In most cases, this is the fault of the companies who advertise "high speed" and leave open the implication that you can do anything you want with it. Put that in front of a geek and we will push those limits and come up with a dozen new ways to use that bandwidth up.
In a past incarnation I worked for a CLEC who had a large number of bank customers who used 64 Kbps DDS circuits for each automated teller machine. Everything went through a frame relay connection and those customers would constantly tinker with their Bc Be and CIR values for each frame circuit. We spent an inordinate amount of time each month tweaking each circuit to the new values that the customer wanted.
The big secret was that we did not penalize them for sustained bursts of traffic. Of course we told them that we would and that we would drop packets if they went beyond the duration of a burst. As long as the connections did not overwhelm our backhaul off of the data switches we never really cared too much. A few customers figured that out and if I had a moment of morbid curiosity I would peek in at their usage and see a high sustained data rate (usually a branch office and not an ATM and their IT folks would try to do backups across the frame relay network at night).
Ingrain those images and sounds in your brain, they represent the pinnacle of our civilization. As a whole, we have given up on dreams of things bigger than we are, of goals that take decades to come to fruition. Of making the impossible happen.
Having lived my life through the glory days of the space program. Watching the Apollo landings on the moon, the tragic losses of Apollo 1 the Challenger and the Columbia. The creation of a space station and our exploration of our planetary neighbors. The days when anything was possible, the childhood dreams that inspired many of us into the sciences and engineering.
We will no longer have scientific legacies that define our generation. Everything has been reduced to what fits within the agenda of the most recently elected representatives or for cuddly, cutesy feel-good quasi-science programs.
Maybe some civilization will colonize the moon and set foot upon the other planets but it will not be ours, we have fallen into the trap of decadence and slow decay. Once the final space shuttle mission flies we will be reduced to observer status as other, more aggressive and visionary cultures step into the forefront of exploration.
Rome faced a similar inward turning and decline. At one time they ruled most of western civilization from Britannia to Egypt. When they lost their vision of who they were as a people they contacted into the areas immediately around Rome, eventually they could not even hold onto that. Even until the times when the barbarians were beating on the gates of Rome they were comfortable in their belief that their civilization was the center of the world.
Read the Book "Titan" by Steven Baxter for a more sobering piece of fiction on where we may be heading.
You gotta remember that there have been doomsday cults going back thousands of years. Sometimes they get a bit extreme and do the "Heaven's Gate" or "Jim Jones" routes. Ignorance and the complete denial of the facts give the folks in charge of these groups the power that they crave.
Science is one of the most poorly misunderstood subjects in schools today. One time I convinced a tech (with a college degree in electronics) that LED's also doubled as cameras. I didn't think anything more of it but a few months later I was over at this house and he had tiny bits of black electrical tape covering every LED in his house. If you are convincing enough (or evil), (not sure if I am convincing or evil) you can make many people who are normally rational, believe some of the most outrageous claims.
Yea, the folks who sell off all of their possessions and go hang out on a mountaintop waiting for doomsday are probably not quite in sync with most people. The measure of sanity vs. insanity is what the majority believes in. At the pace it is going, those of us who laugh this off today will be called "deniers" and considered insane.
The real waste is the dismantling of the launch vehicles (from both countries). We all spent billions developing reliable launch technologies and it breaks my heart to see them crushing perfectly good missiles.
This is the same argument that the incumbent carriers used to fight the municipal fiber optic system in Chattanooga TN. The carriers lost that battle in the courts and Chattanooga is well on it's way with the deployment of fiber everywhere in the city.
The tactic used is to make the legal costs so high that the municipality or district will just give up (they have had some successes with that technique).
I am not against free enterprise, innovation and competition but the incumbent telephone and cable TV carriers are anti-competitive and usually hold exclusive control over their customers. They will fight to the death to keep a competing system from succeeding.
I found it interesting in one of the news articles that Microsoft stated it was not a problem with their systems.
Guess what buddy. When you buy a company for $500 million dollars (a year ago) then it becomes your system.
Microsoft should have had people standing at the front door the day after the sale was completed to go in and document/standardize the operating procedures of Danger. Since they purchased the company they assume all responsibility for it's operation. To now claim that they are blameless is disingenuous at the least.
Of course, since the name was not changed to "Microsoft" they are hiding behind the illusion of a shell corporation where they can always proclaim their innocence.
As other posters have pointed out, backups are one of the key tenets of IT. I would assume that Microsoft would have a grip on essential business procedures in the IT world.
There are other services in the HF band between 1.8 MHz and 50 MHz than just Ham operators and shortwave radio stations.
The spectrum is also used for aviation, particularly when commercial aircraft are over the ocean and out of line-of-sight to a shore station. Most ships at sea use HF radio for communications from ship to ship and for ship to shore communications. The military still uses HF communications for a great many systems, including the broadcast of EAM (emergency action messages).
Someone will say "so what, they are way up in the air or in the middle of the ocean" but they fail to realize that the shore based stations are subject to interference while trying to receive signals from aircraft and ships.
There are still radio navigation systems that operate in the HF bands, weather bouys in the ocean sending back data by HF and many other overlooked systems of lesser renown.
Having spent a significant amount of my professional life hunting down interference sources to communications systems I can say it is NOT a good idea to put a thousand low powerline network extenders across a city. There WILL be harmonic interference, intermodulation and an overall decrease in performance. Look at how badly screwed up the 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and ZigBee are? The 2.4 and 5.8 GHz devices at least have the decency of being line-of-sight and range is limited by buildings. As soon as you attach something to the wiring system of your home you create something that is impossible to manage (resolving interference issues).
Give this one to the Hams and to those of us who still own and use shortwave radios.
I would recommend the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville AL. It is about 15 miles due east of I-65 if you are making a north-south trip across the middle of the country.
The sexagesimal (base 60) numbering system was around for more than a thousand years before the greeks. (approx 2000 BC). It is an odd system but one fully capable of supporting quadratic equations, algeba, roots, powers, multiplication, division and reciprocals.
As a species we have gradually transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies to fixed agrarian settlements and animal husbandry around 10,000 years ago. Essentially the capability of human intellect has changed little in that time. If you were able to take a child from the city of Ur or Uruk 5,000 years ago and put them in modern schools they would do as well (or as badly) as modern students.
The greatest impediment to human progress has not been intellect, numbering systems or technologies. What has kept us from moving to the stars 500 to 1000 years ago has been that we are terrible at keeping knowledge and invention once it is discovered. The rises and falls of civilizations has been the great eraser of knowledge and frequently does the CTRL-ALT-DEL on all of the progress we have made to date.
By the time our sun begins to get warmer and gradually blooms out to a red giant life on this planet will either be completely extinct or so far along the evolutionary path that Homo Sapiens will be as relevant as the dinosaurs are to us today.
Maybe the explosion of life that happened 2-3 billion years ago was brought about by such a probe.
It could be that the speed of light is an absolute limit and earlier civilizations seeded the galaxy with probes filled with amino acids and simple, single celled forms of life. Tens of thousands of probes could be launched with a simple imperative "find a planet in the habitable zone around a star with a reducing atmosphere and water and seed".
This is a legacy that maybe someday we will advance to the point where we play the long game of seeding life, knowing we will be long-gone and our sun has passed into the red giant phase.
They are not CW (continuous wave) lasers, they are pulsed with pulses in the microsecond range (just like the flash on a camera).. There is a power equation on the paper postulating that 200 pSec (picosecond) pulses at 50 MW (megawatts) are seen as optimal.
If my math is right (10 -12 is a picosecond) multiplied by pulse power 50,000,000 watts per pulse, then factoring in lasing efficiencies (for the sake of argument, lets assume that the laser is only 10% efficient). This comes out to around 1/10th of a watt per pulse.
So give the laser a pulse repetition rate of ten times a second, use a mirror to fan it across the sky, creating little ionization channels to the clouds within 5 miles of the laser (it can have a much longer range but because when it is overcast close to the ground, you lose range so we downplay the area and distances covered).
Add in more losses, air conditioning to keep the laser nice and happy, mirror power, some type of control system...
This could draw less power than your computer. The air conditioning for a small enclosure will be the biggest load.
The article presents a very interesting possibility of transferring genetic capabilities of other species into humans. There are several areas where essential metabolic functions are not available to humans.
If you do not have a regular supply of fruits and vegetables that contain Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) you will develop scurvy. This was the leading cause of deaths on oceangoing voyages up until the early 20th century. (it is also why British sailors were called "limeys" because of the storage and consumption of limes while at sea). Humans lack one enzyme L-gulonolactone oxidase that would allow the liver to convert glucose into ascorbic acid and give an humans back an evolutionary edge that was lost to our species.
There are at least 10 essential amino acids that are not produced in the human body. In many other organisms genetics has provided the "key" to unlocking amino acid production.
Further research into what biochemical processes that can be incorporated either as a treatment regimen or as a modification to the human genome can greatly expand our adaptability as a species. Could the ability of the wood frog to survive being frozen solid enable us to travel to distant stars through hibernation?
And each of those 536 congress-critters has their own agenda and suffers from a chronic lack of long term vision or commitment. Their only concern is making their next election cycle, keeping the lobbyist money flowing into their Swiss bank accounts and catering to the very narrow interests of their own constituencies (as they perceive them).
Just from the NASA perspective, look at how the Apollo program was cut off midstream. They canceled the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle in 2002 when congress decided they wanted the money back.
With the military now congress has cut off the funding to the F-22, "while-we-are-building-an-operational-fleet". They canceled the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter in 2004 so they could have money to pay for refurbishing the Vietnam era UH-1 helicopters
It would suck to work at NASA where you dedicate 5-10 years of your life to a project to have the rug yanked out from under you at the last moment. It is not surprising that there are not long lines of aerospace scientists and engineers at the doors of SpaceX, hoping for the opportunity to have something you worked on actually make it into space.
Yes, going into space would be cool, a once in a lifetime event and almost every breathing human being would be utterly flabbergasted by the view and the opportunity. I think that there is an aspect that you are overlooking;
The activities that NASA assigns the shuttle crew, mission specialists and spacewalkers is very intensive and intellectually exhausting. Being in space for a week to two weeks and having nearly every minute of your time mapped out and assigned creates an incredible amount of stress.
Working on earth, in a conventional job. Let's say as a programmer, working 16 hour days with a team of bosses standing right behind you and monitoring your every keystroke, you would find yourself exhausted and looking for a mental margarita after a very short time.
NASA cannot make it to the Mos Eisley Cantina on the planet Tatooine where the crew can have a few beers and tease the imperial storm troopers (Star Wars reference). Being able to take 2-3 hours out of a mission to watch a movie is most certainly a welcome diversion.
For a historical reference look up what happened on Skylab 3 when NASA ground controllers assigned too many tasks to the station crew. After a few days the Skylab 3 crew "went out on strike" for a day and refused to answer any ground communications unless it was an emergency. They needed the downtime to rest and relax. After that incident NASA became a bit more relaxed in how many micromanaged tasks they would burden astronauts with and began to put relaxation time into their mission planning.
They are regulated by the FCC and clearly their lack of cooperation in finding this guy was not in the public interest. The fine print in the Code of Federal regulations does require licensees to cooperate in a legitimate emergency.
It sounds like their customer service people were more concerned about the little red box on a computer screen than in helping the sheriff. The article does not go into enough detail on if an escalation procedure was requested for or offered. No matter what time of the day it is, there is always someone available with enough authority to turn the service on temporarily. It is not as if the sheriff was asking for a service restoration so the guy could make a five hour cell call to Bangladesh.
Verizon should be burned for how they handled this. Maybe someone needs to make a stink with their elected officials or to file a formal complaint with the FCC.
Way back in the 80's I was taking a receiver design course at George Washington University. My lab partner was involved in the continual design of more sensitive receivers to listen in on the voyager craft. It led to interesting discussions about how the pace of receiver design (sensitivity, noise floor, selectivity). At the time we were learning the state of the art, the folks at the research labs were pushing the limits further and further. It warms my heart to realize that 25 years later they are still making significant advancements.
What it will take to monitor the weakening transmissions from the Pioneers and Voyagers five years from now doesn't exist today. Kudos to everyone involved in the process.
The differences between filesystems is not that surprising and you can see a common trend across all of the USB flash drives. This is a good heads-up comparison of the filesystems.
I have a great interest in the differences between manufacturers and models of the flash-drives. You can clearly see who is using faster chips and who is using the dregs out of a bucket full of memory chips. The filesystem comparisons are dwarfed by the hardware speed.
Once a USB flash-drive is put in a convenient plastic case no-one ever looks at access speed. While we all debate the advantages of filesystems and USB 1.0, 1.1 or 2.0 we sometimes forget that it's the chip that becomes the factor limiting performance.
When have you ever seen a USB flash drive that lists the access times in uSec? We all look with great interest at RAM, hard-drive access speeds, video performance yet we treat a USB flash drive like a mouse.
There were a great many factors that were considered before the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. At that point in time, allied forces had cornered the Japanese military to the home islands with it's outposts in the Pacific cut off from resupply and slowly starving into submission.
Our next move for Japan would have been the whole-scale destruction of every Japanese city with incendiaries (like what happened to Dresden Germany). In that bombing campaign, millions of Japanese would have died.
America knew that the next step would be a two-pronged landing invasion of Japan. It was determined that the US losses would have been 1,000,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen. The losses to the Japanese would have been of several million as Japan was prepared to give wooden spears to children and old men and to send them off on banzai charges against tanks and machine guns.
Just in the first few hours of the invasion the casualties of war would have around 1,000 allied and Japanese deaths per hour. This would have gone on for months.
We do not know what the dire position of the Japanese military would have caused them to bring to the battleground. Japan already had extensive experience with biological and chemical weapons and had used them to great effect in China. The German V-1 "buzz bomb" design was in Japanese hands and they were prepared to make Kamikaze attacks against the nearly 3000 allied vessels that would have been off the shores of Japan.
Certainly at the end of the war, the United States would have been much less inclined to help in the rebuilding of the Japanese government and industry. The successes of Japanese industry in the 60's, 70's and 80's may never have happened.
It is indeed unfortunate that Japanese civilians died in the nuclear detonations. Those were indeed desperate times and unfortunately the people who usually suffer the most is the non-combatant.
Some of the problems with the old 121.5 MHz and 243.0 MHz beacons is that they only tranmitted the "wheep-wheep-wheep" signal and it was damned difficult to find an aircraft sitting in a hangar that had it's beacon accidentally activated.
Having been on that "hunt" before (to find an accidentally activated beacon at a small, general aviation airport) it diverts a tremendous amount of resources to drive around and triangulate the transmitter. When the plane is sitting in a hangar or on a parking spot at an airport you can waste an hour or so trying to find what particular plane is guilty.
The new 406 MHz beacons also transmit the plane tail number, serial number, owners name, etc... There will be maritime and personal emergency beacons that will eventually use the same system. Some systems will also transmit the GPS coordinates of where the beacon is located.
At the higher frequencies a satellite fix will be able to give better fix (instead of saying "somewhere in northeast Nebraska"). The beacons are registered to the owner at the time they are sold or installed, giving a record of exactly what is going off.
Right now, if a 121.5 beacon goes off it can be anything from a single passenger private aircraft where some owner disconnected the wrong wire, up to a large commercial jet that has crashed into a mountain.
Aircraft will continue to monitor the "guard" frequencies (121.5 and 243.0). A search of the internet will find an MP3 of the F-117 Stealth Fighter that was shot down over Bosnia. If you listen to the audio, you can hear the pilot on 243.0 calling out that he has ejected and then you will hear the alert beacon tones.
A common phrase heard in Vietnam was "beeper beeper come up voice" as an aircraft went down. Every other aircraft for miles around would suddenly work together to triangulate where the downed crews were.
During the war, the majority of Helicopters did not have beacons. The army crews would beg borrow and steal beacons and survival vests from the air force so if they went down, there was some chance of being found in a big ass jungle.
It is odd that she went through the trouble to purchase a lap-top to do her classes yet could not find the energy to work out a simple connectivity issue to Verizon.
Sure OpenOffice is "different". So is every version of Windowz or MS Office from it's earlier incarnations. Maybe she does not know what the "save as" menu pull-down means.
It seems like a strange case of apathy; "I bought a computer and it is not smarter than me". Even for many of the "computer illiterate", they do not stay totally clueless for very long. If the class was important to her, she should have made some sort of effort.
"Back in the day" before the WWW, we did things through BBS'es, Telnet sessions, Archie or the dreaded 3270 session. It took a marginal familiarity to get a connection going but remember how excited we would get over the differences between xmodem, ymodem or zmodem?
I try not to be jaded but it bewilders me when everyone expects a "plug and play" world. Life is hard, as Larry Niven once wrote "immortality is not for sissies". Are we devolving as a species or are our self-expectations that low?
Similar excuses used over the ages; 1. The dog ate my homework 2. I didn't come to class as it starts to early and I was out partying all night long. 3. Talk to the hand. 4. My car ran out of gas so I did not come to work for the month. Can I still get my pay-check?
Maybe she lives in the wilderness and there are no computer literate people around for thousands of miles. I am surprised that she had the energy to dial the Dell tech support number and ask questions about "what is Ubuntu".... Then again, maybe she didn't.
I tried the Chrome experience last week and had a similar experience. While the browser is faster (always a good thing), there is a serious lack of plug-in support under Chrome.
I too use Adblock Plus, Foxmarks and NoScript and consider these to be important features in any browser. Currently, Chrome is a less mature browser where few if any developers are writing plug-in's to equal the breadth and depth of tools available for Firefox.
I also have this nagging doubt that Google will be openly supportive of features similar to Adblock and NoScript as Google's revenue stream comes from selling advertising space. The old saying "you don't defecate where you eat" makes me question just how far Google will go to support features that allow us to deny adware, scripts and tracking cookies.
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In most cases, this is the fault of the companies who advertise "high speed" and leave open the implication that you can do anything you want with it. Put that in front of a geek and we will push those limits and come up with a dozen new ways to use that bandwidth up.
In a past incarnation I worked for a CLEC who had a large number of bank customers who used 64 Kbps DDS circuits for each automated teller machine. Everything went through a frame relay connection and those customers would constantly tinker with their Bc Be and CIR values for each frame circuit. We spent an inordinate amount of time each month tweaking each circuit to the new values that the customer wanted.
The big secret was that we did not penalize them for sustained bursts of traffic. Of course we told them that we would and that we would drop packets if they went beyond the duration of a burst. As long as the connections did not overwhelm our backhaul off of the data switches we never really cared too much. A few customers figured that out and if I had a moment of morbid curiosity I would peek in at their usage and see a high sustained data rate (usually a branch office and not an ATM and their IT folks would try to do backups across the frame relay network at night).
Ingrain those images and sounds in your brain, they represent the pinnacle of our civilization. As a whole, we have given up on dreams of things bigger than we are, of goals that take decades to come to fruition. Of making the impossible happen.
Having lived my life through the glory days of the space program. Watching the Apollo landings on the moon, the tragic losses of Apollo 1 the Challenger and the Columbia. The creation of a space station and our exploration of our planetary neighbors. The days when anything was possible, the childhood dreams that inspired many of us into the sciences and engineering.
We will no longer have scientific legacies that define our generation. Everything has been reduced to what fits within the agenda of the most recently elected representatives or for cuddly, cutesy feel-good quasi-science programs.
Maybe some civilization will colonize the moon and set foot upon the other planets but it will not be ours, we have fallen into the trap of decadence and slow decay. Once the final space shuttle mission flies we will be reduced to observer status as other, more aggressive and visionary cultures step into the forefront of exploration.
Rome faced a similar inward turning and decline. At one time they ruled most of western civilization from Britannia to Egypt. When they lost their vision of who they were as a people they contacted into the areas immediately around Rome, eventually they could not even hold onto that. Even until the times when the barbarians were beating on the gates of Rome they were comfortable in their belief that their civilization was the center of the world.
Read the Book "Titan" by Steven Baxter for a more sobering piece of fiction on where we may be heading.
You gotta remember that there have been doomsday cults going back thousands of years. Sometimes they get a bit extreme and do the "Heaven's Gate" or "Jim Jones" routes. Ignorance and the complete denial of the facts give the folks in charge of these groups the power that they crave.
Science is one of the most poorly misunderstood subjects in schools today. One time I convinced a tech (with a college degree in electronics) that LED's also doubled as cameras. I didn't think anything more of it but a few months later I was over at this house and he had tiny bits of black electrical tape covering every LED in his house. If you are convincing enough (or evil), (not sure if I am convincing or evil) you can make many people who are normally rational, believe some of the most outrageous claims.
Yea, the folks who sell off all of their possessions and go hang out on a mountaintop waiting for doomsday are probably not quite in sync with most people. The measure of sanity vs. insanity is what the majority believes in. At the pace it is going, those of us who laugh this off today will be called "deniers" and considered insane.
So, is he offering this out of his own pocket? (a billion dollars).
Or is this just a hare-brained idea that he is tossing out there to get some spin on his own name.
Let's see the Dallas Mavericks remove themselves from anything Google first. Oh, that's right, he must have already, never heard of the team before...
The real waste is the dismantling of the launch vehicles (from both countries). We all spent billions developing reliable launch technologies and it breaks my heart to see them crushing perfectly good missiles.
This is the same argument that the incumbent carriers used to fight the municipal fiber optic system in Chattanooga TN. The carriers lost that battle in the courts and Chattanooga is well on it's way with the deployment of fiber everywhere in the city.
The tactic used is to make the legal costs so high that the municipality or district will just give up (they have had some successes with that technique).
I am not against free enterprise, innovation and competition but the incumbent telephone and cable TV carriers are anti-competitive and usually hold exclusive control over their customers. They will fight to the death to keep a competing system from succeeding.
I found it interesting in one of the news articles that Microsoft stated it was not a problem with their systems.
Guess what buddy. When you buy a company for $500 million dollars (a year ago) then it becomes your system.
Microsoft should have had people standing at the front door the day after the sale was completed to go in and document/standardize the operating procedures of Danger. Since they purchased the company they assume all responsibility for it's operation. To now claim that they are blameless is disingenuous at the least.
Of course, since the name was not changed to "Microsoft" they are hiding behind the illusion of a shell corporation where they can always proclaim their innocence.
As other posters have pointed out, backups are one of the key tenets of IT. I would assume that Microsoft would have a grip on essential business procedures in the IT world.
There are other services in the HF band between 1.8 MHz and 50 MHz than just Ham operators and shortwave radio stations.
The spectrum is also used for aviation, particularly when commercial aircraft are over the ocean and out of line-of-sight to a shore station. Most ships at sea use HF radio for communications from ship to ship and for ship to shore communications. The military still uses HF communications for a great many systems, including the broadcast of EAM (emergency action messages).
Someone will say "so what, they are way up in the air or in the middle of the ocean" but they fail to realize that the shore based stations are subject to interference while trying to receive signals from aircraft and ships.
There are still radio navigation systems that operate in the HF bands, weather bouys in the ocean sending back data by HF and many other overlooked systems of lesser renown.
Having spent a significant amount of my professional life hunting down interference sources to communications systems I can say it is NOT a good idea to put a thousand low powerline network extenders across a city. There WILL be harmonic interference, intermodulation and an overall decrease in performance. Look at how badly screwed up the 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth and ZigBee are? The 2.4 and 5.8 GHz devices at least have the decency of being line-of-sight and range is limited by buildings. As soon as you attach something to the wiring system of your home you create something that is impossible to manage (resolving interference issues).
Give this one to the Hams and to those of us who still own and use shortwave radios.
I would recommend the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville AL. It is about 15 miles due east of I-65 if you are making a north-south trip across the middle of the country.
The sexagesimal (base 60) numbering system was around for more than a thousand years before the greeks. (approx 2000 BC). It is an odd system but one fully capable of supporting quadratic equations, algeba, roots, powers, multiplication, division and reciprocals.
http://it.stlawu.edu/~dmelvill/mesomath/index.html
As a species we have gradually transitioned from hunter-gatherer societies to fixed agrarian settlements and animal husbandry around 10,000 years ago. Essentially the capability of human intellect has changed little in that time. If you were able to take a child from the city of Ur or Uruk 5,000 years ago and put them in modern schools they would do as well (or as badly) as modern students.
The greatest impediment to human progress has not been intellect, numbering systems or technologies. What has kept us from moving to the stars 500 to 1000 years ago has been that we are terrible at keeping knowledge and invention once it is discovered. The rises and falls of civilizations has been the great eraser of knowledge and frequently does the CTRL-ALT-DEL on all of the progress we have made to date.
By the time our sun begins to get warmer and gradually blooms out to a red giant life on this planet will either be completely extinct or so far along the evolutionary path that Homo Sapiens will be as relevant as the dinosaurs are to us today.
Maybe the explosion of life that happened 2-3 billion years ago was brought about by such a probe.
It could be that the speed of light is an absolute limit and earlier civilizations seeded the galaxy with probes filled with amino acids and simple, single celled forms of life. Tens of thousands of probes could be launched with a simple imperative "find a planet in the habitable zone around a star with a reducing atmosphere and water and seed".
This is a legacy that maybe someday we will advance to the point where we play the long game of seeding life, knowing we will be long-gone and our sun has passed into the red giant phase.
"It's a cook book!"
Wow, now I am tremendously offended. You left out the entire Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman pantheon.
I have word that Enki, Horus, Thor and Zeus are gonna be mighty pissed!
They are not CW (continuous wave) lasers, they are pulsed with pulses in the microsecond range (just like the flash on a camera).. There is a power equation on the paper postulating that 200 pSec (picosecond) pulses at 50 MW (megawatts) are seen as optimal.
If my math is right (10 -12 is a picosecond) multiplied by pulse power 50,000,000 watts per pulse, then factoring in lasing efficiencies (for the sake of argument, lets assume that the laser is only 10% efficient). This comes out to around 1/10th of a watt per pulse.
So give the laser a pulse repetition rate of ten times a second, use a mirror to fan it across the sky, creating little ionization channels to the clouds within 5 miles of the laser (it can have a much longer range but because when it is overcast close to the ground, you lose range so we downplay the area and distances covered).
Add in more losses, air conditioning to keep the laser nice and happy, mirror power, some type of control system...
This could draw less power than your computer. The air conditioning for a small enclosure will be the biggest load.
The article presents a very interesting possibility of transferring genetic capabilities of other species into humans. There are several areas where essential metabolic functions are not available to humans.
If you do not have a regular supply of fruits and vegetables that contain Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) you will develop scurvy. This was the leading cause of deaths on oceangoing voyages up until the early 20th century. (it is also why British sailors were called "limeys" because of the storage and consumption of limes while at sea). Humans lack one enzyme L-gulonolactone oxidase that would allow the liver to convert glucose into ascorbic acid and give an humans back an evolutionary edge that was lost to our species.
http://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/196x/stone-i-acta_genet_med_et_gemell-1966-v15-p345.htm
There are at least 10 essential amino acids that are not produced in the human body. In many other organisms genetics has provided the "key" to unlocking amino acid production.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/Organic/essam.html
Further research into what biochemical processes that can be incorporated either as a treatment regimen or as a modification to the human genome can greatly expand our adaptability as a species. Could the ability of the wood frog to survive being frozen solid enable us to travel to distant stars through hibernation?
http://www.blurtit.com/q476575.html
And each of those 536 congress-critters has their own agenda and suffers from a chronic lack of long term vision or commitment. Their only concern is making their next election cycle, keeping the lobbyist money flowing into their Swiss bank accounts and catering to the very narrow interests of their own constituencies (as they perceive them).
Just from the NASA perspective, look at how the Apollo program was cut off midstream. They canceled the X-38 Crew Return Vehicle in 2002 when congress decided they wanted the money back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-38
With the military now congress has cut off the funding to the F-22, "while-we-are-building-an-operational-fleet". They canceled the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter in 2004 so they could have money to pay for refurbishing the Vietnam era UH-1 helicopters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAH-66_Comanche
It would suck to work at NASA where you dedicate 5-10 years of your life to a project to have the rug yanked out from under you at the last moment. It is not surprising that there are not long lines of aerospace scientists and engineers at the doors of SpaceX, hoping for the opportunity to have something you worked on actually make it into space.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=766
If you are a programmer, how would you feel if everything you ever did was for naught and was never deployed?
Actually if the author had looked it up in Wikipedia he would have found that Scientologists would not wear the Star of David.
More accurately;
If they were a religion they would wear a purple triangle
-or-
If they were mentally ill or an "asocial element" they would wear a black triangle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badges
Yes, going into space would be cool, a once in a lifetime event and almost every breathing human being would be utterly flabbergasted by the view and the opportunity. I think that there is an aspect that you are overlooking;
The activities that NASA assigns the shuttle crew, mission specialists and spacewalkers is very intensive and intellectually exhausting. Being in space for a week to two weeks and having nearly every minute of your time mapped out and assigned creates an incredible amount of stress.
Working on earth, in a conventional job. Let's say as a programmer, working 16 hour days with a team of bosses standing right behind you and monitoring your every keystroke, you would find yourself exhausted and looking for a mental margarita after a very short time.
NASA cannot make it to the Mos Eisley Cantina on the planet Tatooine where the crew can have a few beers and tease the imperial storm troopers (Star Wars reference). Being able to take 2-3 hours out of a mission to watch a movie is most certainly a welcome diversion.
For a historical reference look up what happened on Skylab 3 when NASA ground controllers assigned too many tasks to the station crew. After a few days the Skylab 3 crew "went out on strike" for a day and refused to answer any ground communications unless it was an emergency. They needed the downtime to rest and relax. After that incident NASA became a bit more relaxed in how many micromanaged tasks they would burden astronauts with and began to put relaxation time into their mission planning.
They are regulated by the FCC and clearly their lack of cooperation in finding this guy was not in the public interest. The fine print in the Code of Federal regulations does require licensees to cooperate in a legitimate emergency.
It sounds like their customer service people were more concerned about the little red box on a computer screen than in helping the sheriff. The article does not go into enough detail on if an escalation procedure was requested for or offered. No matter what time of the day it is, there is always someone available with enough authority to turn the service on temporarily. It is not as if the sheriff was asking for a service restoration so the guy could make a five hour cell call to Bangladesh.
Verizon should be burned for how they handled this. Maybe someone needs to make a stink with their elected officials or to file a formal complaint with the FCC.
Way back in the 80's I was taking a receiver design course at George Washington University. My lab partner was involved in the continual design of more sensitive receivers to listen in on the voyager craft.
It led to interesting discussions about how the pace of receiver design (sensitivity, noise floor, selectivity). At the time we were learning the state of the art, the folks at the research labs were pushing the limits further and further. It warms my heart to realize that 25 years later they are still making significant advancements.
What it will take to monitor the weakening transmissions from the Pioneers and Voyagers five years from now doesn't exist today. Kudos to everyone involved in the process.
The differences between filesystems is not that surprising and you can see a common trend across all of the USB flash drives. This is a good heads-up comparison of the filesystems.
I have a great interest in the differences between manufacturers and models of the flash-drives. You can clearly see who is using faster chips and who is using the dregs out of a bucket full of memory chips. The filesystem comparisons are dwarfed by the hardware speed.
Once a USB flash-drive is put in a convenient plastic case no-one ever looks at access speed. While we all debate the advantages of filesystems and USB 1.0, 1.1 or 2.0 we sometimes forget that it's the chip that becomes the factor limiting performance.
When have you ever seen a USB flash drive that lists the access times in uSec? We all look with great interest at RAM, hard-drive access speeds, video performance yet we treat a USB flash drive like a mouse.
There were a great many factors that were considered before the United States dropped two nuclear weapons on Japan. At that point in time, allied forces had cornered the Japanese military to the home islands with it's outposts in the Pacific cut off from resupply and slowly starving into submission.
Our next move for Japan would have been the whole-scale destruction of every Japanese city with incendiaries (like what happened to Dresden Germany). In that bombing campaign, millions of Japanese would have died.
America knew that the next step would be a two-pronged landing invasion of Japan. It was determined that the US losses would have been 1,000,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen. The losses to the Japanese would have been of several million as Japan was prepared to give wooden spears to children and old men and to send them off on banzai charges against tanks and machine guns.
Just in the first few hours of the invasion the casualties of war would have around 1,000 allied and Japanese deaths per hour. This would have gone on for months.
We do not know what the dire position of the Japanese military would have caused them to bring to the battleground. Japan already had extensive experience with biological and chemical weapons and had used them to great effect in China. The German V-1 "buzz bomb" design was in Japanese hands and they were prepared to make Kamikaze attacks against the nearly 3000 allied vessels that would have been off the shores of Japan.
Certainly at the end of the war, the United States would have been much less inclined to help in the rebuilding of the Japanese government and industry. The successes of Japanese industry in the 60's, 70's and 80's may never have happened.
It is indeed unfortunate that Japanese civilians died in the nuclear detonations. Those were indeed desperate times and unfortunately the people who usually suffer the most is the non-combatant.
Some of the problems with the old 121.5 MHz and 243.0 MHz beacons is that they only tranmitted the "wheep-wheep-wheep" signal and it was damned difficult to find an aircraft sitting in a hangar that had it's beacon accidentally activated.
Having been on that "hunt" before (to find an accidentally activated beacon at a small, general aviation airport) it diverts a tremendous amount of resources to drive around and triangulate the transmitter. When the plane is sitting in a hangar or on a parking spot at an airport you can waste an hour or so trying to find what particular plane is guilty.
The new 406 MHz beacons also transmit the plane tail number, serial number, owners name, etc... There will be maritime and personal emergency beacons that will eventually use the same system. Some systems will also transmit the GPS coordinates of where the beacon is located.
At the higher frequencies a satellite fix will be able to give better fix (instead of saying "somewhere in northeast Nebraska"). The beacons are registered to the owner at the time they are sold or installed, giving a record of exactly what is going off.
Right now, if a 121.5 beacon goes off it can be anything from a single passenger private aircraft where some owner disconnected the wrong wire, up to a large commercial jet that has crashed into a mountain.
Aircraft will continue to monitor the "guard" frequencies (121.5 and 243.0). A search of the internet will find an MP3 of the F-117 Stealth Fighter that was shot down over Bosnia. If you listen to the audio, you can hear the pilot on 243.0 calling out that he has ejected and then you will hear the alert beacon tones.
A common phrase heard in Vietnam was "beeper beeper come up voice" as an aircraft went down. Every other aircraft for miles around would suddenly work together to triangulate where the downed crews were.
During the war, the majority of Helicopters did not have beacons. The army crews would beg borrow and steal beacons and survival vests from the air force so if they went down, there was some chance of being found in a big ass jungle.
It is odd that she went through the trouble to purchase a lap-top to do her classes yet could not find the energy to work out a simple connectivity issue to Verizon.
Sure OpenOffice is "different". So is every version of Windowz or MS Office from it's earlier incarnations. Maybe she does not know what the "save as" menu pull-down means.
It seems like a strange case of apathy; "I bought a computer and it is not smarter than me". Even for many of the "computer illiterate", they do not stay totally clueless for very long. If the class was important to her, she should have made some sort of effort.
"Back in the day" before the WWW, we did things through BBS'es, Telnet sessions, Archie or the dreaded 3270 session. It took a marginal familiarity to get a connection going but remember how excited we would get over the differences between xmodem, ymodem or zmodem?
I try not to be jaded but it bewilders me when everyone expects a "plug and play" world. Life is hard, as Larry Niven once wrote "immortality is not for sissies". Are we devolving as a species or are our self-expectations that low?
Similar excuses used over the ages;
1. The dog ate my homework
2. I didn't come to class as it starts to early and I was out partying all night long.
3. Talk to the hand.
4. My car ran out of gas so I did not come to work for the month. Can I still get my pay-check?
Maybe she lives in the wilderness and there are no computer literate people around for thousands of miles. I am surprised that she had the energy to dial the Dell tech support number and ask questions about "what is Ubuntu".... Then again, maybe she didn't.
I tried the Chrome experience last week and had a similar experience. While the browser is faster (always a good thing), there is a serious lack of plug-in support under Chrome.
I too use Adblock Plus, Foxmarks and NoScript and consider these to be important features in any browser. Currently, Chrome is a less mature browser where few if any developers are writing plug-in's to equal the breadth and depth of tools available for Firefox.
I also have this nagging doubt that Google will be openly supportive of features similar to Adblock and NoScript as Google's revenue stream comes from selling advertising space. The old saying "you don't defecate where you eat" makes me question just how far Google will go to support features that allow us to deny adware, scripts and tracking cookies.