I was sure the submitter meant the NSA but looking at the story it really was NASA.
Are they going to be sharing this info with the Martian Immigration Service?
NASA is the National AERONAUTICS and Space Admin. The space program gets all the press. But they do a LOT of work on all aspects of commercial air flight.
And while their work on cutting edge aircraft design (civilian, military, and research platforms) gets most of the press on their airflight side, they're involved in a lot of other stuff: Flight simulation, air traffic control, baggage searching devices...
And, as you can now see, stealth people-tracking databases for the "war on terror".
I'd suggest you contact your legislator if you object. But that might get me a heavy fine. (Follow this link {cloned from my current signature} to see what I'm talking about.)
Amazing. Almost 100 words in the article on HOPE, without once managing to mention [what] it stands for[], or give us "clueless" the slightest idea what it's about
Not to mention the "helpful link for the clueless" to ANOTHER article that ALSO doesn't explain it.
Anarchy worked for a looong time before any system of laws was written up, so it can't be that bad. We even evolved under anarchy.
Actually, government predates the evolution of human beings. The strongest primate or a clique of the strong is a typical organizational form for bands of social primates. The potential for anarchic social organization is relatively recent.
Don't confuse government with systems of written laws - which are also relatively recent (but ARE still older than recorded history).
And while we're at it, don't confuse anarchy {social organization without an explicit central authority} with either of the following:
- nihilism {opposition to social structure of any sort}
- polyarchy {the violent chaos that results when two or more "governments" duke it out over who rules.}
Note that polyarchy often occurs when a strong government is overthrown. And that it is what government officials are usually pointing at while screaming "anarchy", using the havoc generated by a surplus of governments to tar attempts to organize a peaceful society without the "assistance" of even one set of control-freaks.
It seems that adspace when someone asks for playboy. They are in no way saying that these are ads from playboy, but instead are saying "hey, if you like playboy, check this out".
Which, incidentally, has major implications for supermarkets.
Evern notice that those red-striped coupon printers at the checkout always print you a coupon for a COMPETITOR's alternative to one of the products you bought - typically one you bought a lot of?
That's because the competitor is trying to get you to try his as an alternative. He'll give you a discount, ONCE, to get you to try his version of something you already use.
The supermarket/coupon printer operation specifically sells the right for a manufacturer to get his coupon presented to customers of his compeititors. It's a good deal for the manufacturer because the purchaser has already been qualified on two criteria:
- They buy product FOO.
- They DON'T buy it from the manufacturer. So the manufcturer gets much better response than if the printer spit coupons at random. (Meanwhile, the competitor can do the same by buying the right to get HIS coupons spit when the manufacturer makes a sale. Then both of 'em are buying coupons to try to steal customers back-and-forth - good for the coupon printing operation, not necessarily good for the manufacturers.)
If Playboy wins this case, such targeted advertising is interpreted as trademark infringement. Expect the next case to be from one or a set of established supermarket-products brand(s) against the coupon printing operation, to try to destroy an advertising mechanism that upstarts can use to attack their market dominance.
For those who don't know, HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth. Thats right, folks, hackers.
I'm getting really tired of this "wink and a nod" attitude towards hackers. They are dangerous scofflaws.
And I am sick to death of people like you who continually misuse "hacker" to mean "computer criminal".
A "Hacker" is an exceptionally skilled programmer, who is able to achieve exceptional results and solve difficult problems through the application of his skills, especially in the absense of adequate software tools. (Indeed, most of the tools used by non-hackers to sove mundane problems were writting as hacks by hackers.)
People who break into systems are "(computer) crackers". (Be sure to include the "computer" when in or near Georgia.)
People who abscond with other people's data, converting it to other use (either their own or sold for profit) are "(comptuter) pirates".
People who damage systems for fun are "(computer) vandals", for political reasons are "(comptuer) terrorists" or "(information) warriors".
Calling a (computer) pirate a "hacker" is exactly the same mistake as calling a cattle ruslter a "cowboy", a truck thief a "trucker", or a sea-pirate a "sailor". Yes, many cattle rustlers are cowboys (though some are not). But most cowboys are NOT cattle rustlers.
Two sorts of people make this mistake:
- Those who are largely ignorant of the subject (getting their information from the mainstream/establishment press, politicians, or "security consultants" marketing themselves to upper management.
- (computer) crackers, vandals, or pirates of limited skill who are trying to puff up their reputations.
has negative cultural, and religious ramifications.
So political correctness has made it to open source.
Afriad so.
It's a pity the Daemon is out. There's a logical derivative of the BSD Daemon-in-tennies-with-pitchfork that just REEKS of NetBSD.
Dress him up as a retiarius!
He's already got a bare head and the trident in his right hand. Put him in a tunic, put a dagger in his belt, and put a round, weighted net in his left hand. (Keep the tenni-runners and grin, of course.)
For those of you not familiar with it, a retiarius ("net-thrower") is one of the classic arms-and-armor forms for a Roman gladiator - and perhaps the most formidable.
In a battle with his common and more well-known opponent (the "secutor" - short sword, smooth helm {to avoid entanglement in the net}, some body armor, curved rectangular shield - much like a private in the Roman army), the retiarius was the winner likely winner - fending off the sword and attacking the legs and exposed part of the arms with the trident, entangling him in the net, pulling him over with the net or tripping him with the trident (all from a distance), then finishing him off (if the audience thought the secutor had performed badly) with the dagger. (This was such a foregone conclusion that the secutor's helm typically had a fish on it as its only potentially net-tangling ornimentation - to indicate that he was the retiarius' natural prey.)
Twenty disk platters about a yard across, stacked up with LOTS of space between them. Hydraulic seek mechanism "several" seeks per second. (I hear it the fingers off more than one engineer when the interlock button was accidentally pushed.) Hub about a foot across with the motor built into it. (Extra windings, too, so you could repair the drive if one winding burned out.) Brown oxide glued onto the disks. If you need to change the disk assembly you need to take off the ceiling for another floor's worth of height and bring in a crane - which in some places was cheaper than shipping out the dead box and bringing in a replacement.
Don't recall the data density but it wasn't much. (The first model (305) had about 4.4 MB, or about 110 KB per surface, but the one I dealt with was a bit later vintage, attached to a 7094.)
Hear they had a head crash on one which filled the pretty plexiglass enclosure of the rotating mechanism with brown oxide ground off the disks. When they brought in the crane and removed the disks they discovered that the dust had been selectively attracted to the magnetic bit boundaries and had thus "developed" the disk (as was sometimes done deliberately with a solvent-based system applied to mag tape, to check head alignment and the like). You could read the data (naked-eye visible bits) on the tracks that hadn't been ground off.
First, a ribbon isn't going to cut it. It would have to be a rigid unit. A ribbon isn't going to be able to transfer [sideward] force from one end to the other to aid rotation.
You misunderstand the situation.
It's a bolo.
Imagine two rocks on a string in free space, rotating around their center of gravity. The string is loaded in pure tension. Changing the mass of both weights simultaneously (i.e. attaching or releasing an additional weight that is currently moving at the same velocity as any permanently attached weight) changes the tension but nothing else.
Now put that center of gravity in low earth orbit, with:
- the axis of the bolo's rotation alligned with the axis of the orbit,
- the height of the orbit such that at the closest-to-earth part of the spin, the lower weight is at airplane altitude and,
- the rotation rate of the bolo such that the velocity of the weight at low-point is roughly that of the prevailing wind.
I.e. the bolo is "walking" or "tumbling" across the earth's atmosphere, penetrating it very slightly, with the weights at local wind speed at low point, and at about twice orbital velocity (minus one earth rotation rate) at high point. If it were a wheel rather than just two spokes, it would be "rolling" along the top of the atmosphere penetrating it slightly.
As the load starts to be lifted upwards, gravity is going to be trying to pull it back down. At the same time, gravity is going to be pulling the other end down too. If you actually could keep it spinning a while, the ribbon would become slightly "V" shaped and the load orbits would become very unstable.
If that argument were valid, satellites wouldn't orbit. As a satelite orbits, gravity is always pulling it down. And its path is always curving down. But it also has sideways velocity. So its path is curving down so slowly that it never hits the earth, going around it instead.
But I think you've got the bolo confused with the beanstalk device. Remember, with the bolo you're NOT climbing up the cable (like the beanstalk). You just matched velocity with it as it went by and grabbed on, so that suddenly it was supporting your weight. (At the same time, somebody in a spaceship hooked a package of about the same weight onto the other end, which is now being pulled DOWN by the cable as hard as you're being pulled UP.)
Without torque from the cable, there is no way an object moving at "local wind speed" is going to escape the earth's orbit. And if you used a rigid body, it would collapse from the stress.
When you first hooked onto the cable it was supporting your weight - plus a bit - by pulling straight up. But as it rotates (and you rise) it begins to pull you "forward" along the orbit - and at the same time pulling the upper mass "backward". Still pure tension on the "string".
By the time you're at the center-of-mass height the force is purely an accelleration along the orbit (and a decelleration on the counterweight). But you're now rapidly rising and the counterweight is rapidly falling.
At the end of a half-turn you're at the center-of-mass altitude PLUS half the string length, moving at twice the orbital rate. You can let go and end up at the low-point of a nice conic section free orbit. If they're running this with a payload every half turn, you dutifully hook the new down-bound payload onto the string as you step into the shuttlecraft.
But none of that matters. Even if you can get it to rotate, not slow due to wind-resistance, stay 100% balanced at all times, etc. etc... how do you plan to keep it up in the air?
It's in ORBIT dude! No wind resistance (on the average) because the end of the cable is at the local air velocity as it dips in. (You do get a bit of transfer of wind energy into vibration of the string, which must be damped. But that's a tiny item and easily corrected.)
Talking about wind resistance slowing the rotation is like talki
Which is why we have to figure out how to get the stuff into space cheaply so we can jettison it into the sun.
Naw. It's too useful. Just exile it to an orbit far enough out that it won't bother anybody on Earth again. Then later we can recycle it to use in space-based applications (where there's ALREADY so much radiation that the extra from the nuke waste is just a drop in the bucket.)
Any space-going habitation and/or industry is going to have to deal with the cosmic background and solar flares. So it won't be a going concern until the issues of how to work safely with massive amounts of ionizing radiation (or prevent or repair organic damage from it) are solved. Then stuff like Cobalt 60 and Strontium 90 become useful resources.
A film company announcing that it will stop selling cameras is like a shipping company saying it's going to stop selling ships. Much more note worthy is that they were trying to sell them in the first place.
Even if they DO start to phase out film for personal and even professional photography, it (like vacuum tubes) will live on for a long time in many special-purpose applications.
Think about your microwave oven, for example: The magnetron is a vacuum tube. Semiconductors STILL aren't up to that level of efficiency and low cost for THAT application. Ditto X-ray generation. And there are hundreds of others.
The same is true with film. Medical and dental imaging is starting to incorporate other technologies, but film is still prime-time for much of it. Ditto astronomy. Ditto high-res pro photography. Ditto spectrometry. Ditto long-term radiation exposure measurement. I could go on for hours. Film - even truly fancy low-volume film - is just so darned CHEAP.
And that's not even hitting the applications where nothing else will do the job.
For every load you move from high in the atmosphere to such-and-such an orbit, you sap the rotational energy of your lifter, and must add more energy to bring yourself up to speed. In the best possible case, the amount of energy you need to get your lifter back up to rotational speed is the amount of energy it would have taken you to move the load up to it's orbit without the lifter.
Which is why one operational mode is to balance the mass, momentum, and energy by using it to DEcellerate an equal amount of space-mined material on each lift. You use it to exchange a spaceplane full of passengers for a spaceplane full of space-manufactured goods, or a spaceplane full of returning passengers for one full of tools.
But that's not the only mode. If the device is sufficiently masive and your launches sufficiently rare, you don't need to do a matching down-trip now. You can let the orbit decay somewhat due to launching your ship. Then you pump it back up later with the same ship returning from its mission. Or you can pump it back up using SLOW thrusters, lightsails, or the earth-field electric motor effect over a period of weeks.
Electric-motor pumping it with the earth's magnetic field does essentially the same job as using electric-motor elevators in a more conventional skyhook design - working against the earth's angular momentum for your orbital thrust. It just does it more slowly than a physical connection to an anchor point in the crust. And it requires you to use a space-based source of power for the motor, rather than an earth-based generating plant. (Unless you use microwaves or laser light to send ground-generated power up, of course. But why bother when you have all that sunlight?)
The important part of ANY skyhook design is to do the FIRST HALF of the launch - getting from the surfact to near-earth orbit - where the payload must be accellerated VERY RAPIDLY to overcome the one-g field and atmospheric friction. Once you're out of the atmosphere there are lots of better-but-less-immediate ways to go the rest of the way.
A spinning-cable skyhook lets you use relatively efficient engines burning atmospheric oxygen in a vehicle generating airfoil-based lift (rather than rockets spending their first g of delta-v on the gravitational red-queen's race) to get you near the atmosphere/vacuum transisition, then the energy-balanced skyhook to yank you above it. It's far more efficient than even self-contained spaceplanes and gives you most of the advantage of a beanstalk at a tiny fraction of the cost (though with somewhat increased complexity).
The space elevator needs equal pull on both sides of the point where it would be at the same distance from Earth as objects in geosynchronous orbit. You can either do that using a counterwieght such as a large asteroid, or by making the elevator exceedingly long, about the same length on either side of that geosync orbit position.
Admittedly, the basic ground-to-counterweight-above-sync-orbit design has great potential. But there are other designs with less cost, extreme materials, and risk.
For instance: A section of cable in low orbit, spinning end-over-end so that each end periodically dips into the stratosphere at approximately the average local wind speed. Fly up to it, hook on as it goes by, and get lifted into orbit. Balance the momentum by bringing back a payload of space-mined material on the other end.
Build it so that if the orbit decays it will break up on reentry rather than crashing, keeping its own mass low enough that it won't create another Cretaceous event by spreading tons of red-hot debris throught the upper atmosphere if it comes in. (But if you get your spin right you can design it so that it tends to be pushed UP if the active guidance fails.)
Use a near-circular orbit if you want to lift a lot of payloads to near orbit (where you can use slower engines - like ion or light-sail - to achieve high orbit or escape), or an eliptical orbit for fewer payloads to a higher initial launch.
Lots of ways to do the active guidance:
- Control the spin with currents through the cable to electron guns and collectors at the ends working against the earth's mag field.
- Small attached light sails - For orbital elements, spin, attitude, AND killing vibrations.
- Ion thrusters ditto - and you can collect reaction mass each time an end dips into the atmosphere.
- Control, solar power plant, etc. at the center, which never enters the atmosphere. (Elevator/cable-crawler to get there from the ends.)
It doesn't NEED to be that expensive. By a LONG shot.
you can buy a nearly weightless (15 lbs) carbon fiber bike that Lance Armstrong would be proud to ride, and with a few weeks of practice, any reasonably healthy person could out pace and out distance any Segway.
Try riding a carbon-fiber bicycle around indoors, at a crowded convention, in a buisness suit. B-)
As someone pointed out, wouldn't it be much cheaper if they just added a third wheel on a spring? No need for all these fancy balancing systems...
I was at a convention last Nov where a fellow had hacked up his own Segway-like device. Very stable. Very zippy. Very controllable.
Segway talks a lot about how hard the balance problem is, going on about the number of processors they threw at the problem. This guy said it was actually pretty simple. Yes you do need a rate gyro and an accellerometer. But they're not all THAT expensive and the control loop is pretty basic.
Its a clear case of misleading advertising. If its a 9000 then say 9000, if its a 9200 then say 9200, don't give this "it has the same performance" BS, hell they could have stuck a Geforce4 5200Go in there and got similar performance, but I would hardly call that a 9200.
Damn right.
Back in '67 or so GM was trying to cost-cut and consolidate. The Odlsmobile and one of the Buick models were by then built on the same chassis and were virtually the same car, with three differences:
- The brand-name/model-designation trim.
- The shape of a couple body panels.
- The engine.
They were built on the same production lines by the same workers. (Indeed, they were literally intermixed on the lines. Olds, Buick, Buick, Olds, Buick, something else, Olds,...) Identical quality of fit and finish, identical paint, identical seats, etc.
But Oldsmobile engines were built at an engine plant in Lansing Michigan - one of the few holdovers from the original Oldsmobile company. They were a descendant of the "Rocket '88" V8 engine - which was VERY powerful. It was said that it could pass anything on the road but a gas station. (At one time the stock design was tuned so it had no "top end", i.e. you could literally go out on the highway, floor it, and it would accellerate until the engine blew.) Despite its mass and strength, the Olds was one of the peppiest cars on the road.
GM was in an ongoing cost crunch, and decided to close the engine plant - gradually, weaning the customers of their perceived "love affair with the Oldsmobile", which they believed to be purely a product of advertising and status games.
But the Olds was both significantly higher status and significantly more expensive than the Buick. And there were TWO reasons to pay the premium:
- The high-status brand name.
- The engine.
GM did a run of Olds Cutlasses with the Buick engine in them. And they didn't mark it on the paperwork. A few months later (after a LOT of Olds customers were driving new cars with Buick engines and cursing the emission regulations that they believed had robbed them of their expected performance), GM got caught. And they got sued, BIG time, for consumer fraud.
They had laid off enough workers that they couldn't ramp the engine plant up enough to put genuine Olds engines in all the Oldsmobiles until the model year AFTER the one where they pulled the boner. So for the next year's model they built some with each engine type, and clearly marked it on the sticker. Something like this:
"This car has a high quality GM engine manufactured in {an Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan / a Buick plant in Pontiac, Michigan}.
It was a VERY expensive lesson. (I think they ended up shelling out refunds for the FULL cost of an Olds engine to each of the customers.)
(So of course the NEXT year the suckers pulled ANOTHER switch: They substituted a 200 (Chevette) transmission for the 350! Hanging an extra ton of car on one end and an extra hundred horses on the other caused it to melt a seal and fail after about 25,000 miles. Oops! But substitute a rebuilt 350 and it would run like a bat unti it finally started the one-horse shay number at about 200,000 or so - a very long life for cars of that vintage.)
This is pure blackmail. It's clearly aimed at the upcoming IPO of Google and the last thing a company facing before an IPO is a legal battle, hence they might just throw a bone to SCO to sweep the problem under the rug. Well planned move on SCO's part.
Given the huge number of servers that Google is running, the huge size of its expected IPO, and the likely effect of a miniscule license fee on their future extortion attemps, I doubt the carnivores at SCO could manage to keep their demands down to a thrown bone.
The trick to pulling this off is to keep your demands to a minimum - like less than the lawyer time to look at them - and to be the only player in the game. Like the clutch of lawyers that bought up the patent on the XOR cursor, then for a decade or two systematically sued every computerish IPO in Silicon Valley over it (whether they had anything to do with graphics or not) and settled for something like $10k - effectively imposing an "incorporation tax".
When one extortionist is panhandling a bag of peanuts it might be expedient to throw one to him. If he's asking to become a large, permanent hemmorage in your cash stream (or if there are a large crowd of these ticks sucking your corporate blood), paying the danegeld is a bad move.
I suspect that that's what SCO thought it was doing to IBM - but they asked for too much, and/or got in the game too late and ran into an IBM policy of delousing rather than scratching the itch (due to IBM's long history and repeated experience with such extortion).
But given SCO's track record for lack of savvy on these issues (i.e. taking on the IBM 500 lb Gorilla followed by a series of other stupid moves), I see no reason for them to suddenly wise up and avoid opening yet another front in the Unix Second World War (AT&T vs. UCB being the first).
If they do, I'd bet that Google will fight - and probably ask the court to put it all on hold until the SCO/IBM case is resolved - or perhaps combine them, if the form of SCO's demands is such that this is an option.
Heard about a sucker bet one pro golfer used to make - that he could drive a ball for a mile or more, provided he could choose the course, time, and season for the shot.
The course he selected was in or near Chicago, having a tee on a cliff overlooking Lake Michigan. The season chosen was mid winter - on a day and time when the ice would be solid but still flat and the wind strong and from the west. (It's not called "The Windy City" for nothing.)
He'd tee off backward, shooting the ball out onto the lake ice, where, driven by the wind, it would bounce away for miles and then keep rolling for as far as it could be observed.
nobody can say you're "wrong" but they can certainly deny your grant application, decline your papers, deny you tenure... Academics in those fields compete with a sort of gamesmanship and style that's every bit as cutthroat as being right.
Which isn't entirely unreasonable.
You see, while the hard sciences are all about controlling and manipulating the real world, the social sciences are all about controlling and manipulating other people.
So of COURSE there is a "right" and "wrong" to things like deconstructionism. "Right" is "manipulating the other members of the department into granting you high status".
If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't?
I understand that a similar stunt was once pulled on a women's studies department with a bogus article about lesbian behavior in sheep.
Background required... Mating behavior in normal sheep is:
- The ram kicks the sheep in the side.
- If the sheep is not in heat, she moves away.
- If the sheep is in heat, she responds by holding still.
- Upon determining that kicking the sheep in the side causes her to hold still, the ram mounts her.
Therefore, if there WERE a lesbian sheep, she would demonstrate her attraction to another sheep by holding still - which would be essentially indistinguishable from disintrest. This would make it VERY difficult to determine whether lesbian sheep actually exist.
So a young lady who was thoroughly fed up with the women's studies department put her tongue firmly in cheek, wrote this up, and submitted it.
Of course the department didn't recognize they were being put on and made quite a big thing about this brilliant paper by their new star student. B-)
What I did mean is that something is going to happen to those users to cut their usage down, and I did not mean to specify or imply exactly "what" at all.
But I do guarentee they won't like it and many of them will bitch. There's no way to make them happy, so that's a bit of a lost cause. (You weren't necessarily claiming otherwise but it's worth pointing out;-) )
Check. B-)
Point I'm making, though, is that the appropriate response by the ISPs is just to arrange that heavy usage results in an "internet brownout" that is evenly distributed (and then look into adding capacity where it's needed and perhaps redistributing the feeds to the areas containing "power users", rather than just trying to dump the people who are actually using what they thought they rented.
The telephone companies have EXACTLY this issue with flat-rate service. Do you see THEM trying to dump the "power phoners" who stay online all day?
Not on your life!
Instead they add more capacity as needed to provide the service, and adjust the pricing of ALL flat-rate users as necessary (which it generally isn't.)
Same for long-distance carriers - and even cellphone providers (who add more cells when things get congested - or at least who USED to do so. B-b )
The problem is cable ISPs, who have a limited amount of bandwidth before they have to run more fiber and install more fiber-to-RF bridges, to more finely divide the neighborhood "internet cells" when they actually get some usage. The execs in some of these companies apparently underestimated the demand for the service they (over)sold, and are now in a crunch where they don't want to pay for the necessary upgrades to keep providing it as more customers buy in and/or find things to do with the bandwidth.
It may suck if you're one of the 50 or 100 people, but if you look at it abstractly, there's nothing else [than kicking out a few high-bandwidth users] an ISP can possibl[y] do.
That is absolutely not true.
They can configure their equipment so that, during usage peaks, the heavy user's connection is throttled down to a "fair share" of the currnet bandwidth usage.
(Note that I'm talking about an instintaneous throttling, not a daemon that reconfigures his modem on an hourly basis.)
If the uplink can handle, say, 45 mbps and 45 users are all transferring flat-out, he should get 1 mbps throughput - as should the other 44.
And it is the ISP's job - not the customer's - to configure their equipment so that this happens - and beat on their vendor (or find another) if the equipment can't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I was sure the submitter meant the NSA but looking at the story it really was NASA.
Are they going to be sharing this info with the Martian Immigration Service?
NASA is the National AERONAUTICS and Space Admin. The space program gets all the press. But they do a LOT of work on all aspects of commercial air flight.
And while their work on cutting edge aircraft design (civilian, military, and research platforms) gets most of the press on their airflight side, they're involved in a lot of other stuff: Flight simulation, air traffic control, baggage searching devices...
And, as you can now see, stealth people-tracking databases for the "war on terror".
I'd suggest you contact your legislator if you object. But that might get me a heavy fine. (Follow this link {cloned from my current signature} to see what I'm talking about.)
Amazing. Almost 100 words in the article on HOPE, without once managing to mention [what] it stands for[], or give us "clueless" the slightest idea what it's about
Not to mention the "helpful link for the clueless" to ANOTHER article that ALSO doesn't explain it.
Anarchy worked for a looong time before any system of laws was written up, so it can't be that bad. We even evolved under anarchy.
Actually, government predates the evolution of human beings. The strongest primate or a clique of the strong is a typical organizational form for bands of social primates. The potential for anarchic social organization is relatively recent.
Don't confuse government with systems of written laws - which are also relatively recent (but ARE still older than recorded history).
And while we're at it, don't confuse anarchy {social organization without an explicit central authority} with either of the following:
- nihilism {opposition to social structure of any
sort}
- polyarchy {the violent chaos that results when two or more "governments" duke it out over who rules.}
Note that polyarchy often occurs when a strong government is overthrown. And that it is what government officials are usually pointing at while screaming "anarchy", using the havoc generated by a surplus of governments to tar attempts to organize a peaceful society without the "assistance" of even one set of control-freaks.
It seems that adspace when someone asks for playboy. They are in no way saying that these are ads from playboy, but instead are saying "hey, if you like playboy, check this out".
Which, incidentally, has major implications for supermarkets.
Evern notice that those red-striped coupon printers at the checkout always print you a coupon for a COMPETITOR's alternative to one of the products you bought - typically one you bought a lot of?
That's because the competitor is trying to get you to try his as an alternative. He'll give you a discount, ONCE, to get you to try his version of something you already use.
The supermarket/coupon printer operation specifically sells the right for a manufacturer to get his coupon presented to customers of his compeititors. It's a good deal for the manufacturer because the purchaser has already been qualified on two criteria:
- They buy product FOO.
- They DON'T buy it from the manufacturer.
So the manufcturer gets much better response than if the printer spit coupons at random. (Meanwhile, the competitor can do the same by buying the right to get HIS coupons spit when the manufacturer makes a sale. Then both of 'em are buying coupons to try to steal customers back-and-forth - good for the coupon printing operation, not necessarily good for the manufacturers.)
If Playboy wins this case, such targeted advertising is interpreted as trademark infringement. Expect the next case to be from one or a set of established supermarket-products brand(s) against the coupon printing operation, to try to destroy an advertising mechanism that upstarts can use to attack their market dominance.
For those who don't know, HOPE stands for Hackers on Planet Earth. Thats right, folks, hackers.
I'm getting really tired of this "wink and a nod" attitude towards hackers. They are dangerous scofflaws.
And I am sick to death of people like you who continually misuse "hacker" to mean "computer criminal".
A "Hacker" is an exceptionally skilled programmer, who is able to achieve exceptional results and solve difficult problems through the application of his skills, especially in the absense of adequate software tools. (Indeed, most of the tools used by non-hackers to sove mundane problems were writting as hacks by hackers.)
People who break into systems are "(computer) crackers". (Be sure to include the "computer" when in or near Georgia.)
People who abscond with other people's data, converting it to other use (either their own or sold for profit) are "(comptuter) pirates".
People who damage systems for fun are "(computer) vandals", for political reasons are "(comptuer) terrorists" or "(information) warriors".
Calling a (computer) pirate a "hacker" is exactly the same mistake as calling a cattle ruslter a "cowboy", a truck thief a "trucker", or a sea-pirate a "sailor". Yes, many cattle rustlers are cowboys (though some are not). But most cowboys are NOT cattle rustlers.
Two sorts of people make this mistake:
- Those who are largely ignorant of the subject (getting their information from the mainstream/establishment press, politicians, or "security consultants" marketing themselves to upper management.
- (computer) crackers, vandals, or pirates of limited skill who are trying to puff up their reputations.
has negative cultural, and religious ramifications.
So political correctness has made it to open source.
Afriad so.
It's a pity the Daemon is out. There's a logical derivative of the BSD Daemon-in-tennies-with-pitchfork that just REEKS of NetBSD.
Dress him up as a retiarius!
He's already got a bare head and the trident in his right hand. Put him in a tunic, put a dagger in his belt, and put a round, weighted net in his left hand. (Keep the tenni-runners and grin, of course.)
For those of you not familiar with it, a retiarius ("net-thrower") is one of the classic arms-and-armor forms for a Roman gladiator - and perhaps the most formidable.
In a battle with his common and more well-known opponent (the "secutor" - short sword, smooth helm {to avoid entanglement in the net}, some body armor, curved rectangular shield - much like a private in the Roman army), the retiarius was the winner likely winner - fending off the sword and attacking the legs and exposed part of the arms with the trident, entangling him in the net, pulling him over with the net or tripping him with the trident (all from a distance), then finishing him off (if the audience thought the secutor had performed badly) with the dagger. (This was such a foregone conclusion that the secutor's helm typically had a fish on it as its only potentially net-tangling ornimentation - to indicate that he was the retiarius' natural prey.)
I still remember the RAMAC.
Twenty disk platters about a yard across, stacked up with LOTS of space between them. Hydraulic seek mechanism "several" seeks per second. (I hear it the fingers off more than one engineer when the interlock button was accidentally pushed.) Hub about a foot across with the motor built into it. (Extra windings, too, so you could repair the drive if one winding burned out.) Brown oxide glued onto the disks. If you need to change the disk assembly you need to take off the ceiling for another floor's worth of height and bring in a crane - which in some places was cheaper than shipping out the dead box and bringing in a replacement.
Don't recall the data density but it wasn't much. (The first model (305) had about 4.4 MB, or about 110 KB per surface, but the one I dealt with was a bit later vintage, attached to a 7094.)
Hear they had a head crash on one which filled the pretty plexiglass enclosure of the rotating mechanism with brown oxide ground off the disks. When they brought in the crane and removed the disks they discovered that the dust had been selectively attracted to the magnetic bit boundaries and had thus "developed" the disk (as was sometimes done deliberately with a solvent-based system applied to mag tape, to check head alignment and the like). You could read the data (naked-eye visible bits) on the tracks that hadn't been ground off.
First, a ribbon isn't going to cut it. It would have to be a rigid unit. A ribbon isn't going to be able to transfer [sideward] force from one end to the other to aid rotation.
You misunderstand the situation.
It's a bolo.
Imagine two rocks on a string in free space, rotating around their center of gravity. The string is loaded in pure tension. Changing the mass of both weights simultaneously (i.e. attaching or releasing an additional weight that is currently moving at the same velocity as any permanently attached weight) changes the tension but nothing else.
Now put that center of gravity in low earth orbit, with:
- the axis of the bolo's rotation alligned with the axis of the orbit,
- the height of the orbit such that at the closest-to-earth part of the spin, the lower weight is at airplane altitude and,
- the rotation rate of the bolo such that the velocity of the weight at low-point is roughly that of the prevailing wind.
I.e. the bolo is "walking" or "tumbling" across the earth's atmosphere, penetrating it very slightly, with the weights at local wind speed at low point, and at about twice orbital velocity (minus one earth rotation rate) at high point. If it were a wheel rather than just two spokes, it would be "rolling" along the top of the atmosphere penetrating it slightly.
As the load starts to be lifted upwards, gravity is going to be trying to pull it back down. At the same time, gravity is going to be pulling the other end down too. If you actually could keep it spinning a while, the ribbon would become slightly "V" shaped and the load orbits would become very unstable.
If that argument were valid, satellites wouldn't orbit. As a satelite orbits, gravity is always pulling it down. And its path is always curving down. But it also has sideways velocity. So its path is curving down so slowly that it never hits the earth, going around it instead.
But I think you've got the bolo confused with the beanstalk device. Remember, with the bolo you're NOT climbing up the cable (like the beanstalk). You just matched velocity with it as it went by and grabbed on, so that suddenly it was supporting your weight. (At the same time, somebody in a spaceship hooked a package of about the same weight onto the other end, which is now being pulled DOWN by the cable as hard as you're being pulled UP.)
Without torque from the cable, there is no way an object moving at "local wind speed" is going to escape the earth's orbit. And if you used a rigid body, it would collapse from the stress.
When you first hooked onto the cable it was supporting your weight - plus a bit - by pulling straight up. But as it rotates (and you rise) it begins to pull you "forward" along the orbit - and at the same time pulling the upper mass "backward". Still pure tension on the "string".
By the time you're at the center-of-mass height the force is purely an accelleration along the orbit (and a decelleration on the counterweight). But you're now rapidly rising and the counterweight is rapidly falling.
At the end of a half-turn you're at the center-of-mass altitude PLUS half the string length, moving at twice the orbital rate. You can let go and end up at the low-point of a nice conic section free orbit. If they're running this with a payload every half turn, you dutifully hook the new down-bound payload onto the string as you step into the shuttlecraft.
But none of that matters. Even if you can get it to rotate, not slow due to wind-resistance, stay 100% balanced at all times, etc. etc... how do you plan to keep it up in the air?
It's in ORBIT dude! No wind resistance (on the average) because the end of the cable is at the local air velocity as it dips in. (You do get a bit of transfer of wind energy into vibration of the string, which must be damped. But that's a tiny item and easily corrected.)
Talking about wind resistance slowing the rotation is like talki
Which is why we have to figure out how to get the stuff into space cheaply so we can jettison it into the sun.
Naw. It's too useful. Just exile it to an orbit far enough out that it won't bother anybody on Earth again. Then later we can recycle it to use in space-based applications (where there's ALREADY so much radiation that the extra from the nuke waste is just a drop in the bucket.)
Any space-going habitation and/or industry is going to have to deal with the cosmic background and solar flares. So it won't be a going concern until the issues of how to work safely with massive amounts of ionizing radiation (or prevent or repair organic damage from it) are solved. Then stuff like Cobalt 60 and Strontium 90 become useful resources.
A film company announcing that it will stop selling cameras is like a shipping company saying it's going to stop selling ships. Much more note worthy is that they were trying to sell them in the first place.
Even if they DO start to phase out film for personal and even professional photography, it (like vacuum tubes) will live on for a long time in many special-purpose applications.
Think about your microwave oven, for example: The magnetron is a vacuum tube. Semiconductors STILL aren't up to that level of efficiency and low cost for THAT application. Ditto X-ray generation. And there are hundreds of others.
The same is true with film. Medical and dental imaging is starting to incorporate other technologies, but film is still prime-time for much of it. Ditto astronomy. Ditto high-res pro photography. Ditto spectrometry. Ditto long-term radiation exposure measurement. I could go on for hours. Film - even truly fancy low-volume film - is just so darned CHEAP.
And that's not even hitting the applications where nothing else will do the job.
For every load you move from high in the atmosphere to such-and-such an orbit, you sap the rotational energy of your lifter, and must add more energy to bring yourself up to speed. In the best possible case, the amount of energy you need to get your lifter back up to rotational speed is the amount of energy it would have taken you to move the load up to it's orbit without the lifter.
Which is why one operational mode is to balance the mass, momentum, and energy by using it to DEcellerate an equal amount of space-mined material on each lift. You use it to exchange a spaceplane full of passengers for a spaceplane full of space-manufactured goods, or a spaceplane full of returning passengers for one full of tools.
But that's not the only mode. If the device is sufficiently masive and your launches sufficiently rare, you don't need to do a matching down-trip now. You can let the orbit decay somewhat due to launching your ship. Then you pump it back up later with the same ship returning from its mission. Or you can pump it back up using SLOW thrusters, lightsails, or the earth-field electric motor effect over a period of weeks.
Electric-motor pumping it with the earth's magnetic field does essentially the same job as using electric-motor elevators in a more conventional skyhook design - working against the earth's angular momentum for your orbital thrust. It just does it more slowly than a physical connection to an anchor point in the crust. And it requires you to use a space-based source of power for the motor, rather than an earth-based generating plant. (Unless you use microwaves or laser light to send ground-generated power up, of course. But why bother when you have all that sunlight?)
The important part of ANY skyhook design is to do the FIRST HALF of the launch - getting from the surfact to near-earth orbit - where the payload must be accellerated VERY RAPIDLY to overcome the one-g field and atmospheric friction. Once you're out of the atmosphere there are lots of better-but-less-immediate ways to go the rest of the way.
A spinning-cable skyhook lets you use relatively efficient engines burning atmospheric oxygen in a vehicle generating airfoil-based lift (rather than rockets spending their first g of delta-v on the gravitational red-queen's race) to get you near the atmosphere/vacuum transisition, then the energy-balanced skyhook to yank you above it. It's far more efficient than even self-contained spaceplanes and gives you most of the advantage of a beanstalk at a tiny fraction of the cost (though with somewhat increased complexity).
The space elevator needs equal pull on both sides of the point where it would be at the same distance from Earth as objects in geosynchronous orbit. You can either do that using a counterwieght such as a large asteroid, or by making the elevator exceedingly long, about the same length on either side of that geosync orbit position.
Admittedly, the basic ground-to-counterweight-above-sync-orbit design has great potential. But there are other designs with less cost, extreme materials, and risk.
For instance: A section of cable in low orbit, spinning end-over-end so that each end periodically dips into the stratosphere at approximately the average local wind speed. Fly up to it, hook on as it goes by, and get lifted into orbit. Balance the momentum by bringing back a payload of space-mined material on the other end.
Build it so that if the orbit decays it will break up on reentry rather than crashing, keeping its own mass low enough that it won't create another Cretaceous event by spreading tons of red-hot debris throught the upper atmosphere if it comes in. (But if you get your spin right you can design it so that it tends to be pushed UP if the active guidance fails.)
Use a near-circular orbit if you want to lift a lot of payloads to near orbit (where you can use slower engines - like ion or light-sail - to achieve high orbit or escape), or an eliptical orbit for fewer payloads to a higher initial launch.
Lots of ways to do the active guidance:
- Control the spin with currents through the cable to electron guns and collectors at the ends working against the earth's mag field.
- Small attached light sails - For orbital elements, spin, attitude, AND killing vibrations.
- Ion thrusters ditto - and you can collect reaction mass each time an end dips into the atmosphere.
- Control, solar power plant, etc. at the center, which never enters the atmosphere. (Elevator/cable-crawler to get there from the ends.)
Lots of other systems are possible, too.
This is a dupe...
No it's not.
The previous article was about the leaking of the memo. This one is about IBM trying to downplay the leaked memo. Two different stories.
Why clone the Segway?
For the price of a Segway
You just answered your own question.
It doesn't NEED to be that expensive. By a LONG shot.
you can buy a nearly weightless (15 lbs) carbon fiber bike that Lance Armstrong would be proud to ride, and with a few weeks of practice, any reasonably healthy person could out pace and out distance any Segway.
Try riding a carbon-fiber bicycle around indoors, at a crowded convention, in a buisness suit. B-)
As someone pointed out, wouldn't it be much cheaper if they just added a third wheel on a spring? No need for all these fancy balancing systems...
I was at a convention last Nov where a fellow had hacked up his own Segway-like device. Very stable. Very zippy. Very controllable.
Segway talks a lot about how hard the balance problem is, going on about the number of processors they threw at the problem. This guy said it was actually pretty simple. Yes you do need a rate gyro and an accellerometer. But they're not all THAT expensive and the control loop is pretty basic.
Its a clear case of misleading advertising. If its a 9000 then say 9000, if its a 9200 then say 9200, don't give this "it has the same performance" BS, hell they could have stuck a Geforce4 5200Go in there and got similar performance, but I would hardly call that a 9200.
...) Identical quality of fit and finish, identical paint, identical seats, etc.
Damn right.
Back in '67 or so GM was trying to cost-cut and consolidate. The Odlsmobile and one of the Buick models were by then built on the same chassis and were virtually the same car, with three differences:
- The brand-name/model-designation trim.
- The shape of a couple body panels.
- The engine.
They were built on the same production lines by the same workers. (Indeed, they were literally intermixed on the lines. Olds, Buick, Buick, Olds, Buick, something else, Olds,
But Oldsmobile engines were built at an engine plant in Lansing Michigan - one of the few holdovers from the original Oldsmobile company. They were a descendant of the "Rocket '88" V8 engine - which was VERY powerful. It was said that it could pass anything on the road but a gas station. (At one time the stock design was tuned so it had no "top end", i.e. you could literally go out on the highway, floor it, and it would accellerate until the engine blew.) Despite its mass and strength, the Olds was one of the peppiest cars on the road.
GM was in an ongoing cost crunch, and decided to close the engine plant - gradually, weaning the customers of their perceived "love affair with the Oldsmobile", which they believed to be purely a product of advertising and status games.
But the Olds was both significantly higher status and significantly more expensive than the Buick. And there were TWO reasons to pay the premium:
- The high-status brand name.
- The engine.
GM did a run of Olds Cutlasses with the Buick engine in them. And they didn't mark it on the paperwork. A few months later (after a LOT of Olds customers were driving new cars with Buick engines and cursing the emission regulations that they believed had robbed them of their expected performance), GM got caught. And they got sued, BIG time, for consumer fraud.
They had laid off enough workers that they couldn't ramp the engine plant up enough to put genuine Olds engines in all the Oldsmobiles until the model year AFTER the one where they pulled the boner. So for the next year's model they built some with each engine type, and clearly marked it on the sticker. Something like this:
"This car has a high quality GM engine manufactured in {an Oldsmobile plant in Lansing, Michigan / a Buick plant in Pontiac, Michigan}.
It was a VERY expensive lesson. (I think they ended up shelling out refunds for the FULL cost of an Olds engine to each of the customers.)
(So of course the NEXT year the suckers pulled ANOTHER switch: They substituted a 200 (Chevette) transmission for the 350! Hanging an extra ton of car on one end and an extra hundred horses on the other caused it to melt a seal and fail after about 25,000 miles. Oops! But substitute a rebuilt 350 and it would run like a bat unti it finally started the one-horse shay number at about 200,000 or so - a very long life for cars of that vintage.)
Dupe. ... For God's sake, search for 'speakfreely' in your own engine. It returns ONE result! The same damned article!
That posting was last September.
John is taking the archive down next Thursday. (Possibly Wed night - he's in Switzerland.)
A reminder post now, when we still have a few days to grab the archive, is VERY appropriate.
(Thanks, Timothy!)
This is pure blackmail. It's clearly aimed at the upcoming IPO of Google and the last thing a company facing before an IPO is a legal battle, hence they might just throw a bone to SCO to sweep the problem under the rug. Well planned move on SCO's part.
Given the huge number of servers that Google is running, the huge size of its expected IPO, and the likely effect of a miniscule license fee on their future extortion attemps, I doubt the carnivores at SCO could manage to keep their demands down to a thrown bone.
The trick to pulling this off is to keep your demands to a minimum - like less than the lawyer time to look at them - and to be the only player in the game. Like the clutch of lawyers that bought up the patent on the XOR cursor, then for a decade or two systematically sued every computerish IPO in Silicon Valley over it (whether they had anything to do with graphics or not) and settled for something like $10k - effectively imposing an "incorporation tax".
When one extortionist is panhandling a bag of peanuts it might be expedient to throw one to him. If he's asking to become a large, permanent hemmorage in your cash stream (or if there are a large crowd of these ticks sucking your corporate blood), paying the danegeld is a bad move.
I suspect that that's what SCO thought it was doing to IBM - but they asked for too much, and/or got in the game too late and ran into an IBM policy of delousing rather than scratching the itch (due to IBM's long history and repeated experience with such extortion).
But given SCO's track record for lack of savvy on these issues (i.e. taking on the IBM 500 lb Gorilla followed by a series of other stupid moves), I see no reason for them to suddenly wise up and avoid opening yet another front in the Unix Second World War (AT&T vs. UCB being the first).
If they do, I'd bet that Google will fight - and probably ask the court to put it all on hold until the SCO/IBM case is resolved - or perhaps combine them, if the form of SCO's demands is such that this is an option.
Heard about a sucker bet one pro golfer used to make - that he could drive a ball for a mile or more, provided he could choose the course, time, and season for the shot.
The course he selected was in or near Chicago, having a tee on a cliff overlooking Lake Michigan. The season chosen was mid winter - on a day and time when the ice would be solid but still flat and the wind strong and from the west. (It's not called "The Windy City" for nothing.)
He'd tee off backward, shooting the ball out onto the lake ice, where, driven by the wind, it would bounce away for miles and then keep rolling for as far as it could be observed.
Two objectives were destroyed, one damaged.
And that's dam good odds for a military operation.
Now all I need is a CP/M emulator and I'm all set.
(Assuming the adhesive on any of those old floppies survived well enough to extract the contents.)
nobody can say you're "wrong" but they can certainly deny your grant application, decline your papers, deny you tenure... Academics in those fields compete with a sort of gamesmanship and style that's every bit as cutthroat as being right.
Which isn't entirely unreasonable.
You see, while the hard sciences are all about controlling and manipulating the real world, the social sciences are all about controlling and manipulating other people.
So of COURSE there is a "right" and "wrong" to things like deconstructionism. "Right" is "manipulating the other members of the department into granting you high status".
If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't?
I understand that a similar stunt was once pulled on a women's studies department with a bogus article about lesbian behavior in sheep.
Background required... Mating behavior in normal sheep is:
- The ram kicks the sheep in the side.
- If the sheep is not in heat, she moves away.
- If the sheep is in heat, she responds by holding still.
- Upon determining that kicking the sheep in the side causes her to hold still, the ram mounts her.
Therefore, if there WERE a lesbian sheep, she would demonstrate her attraction to another sheep by holding still - which would be essentially indistinguishable from disintrest. This would make it VERY difficult to determine whether lesbian sheep actually exist.
So a young lady who was thoroughly fed up with the women's studies department put her tongue firmly in cheek, wrote this up, and submitted it.
Of course the department didn't recognize they were being put on and made quite a big thing about this brilliant paper by their new star student. B-)
What I did mean is that something is going to happen to those users to cut their usage down, and I did not mean to specify or imply exactly "what" at all.
;-) )
But I do guarentee they won't like it and many of them will bitch. There's no way to make them happy, so that's a bit of a lost cause. (You weren't necessarily claiming otherwise but it's worth pointing out
Check. B-)
Point I'm making, though, is that the appropriate response by the ISPs is just to arrange that heavy usage results in an "internet brownout" that is evenly distributed (and then look into adding capacity where it's needed and perhaps redistributing the feeds to the areas containing "power users", rather than just trying to dump the people who are actually using what they thought they rented.
The telephone companies have EXACTLY this issue with flat-rate service. Do you see THEM trying to dump the "power phoners" who stay online all day?
Not on your life!
Instead they add more capacity as needed to provide the service, and adjust the pricing of ALL flat-rate users as necessary (which it generally isn't.)
Same for long-distance carriers - and even cellphone providers (who add more cells when things get congested - or at least who USED to do so. B-b )
The problem is cable ISPs, who have a limited amount of bandwidth before they have to run more fiber and install more fiber-to-RF bridges, to more finely divide the neighborhood "internet cells" when they actually get some usage. The execs in some of these companies apparently underestimated the demand for the service they (over)sold, and are now in a crunch where they don't want to pay for the necessary upgrades to keep providing it as more customers buy in and/or find things to do with the bandwidth.
It may suck if you're one of the 50 or 100 people, but if you look at it abstractly, there's nothing else [than kicking out a few high-bandwidth users] an ISP can possibl[y] do.
That is absolutely not true.
They can configure their equipment so that, during usage peaks, the heavy user's connection is throttled down to a "fair share" of the currnet bandwidth usage.
(Note that I'm talking about an instintaneous throttling, not a daemon that reconfigures his modem on an hourly basis.)
If the uplink can handle, say, 45 mbps and 45 users are all transferring flat-out, he should get 1 mbps throughput - as should the other 44.
And it is the ISP's job - not the customer's - to configure their equipment so that this happens - and beat on their vendor (or find another) if the equipment can't do it.