I'd love to see one of these depolymerization plants on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Currently, the chicken farmers dump so much waste into the ecosytem that it's beyond saturation. Fertilizer for plants further exacerbates the problem. All of it washes into the Chesapeake Bay. A TD plant installed by the gub'ment, along with some "no dumping chicken guts/crap on the ground" rules, would go a long way toward controlling pollution. The fact that the system produces a usable product is just sauce for the... um... chicken. I'd much rather see pollution control programs that stand a chance of being self sustaining - as opposed to the current crop of "find somewhere else to bury it" methods.
You're talking about the Stots TemplateMaster. The license is even worse than you indicate - the license attempts to restrict resale of the physical object.
I've got serious objections to folks who try to "license" me physical objects. If I purchase it through retail channels, it's a "sale." I have certain ownership rights at that point. If I choose to give the object to my slacker brother-in-law, the manufacturer is SOL to do anything about the transfer. If you have a patent on the object, you have legal recourse to pursue me if I make a duplicate item. However, you still can't prevent me from giving the original to someone else.
Even the First Sale Doctrine in copyright law doesn't apply here. Assuming that you could actually copyright a physical object (i.e. a dovetailing jig,) I've still got the right to transfer ownership under the First Sale Doctrine. You can't take that away from me with some crummy EULA-esque piece of toilet paper jammed in the box.
The crossover of IP into meatspace is a bad thing. IP is not a physical object that I can bash into the curb if I want to. It deserves none of the ownership protections afforded to hardware. That includes patents. (Don't get me started on software patents being a horrible thing, or why I think IP *is* software...) Copyright is the place for non-tangible items... like software and IP. Unfortunately, the software industry seems to be purchasing politicians as fast as the entertainment industry is.
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
Yep, I hear it's much more clear in the original Klingon.
They want to manipulate people through fear instead of through rule of law. So it's a psychological campaign to get people to change their behavior. Sounds like PR to me. It's just not the typical corporate PR we're used to.
The 9/11 terrorists were aiming for the buildings - the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and one other significant "symbol" of America. The human casualties were collateral damage; sauce for the goose. If they wanted to maximize the human loss, they would have targeted a Sunday afternoon NFL football game where 80,000 folks would have been packed into a stadium. Dropping a 767's worth of Jet-A into that environment would have maximized the human loss, but probably would have had less lasting effect overall. Attacking specific individuals is limited. Attacking the symbols of a country affects *everyone*. The terrorist folks aren't stupid. They understand how powerful good PR can be.
It would be terribly difficult for the bad guys to sneak a nuke into DC and detonate it. However, setting off a nuke at the Mall of America at 3am is probably more effective in terms of crippling the economy and causing widespread fear. Few people travel to DC. Everybody goes to the mall.
It's much harder to smuggle a dispersal-type "dirty" bomb into another country (and have it be effective) than to detonate a 10-kiloton-class nuke on a ship in international waters. While the dirty bomb will cause suffering, it also has the potential to galvanize the victims against you. A nuke out in the middle of the ocean would get everyone's attention, without all the collateral damage. It's hard for a government to label you as "monsters" if all you did was evaporate some water and a few fish. Just one reason...
The state has never been obligated to provide protection. They are obligated to enforce the law. If they had to provide protection for individuals, they'd need to assign you a 24/7 bodyguard. Oh, and since the bodyguard is a citizen, he'd need a bodyguard... ad infinitum.
A police force is a reactionary entity. After something bad happens, they show up to apply a corrective force. Sometimes that means confronting the bad guy. Sometimes that means just filling out the appropriate paperwork.
Understanding the value of your material goods is important. Compared to your life, the material stuff is insignificant. However, if someone breaks into my home and gets between me and my wife or kid, the police are going to need to ask the corpse what his intentions were.
There's a difference between a useful animation, like the red X lighting up to indicate activity, and the unnecessary cruft like animated icons. The former serves a purpose; the latter just serves to distract you.
I'd really love to have the "disable cruft" option at install time. I appreciate functional improvemnts. I subscribe to the form-fits-function mentality, and I strongly oppose increasing my effort without getting some benefit in return.
I'm appalled that folks generally just accept that they'll need to upgrade their computer just to handle the additional burden that an OS like WinXP imposes. I feel like we've stagnated in terms of progress in computing capability. The hardware gets better, but the OS "improvements" chew up the benefits before the applications get a shot.
Way back in 1987 or so, I got permission to purchase a Radio Shack R/C tank on the company dime. We needed to pull cables through an already overcrowded cable raceway, and there were severe access issues in certain areas. The R/C tank worked wonders, drawing a chase-tape through the confined spaces. We used the chase-tape to pull the bigger cable bundles through. We'd tried the tennis-ball-and-string trick earlier. I'll bet the ball it still dangling from the trusswork it got stuck on.
The fun part was getting reprimanded for misusing company funds. Some middle-manager reviewed my expense report, and gave me a stern lecture and a severe finger-waving. I told my supervisor, who promptly went upstairs and bitched him out. Apparently the entire 5th floor staff got an inadvertent earful. That was one of few jobs I've had where my boss actually gave a crap about the folks who reported to him.
If the crystal isn't being used to run the CPU, it's gotta be part of the carrier detection filter. Or maybe they just soldered-on a bunch of random components because the marketing dweeb said it needed to look more "high tech."
I did RTFA. Great, a future application may need a microprocessor. Why is one in there *now*? It's not like a software upgade will magically transform the diode dettector into a superheterodyne receiver.
If you're trying to cram functionality into a restricted space, like a ring, you don't go adding extra cruft willy-nilly. If they intend to get anywhere near to what the pretty concept drawings look like, they're going to need to shave a metric crapload of cruft off the existing design. And that's before they put a real receiver in it. The battery they have is large compared to the concept packaging. The crytal package (on the not-visible bottom of the board) is probably not available in a package conducive to ring-encapsulation. They've got some serious mechanical hurdles to deal with before they get *anywhere* near the pretty marketing-concept drawings.
No, the RF section of this device takes in RF energy and puts out DC. There's no information content in DC. Just an indication of the RF input level that's proportional to the DC level. Once the signal is converted to DC, there's no way to extract any information about the modulated data signal. The current design is a blinky-light, and is a completely wasteful use of a microprocessor.
Any future device that intends to interpret the information modulated onto the carrier will need a form of downconverter. I don't care what kind is implemented, but it's going to need to be a honest-to-ghod receiver. That's much more complicated than a simple peak detector. I'll be impressed when they put the receiver in there. Until then... meh.
I like the "fleet of Hubbles" idea. Many folks argue that designing a replacement will take 5-7 years... okay, how long will building an exact replica take? Oh, the establishment players don't really want to answer that one, do they? There's not enough R&D funding to justify it. I personally think they should build a second unit with the available spares and chuck it into orbit. Let Hubble I keep functioning as long as it can. Put a second resource up in a slightly different orbit. Do more science. Rinse, lather, repeat. Who says we're restricted to only one orbital telescope at a time?
Pardon me for pointing out that this is overly complicated. You've got a tuned-circuit detector looking for a particular frequency. That's rectified into a DC voltage. Why didn't they use an analog comparator chip to light the LED? You can't tell me that the A/D plus CPU-and-software is a simpler solution.
They mention a future revision doing interpretation of the open/closed/encrypted state of the WiFi node, but that's going to need a real front-end, not just a diode power detector. If they decoded the packets, I'd be impressed. So far, I'm not.
Y'all are making me feel old... Win 3.1 and all...
*My* high school had an HP 3000 server with dinosaur terminals for client accounts. In a situation that would never be tolerated today, that was the same computer system that the school administration used (grades, accounting, etc.) We even had a printer-console. Yep, no CRT, just 14" wide pin-fed fanfold paper.
Fake login scripts, background process monitors, and all manner of social engineering were employed to get those coveted superuser accounts. Once we had access, we laid down a dizzying array of backup plans to cover our tracks. I thought the most ingenious one was hiding superuser priveledge restoration scripts in the system backup cron job. (This was important, because account modifications printed a message on the system console printer in the school office. The system backup cron job ran on weekends, and generated a metric crapload of console prints. Nobody every bothered sifting through the paper logs because "it's supposed to do that.") They could eliminate our priveledges, but they always managed to get restored somehow. We always used fictitious accounts too. They probably would have suspended J.H. Christ if they could have found him... he's the one who bumped our account stats every Monday at lunchtime when the computer lab was open.
I'm running a fluid-dynamics simulation for a super-secret aircraft/submarine/time-machine. Can I guarantee the security environment for my processing? No? I guess I'll be building my own cluster, thankyouverymuch.
Agreed, and the process whereby you achieve that goal needs as much scrutiny as the goal itself. If you shackle the "permanent colony on the moon" goal to "achieved using existing infrastructure," you're doomed to failure.
If the gub'ment dictates that the Shuttle shall be involved, now all components must a) break down to fit in a Shuttle cargo bay; b) meet Shuttle safety requirements; c) visit LEO and possibly the ISS before moving onward. Yeah, it uses the existing infrastructure, but certainly isn't an optimal solution.
We need a heavy-lift infrastructure element that'll send big payloads to the moon. I would further propose that the heavy-lift launch vehicle be explicitly not-man-rated. Cargo payloads only. Robotic and tele-operated missions as terraforming operations are appropriate for the initial missions. Sending the people up should be one of the last things on the list. When they arrive, there should be cargo containers and shelters waiting for them.
Every time I see the government funding another Crew ($synonym-for-"move") Vehicle, it just makes me cringe. If you want to send a larger crew to the ISS, send another Soyuz. And for chrissakes, install the damned ECLSS Module so the station isn't dependent on the water truck making a delivery.
And it's more complicated than the explicitly-stated "oversimplified" description I made earlier. If you just shoot propellant out the spacecraft normal to the velocity vector, the spacecraft heading will change. The net effect is that you've vector-summed the original velocity plus the new input. The result is a new vector direction with a larger magnitude than the original. Congratulations, you just raised your altitude.
It's really tough to change your orbital plane. There's no ocean for your keel to react against. There's no road for your tires to push on. You only have the linear reaction of the thruster. It boils down to vector-sums of linear elements. Really.
If you intend to maintain your orbital altitude, you have to keep the magnitude of your velocity vectory the same. That implies that the steering forces will be constantly moving in a circular motion around the center of the spacecraft. The net effect will be that you cancel out the velocity vector in the "x" direction, and introduce a new one in the "y" direction.
There are plenty of references on the web. If you're willing to substantially alter your orbital parameters, plane changes thorugh a circular-elliptical-circular progression will only require about 1x delta-v expenditure. You make the plane alterations at apogee in the ellipitical phase, then re-circularize. If you intend to make the 90-degree turn while staying in the circular orbit, you're required to expend 2x your original velocity in terms of delta-v.
Yeah, I know the politicians have restricted the Shuttle missions to the ISS orbitlal plane. That's just a horrible restriction. It's the wrong plane for a payload that needs to go into GTO (or anywhere else useful.) Also, you've increased the risk to the ISS by bringing the Shuttle and it's payload into the same plane. If the payload malfunctions, you've got an awfully large piece of debris in the same plane as the ISS. Any debris left over from non-ISS-specific missions becomes and in-plane impact hazard. So yeah, that restriction sucks no matter how you look at it.
I didn't intend for my original post to be specific to the Shuttle. The solution would, in principle, work for just about any manned mission where a) you could get to the damages ship; and b) the daaged ship has an airlock/egress capability.
Too bad the Soyuz module only seats three. It's almost what you'd want. Of course, that's not a glamorous, high-tech, high-dollar, corporate-welfare program for the US space industry, so I don't expect to see it anytime soon. Another poster noted that the vehicle is worth more than the crew, and I think that's probably correct too (though you won't hear any politicians saying that.)
Have a look at the orbital mechanics - you can raise or lower your orbit by changing your speed a little. That's a mostly-scalar operation. You go up and down, but stay in the same orbital plane (please forgive the obvious simplification.) Now think of your orbital path in terms of the velocity vector. Rotating your orbital plane 90-degrees, for example, requires that you reduce your vector velocity in one axis to zero, while raising the vector velocity in the perpendicular axis to the original amount. So, how much energy did it take to get your original vector velocity? That's right, the whole launch amount. So to turn 90 degrees, you'll need two complete launches worth of fuel and expendibles. That's oversimplified too, because you need to haul that two-launches-worth of booster and fuel up with you in the initial launch. The Rocket Equaiton makes that scenario prohibitive.
Similarly, hauling the rescue capsule around on every frickin' launch has similar implications. It's tremendously wasteful to haul extra weight around "just in case."
I'd propose a "tow truck" kind of solution. To pose an analogy, how often do you use the spare tire in your car? Maybe never? (Automakers won't sell a spare-less car mostly due to negative market perception.) If you don't have a spare tire, what will you do? You'll get on the cell phone and call a tow truck. (I realize you can't just pull over to the curb in space, but bear with me.) The cell phone and tow truck represent elements of a repair (i.e. rescue) infrastructure we have in place. The better the infrastructure, the less you need to haul around the materials to be self-sufficient. I'd rather see a Delta 4 Heavy (or equivalent) equipped with a Crew Extraction Vehicle (CEV.) Yep, it's a capsule that fits a crew of N in horrible discomfort just long enough to return them to earth. I'm thinking extreme Spam-in-a-Can. They wedge inside however they must. There will be rudimentary water and food aboard - think a couple of bottles of Aquafina and some granola bars. They soil their undergarments, if necessary. A shower will be waiting for them when they return. Feces washes off.
The "infrastructure" part involves doing all the pre-flight coordination with the manned mission, and would require that the tow truck could be prepped and launched within 2 days or so of declaration of an emergency. Since it's on the ground, the CEV only has one orbital insertion to deal with. It'd need to mate up with the manned mission, but that's part of the infrastructure too.
Since the CEV is unmanned on launch, it can be configured to use solid boosters. That's going to mitigate liquid-fuel handling issues. It also mitigates flight profile problems - high G-loading tends to do bad things to ugly-bags-of-mostly-water. But the meatbags don't board the CEV until it's already on-orbit, so you only have the human-friendly (re)-entry profile to deal with, right?
The Crew Return Vehicle (not to be confuced with my CEV, above) is a boondoggle. Passengers are seated in relative comfort. They get all sorts of space to move around. The CRV even has wings and a pilot. And it's supposed to be reusable. What a bunch of crap. My CEV, on the other hand, is horribly cramped and has exactly one job to do - return the crew to earth safely. Once. Period.
In writing this, I'm thinking that "tow truck" is the wrong term. The CEV is more of a taxi. We abandon the original damaged spacecraft.
I've implemented the 128-bit AES algorithm in a PIC16F873. Here's the Microchip page with the app note and source code. The app note has performance metrics - 5273 cycles to encrypt; 6413 to decrypt (section 6, page 14.) My implementation, written from scratch, has comparable performance.
Since the PIC is a single-cycle execution unit, clocks correlate directly to real-time once you spec the operating frequency. At 40kHz clock (=10kHz instruction execution frequency) it'll take 527mS to encrypt one 128-bit block of data. Similarly, a 400kHz clock results in a 52.7mS block excrypt time. A maximum of 41-bytes of RAM are required for either encode/decode operations.
The claim that AES requires substantial hardware is bogus. AES is designed to be byte-processing friendly. It's much nicer than dealing with the bit-oriented DES and 3DES standards, especially in an 8-bit microcontroller environment.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. A company doesn't invent things, people do. Just as a company can't apply for a patent - patents are only issued to individuals. "Assignment" to a company is a completely different matter.
As written, "... by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" tends to indicate that the period of exclusivity ends with the author's death. I think that's a fair deal. At a minimum, I'd like the moving target crap to end. The Mouse has to fall into the public domain at some point...
I'll re-state what I've said before: extension of copyright periods, especially the retroactive ones, is a criminal act. The People have established a contract with the content creators -
1. offer: force-of-law in exchange for incentive toward creativity and acceptance of financial risk
2. acceptance: putting the (c) on your document
3. consideration: court-recognized limited monopoly
By extending the copyright period, Congress has effectively stolen works from the public. Many works should have reverted into the public trust by now. When the contract was established, the period of exclusivity was defined. "Extending" copyright shouldn't apply to works prior to the extension date. We, The People, have a contract.
If I have a contract with a plumber, and he decided to raise his rates, my original contract is still binding. He can charge more for new contracts, but he can't ammend my original contract by claiming a retroactive rate increase. That'd get laughed out of court.
I don't see how this can work, unless the only choice for a playback device is one with DRM. If a non-DRM playback solution exists, there's motivation to rip to a non-DRM format and share.
The only way I see that the DRM Cartel can eliminate the non-DRM elements is through force of law. Expect the Cartel to purchase legislation making it illegal to even think about a non-DRM'd device. They'll surround themselves with a defensive battery of copyrights and patents. Oh, and to dodge the anti-trust laws in the US, expect the DRM Cartel to license the DRM technology to anyone willing to pay the extortion fee and accept the draconian usage license. Just like the SD Card Association.
About a decade ago, we had a series of "incidents" with the EPO button in the software lab. Shortly after a serious lab upgrade (due to constantly blowing breakers,) someone decided to test the EPO switch (it was a bit of a novelty at the time.) *click* "Cool, it works. Hey, how do you reset this thing?" Turns out you needed to have a key to reset it. It took about 4 hours to find someone who had the key. That one got replaced with the Mark II resetable switch...
About a month later, one of the managers was giving a prospective new-hire a tour. He got to the software lab, and started blathering about "don't ever push the red switch" as he put his finger on the switch... *click*
So some einstein decided that the Big Red Switch was "dangerous" and put a plexi cover over it - the same kind that goes over the thermostat control, and the same kind that has a key lock. Yep, about six months later we had a gen-you-ine emergency. One of the HP 9000/300 monitors went crispy, and was snorting smoke and sparks. One of the software folks went to hit the Big Red Button, but was somewhat nonplussed to find a locking cover over it. She took the co-located fire bottle, sheared the cover off, pressed the button, then got to use said fire bottle on the monitor.
So the cover gets replaced again, though this time with a non-locking cover. At some point, the software server stack needed to be relocated into the corner with the Big Red Button. Another einstein discovered that it was inconvenient to slink behind the equipment rack - the cover kept bashing him in the neck or shoulder. So he removed it, thinking that accidental presses wouldn't happen because the button was obstructed by the server stack. (yep, inaccessible = useless.) Some time later, the equipment was being jockeyed for an upgrade, and one of the big SCSI cables snagged the Big Red Button and *click*...
All these shenanigans happened in the space of one year, and I got tired of the thrash. I measured the space between the back of the switch and the faceplate - just over 3/4 inch. I cut a horseshoe shape out of 3/4 plywood, and hung it on the switch shaft. In and emergency, it's really easy (and obvious) to remove it. Gravity keeps it there otherwise. No problems since...
Oh yes they did. The school board didn't just decide "hey, this book needs an 'evolution' warning sticker." 2000 irate bible-thumping parents incited a response (the incitement was the "flaming bag of dogshit.") The decision to put the sticker in the book just resulted in steaming poo on the shcool baord's collective foot.
Once the pro-religion folks opened the can of worms, a lawsuit was inevitable. The school board failed to realized that they couldn't avoid litigation, and took action that they hoped would quell the vocal parents. Classic myopia. The school board neglected to consider that their actions would cheese off an even bigger chunk of the population.
Yep, it was a real-life Kobiashi Maru kind of situation.
Seems that the "vocal special interest group" mentality was at work here. 2000 parents bitched that the book contained "evolution" and needed a warning label. The school district attempted to dodge what probably would have become a (cl)ass-action lawsuit. They seem to have made matters worse, garnering national attention.
They had a flaming bag of dogshit tossed on their doorstep, and they made a choice as to which foot to stomp with. If they'd decided to do nothing, they get sued. If they put the current sticker in, they get sued (albeit by a different group.) If they changed the wording to say something like "all religion is theory, as is evolution; decide for yourself" they'd get sued too. A better solution would have been to show the bitching parents the door, and remind them that they can always home-school the little hellions if the parents don't like the public school curriculum. At least then the school district could have stood up in the courtroom (for the inevitable lawsuit) and maintained that "we will not endorse religion; any of them." A lawsuit was pretty much inevitable. I don't think they chose the right one, though.
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I'd love to see one of these depolymerization plants on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Currently, the chicken farmers dump so much waste into the ecosytem that it's beyond saturation. Fertilizer for plants further exacerbates the problem. All of it washes into the Chesapeake Bay. A TD plant installed by the gub'ment, along with some "no dumping chicken guts/crap on the ground" rules, would go a long way toward controlling pollution. The fact that the system produces a usable product is just sauce for the ... um ... chicken. I'd much rather see pollution control programs that stand a chance of being self sustaining - as opposed to the current crop of "find somewhere else to bury it" methods.
Vehicle exhaust isn't the only kind of pollution.
You're talking about the Stots TemplateMaster. The license is even worse than you indicate - the license attempts to restrict resale of the physical object.
...) Copyright is the place for non-tangible items ... like software and IP. Unfortunately, the software industry seems to be purchasing politicians as fast as the entertainment industry is.
I've got serious objections to folks who try to "license" me physical objects. If I purchase it through retail channels, it's a "sale." I have certain ownership rights at that point. If I choose to give the object to my slacker brother-in-law, the manufacturer is SOL to do anything about the transfer. If you have a patent on the object, you have legal recourse to pursue me if I make a duplicate item. However, you still can't prevent me from giving the original to someone else.
Even the First Sale Doctrine in copyright law doesn't apply here. Assuming that you could actually copyright a physical object (i.e. a dovetailing jig,) I've still got the right to transfer ownership under the First Sale Doctrine. You can't take that away from me with some crummy EULA-esque piece of toilet paper jammed in the box.
The crossover of IP into meatspace is a bad thing. IP is not a physical object that I can bash into the curb if I want to. It deserves none of the ownership protections afforded to hardware. That includes patents. (Don't get me started on software patents being a horrible thing, or why I think IP *is* software
I've never understood how people can believe that the Bible is true, yet at the same time not find it important enough to read in the original languages.
Yep, I hear it's much more clear in the original Klingon.
They want to manipulate people through fear instead of through rule of law. So it's a psychological campaign to get people to change their behavior. Sounds like PR to me. It's just not the typical corporate PR we're used to.
The 9/11 terrorists were aiming for the buildings - the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and one other significant "symbol" of America. The human casualties were collateral damage; sauce for the goose. If they wanted to maximize the human loss, they would have targeted a Sunday afternoon NFL football game where 80,000 folks would have been packed into a stadium. Dropping a 767's worth of Jet-A into that environment would have maximized the human loss, but probably would have had less lasting effect overall. Attacking specific individuals is limited. Attacking the symbols of a country affects *everyone*. The terrorist folks aren't stupid. They understand how powerful good PR can be.
It would be terribly difficult for the bad guys to sneak a nuke into DC and detonate it. However, setting off a nuke at the Mall of America at 3am is probably more effective in terms of crippling the economy and causing widespread fear. Few people travel to DC. Everybody goes to the mall.
So I disagree. I think it *is* a PR contest.
It's much harder to smuggle a dispersal-type "dirty" bomb into another country (and have it be effective) than to detonate a 10-kiloton-class nuke on a ship in international waters. While the dirty bomb will cause suffering, it also has the potential to galvanize the victims against you. A nuke out in the middle of the ocean would get everyone's attention, without all the collateral damage. It's hard for a government to label you as "monsters" if all you did was evaporate some water and a few fish. Just one reason ...
The state has never been obligated to provide protection. They are obligated to enforce the law. If they had to provide protection for individuals, they'd need to assign you a 24/7 bodyguard. Oh, and since the bodyguard is a citizen, he'd need a bodyguard ... ad infinitum.
A police force is a reactionary entity. After something bad happens, they show up to apply a corrective force. Sometimes that means confronting the bad guy. Sometimes that means just filling out the appropriate paperwork.
Understanding the value of your material goods is important. Compared to your life, the material stuff is insignificant. However, if someone breaks into my home and gets between me and my wife or kid, the police are going to need to ask the corpse what his intentions were.
There's a difference between a useful animation, like the red X lighting up to indicate activity, and the unnecessary cruft like animated icons. The former serves a purpose; the latter just serves to distract you.
I'd really love to have the "disable cruft" option at install time. I appreciate functional improvemnts. I subscribe to the form-fits-function mentality, and I strongly oppose increasing my effort without getting some benefit in return.
I'm appalled that folks generally just accept that they'll need to upgrade their computer just to handle the additional burden that an OS like WinXP imposes. I feel like we've stagnated in terms of progress in computing capability. The hardware gets better, but the OS "improvements" chew up the benefits before the applications get a shot.
Way back in 1987 or so, I got permission to purchase a Radio Shack R/C tank on the company dime. We needed to pull cables through an already overcrowded cable raceway, and there were severe access issues in certain areas. The R/C tank worked wonders, drawing a chase-tape through the confined spaces. We used the chase-tape to pull the bigger cable bundles through. We'd tried the tennis-ball-and-string trick earlier. I'll bet the ball it still dangling from the trusswork it got stuck on.
The fun part was getting reprimanded for misusing company funds. Some middle-manager reviewed my expense report, and gave me a stern lecture and a severe finger-waving. I told my supervisor, who promptly went upstairs and bitched him out. Apparently the entire 5th floor staff got an inadvertent earful. That was one of few jobs I've had where my boss actually gave a crap about the folks who reported to him.
If the crystal isn't being used to run the CPU, it's gotta be part of the carrier detection filter. Or maybe they just soldered-on a bunch of random components because the marketing dweeb said it needed to look more "high tech."
I did RTFA. Great, a future application may need a microprocessor. Why is one in there *now*? It's not like a software upgade will magically transform the diode dettector into a superheterodyne receiver.
If you're trying to cram functionality into a restricted space, like a ring, you don't go adding extra cruft willy-nilly. If they intend to get anywhere near to what the pretty concept drawings look like, they're going to need to shave a metric crapload of cruft off the existing design. And that's before they put a real receiver in it. The battery they have is large compared to the concept packaging. The crytal package (on the not-visible bottom of the board) is probably not available in a package conducive to ring-encapsulation. They've got some serious mechanical hurdles to deal with before they get *anywhere* near the pretty marketing-concept drawings.
No, the RF section of this device takes in RF energy and puts out DC. There's no information content in DC. Just an indication of the RF input level that's proportional to the DC level. Once the signal is converted to DC, there's no way to extract any information about the modulated data signal. The current design is a blinky-light, and is a completely wasteful use of a microprocessor.
... meh.
Any future device that intends to interpret the information modulated onto the carrier will need a form of downconverter. I don't care what kind is implemented, but it's going to need to be a honest-to-ghod receiver. That's much more complicated than a simple peak detector. I'll be impressed when they put the receiver in there. Until then
I like the "fleet of Hubbles" idea. Many folks argue that designing a replacement will take 5-7 years ... okay, how long will building an exact replica take? Oh, the establishment players don't really want to answer that one, do they? There's not enough R&D funding to justify it. I personally think they should build a second unit with the available spares and chuck it into orbit. Let Hubble I keep functioning as long as it can. Put a second resource up in a slightly different orbit. Do more science. Rinse, lather, repeat. Who says we're restricted to only one orbital telescope at a time?
Pardon me for pointing out that this is overly complicated. You've got a tuned-circuit detector looking for a particular frequency. That's rectified into a DC voltage. Why didn't they use an analog comparator chip to light the LED? You can't tell me that the A/D plus CPU-and-software is a simpler solution.
They mention a future revision doing interpretation of the open/closed/encrypted state of the WiFi node, but that's going to need a real front-end, not just a diode power detector. If they decoded the packets, I'd be impressed. So far, I'm not.
Y'all are making me feel old ... Win 3.1 and all ...
... he's the one who bumped our account stats every Monday at lunchtime when the computer lab was open.
*My* high school had an HP 3000 server with dinosaur terminals for client accounts. In a situation that would never be tolerated today, that was the same computer system that the school administration used (grades, accounting, etc.) We even had a printer-console. Yep, no CRT, just 14" wide pin-fed fanfold paper.
Fake login scripts, background process monitors, and all manner of social engineering were employed to get those coveted superuser accounts. Once we had access, we laid down a dizzying array of backup plans to cover our tracks. I thought the most ingenious one was hiding superuser priveledge restoration scripts in the system backup cron job. (This was important, because account modifications printed a message on the system console printer in the school office. The system backup cron job ran on weekends, and generated a metric crapload of console prints. Nobody every bothered sifting through the paper logs because "it's supposed to do that.") They could eliminate our priveledges, but they always managed to get restored somehow. We always used fictitious accounts too. They probably would have suspended J.H. Christ if they could have found him
I'm running a fluid-dynamics simulation for a super-secret aircraft/submarine/time-machine. Can I guarantee the security environment for my processing? No? I guess I'll be building my own cluster, thankyouverymuch.
Agreed, and the process whereby you achieve that goal needs as much scrutiny as the goal itself. If you shackle the "permanent colony on the moon" goal to "achieved using existing infrastructure," you're doomed to failure.
If the gub'ment dictates that the Shuttle shall be involved, now all components must a) break down to fit in a Shuttle cargo bay; b) meet Shuttle safety requirements; c) visit LEO and possibly the ISS before moving onward. Yeah, it uses the existing infrastructure, but certainly isn't an optimal solution.
We need a heavy-lift infrastructure element that'll send big payloads to the moon. I would further propose that the heavy-lift launch vehicle be explicitly not-man-rated. Cargo payloads only. Robotic and tele-operated missions as terraforming operations are appropriate for the initial missions. Sending the people up should be one of the last things on the list. When they arrive, there should be cargo containers and shelters waiting for them.
Every time I see the government funding another Crew ($synonym-for-"move") Vehicle, it just makes me cringe. If you want to send a larger crew to the ISS, send another Soyuz. And for chrissakes, install the damned ECLSS Module so the station isn't dependent on the water truck making a delivery.
Yep, quite sure.
And it's more complicated than the explicitly-stated "oversimplified" description I made earlier. If you just shoot propellant out the spacecraft normal to the velocity vector, the spacecraft heading will change. The net effect is that you've vector-summed the original velocity plus the new input. The result is a new vector direction with a larger magnitude than the original. Congratulations, you just raised your altitude.
It's really tough to change your orbital plane. There's no ocean for your keel to react against. There's no road for your tires to push on. You only have the linear reaction of the thruster. It boils down to vector-sums of linear elements. Really.
If you intend to maintain your orbital altitude, you have to keep the magnitude of your velocity vectory the same. That implies that the steering forces will be constantly moving in a circular motion around the center of the spacecraft. The net effect will be that you cancel out the velocity vector in the "x" direction, and introduce a new one in the "y" direction.
There are plenty of references on the web. If you're willing to substantially alter your orbital parameters, plane changes thorugh a circular-elliptical-circular progression will only require about 1x delta-v expenditure. You make the plane alterations at apogee in the ellipitical phase, then re-circularize. If you intend to make the 90-degree turn while staying in the circular orbit, you're required to expend 2x your original velocity in terms of delta-v.
Yeah, I know the politicians have restricted the Shuttle missions to the ISS orbitlal plane. That's just a horrible restriction. It's the wrong plane for a payload that needs to go into GTO (or anywhere else useful.) Also, you've increased the risk to the ISS by bringing the Shuttle and it's payload into the same plane. If the payload malfunctions, you've got an awfully large piece of debris in the same plane as the ISS. Any debris left over from non-ISS-specific missions becomes and in-plane impact hazard. So yeah, that restriction sucks no matter how you look at it.
I didn't intend for my original post to be specific to the Shuttle. The solution would, in principle, work for just about any manned mission where a) you could get to the damages ship; and b) the daaged ship has an airlock/egress capability.
Too bad the Soyuz module only seats three. It's almost what you'd want. Of course, that's not a glamorous, high-tech, high-dollar, corporate-welfare program for the US space industry, so I don't expect to see it anytime soon. Another poster noted that the vehicle is worth more than the crew, and I think that's probably correct too (though you won't hear any politicians saying that.)
Have a look at the orbital mechanics - you can raise or lower your orbit by changing your speed a little. That's a mostly-scalar operation. You go up and down, but stay in the same orbital plane (please forgive the obvious simplification.) Now think of your orbital path in terms of the velocity vector. Rotating your orbital plane 90-degrees, for example, requires that you reduce your vector velocity in one axis to zero, while raising the vector velocity in the perpendicular axis to the original amount. So, how much energy did it take to get your original vector velocity? That's right, the whole launch amount. So to turn 90 degrees, you'll need two complete launches worth of fuel and expendibles. That's oversimplified too, because you need to haul that two-launches-worth of booster and fuel up with you in the initial launch. The Rocket Equaiton makes that scenario prohibitive.
Similarly, hauling the rescue capsule around on every frickin' launch has similar implications. It's tremendously wasteful to haul extra weight around "just in case."
I'd propose a "tow truck" kind of solution. To pose an analogy, how often do you use the spare tire in your car? Maybe never? (Automakers won't sell a spare-less car mostly due to negative market perception.) If you don't have a spare tire, what will you do? You'll get on the cell phone and call a tow truck. (I realize you can't just pull over to the curb in space, but bear with me.) The cell phone and tow truck represent elements of a repair (i.e. rescue) infrastructure we have in place. The better the infrastructure, the less you need to haul around the materials to be self-sufficient. I'd rather see a Delta 4 Heavy (or equivalent) equipped with a Crew Extraction Vehicle (CEV.) Yep, it's a capsule that fits a crew of N in horrible discomfort just long enough to return them to earth. I'm thinking extreme Spam-in-a-Can. They wedge inside however they must. There will be rudimentary water and food aboard - think a couple of bottles of Aquafina and some granola bars. They soil their undergarments, if necessary. A shower will be waiting for them when they return. Feces washes off.
The "infrastructure" part involves doing all the pre-flight coordination with the manned mission, and would require that the tow truck could be prepped and launched within 2 days or so of declaration of an emergency. Since it's on the ground, the CEV only has one orbital insertion to deal with. It'd need to mate up with the manned mission, but that's part of the infrastructure too.
Since the CEV is unmanned on launch, it can be configured to use solid boosters. That's going to mitigate liquid-fuel handling issues. It also mitigates flight profile problems - high G-loading tends to do bad things to ugly-bags-of-mostly-water. But the meatbags don't board the CEV until it's already on-orbit, so you only have the human-friendly (re)-entry profile to deal with, right?
The Crew Return Vehicle (not to be confuced with my CEV, above) is a boondoggle. Passengers are seated in relative comfort. They get all sorts of space to move around. The CRV even has wings and a pilot. And it's supposed to be reusable. What a bunch of crap. My CEV, on the other hand, is horribly cramped and has exactly one job to do - return the crew to earth safely. Once. Period.
In writing this, I'm thinking that "tow truck" is the wrong term. The CEV is more of a taxi. We abandon the original damaged spacecraft.
I've implemented the 128-bit AES algorithm in a PIC16F873. Here's the Microchip page with the app note and source code. The app note has performance metrics - 5273 cycles to encrypt; 6413 to decrypt (section 6, page 14.) My implementation, written from scratch, has comparable performance.
Since the PIC is a single-cycle execution unit, clocks correlate directly to real-time once you spec the operating frequency. At 40kHz clock (=10kHz instruction execution frequency) it'll take 527mS to encrypt one 128-bit block of data. Similarly, a 400kHz clock results in a 52.7mS block excrypt time. A maximum of 41-bytes of RAM are required for either encode/decode operations.
The claim that AES requires substantial hardware is bogus. AES is designed to be byte-processing friendly. It's much nicer than dealing with the bit-oriented DES and 3DES standards, especially in an 8-bit microcontroller environment.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. A company doesn't invent things, people do. Just as a company can't apply for a patent - patents are only issued to individuals. "Assignment" to a company is a completely different matter.
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As written, "... by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" tends to indicate that the period of exclusivity ends with the author's death. I think that's a fair deal. At a minimum, I'd like the moving target crap to end. The Mouse has to fall into the public domain at some point
I'll re-state what I've said before: extension of copyright periods, especially the retroactive ones, is a criminal act. The People have established a contract with the content creators -
1. offer: force-of-law in exchange for incentive toward creativity and acceptance of financial risk
2. acceptance: putting the (c) on your document
3. consideration: court-recognized limited monopoly
By extending the copyright period, Congress has effectively stolen works from the public. Many works should have reverted into the public trust by now. When the contract was established, the period of exclusivity was defined. "Extending" copyright shouldn't apply to works prior to the extension date. We, The People, have a contract.
If I have a contract with a plumber, and he decided to raise his rates, my original contract is still binding. He can charge more for new contracts, but he can't ammend my original contract by claiming a retroactive rate increase. That'd get laughed out of court.
I don't see how this can work, unless the only choice for a playback device is one with DRM. If a non-DRM playback solution exists, there's motivation to rip to a non-DRM format and share.
The only way I see that the DRM Cartel can eliminate the non-DRM elements is through force of law. Expect the Cartel to purchase legislation making it illegal to even think about a non-DRM'd device. They'll surround themselves with a defensive battery of copyrights and patents. Oh, and to dodge the anti-trust laws in the US, expect the DRM Cartel to license the DRM technology to anyone willing to pay the extortion fee and accept the draconian usage license. Just like the SD Card Association.
About a decade ago, we had a series of "incidents" with the EPO button in the software lab. Shortly after a serious lab upgrade (due to constantly blowing breakers,) someone decided to test the EPO switch (it was a bit of a novelty at the time.) *click* "Cool, it works. Hey, how do you reset this thing?" Turns out you needed to have a key to reset it. It took about 4 hours to find someone who had the key. That one got replaced with the Mark II resetable switch ...
... *click*
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About a month later, one of the managers was giving a prospective new-hire a tour. He got to the software lab, and started blathering about "don't ever push the red switch" as he put his finger on the switch
So some einstein decided that the Big Red Switch was "dangerous" and put a plexi cover over it - the same kind that goes over the thermostat control, and the same kind that has a key lock. Yep, about six months later we had a gen-you-ine emergency. One of the HP 9000/300 monitors went crispy, and was snorting smoke and sparks. One of the software folks went to hit the Big Red Button, but was somewhat nonplussed to find a locking cover over it. She took the co-located fire bottle, sheared the cover off, pressed the button, then got to use said fire bottle on the monitor.
So the cover gets replaced again, though this time with a non-locking cover. At some point, the software server stack needed to be relocated into the corner with the Big Red Button. Another einstein discovered that it was inconvenient to slink behind the equipment rack - the cover kept bashing him in the neck or shoulder. So he removed it, thinking that accidental presses wouldn't happen because the button was obstructed by the server stack. (yep, inaccessible = useless.) Some time later, the equipment was being jockeyed for an upgrade, and one of the big SCSI cables snagged the Big Red Button and *click*
All these shenanigans happened in the space of one year, and I got tired of the thrash. I measured the space between the back of the switch and the faceplate - just over 3/4 inch. I cut a horseshoe shape out of 3/4 plywood, and hung it on the switch shaft. In and emergency, it's really easy (and obvious) to remove it. Gravity keeps it there otherwise. No problems since
Oh yes they did. The school board didn't just decide "hey, this book needs an 'evolution' warning sticker." 2000 irate bible-thumping parents incited a response (the incitement was the "flaming bag of dogshit.") The decision to put the sticker in the book just resulted in steaming poo on the shcool baord's collective foot.
Once the pro-religion folks opened the can of worms, a lawsuit was inevitable. The school board failed to realized that they couldn't avoid litigation, and took action that they hoped would quell the vocal parents. Classic myopia. The school board neglected to consider that their actions would cheese off an even bigger chunk of the population.
Yep, it was a real-life Kobiashi Maru kind of situation.
Seems that the "vocal special interest group" mentality was at work here. 2000 parents bitched that the book contained "evolution" and needed a warning label. The school district attempted to dodge what probably would have become a (cl)ass-action lawsuit. They seem to have made matters worse, garnering national attention.
They had a flaming bag of dogshit tossed on their doorstep, and they made a choice as to which foot to stomp with. If they'd decided to do nothing, they get sued. If they put the current sticker in, they get sued (albeit by a different group.) If they changed the wording to say something like "all religion is theory, as is evolution; decide for yourself" they'd get sued too. A better solution would have been to show the bitching parents the door, and remind them that they can always home-school the little hellions if the parents don't like the public school curriculum. At least then the school district could have stood up in the courtroom (for the inevitable lawsuit) and maintained that "we will not endorse religion; any of them." A lawsuit was pretty much inevitable. I don't think they chose the right one, though.