The incident in question involved a classified military satellite, and because of the classified nature, exact figures are extremely hard to pin down. The "Several billion dollar" figure came from one of TWO immediate family members of mine that were working on the project. It could be wrong, it could be right.
A few classified satellite have been lost in the past few years. The most expensive one exploded on Aug 12 1998. Its cost is publicly known, and less than 1 billion dollars. The figure your friends told you was wrong.
In the end, the proposal of having TWO launch craft (one for people, one for payload) will not only increase launch costs by at least a factor of two (probably more)
We already have more than two launch craft, and they've already reduced costs by more than a factor of two. (The savings to launch a satellite by Titan instead of shuttle easily exceed 280%)
Another launch system I wish would be considered is the rail gun.
The railgun is a good idea, but it could only be used for some kinds of payloads. Specifically, you can't launch humans from a railgun!
The rail could be at most 6-7 km long, and of course propulsion stops once the vehicle is off the rail. So all the acceleration needed to reach orbit must happen in those 6 km. The existing shuttle keeps its rockets firing for more than 40 km of travel. Reaching the same speed with less than 1/7th the time to do it means that instead of an uncomfortable 3gs, the passengers would experience a lethal acceleration greater than 20 times the earth's gravity.
That problem was even worse in Jules Verne's proposed Columbiad launcher design, which had less than 200 meters to do the acceleration.
PS. A vehicle which combined railgun and rocket propulsion would be a little better, but still dangerous to the astronauts.
the *payload* that it had been commissioned to launch was worth several *billion* dollars
You'll have to get some "recall" ability if you want anyone to believe you. A payload worth more than $4,000,000,000? The most expensive payload I've ever heard of was the HST, and it cost less than 1 billion.
(It came to 1.5 billion if you include all the efford spent designing the payload- but that money wouldn't have to be respent to build another satellite after a failure)
I can find examples of launch failures that cost nearly 1 billion when counting the rocket, but nothing that's multi-billion for just the payload.
PS. According to a broad survey of American English speakers, the word "several" means a number between 5 and 8.
What I don't understand is that people that can't afford decent legal representation still commit these crimes. I guess that people that don't think about the consequences of their actions don't deserve better.
You just said it yourself: if they're rich and can afford a lawyer, the RIAA won't sue them. Therefore the actions have no consequence.
The fact that they commit copyright infringement shows that music-sharing isn't just about avoiding payment. They can afford the songs, so there must be other motivations. This weakens' the RIAA's argument that P2P is about theft, and suggest's its done for other reasons, like convenience.
(Which is easier? Click your mouse 4 times on Kazaa and have the song instantly playable forever, or click 9 times on Amazon to locate & purchase it, wait 4 days for arrival, load&rip CD, type in title/musician data...)
1. The quality of a 128k MP3 is more than enough for most people. If FM radio or casette tapes are acceptable for listeners, why would MP3 bother them?
2. Most people don't want full albums. Too many albums have 2 good songs and 9 junk. People want the one song that's getting heavy airplay, and that's enough.
I guess the compression wouldn't be anywhere near as good as MP3, though.
It would be more than 10 times worse. MP3 of a whole album is 50-100 meg. ISO is 650 meg.
Downloader's are not the issue here, it's the act of distributing the protected works that's the issue.
If you participate in breaking a law, you may be punished. The downloaders ALSO violated copyright. The act of "distribution" took 2 parties to complete- both the sender and recipient are liable.
The reason that the RIAA will mainly target "distributors" is they're likely to have many more counts of infringement against them. They're also more likely to have knowingly infringed, and will tend to be more sophisticated and less sympathetic characters on a whole.
Is Star Trek no longer sci-fi because, in one episode, the Voyager crew had to brave a "demon planet" in order to collect precious deuterium
I don't care what gets called "sci-fi". "Sci-fi" is commonly used by video-store owners to mean "featuring impossible robots, rayguns, or spaceships". Star Trek fits that perfectly. If you like that definition, The Matrix fits it too.
However, Star Trek is not "science fiction" in that it is not about science. Books like Childhood's End, Robots of Dawn, From the Earth to the Moon, and The Diamond Age are about science. There's quite a bit of bad/nonsensical science in them too- but science is the subject-matter. (Not the only subject, if the book wants to be popular)
On rare occasions, Star Trek will use science as the topic of an individual episode. That's an anomaly, and doesn't change the overall categorization of the series as "fantasy (space-adventure)".
I'm parsing "science fiction" as "fiction about science". It could also be read as "the science is fictional", a description that applies to LOTR, Harry Potter, and anything with dragons or wizards.
If you interpret Cowboy Bebop as sci-fi, you must place Trigun in the same category. Both include FTL travel and gunpowder weaponry, as well as immortal humanoids from alternate dimensions. (In fact, Cowboy Bebop is more like a fantasy in that it includes magicians)
Any japanese care to comment?
I'm not japanese, but I've read their TV schedules. The majority of anime is NOT scifi. Nor is it fantasy, in the Tolkineque sense. The majority of anime is Pokemonish fantasy or something even less coherent (along the lines of Carebears/Smurfs/ScoobyDoo). In another reply, an AC gives a list of recent anime- but those are only the titles of interest to Americans, and thus they're heavily skewed towards scifi/fantasy. The shows he listed probably amount to just 5% of what's on TV each week.
The bulk of manga, on the other hand, is either childish fantasy (corresponding to TV anime) or real-world stories of romance, adventure, and athletics (for the more adult reader)
The science in the Matrix is, well, not there. From 'humans combined with a form of fusion' to people who should by all means be horribly atrophied running around and learning kung fu, it's just not a believable work of science.
It will take the final movie to tell if The Matrix has a reasonable Science-Fiction basis or not. So far there has been nothing firm to rule that out.
The only blatantly wrong part would be 'humans as batteries'. Fortunately we've seen nothing in the films to suggest this is the case- only a single monologue by Morpheous, who is admittedly an unrealistic dreamer.
Hopefully, the climax of the 3rd film will reveal a Rod Sterling twist: Humanity lives inside the Matrix voluntarily, because it's more pleasant than the real world. The robots are carrying out explicitly programmed instructions to maintain a believable VR world.
(That would plug the biggest plot hole- there are others, of course, which the filmmakers could address but probably won't. But we can hold out a sliver of hope that the "battery" thing will be thrown out)
Except that when you talk about science fiction, anything is possible.
When you talk about science fiction, there should be some scientific principles in it. Science doesn't mean high-technology- it means applying the scientific princples: logical thought, experimental verification of hypothesis, and independently reproducible results. That's the definition of "science fiction" used by writers like Clarke and Asimov, and by those elitists who say "SF" instead of "sci-fi".
The best sci-fi writers are those that do not use technology to solve the crises in their stories -- see Asimov for some good examples. We do not need any more of "let's just up this engine to warp speed"
Those non-Asimovian writers you allude to are arguably working not in "science" fiction at all, but in fantasy. High-tech fantasy doesn't mean "science fiction", even if that's the labelling some bookstores use.
By "warp engine" you allude directly to Star Trek. As someone who mispells "grok" mentioned in another post, "fantasy" works seem to focus on characters and their emotional struggle, rather than details of the mechanism. Star Trek falls solidly into that camp- the repairing of engines or construction of a deflector-dish hack are essentially just ways for an heroic character to transform his effort&drive into effective results.
A good rule of thumb to help classify works into fantasy or SF is to look for irreproducible results. If a madman can make a star-destroying bomb in one episode, can friendly and hostile governments learn to reproduce that weapon within a few years? Not in Star Trek! A principle of science is that experimental results can be reproduced and verified.
In SF, if a new weapon gizmo is invented, the implications of the power should ripple around the world. In fantasy (or Star Trek / Star Wars), the devastating power was just the manifestation of one villian's evil spirit, and it dissolves and is forgotten upon his defeat.
give us a non-alarmist story once in a while.
That's an inherent problem with writing popular fiction. A story has to be alarmist to be interesting. If you paint a rosy future, then where's the conflict? Where's the threat that makes us fear for the protagonist's safety? Why does the reader care at all?
If a book is going to pull in sales, it needs "Good Vs Evil"- so some of the technology always has to be portrayed evilly. And since evil is usually mysterious, whatever is new and unknown will gravitate towards negative uses.
Consider a graph over time of the maximum distance between any living human being and the point on the earth's surface nearest to him.
The line is mostly flat until 1900, when increasing balloon aviation and the Wright Flyer make areonautics a viable career path. From there, the graph zooms upward until peaking at the Apollo moon landing. From there it descends and levels off at the intermediate orbital-habitation of cosmonauts.
A human's perception of technological possibility is based on his own experience of progress. The amazingly fast 60-year race from Kitty Hawk to Luna was the time of greatest apparent progress this planet has ever known. For people who remembered that time, their natural inclination would be to predict that technological advancement (especially as relating to space travel) will continue to proceed at the rate to which they were accustomed.
"In 1930 we could barely fly to Europe, but just 30 years later and we're on the moon. Therefore 1990 will bring us to Mars, 2020 will explore Jupiter, and in 2050 the Stars&Stripes will be planted on Alpha Centauri!"
Naturally, as the decades passed and no serious effort was made to exceed (or even maintain) the spaceflight levels of the 1960s, it became harder for the common imagination to accept Buck Rodgers-style spacetravel as occuring in the forseeable future.
I say that the common SF interpretation of the future is an extrapolation of a time-lasped view of the curve of apparent technological progress. Stories written while the curve was on an upswing predicted glorious adventure at distant stars. Once the curve flattened and began to sink, we switched to a smaller quantity of inwardly-focused, pessimistic cyberpunk. (This latter being neither popular nor prolific enough to make up a major genre like "Space Opera" had)
The reasoning is that "pulp" paper was so much less expensive than other print media. The decision to use pulp for a book was an admission that the work was of low overall quality- not sufficiently valuable to merit decent materials.
That's what many (most?) big ISPs would have you believe. Actually they don't want the Internet to be used for Web only, they also accept POP3, SMTP, and some form of IM.
The critical limitation ISPs like to make is that the "Internet Access" they provide is client-only. You can't serve web-pages, only read them. For a typical writeup, look at the Comcast Terms of Service:
Prohibited uses include (xiv) run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers.
Note that technically, that clause doesn't even allow you to send an email to an outsider (that would be running a program to provide him content, after all!)
In my opinion, anyone selling a service named "High-speed Internet Access" and then placing such restrictions on it is engaged in false advertising. The term "Internet Access" has a well-defined technical meaning: that the provider will make an effort to deliver packets (on any valid port number)
Back to the topic of the article: It would be bad if ISPs continue to block "dangerous" ports by default. They could offer an inexpensive "software firewall" service to their customers, "we'll protect your PC so you don't have to (as much)", but that should be optional.
Anyone who can get a copy of your thumbprint can impersonate you at your bank
Implied in that example was that the teller would inspect the customer's hands before he grabs the scanner. Carrying a wax cast would fall under "obviously hinky".
Re:Biometrics are hated by real security geeks.
on
Users feel Password Rage
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Biometrics are essentially useless for over-the-net identity verification because you have no way of knowing whether the equipment on the other end has been tampered with.
That's why biometrics should only be used in an environment with physical security of the client-side hardware (airports, factories, etc. And maybe even ATMs).
However, another critical failure of biometric IDs is that they are yet another form of "security through obscurity". With a good security system, you could recover from a total theft of the password file as soon as all users select new keys.
Biometrics makes changing your password impossible- once compromised, it's compromised FOREVER. (Painful & dangerous surgical intervention aside). If your network relies on iris-scanning for authentication, what do you do if 2-3 users have their opthalmolgist's records stolen? (Replace the whole thing with a fingerprint scanning system, which will be almost secure until an employee dines in a public restaurant)
This is especially important because users don't just stay at one job forever. They move around over the course of a career, often working for competitors in the same industry. With a sense of healthy paranoia, one should assume that all prior employers of a potential recruit will have her biometric descriptions still buffered in THEIR OWN security files.
Sure, there will probably be a law forcing biometric identifiers to be purged once the user ends affiliation with your group, but a diligent security designer shouldn't rely on everyone else deleting those files with no trace.
I don't think you're correct in that assertion. I think that air superiority at the time was measured either in terms of payload ("dropping bombs"), or maneuverability ("dog-fighting"). Also, you
And I think you don't understand air-air combat. Speed kills. A supersonic bomber makes dogfights irrelevant, because it can fly past any interceptor. Range kills. A faster plane can go further, and the DoD was fresh with the memory of the painful amphibious invasions of WWII that would've been simplified if the territory had been inside easy aircraft range. Any deployment of higher speed planes would become an immediate strategic advantage in whatever proxy-war was going on at the time- and the US & UK governments knew full well that the Cold War was developing. (It was published in newspapers since at least Mar 1946, a year before supersonic flight was unveiled)
Well, if we can settle on Mars, there's a pretty obvious practical
Building an orbital-space station or doing any kind of space-shuttle based experiment does not contribute to settling on Mars. Settling in Atlantis or Antarctica would contribute to a Martian colony, and have other economic benefits as well. We're not doing that, though, because it's impossible with modern technology. We could fund more basic research to advance technology, if we stopped pretending that putting humans in earth-orbit helped science.
Well, we've already been to Mars...
Humans have been to Mars?? I've got to pay more attention to the headlines!
How could Portugal have measured the potential benefits to the world of Columbus's voyage?
They believed there would be a major, short-term economic gain. They were wrong, and in fact the Columbus expedition wound up harming their nation in relationship to its competitor states.
Your perception ability is limited. Everything belongs to a tree.
Your perception ability is limited if you think everything belongs to ONE TREE.
And it is easy to countersay your comment, since a tree can exist into another tree. Multiple trees can exist into other trees.
If you think that, it explains why you are so wrong. From a strict Computer Science standpoint, the very definition of "tree" means that they cannot "exist into other trees".
Actually, speed of count is in no way related to country size, because you should really be counting on a distributed local level and counting in parallel.
Properly implemented electronic voting could accelerate counting not just in total hours, but also in man-hours (independent of parrellelization).
Since today the US is evidently unwilling to spend the money to count (or recount) a national election correctly, reducing the total cost might improve accuracy. (Or at least take away a rhetorical lever from the Gore-heads)
A different kind of benefit for electronic voting is that it would be a step along the way towards elminating the electoral college- a system of indirection that was originally meant to make a national-scale election managable, but which today only serves to give the votes of individual citizens unequal weights.
There are other forms of voting like "instant runoff" which are mathematically better than electoral college or simple plurality, but they'd be more difficult to implement without a computer doing the counting.
Develop is the key word. Out of the $1.5 billion total, building the thing was < $100 million, after the detailed planning was complete. Launching it cost > $400 million, just like any other shuttle trip. If the mission had failed, rebuilding the satellite would be only a small part of the cost.
(If we didn't have shuttles, a launch would be $100 mill)
The Hubble was similarly expensive to build- in fact it's harder to recreate than the Chandra- but even it's cost is insignificant next to the $2 billion shuttle that hauls it around.
Written? Or "ghostwritten"? I wonder how big of a "contribution" his part was. I suspect he's a wordsmith who can spell the computer-terms properly, and helps engineers format their thoughts into 15 orderly chapters.
Slashdot Mirror
The incident in question involved a classified military satellite, and because of the classified nature, exact figures are extremely hard to pin down. The "Several billion dollar" figure came from one of TWO immediate family members of mine that were working on the project. It could be wrong, it could be right.
A few classified satellite have been lost in the past few years. The most expensive one exploded on Aug 12 1998. Its cost is publicly known, and less than 1 billion dollars. The figure your friends told you was wrong.
In the end, the proposal of having TWO launch craft (one for people, one for payload) will not only increase launch costs by at least a factor of two (probably more)
We already have more than two launch craft, and they've already reduced costs by more than a factor of two. (The savings to launch a satellite by Titan instead of shuttle easily exceed 280%)
Another launch system I wish would be considered is the rail gun.
The railgun is a good idea, but it could only be used for some kinds of payloads. Specifically, you can't launch humans from a railgun!
The rail could be at most 6-7 km long, and of course propulsion stops once the vehicle is off the rail. So all the acceleration needed to reach orbit must happen in those 6 km. The existing shuttle keeps its rockets firing for more than 40 km of travel. Reaching the same speed with less than 1/7th the time to do it means that instead of an uncomfortable 3gs, the passengers would experience a lethal acceleration greater than 20 times the earth's gravity.
That problem was even worse in Jules Verne's proposed Columbiad launcher design, which had less than 200 meters to do the acceleration.
PS. A vehicle which combined railgun and rocket propulsion would be a little better, but still dangerous to the astronauts.
the *payload* that it had been commissioned to launch was worth several *billion* dollars
You'll have to get some "recall" ability if you want anyone to believe you. A payload worth more than $4,000,000,000? The most expensive payload I've ever heard of was the HST, and it cost less than 1 billion.
(It came to 1.5 billion if you include all the efford spent designing the payload- but that money wouldn't have to be respent to build another satellite after a failure)
I can find examples of launch failures that cost nearly 1 billion when counting the rocket, but nothing that's multi-billion for just the payload.
PS. According to a broad survey of American English speakers, the word "several" means a number between 5 and 8.
What I don't understand is that people that can't afford decent legal representation still commit these crimes. I guess that people that don't think about the consequences of their actions don't deserve better.
You just said it yourself: if they're rich and can afford a lawyer, the RIAA won't sue them. Therefore the actions have no consequence.
The fact that they commit copyright infringement shows that music-sharing isn't just about avoiding payment. They can afford the songs, so there must be other motivations. This weakens' the RIAA's argument that P2P is about theft, and suggest's its done for other reasons, like convenience.
(Which is easier? Click your mouse 4 times on Kazaa and have the song instantly playable forever, or click 9 times on Amazon to locate & purchase it, wait 4 days for arrival, load&rip CD, type in title/musician data...)
1. The quality of a 128k MP3 is more than enough for most people. If FM radio or casette tapes are acceptable for listeners, why would MP3 bother them?
2. Most people don't want full albums. Too many albums have 2 good songs and 9 junk. People want the one song that's getting heavy airplay, and that's enough.
I guess the compression wouldn't be anywhere near as good as MP3, though.
It would be more than 10 times worse. MP3 of a whole album is 50-100 meg. ISO is 650 meg.
Downloader's are not the issue here, it's the act of distributing the protected works that's the issue.
If you participate in breaking a law, you may be punished. The downloaders ALSO violated copyright. The act of "distribution" took 2 parties to complete- both the sender and recipient are liable.
The reason that the RIAA will mainly target "distributors" is they're likely to have many more counts of infringement against them. They're also more likely to have knowingly infringed, and will tend to be more sophisticated and less sympathetic characters on a whole.
Is Star Trek no longer sci-fi because, in one episode, the Voyager crew had to brave a "demon planet" in order to collect precious deuterium
I don't care what gets called "sci-fi". "Sci-fi" is commonly used by video-store owners to mean "featuring impossible robots, rayguns, or spaceships". Star Trek fits that perfectly. If you like that definition, The Matrix fits it too.
However, Star Trek is not "science fiction" in that it is not about science. Books like Childhood's End, Robots of Dawn, From the Earth to the Moon, and The Diamond Age are about science. There's quite a bit of bad/nonsensical science in them too- but science is the subject-matter. (Not the only subject, if the book wants to be popular)
On rare occasions, Star Trek will use science as the topic of an individual episode. That's an anomaly, and doesn't change the overall categorization of the series as "fantasy (space-adventure)".
I'm parsing "science fiction" as "fiction about science". It could also be read as "the science is fictional", a description that applies to LOTR, Harry Potter, and anything with dragons or wizards.
As for me, I'll continue to dream and try to push the envelope.
What have you done to disprove Einstein today?
If you interpret Cowboy Bebop as sci-fi, you must place Trigun in the same category. Both include FTL travel and gunpowder weaponry, as well as immortal humanoids from alternate dimensions. (In fact, Cowboy Bebop is more like a fantasy in that it includes magicians)
Any japanese care to comment?
I'm not japanese, but I've read their TV schedules. The majority of anime is NOT scifi. Nor is it fantasy, in the Tolkineque sense. The majority of anime is Pokemonish fantasy or something even less coherent (along the lines of Carebears/Smurfs/ScoobyDoo). In another reply, an AC gives a list of recent anime- but those are only the titles of interest to Americans, and thus they're heavily skewed towards scifi/fantasy. The shows he listed probably amount to just 5% of what's on TV each week.
The bulk of manga, on the other hand, is either childish fantasy (corresponding to TV anime) or real-world stories of romance, adventure, and athletics (for the more adult reader)
The science in the Matrix is, well, not there. From 'humans combined with a form of fusion' to people who should by all means be horribly atrophied running around and learning kung fu, it's just not a believable work of science.
It will take the final movie to tell if The Matrix has a reasonable Science-Fiction basis or not. So far there has been nothing firm to rule that out.
The only blatantly wrong part would be 'humans as batteries'. Fortunately we've seen nothing in the films to suggest this is the case- only a single monologue by Morpheous, who is admittedly an unrealistic dreamer.
Hopefully, the climax of the 3rd film will reveal a Rod Sterling twist: Humanity lives inside the Matrix voluntarily, because it's more pleasant than the real world. The robots are carrying out explicitly programmed instructions to maintain a believable VR world.
(That would plug the biggest plot hole- there are others, of course, which the filmmakers could address but probably won't. But we can hold out a sliver of hope that the "battery" thing will be thrown out)
Except that when you talk about science fiction, anything is possible.
When you talk about science fiction, there should be some scientific principles in it. Science doesn't mean high-technology- it means applying the scientific princples: logical thought, experimental verification of hypothesis, and independently reproducible results. That's the definition of "science fiction" used by writers like Clarke and Asimov, and by those elitists who say "SF" instead of "sci-fi".
The best sci-fi writers are those that do not use technology to solve the crises in their stories -- see Asimov for some good examples. We do not need any more of "let's just up this engine to warp speed"
Those non-Asimovian writers you allude to are arguably working not in "science" fiction at all, but in fantasy. High-tech fantasy doesn't mean "science fiction", even if that's the labelling some bookstores use.
By "warp engine" you allude directly to Star Trek. As someone who mispells "grok" mentioned in another post, "fantasy" works seem to focus on characters and their emotional struggle, rather than details of the mechanism. Star Trek falls solidly into that camp- the repairing of engines or construction of a deflector-dish hack are essentially just ways for an heroic character to transform his effort&drive into effective results.
A good rule of thumb to help classify works into fantasy or SF is to look for irreproducible results. If a madman can make a star-destroying bomb in one episode, can friendly and hostile governments learn to reproduce that weapon within a few years? Not in Star Trek! A principle of science is that experimental results can be reproduced and verified.
In SF, if a new weapon gizmo is invented, the implications of the power should ripple around the world. In fantasy (or Star Trek / Star Wars), the devastating power was just the manifestation of one villian's evil spirit, and it dissolves and is forgotten upon his defeat.
give us a non-alarmist story once in a while.
That's an inherent problem with writing popular fiction. A story has to be alarmist to be interesting. If you paint a rosy future, then where's the conflict? Where's the threat that makes us fear for the protagonist's safety? Why does the reader care at all?
If a book is going to pull in sales, it needs "Good Vs Evil"- so some of the technology always has to be portrayed evilly. And since evil is usually mysterious, whatever is new and unknown will gravitate towards negative uses.
The line is mostly flat until 1900, when increasing balloon aviation and the Wright Flyer make areonautics a viable career path. From there, the graph zooms upward until peaking at the Apollo moon landing. From there it descends and levels off at the intermediate orbital-habitation of cosmonauts.
A human's perception of technological possibility is based on his own experience of progress. The amazingly fast 60-year race from Kitty Hawk to Luna was the time of greatest apparent progress this planet has ever known. For people who remembered that time, their natural inclination would be to predict that technological advancement (especially as relating to space travel) will continue to proceed at the rate to which they were accustomed.
Naturally, as the decades passed and no serious effort was made to exceed (or even maintain) the spaceflight levels of the 1960s, it became harder for the common imagination to accept Buck Rodgers-style spacetravel as occuring in the forseeable future.
I say that the common SF interpretation of the future is an extrapolation of a time-lasped view of the curve of apparent technological progress. Stories written while the curve was on an upswing predicted glorious adventure at distant stars. Once the curve flattened and began to sink, we switched to a smaller quantity of inwardly-focused, pessimistic cyberpunk. (This latter being neither popular nor prolific enough to make up a major genre like "Space Opera" had)
How you equate pulp to crap is beyond me
The reasoning is that "pulp" paper was so much less expensive than other print media. The decision to use pulp for a book was an admission that the work was of low overall quality- not sufficiently valuable to merit decent materials.
only MS networking ports all of which should not be open across the Internet.
Microsoft should not be allowed to dictate what ports the rest of us can use.
If they want to designed amateurishly insecure OS services, that's their perogative. But don't expect the internet to change to fix their mistakes.
That's what many (most?) big ISPs would have you believe. Actually they don't want the Internet to be used for Web only, they also accept POP3, SMTP, and some form of IM.
The critical limitation ISPs like to make is that the "Internet Access" they provide is client-only. You can't serve web-pages, only read them. For a typical writeup, look at the Comcast Terms of Service:
(xiv) run programs, equipment, or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN (Local Area Network), also commonly referred to as public services or servers.
Note that technically, that clause doesn't even allow you to send an email to an outsider (that would be running a program to provide him content, after all!)
In my opinion, anyone selling a service named "High-speed Internet Access" and then placing such restrictions on it is engaged in false advertising. The term "Internet Access" has a well-defined technical meaning: that the provider will make an effort to deliver packets (on any valid port number)
Back to the topic of the article:
It would be bad if ISPs continue to block "dangerous" ports by default. They could offer an inexpensive "software firewall" service to their customers, "we'll protect your PC so you don't have to (as much)", but that should be optional.
Anyone who can get a copy of your thumbprint can impersonate you at your bank
Implied in that example was that the teller would inspect the customer's hands before he grabs the scanner. Carrying a wax cast would fall under "obviously hinky".
Biometrics are essentially useless for over-the-net identity verification because you have no way of knowing whether the equipment on the other end has been tampered with.
That's why biometrics should only be used in an environment with physical security of the client-side hardware (airports, factories, etc. And maybe even ATMs).
However, another critical failure of biometric IDs is that they are yet another form of "security through obscurity". With a good security system, you could recover from a total theft of the password file as soon as all users select new keys.
Biometrics makes changing your password impossible- once compromised, it's compromised FOREVER. (Painful & dangerous surgical intervention aside). If your network relies on iris-scanning for authentication, what do you do if 2-3 users have their opthalmolgist's records stolen? (Replace the whole thing with a fingerprint scanning system, which will be almost secure until an employee dines in a public restaurant)
This is especially important because users don't just stay at one job forever. They move around over the course of a career, often working for competitors in the same industry. With a sense of healthy paranoia, one should assume that all prior employers of a potential recruit will have her biometric descriptions still buffered in THEIR OWN security files.
Sure, there will probably be a law forcing biometric identifiers to be purged once the user ends affiliation with your group, but a diligent security designer shouldn't rely on everyone else deleting those files with no trace.
I find the best way to get rid of data on CD-R's isn't to erase it
Good, because a CD-R cannot be erased.
Maybe you're thinking of the more advanced CD-RW media.
I don't think you're correct in that assertion. I think that air superiority at the time was measured either in terms of payload ("dropping bombs"), or maneuverability ("dog-fighting"). Also, you
And I think you don't understand air-air combat. Speed kills. A supersonic bomber makes dogfights irrelevant, because it can fly past any interceptor. Range kills. A faster plane can go further, and the DoD was fresh with the memory of the painful amphibious invasions of WWII that would've been simplified if the territory had been inside easy aircraft range. Any deployment of higher speed planes would become an immediate strategic advantage in whatever proxy-war was going on at the time- and the US & UK governments knew full well that the Cold War was developing. (It was published in newspapers since at least Mar 1946, a year before supersonic flight was unveiled)
Well, if we can settle on Mars, there's a pretty obvious practical
Building an orbital-space station or doing any kind of space-shuttle based experiment does not contribute to settling on Mars. Settling in Atlantis or Antarctica would contribute to a Martian colony, and have other economic benefits as well. We're not doing that, though, because it's impossible with modern technology. We could fund more basic research to advance technology, if we stopped pretending that putting humans in earth-orbit helped science.
Well, we've already been to Mars...
Humans have been to Mars?? I've got to pay more attention to the headlines!
How could Portugal have measured the potential benefits to the world of Columbus's voyage?
They believed there would be a major, short-term economic gain. They were wrong, and in fact the Columbus expedition wound up harming their nation in relationship to its competitor states.
Your perception ability is limited. Everything belongs to a tree.
Your perception ability is limited if you think everything belongs to ONE TREE.
And it is easy to countersay your comment, since a tree can exist into
another tree. Multiple trees can exist into other trees.
If you think that, it explains why you are so wrong. From a strict Computer Science standpoint, the very definition of "tree" means that they cannot "exist into other trees".
Actually, speed of count is in no way related to country size, because you should really be counting on a distributed local level and counting in parallel.
Properly implemented electronic voting could accelerate counting not just in total hours, but also in man-hours (independent of parrellelization).
Since today the US is evidently unwilling to spend the money to count (or recount) a national election correctly, reducing the total cost might improve accuracy. (Or at least take away a rhetorical lever from the Gore-heads)
A different kind of benefit for electronic voting is that it would be a step along the way towards elminating the electoral college- a system of indirection that was originally meant to make a national-scale election managable, but which today only serves to give the votes of individual citizens unequal weights.
There are other forms of voting like "instant runoff" which are mathematically better than electoral college or simple plurality, but they'd be more difficult to implement without a computer doing the counting.
Separate cargo and crew are exactly what we need for space missions in the next few decades.
The cargo can fly on a Delta-2 rocket. The crew can take a Ford Expedition from Cape Canaveral to the NASA pavillion at Walt Disney World.
There, they can conduct all their orbital duties in complete safety, while being more accessible to the admiring public than ever before!
(Oops, maybe Disney isn't that safe after all...)
The cost to develop and launch
Develop is the key word. Out of the $1.5 billion total, building the thing was < $100 million, after the detailed planning was complete. Launching it cost > $400 million, just like any other shuttle trip. If the mission had failed, rebuilding the satellite would be only a small part of the cost.
(If we didn't have shuttles, a launch would be $100 mill)
The Hubble was similarly expensive to build- in fact it's harder to recreate than the Chandra- but even it's cost is insignificant next to the $2 billion shuttle that hauls it around.
Good stuff!
Written? Or "ghostwritten"? I wonder how big of a "contribution" his part was. I suspect he's a wordsmith who can spell the computer-terms properly, and helps engineers format their thoughts into 15 orderly chapters.