches for each socket (though they seem uncommon).
As an aside - the situation does seem to be improving with more manufacturers implementing charging over USB (eg. Sony playstation controllers, Garmin GPS units).
I assume that the additional cost of an internal DC-DC converter (if required) is offset a little by not having to have separate connectors for data-transfer and battery charging : and once enough different devices use USB they won't need to include a charger bundled with every item (more savings for the manufacturer)