The test browsers should apply is whether a word in the URL contains letters from more than one script (e.g., using a Cyrillic letter in a word otherwise in the latin script is suspicious, whereas a word consisting entirely of Cyrillic is OK).
I think this kind of test would only be possible if you assumed what the expected character set is and tried to flag any characters that don't belong there. For example, there are russian words that use only latin letters (the acronym CPPP comes to mind - ok not a real word, but definitely a potential url or part thereof) as well as ones with only one uniquely cyrillic letter (not sure how to give an example on Slashdot). How would you distinguish those from genuine phishing attack?
That should be moderated to insightful because it's actually a very good suggestion. It's something simple that people can do and it guards against some other vulnerabilities as well.
At first I thought that sociopathic was the wrong word to use but after looking it up at Miriam-Webster it seems quite accurate. "sociopathic" directs you to "psychopathy" which in turn is defined as "extreme mental disorder marked usually by egocentric and antisocial activity"
Since closest approach was at 1:57 UT and Venus and Jupiter rise an hour before sunrise that means anywhere where it is dawn at around this time, which would be southern and eastern Africa, Saudi Arabia, Middle East, central Asia and eastern Siberia.
Your exact location does really matter though since the planets move slowly enough that the planets will still be very close if you look today or tomorrow morning. You need to get out just as dawn is begining to break and look in the east (the direction where the sun is early in the morning). Providing there is nothing much obstructing your view in that direction near the horizon you should be able to spot the two planets close together before the sun comes up.
How to know you're definitely looking at Venus and Jupiter?
They will be brighter than any stars but not by that much with Venus noticeably brighter than Jupiter.
Both pale yellow/orange.
Will rise together. You will not see their separation change unless you look the next morning.
I was under the impression that energy is strictly equivalent to mass and therefore when you have a huge amount of energy moving along this is equivalent to some amount of mass moving along ie. momentum.
Therefore, as far as I understand, the momentum is there to begin with. Where I might be wrong and maybe what you're trying to say is that it is very difficult to achieve an elastic collision between the cosmic ray particle and everyday substances like tin or even lead. To feel the recoil effect of a particle hit it has to transfer the bulk of its momentum to (one or more) nuclei of particles making up your helmet. But unfortunately at the tremendous energy of one of these particles I think they have no trouble penetrating atoms right down to quark level and further and almost always cause the atom to split into its constituent particles creating a "cosmic ray shower" of sub-atomic particles and gamma rays inside your helmet. I feel that under some conditions you could experience the kick of a supermassive particle but maybe these conditions are rare or very difficult to meet.
It better be pretty thick, made of lead and with plenty of shock absorption. The down-side of a hat effective enough to stop a cosmic ray in its tracks is that you would feel some of them hit your hat, especially the most powerful ones. The most energetic recorded cosmic ray ever had about 50 Joules of energy. That would feel like a brick dropped on a hardhat from the next storey up.
Fortunately cosmic rays are stopped by our atmosphere before they reach the ground.
If you're referring to the main story then it's not yet enforced using trade agreements, but will be soon because there's one in the works which looks likely to face no obstacles now that the Liberal/National party coalition looks set to have a majority in both houses of the Australian Parliament.
No. A fundamentalist is someone who insists on concentrating on the fundamentals of the belief system rather than additional customs and traditions that have grown around the core beliefs. In the case of Christianity this would be, for example, concentrating on Jesus Christ and the Bible and regarding institutions such as the Papacy to be of minor importance.
In the case of atheism the core belief would be that God does not exist but what are the non-core beliefs? If you can answer that then you will have defined a "fundamentalist atheist."
My guess is that if sending spent nuclear material into space was cheap then it wouldn't be discarded by sending it into the sun. After all once it's a 100,000 kms away from Earth it doesn't matter what you do with it as long as it stays there. Very likely it would be collected into a "radioactive trash dump" asteroid somewhere near the earth where it would be far enough to be safe but still close enough so that we can monitor its condition and add more stuff easily.
I'm glad you asked:)
The answer is: very little energy is needed to send something from Earth into orbit and then into the Sun if you have the futuristic technology and infrastructure that can do it. The total energy needed to move the mass is not the issue - a hundred kilowatt hours per kilogram would be enough if you have something like the "Space Elevator"
Such a device would be able to lift the nuclear waste into orbit for the cost of energy needed to do the lifting which would be minimal (about 13kWh per kilogram for geostationary orbit). From there it would be simple to send the nuclear waste into the sun using a "mass driver" (about 125kWh per kilogram) to accelerate it to 30km/s so that it falls into the Sun. Total cost at today's (industrial) energy prices about $7 per kilogram.
Yes it's built to the correct scale ie. the sizes of objects and distances between them are all accurate. But it also lets you travel through the universe at speeds which you could never achieve in the real universe (unless our understanding of physics is not complete in this respect - which what this article is about)
Where is the license? At what point do I agree to it? How can I read it pre-sale and decide wether or not I want to accept the license? No license is ever advertised or presented to me for acceptance.
A license is not a contract - you don't need to agree to anything to be bound by one. It's more like an offer of access to something which the law, by default, prohibits you from doing, usually subject to some conditions. In the case of a DVD, the law says you are not allowed to reproduce a copyrighted work but it tells you on the disc under what conditions you are allowed to reproduce it. Usually something along the lines of "Licensed for personal, home use only. Unauthorised copying, distribution etc. etc, strictly prohibited". You can read this before you put it in your DVD player and if you don't agree to obey those you have the option to put it up on your bookshelf to impress your neighbors with your taste in movies and no harm done.
The only truly democratic way is to give everyone the option to vote. Restricting who is permitted to vote is undemocratic. One of the differences between democracy, fascism and anarchism is the criterion for deciding who the best leader is. In a democracy that means the one preferred by the majority of the people. If you start using political criteria to bar people from voting then you are no longer truly democratic.
Yes it is a small area but remember that in space there's no air resistance and friction of any kind to sap your speed so even a small acceleration can build up to an enormous speed over time.
The key question is the weight of the craft.
On the Planetary Society website they state that the mass of their craft is 100kg. Sunlight in Earth orbit is able to exert about 9.12 microNewtons of force per square metre. So a sail 15m^2 will be pushed by up to 137 microNewtons.
This tiny force applied to the weight of the craft would be able to achieve an acceleration about 1.4microns per second^2.
This is a tiny acceleration so it will take a long time to get anywhere but eventually the change in speed will add up. For example, it would take a year to accelerate to 155km/h (approx. 100miles per hour)
They also state some example accelerations but they seem to imply the weight of the craft of only 275 grams so they must be talking about a sail accelerating alone without a payload. The much lower mass makes a huge difference. Such a light craft could achieve 16km/s in a year and make a journey to any planet in the solar system within 5 years.
With space ships you can never get closer to the origin of the radiation (with radiation power!
I believe this is wrong - maybe you mean you cannot accelerate directly towards the source of radiation. That's true but it is not necessary to do so. For example if you tilt your sail so that the incident sunlight makes a 10 degree angle with the plane of the sail you will experience an acceration along a direction only 20 degrees away from sun - which is pretty close to directly towards it.
The way to navigate in an arbitrary direction within a solar system is to change your orbital speed.
I agree with this point. This is true for any currently feasible spacecraft, solar sail or not. The difference lies in the acceleration achieved by different propulsion methods.
A traditional rocket is able to achieve several Gs of acceleration. This means it only needs to burn for a few minutes to achieve a net acceleration of a few kilometers per second. This changes its orbital speed such that it is effectively in a different orbit - one that will hopefully take it where it needs to go. After the burn is done the craft coasts the rest of the way along its new orbit.
A solar sail OTOH can only achieve much smaller accelerations. Since no actual craft has been built let's assume a 5 micron thick mylar sail 10 by 10 metres square propelling a craft with a total weight of 70kg of which 1 kg would be the sail. Such a sail could achieve about 120 microGs. This might seem small but over 24hours it would add up to a change in speed of 100 metres per second. Over the period of two or three months it could easily match the boost that the current chemical rockets provide. Unlike them it would be constantly changing its orbit while travelling along it.
In interstellar space you'll always be able to plot a course that ensures that the acceleration points in the right direction because there are many radiation sources available
Using the stars as propulsion sources would require truly gigantic sails because they are so much fainter than the sun! For example, in the example above the sails would have be 1000km by 1000km to achieve similar accelerations.
Solar sails are also impractical for travel in a solar system (with the exception of traveling from an inner plannet straight out to a planet more distant from the sun.) Solar sails can not function like sails on an ocean.
Solar sails can be used to travel in any direction just like ocean-going vessel sails can, it's called "tacking" and for solar sails it involves tilting the sails away from the sun to change the direction of the reflected photons. Obviously this means that the greater the angle away from the sun the less area exposed to incident photons so that reduces the acceleration that can be achieved but that hardly makes it any particular destination impractical.
And when they notice you're using such a strong encryption they'll go back and use that as evidence that you've got something to hide and get a warrant and surrepticiously install a bug in your keyboard which will work around your encryption.
They are being employed to write a voting system for the AEC to own and use, NOT to write a voting system and license it to the AEC (Australian Electoral Commission).
It hasn't been done because it isn't free to boost a spacecraft to a higher orbit and the L1 point is a long way out - so far out that it requires almost as much fuel to reach it as to escape the Earth - Moon system altogether. And once you're there you still need some fuel to keep the spacecraft there, because the L1 point moves slowly over time due to many factors. The main one is that the distance between the Moon and the Earth changes (lunar orbit is elliptical).
The light illuminating the front of the astronaut in the picture is coming from two main sources:
The main light source is the ground. Contrary to what the other poster said the lunar dust is NOT highly reflective - on average it only reflects around 7% of the incident light which makes it a dark grey color. But there's a lot of it around so overall it is probably the most significant source of light. The low reflectivity helps though, because it reduces the contrast between the background terrain behind the astronaut and the limited illumination of his front.
You can see its effect by the fact that his legs, especially the lower parts, are better lit than his chest and right arm and shoulder.
The second light source is that gold foil covered lunar lander foot-pad you can see in lower right of the photo (as well as reflected in the visor)
You can see its contribution in the yellow tinge of the parts of the spacesuit not directly lit by the sun. If the color you are seeing in the shadowed areas were the true color of the spacesuit then the sun-lit parts of the suit would also be that color - instead they're white - their color under white light.
Some light may also be provided by the the astronaut taking the picture and the lander he's standing next to. You can see them both reflected in the visor and can confirm they are only a few meters away and thus able to contribute to the illumination. The spacesuits are white which means they reflect around 50 % or more of the light falling on them. Much of the lander is also covered with gold foil.
There is also one other thing making the scene look "not right" to a photographer used to shooting terrestial scenes - the ground looks bright near the astronaut and dimmer in the distance.
This is due to the reflectance properties of the lunar soil - there's a significant specular reflection component. This means that the soil reflects the most light were the angle of reflection is close to the angle of incidence.
Slashdot Mirror
"Firefox to Disable IDN Support as Phishing Defense"
I think this kind of test would only be possible if you assumed what the expected character set is and tried to flag any characters that don't belong there. For example, there are russian words that use only latin letters (the acronym CPPP comes to mind - ok not a real word, but definitely a potential url or part thereof) as well as ones with only one uniquely cyrillic letter (not sure how to give an example on Slashdot). How would you distinguish those from genuine phishing attack?
That should be moderated to insightful because it's actually a very good suggestion. It's something simple that people can do and it guards against some other vulnerabilities as well.
No you can't steal software any more than you can steal ideas. :)
At first I thought that sociopathic was the wrong word to use but after looking it up at Miriam-Webster it seems quite accurate. "sociopathic" directs you to "psychopathy" which in turn is defined as "extreme mental disorder marked usually by egocentric and antisocial activity"
Your exact location does really matter though since the planets move slowly enough that the planets will still be very close if you look today or tomorrow morning. You need to get out just as dawn is begining to break and look in the east (the direction where the sun is early in the morning). Providing there is nothing much obstructing your view in that direction near the horizon you should be able to spot the two planets close together before the sun comes up.
How to know you're definitely looking at Venus and Jupiter?
They will be brighter than any stars but not by that much with Venus noticeably brighter than Jupiter.
Both pale yellow/orange.
Will rise together. You will not see their separation change unless you look the next morning.
I was under the impression that energy is strictly equivalent to mass and therefore when you have a huge amount of energy moving along this is equivalent to some amount of mass moving along ie. momentum. Therefore, as far as I understand, the momentum is there to begin with. Where I might be wrong and maybe what you're trying to say is that it is very difficult to achieve an elastic collision between the cosmic ray particle and everyday substances like tin or even lead. To feel the recoil effect of a particle hit it has to transfer the bulk of its momentum to (one or more) nuclei of particles making up your helmet. But unfortunately at the tremendous energy of one of these particles I think they have no trouble penetrating atoms right down to quark level and further and almost always cause the atom to split into its constituent particles creating a "cosmic ray shower" of sub-atomic particles and gamma rays inside your helmet. I feel that under some conditions you could experience the kick of a supermassive particle but maybe these conditions are rare or very difficult to meet.
It better be pretty thick, made of lead and with plenty of shock absorption. The down-side of a hat effective enough to stop a cosmic ray in its tracks is that you would feel some of them hit your hat, especially the most powerful ones. The most energetic recorded cosmic ray ever had about 50 Joules of energy. That would feel like a brick dropped on a hardhat from the next storey up. Fortunately cosmic rays are stopped by our atmosphere before they reach the ground.
If you're referring to the main story then it's not yet enforced using trade agreements, but will be soon because there's one in the works which looks likely to face no obstacles now that the Liberal/National party coalition looks set to have a majority in both houses of the Australian Parliament.
In the case of atheism the core belief would be that God does not exist but what are the non-core beliefs? If you can answer that then you will have defined a "fundamentalist atheist."
My guess is that if sending spent nuclear material into space was cheap then it wouldn't be discarded by sending it into the sun. After all once it's a 100,000 kms away from Earth it doesn't matter what you do with it as long as it stays there. Very likely it would be collected into a "radioactive trash dump" asteroid somewhere near the earth where it would be far enough to be safe but still close enough so that we can monitor its condition and add more stuff easily.
I'm glad you asked :)
The answer is: very little energy is needed to send something from Earth into orbit and then into the Sun if you have the futuristic technology and infrastructure that can do it. The total energy needed to move the mass is not the issue - a hundred kilowatt hours per kilogram would be enough if you have something like the "Space Elevator"
Such a device would be able to lift the nuclear waste into orbit for the cost of energy needed to do the lifting which would be minimal (about 13kWh per kilogram for geostationary orbit). From there it would be simple to send the nuclear waste into the sun using a "mass driver" (about 125kWh per kilogram) to accelerate it to 30km/s so that it falls into the Sun. Total cost at today's (industrial) energy prices about $7 per kilogram.
Yes it's built to the correct scale ie. the sizes of objects and distances between them are all accurate. But it also lets you travel through the universe at speeds which you could never achieve in the real universe (unless our understanding of physics is not complete in this respect - which what this article is about)
A license is not a contract - you don't need to agree to anything to be bound by one. It's more like an offer of access to something which the law, by default, prohibits you from doing, usually subject to some conditions. In the case of a DVD, the law says you are not allowed to reproduce a copyrighted work but it tells you on the disc under what conditions you are allowed to reproduce it. Usually something along the lines of "Licensed for personal, home use only. Unauthorised copying, distribution etc. etc, strictly prohibited". You can read this before you put it in your DVD player and if you don't agree to obey those you have the option to put it up on your bookshelf to impress your neighbors with your taste in movies and no harm done.
yes but think about what that $20 a week can do for that Indian and his community.
... it describes how the solar power is being used for more basic needs as well.
The hypocrisy is all too transparent, isn't it?
The only truly democratic way is to give everyone the option to vote. Restricting who is permitted to vote is undemocratic. One of the differences between democracy, fascism and anarchism is the criterion for deciding who the best leader is. In a democracy that means the one preferred by the majority of the people. If you start using political criteria to bar people from voting then you are no longer truly democratic.
The key question is the weight of the craft. On the Planetary Society website they state that the mass of their craft is 100kg. Sunlight in Earth orbit is able to exert about 9.12 microNewtons of force per square metre. So a sail 15m^2 will be pushed by up to 137 microNewtons. This tiny force applied to the weight of the craft would be able to achieve an acceleration about 1.4microns per second^2. This is a tiny acceleration so it will take a long time to get anywhere but eventually the change in speed will add up. For example, it would take a year to accelerate to 155km/h (approx. 100miles per hour)
They also state some example accelerations but they seem to imply the weight of the craft of only 275 grams so they must be talking about a sail accelerating alone without a payload. The much lower mass makes a huge difference. Such a light craft could achieve 16km/s in a year and make a journey to any planet in the solar system within 5 years.
I believe this is wrong - maybe you mean you cannot accelerate directly towards the source of radiation. That's true but it is not necessary to do so. For example if you tilt your sail so that the incident sunlight makes a 10 degree angle with the plane of the sail you will experience an acceration along a direction only 20 degrees away from sun - which is pretty close to directly towards it.
The way to navigate in an arbitrary direction within a solar system is to change your orbital speed.
I agree with this point. This is true for any currently feasible spacecraft, solar sail or not. The difference lies in the acceleration achieved by different propulsion methods.
A traditional rocket is able to achieve several Gs of acceleration. This means it only needs to burn for a few minutes to achieve a net acceleration of a few kilometers per second. This changes its orbital speed such that it is effectively in a different orbit - one that will hopefully take it where it needs to go. After the burn is done the craft coasts the rest of the way along its new orbit.
A solar sail OTOH can only achieve much smaller accelerations. Since no actual craft has been built let's assume a 5 micron thick mylar sail 10 by 10 metres square propelling a craft with a total weight of 70kg of which 1 kg would be the sail. Such a sail could achieve about 120 microGs. This might seem small but over 24hours it would add up to a change in speed of 100 metres per second. Over the period of two or three months it could easily match the boost that the current chemical rockets provide. Unlike them it would be constantly changing its orbit while travelling along it.
In interstellar space you'll always be able to plot a course that ensures that the acceleration points in the right direction because there are many radiation sources available
Using the stars as propulsion sources would require truly gigantic sails because they are so much fainter than the sun! For example, in the example above the sails would have be 1000km by 1000km to achieve similar accelerations.
Solar sails can be used to travel in any direction just like ocean-going vessel sails can, it's called "tacking" and for solar sails it involves tilting the sails away from the sun to change the direction of the reflected photons. Obviously this means that the greater the angle away from the sun the less area exposed to incident photons so that reduces the acceleration that can be achieved but that hardly makes it any particular destination impractical.
And when they notice you're using such a strong encryption they'll go back and use that as evidence that you've got something to hide and get a warrant and surrepticiously install a bug in your keyboard which will work around your encryption.
They are being employed to write a voting system for the AEC to own and use, NOT to write a voting system and license it to the AEC (Australian Electoral Commission).
It hasn't been done because it isn't free to boost a spacecraft to a higher orbit and the L1 point is a long way out - so far out that it requires almost as much fuel to reach it as to escape the Earth - Moon system altogether. And once you're there you still need some fuel to keep the spacecraft there, because the L1 point moves slowly over time due to many factors. The main one is that the distance between the Moon and the Earth changes (lunar orbit is elliptical).
The main light source is the ground. Contrary to what the other poster said the lunar dust is NOT highly reflective - on average it only reflects around 7% of the incident light which makes it a dark grey color. But there's a lot of it around so overall it is probably the most significant source of light. The low reflectivity helps though, because it reduces the contrast between the background terrain behind the astronaut and the limited illumination of his front. You can see its effect by the fact that his legs, especially the lower parts, are better lit than his chest and right arm and shoulder.
The second light source is that gold foil covered lunar lander foot-pad you can see in lower right of the photo (as well as reflected in the visor) You can see its contribution in the yellow tinge of the parts of the spacesuit not directly lit by the sun. If the color you are seeing in the shadowed areas were the true color of the spacesuit then the sun-lit parts of the suit would also be that color - instead they're white - their color under white light.
Some light may also be provided by the the astronaut taking the picture and the lander he's standing next to. You can see them both reflected in the visor and can confirm they are only a few meters away and thus able to contribute to the illumination. The spacesuits are white which means they reflect around 50 % or more of the light falling on them. Much of the lander is also covered with gold foil.
There is also one other thing making the scene look "not right" to a photographer used to shooting terrestial scenes - the ground looks bright near the astronaut and dimmer in the distance. This is due to the reflectance properties of the lunar soil - there's a significant specular reflection component. This means that the soil reflects the most light were the angle of reflection is close to the angle of incidence.