I don't know if DNS is the right place for it (meta tags or HTTP headers might be more appropriate?), and the Internet as an unregulated medium will always be open to abuse, but to have a simple, widely-established RFC in place for content indication and rating seems like a Good Idea.
I do have a lot of sympathy for the liberal, kids-should-see-what they want point of view, but hey - let M$ implement this, then let the kids figure out how to hax0r it - that'd be almost as educational as the porn itself...
That's still very much the case at trade shows relating to more specialist branches of the technology industry - digital pro audio, scientific computing, etc. The reason developers tend not to turn up at the big generic shows like MacWorld and Comdex is that the ratio of numbskulls to informed visitors is way high.
Considering the cost of exhibiting at one of these shows runs to five figures -minimum-, it's no surprise that you won't find many small-and-interesting firms at the big general shows.
Re:speed is not a concern
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
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· Score: 1
Who cares about DVD-9? Blu-Ray (17GB+) burners are already shipping in Japan... admittedly they cost several thousand dollars apiece right now.
Space-based communications do not require a space programme. They require a bunch of comms satellites in LEO... we've had the electronics to do that for 20+ years, and the rocketry for 40. *yawn*.
Which, to your average dumb politician or member of the public is an entirely arbitrary goal (unlike "beat the damn commie Russkies", or "save our asses from xyz Big Asteroid", which are easy to sell). "For (y)our own long-term safety" won't work either... they tried that on cigarette smokers enough times.
Yes, but it's still much lower than the air velocities where NASA was experimenting, or indeed the air velocities generated by aircraft props and helicopter blades (good sources of static).
A valid point, but it strikes me that the types of propulsion system we'll need for deep space vs. the types needed for getting in to orbit are radically different anyways.
Most of the promising high-efficiency propulsion technologies for deep space either rely on relatively small forces applied over a long time, or nuclear propulsion. Neither is remotely suitable for launching from Earth.
Actually the centrifugal force is -exactly- what you want. The object is accelerated by the taut cable as it climbs it, so that when it reaches geostationary orbit it is travelling at the appropriate velocity. Remember that escaping the Earth's gravity well is about velocity, not just plain altitude.
This thing is not going to be in a crowded, public access zone. It'll be in the middle of an ocean, hundreds of miles from anything, presumably with the US Navy's finest patrolling the surrounding area. Can't see al-Qaeda and their like getting anywhere near.
a) Carbon nanotubes are strong but very, very light. They have a high surface area per unit mass. In the lower atmosphere, the cable would float to earth like a piece of fishing twine; in the higher atmosphere it would just burn up.
b) Not really. Airborne traffic is smart enough to deal with comms towers, skyscrapers and hurricanes. This thing does not move - all you need to do is fly around it.
c) Yes it does. In order to advance space traffic, we need to get to geosynchronous and LEO MUCH cheaper, allowing us to loft the larger masses necessary for more ambitious space missions. Getting big tonnages out of Earth's gravity well cheaper and more reliably than is currently possible would be a BIG win for space travel.
Probably. Then again, the atmospheric pollution expelled by a typical rocket launch is also hazardous for us to inhale. Very. Not to mention the crud emitted when a satellite (or, worse yet, a Space Shuttle) burns up.
Fortunately, rocket launches and re-entries are a relatively rare event, and most of their nastiness is dumped high enough in the atmosphere that it gets dispersed well before anyone breathes it in. The same would be true of burning-up bits of elevator.
A domain name is a publicly accessible object, and a responsibility. As a society, we expect that for certain activities, people be publicly registered (running a company is an obvious example) - reasonable privacy is a right, but anonymity - which is what we are really talking about here - is not.
I can only think of a very small minority of legitimate Internet activities that both require a domain name and for which privacy is likely to be a concern; in those cases there are plenty of registration agents who will act as a proxy for registration and take on the responsibilities associated with being the owner of a domain.
I don't buy it. Most adults are "stupid" because they have no real incentive to be otherwise. With appropriate underlying education, the vast majority of the population is capable of understanding basic calculus.
Presumably police patrol cars will also be fitted with the detector boxes for these chips. So the cops can scan a queue of traffic for license validity just by driving past...
Yes, it's all relative. 3000 road deaths against maybe 300 drug-related deaths and 7-800 murders (and perhaps five or ten paedophile killings). Now compare with the column inches in the UK press...
From http://www.somerset.gov.uk/yourviews/SCC/T ransport/roadsafety/default.htm
When children are hit by a vehicle in a road traffic accident: At 40mph 17 out of 20 will die as a result At 30mph 10 out of 20 will die as a result At 20mph 19 out of 20 children will survive
I don't know... I'm sure they could turn this in to a money-spinner - mandatory re-tests every five or ten years, with a testing fee of GBP500? Not to mention, couple this spy-system with smart cards and you could potentially allow IAM-qualified drivers to reach higher speeds under certain conditions.
If you've never seen the safety stats on survivability for 20mph vs 30mph vs 40mph pedestrian-vehicle accidents (not to mention the vastly reduced likelihood of actually hitting the person in the first place if you're only doing 20), go look them up. I would favour a blanket 20mph on urban and surburban streets, except dual carriageways and arterial roads.
As to an 80mph limit on motorways... they should certainly review the situation as modern cars with ABS etc. can certainly handle motorways much safer than older models, but if it's to be 80 it has to be enforced.
Public right of way or no, the railway does a (mostly) adequate job of getting people from A to B without killing anyone in the process. I'm inclined to think that "general public" and "speeds in excess of 25mph" do not mix all that well in areas where transport by a trained, responsible operator (heck, even a robot) is a viable alternative.
You are my problem any time you endager members of my family whilst breaking a law you know full well is there for the safety of yourself and others. Furthermore, I'll bet that nine times out of ten, you drive down the A40 ALONE, in a car perfectly capable of carrying four or more passengers. And I'll bet that there are three people living within ten minutes' walk of your home and working within ten minutes' walk of your workplace.
FWIW, I do advocate that this system at least warns people before fining them - an orange light when you exceed 70 for more than say 30 seconds at a time or immediately when you exceed 80, and a fine when you exceed 80 for more than a minute or two or any time you exceed 90.
Do table knives kill 3,000 people per year in the UK? More to the point, do they kill people who have no connection whatsoever to their killer apart from sharing the same public space?
The UK has (very) restrictive gun laws for precisely this reason, and they enjoy huge majority support.
Just to bring it to peoples' attention, something in excess of 3,000 people are KILLED every year by cars and trucks in the UK... and yet the UK is considered to have a "good" road safety record. That figure is in the region of a hundred times worse per passenger mile than the rail or bus system, the equivalent of a fully-loaded 767 going down every single month.
Hence, I'm in favour of virtually ANY regulation of motorists. Nobody has a god-given right to carry themselves about in two tons of steel - especially in a small and crowded country like the UK with an adequate public transport infrastructure.
As to "driving at 35 when the limit is 30"... in any case, either of those speeds is too fast on urban UK roads. We have a much higher level of pedestrian (and cyclist) activity than the US, especially in towns. There's also a massive problem with illegaly-owned, uninsured cars and people driving them without the proper license.
Anyways, to finish on a more/.-friendly note, this type of infrastructure is PERFECT to pave the way for robot-driven self-navigating cars and autonomous road vehicles.
Not true. When using acronyms, it's acceptable (though personally I think it looks ugly) to have apostrophes in the pluralisation, because it is typically the last word, generally a noun, that is in the plural form.
PIC's is acceptable because it expands to Programmable Integrated Circuits - Circuits is shortened in this case to C's.
The exception to the rule is when an acronym becomes a word in its own right instead of a shortened form. Few people still think of "PC" as being short for "personal computer", for example, which is why "PC's" looks wrong. I don't know whether or not you could say the same for PICs at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up.
I don't know if DNS is the right place for it (meta tags or HTTP headers might be more appropriate?), and the Internet as an unregulated medium will always be open to abuse, but to have a simple, widely-established RFC in place for content indication and rating seems like a Good Idea.
I do have a lot of sympathy for the liberal, kids-should-see-what they want point of view, but hey - let M$ implement this, then let the kids figure out how to hax0r it - that'd be almost as educational as the porn itself...
VLF to/from a lander on the surface, which then transmits (via one or more additional relays) high frequency radio back to Earth?
That's still very much the case at trade shows relating to more specialist branches of the technology industry - digital pro audio, scientific computing, etc. The reason developers tend not to turn up at the big generic shows like MacWorld and Comdex is that the ratio of numbskulls to informed visitors is way high.
Considering the cost of exhibiting at one of these shows runs to five figures -minimum-, it's no surprise that you won't find many small-and-interesting firms at the big general shows.
Who cares about DVD-9? Blu-Ray (17GB+) burners are already shipping in Japan... admittedly they cost several thousand dollars apiece right now.
Space-based communications do not require a space programme. They require a bunch of comms satellites in LEO... we've had the electronics to do that for 20+ years, and the rocketry for 40. *yawn*.
Which, to your average dumb politician or member of the public is an entirely arbitrary goal (unlike "beat the damn commie Russkies", or "save our asses from xyz Big Asteroid", which are easy to sell). "For (y)our own long-term safety" won't work either... they tried that on cigarette smokers enough times.
Yes, but it's still much lower than the air velocities where NASA was experimenting, or indeed the air velocities generated by aircraft props and helicopter blades (good sources of static).
A valid point, but it strikes me that the types of propulsion system we'll need for deep space vs. the types needed for getting in to orbit are radically different anyways.
Most of the promising high-efficiency propulsion technologies for deep space either rely on relatively small forces applied over a long time, or nuclear propulsion. Neither is remotely suitable for launching from Earth.
Actually the centrifugal force is -exactly- what you want. The object is accelerated by the taut cable as it climbs it, so that when it reaches geostationary orbit it is travelling at the appropriate velocity. Remember that escaping the Earth's gravity well is about velocity, not just plain altitude.
It's geostationary... the atmosphere whizzes past at ~0mph.
This thing is not going to be in a crowded, public access zone. It'll be in the middle of an ocean, hundreds of miles from anything, presumably with the US Navy's finest patrolling the surrounding area. Can't see al-Qaeda and their like getting anywhere near.
a) Carbon nanotubes are strong but very, very light. They have a high surface area per unit mass. In the lower atmosphere, the cable would float to earth like a piece of fishing twine; in the higher atmosphere it would just burn up.
b) Not really. Airborne traffic is smart enough to deal with comms towers, skyscrapers and hurricanes. This thing does not move - all you need to do is fly around it.
c) Yes it does. In order to advance space traffic, we need to get to geosynchronous and LEO MUCH cheaper, allowing us to loft the larger masses necessary for more ambitious space missions. Getting big tonnages out of Earth's gravity well cheaper and more reliably than is currently possible would be a BIG win for space travel.
Probably. Then again, the atmospheric pollution expelled by a typical rocket launch is also hazardous for us to inhale. Very. Not to mention the crud emitted when a satellite (or, worse yet, a Space Shuttle) burns up.
Fortunately, rocket launches and re-entries are a relatively rare event, and most of their nastiness is dumped high enough in the atmosphere that it gets dispersed well before anyone breathes it in. The same would be true of burning-up bits of elevator.
Sorry, I don't buy it.
A domain name is a publicly accessible object, and a responsibility. As a society, we expect that for certain activities, people be publicly registered (running a company is an obvious example) - reasonable privacy is a right, but anonymity - which is what we are really talking about here - is not.
I can only think of a very small minority of legitimate Internet activities that both require a domain name and for which privacy is likely to be a concern; in those cases there are plenty of registration agents who will act as a proxy for registration and take on the responsibilities associated with being the owner of a domain.
I don't buy it. Most adults are "stupid" because they have no real incentive to be otherwise. With appropriate underlying education, the vast majority of the population is capable of understanding basic calculus.
Presumably police patrol cars will also be fitted with the detector boxes for these chips. So the cops can scan a queue of traffic for license validity just by driving past...
Yes, it's all relative. 3000 road deaths against maybe 300 drug-related deaths and 7-800 murders (and perhaps five or ten paedophile killings). Now compare with the column inches in the UK press...
You want scientific? Fine.
T ransport /roadsafety/default.htm
From
http://www.somerset.gov.uk/yourviews/SCC/
When children are hit by a vehicle in a road traffic accident:
At 40mph 17 out of 20 will die as a result
At 30mph 10 out of 20 will die as a result
At 20mph 19 out of 20 children will survive
I don't know... I'm sure they could turn this in to a money-spinner - mandatory re-tests every five or ten years, with a testing fee of GBP500? Not to mention, couple this spy-system with smart cards and you could potentially allow IAM-qualified drivers to reach higher speeds under certain conditions.
If you've never seen the safety stats on survivability for 20mph vs 30mph vs 40mph pedestrian-vehicle accidents (not to mention the vastly reduced likelihood of actually hitting the person in the first place if you're only doing 20), go look them up. I would favour a blanket 20mph on urban and surburban streets, except dual carriageways and arterial roads.
As to an 80mph limit on motorways... they should certainly review the situation as modern cars with ABS etc. can certainly handle motorways much safer than older models, but if it's to be 80 it has to be enforced.
Public right of way or no, the railway does a (mostly) adequate job of getting people from A to B without killing anyone in the process. I'm inclined to think that "general public" and "speeds in excess of 25mph" do not mix all that well in areas where transport by a trained, responsible operator (heck, even a robot) is a viable alternative.
You are my problem any time you endager members of my family whilst breaking a law you know full well is there for the safety of yourself and others. Furthermore, I'll bet that nine times out of ten, you drive down the A40 ALONE, in a car perfectly capable of carrying four or more passengers. And I'll bet that there are three people living within ten minutes' walk of your home and working within ten minutes' walk of your workplace. FWIW, I do advocate that this system at least warns people before fining them - an orange light when you exceed 70 for more than say 30 seconds at a time or immediately when you exceed 80, and a fine when you exceed 80 for more than a minute or two or any time you exceed 90.
Do table knives kill 3,000 people per year in the UK? More to the point, do they kill people who have no connection whatsoever to their killer apart from sharing the same public space? The UK has (very) restrictive gun laws for precisely this reason, and they enjoy huge majority support.
Just to bring it to peoples' attention, something in excess of 3,000 people are KILLED every year by cars and trucks in the UK... and yet the UK is considered to have a "good" road safety record. That figure is in the region of a hundred times worse per passenger mile than the rail or bus system, the equivalent of a fully-loaded 767 going down every single month.
/.-friendly note, this type of infrastructure is PERFECT to pave the way for robot-driven self-navigating cars and autonomous road vehicles.
Hence, I'm in favour of virtually ANY regulation of motorists. Nobody has a god-given right to carry themselves about in two tons of steel - especially in a small and crowded country like the UK with an adequate public transport infrastructure.
As to "driving at 35 when the limit is 30"... in any case, either of those speeds is too fast on urban UK roads. We have a much higher level of pedestrian (and cyclist) activity than the US, especially in towns. There's also a massive problem with illegaly-owned, uninsured cars and people driving them without the proper license.
Anyways, to finish on a more
Not true. When using acronyms, it's acceptable (though personally I think it looks ugly) to have apostrophes in the pluralisation, because it is typically the last word, generally a noun, that is in the plural form.
PIC's is acceptable because it expands to
Programmable Integrated Circuits
- Circuits is shortened in this case to C's.
The exception to the rule is when an acronym becomes a word in its own right instead of a shortened form. Few people still think of "PC" as being short for "personal computer", for example, which is why "PC's" looks wrong. I don't know whether or not you could say the same for PICs at this point.