And you've gotten to 30,000 feet - there's no particular reason to leave the safety of the capsule for the complexity and risk of ejecting or otherwise departing the capsule for a parachute jump. Might as well come all the way to the surface.
But you're assuming a capsule which does not exist; if you have a full reentry capsule then you're going to ride it all the way to the ground as there's little sense in having the crew eject when the weight of ejection seats would probably be more than the weight of a parachute capable of landing the whole capsule.
I presume this is intended for a MOOSE-style system which would be an emergency means of escaping from the shuttle or a similar vehicle, which means it has to be very light and very small, not a full-size capsule. And in that case, once you've inflated your heat-shield and it's brought you down to 100,000 feet it's a liability you're safer without.
A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.
However, re-entry is largely a solved problem, whereas high-altitude parachuting isn't. If we had a need for an emergency system to bring astronauts down to 100,000 feet we could probably build a suitable heat-shield and reaction jet control system in a few months, but it won't help if their parachute fails after that.
If they can actually get astronauts down from "space" with no vehicle, that is cool. and it can probably help with efficiency (no worries about a return vehicle).
MOOSE was planning to do it in the 60s, but I somehow doubt that the average astronaut would prefer sticking a foam heat-shield on their back to using a real return vehicle.
Plus I think Trent Reznor was pushing for this with Nine Inch Nails? Or something like that.
Nine Inch Nails have been releasing their music under a CC license for a few years now, as well as selling it from their web site in FLAC format (I think) or on CD. I'm guessing they probably make more money from that than they did from their 2.3% cut of RIAA CD sales.
There will be some very talented folks that are also independently wealthy (or have gotten rich from when their music had value) that can afford to work for nothing. The rest of the world is going to do something that pays the rent and the grocery bill.
I know plenty of people making movies, software and music that will never make them any money. I know about three million people writing novels that will never make them any money.
I also know one person who does make money from making movies who's publically stated that he thinks P2P helps his sales because people see one of ihs movies and then buy others. Of course he doesn't pay his actors $200,000,000 for six weeks' work.
No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to get rid of the distribution companies.
In a digital world the only benefit that distributors provide is advertising; people see your music/song/novel on that distributor's site and buy it. Otherwise you can just sell from your own web site.
"They" have speculated that electric cars could be used for load leveling. In other words, the car's charger would be controlled by the power company... just like all your other large appliances..
Yeah, I really want the power company deciding whether or not I'll be allowed to drive to work in the morning.
Not only were half the programs running in 32 bit mode
Only half of them? Is there any 64-bit software that the average Windows user has installed other than IE, which is useless due to lack of Flash plugins?
Did Microsoft even recompile notepad and paint to 64-bit?
Firstly it requires applications to be modified to really see much benefit
Modified? You mean setting the 'allow me to see more than 2GB of RAM' bit on the executable? Which they should be doing in any case so that it works better on 64-bit Windows? That sounds like lots of work.
PAE is invisible to applications, has a small performance impact in the worst case and a significant performance benefit in the best case. Microsoft just chose not to support it because they didn't want the support calls when poorly-written drivers fell over.
Re:More corporate BS
on
The End of Free
·
· Score: 2, Informative
ubuntu, arguably the most advanced desktop linux, won't play DVDs out of the box. the process for making it play DVDs wouldn't be discoverable / doable by the "normal" user.
I don't know about Windows 7, but XP 'won't play DVDs out of the box' either. The difference is that Ubuntu can easily be configured to do so and only doesn't come with DVD playback enable by default because of US laws.
no itunes. and so on.
things like that stop people dead in their tracks.
Given that iTunes is probably the worst media player in the known universe, I consider that a benefit.
I should really say that's where we are now. Cable/satellite, music, books/magazines, video, DVDs, games, etc. etc. etc. Paying a monthly fee to one or more providers for all-you-can-eat access to content.
Except it will never work because everyone wants to be the man in the middle sucking up their percentage and no-one wants to be commoditised by offering their media to multiple different services who'll offer it at discount prices.
Look at the number of digital download systems for games, for example: a few years back there was basically just Steam and any decent game was likely to go there, now there are dozens and even some games on Steam require you to log in to multiple different online gaming systems in order to run. It's going from convenient to a disaster zone as every company wants to be 'The One'.
$20 for Star Trek, Slumdog Millionaire, or other good movie on DVD
I don't remember the last time I paid more than $10 for a DVD... heck, last week I bought about $100 of Blu-Rays for $10 or less ech and you can get the whole 'Band of Brothers' series on Blu-Ray for about $25, which is one of the best TV shows ever made.
As the OP said, video is cheap and getting cheaper all the time; only rare movies and new releases cost anything like what a ten year old B-movie used to cost on VHS.
If you can't get the software under control, just make two devices in one. The electronics needed for a complete phone should be negligible compared to the rest of the portable computer.
This is why I like a phone which just, you know, makes phone calls. We don't use ours much but we've never had to reboot it or install OS upgrades just to be able to phone someone.
Why is everyone bitching that the guy got in trouble for downloading free music. I was taught "don't do the crime if you cant do the time." These guys broke the law and committed a felony. They are lucky they are not going to prison. I would gladly pay $60k and keep my ass out of the prison shower room.
I think the complaint is the disproportionate punishment for the crime. He apparently downloaded 30 songs, which is about 3 CDs worth... if he'd walked into a CD store and stolen three CDs with no previous criminal record, do you really think he'd be fined $67,000 or sent to jail?
You're going to be embarrassed when you see my handle...:)
I already saw that your handle is 'BobMcD'; that's not a real name unless your surname is really 'McD', nor is it likely to be your full name even if that's the case (most people have at least one middle name too).
And I note you cropped the rest of my request. Again, if you think anonymity is so bad, then what do you have to hide? Why won't you post your real name, birthdate, address, phone number, bank account details, government identfication number etc on every forum you frequent?
You don't get it in the real world. That'd be the point. In fact, in the real world people get to see your very face. They're privy to your ethnicity, age, likely occupation, etc, all at a glance.
In the real world I spend very little time around asshats. And if I do run into an asshat then they are unlikely to get my name or other identifying details which easily allow them to track me down.
I understand that anonymity has advantages, but AVOIDING DEATH simply IS NOT one of them.
Of course it is; you can't murder me if you can't find me. And avoiding harassment is a much larger benefit as there are many more asshats than murderers.
The problem really boils down to they have a very small number of real moderators and many many many posts, and the infrastructure really doesn't scale.
Then, uh, they could spend some of their trillion dollars a month income to hire more moderators and ban the asshats.
It is just disgusting. To save a single, hypothetical life, we're willing to sacrifice personal responsibility?
If you believe that posting your real information all over the Internet is such a great idea, why don't you include your real name, address, phone number, employment details, etc, in every Slashdot post?
If the number of WoW players is reason enough for anonymity, then why not in the real world as well?
Yes, anonymity is a very good idea in the real world; most of us understand that only asshats benefit from removing anonymity from non-asshats.
My greatest objection to Blizzard backing down on this issue is underscored by the notion above.
You're explicitly saying that the behavior you describe, physical retribution for digital offenses, is a foregone conclusion. You're implicitly saying it is normal, and by insisting that Blizzard take responsibility for it, you're effectively endorsing it.
There are crazy people everywhere and games with easy ganking PvP attract even more of them than elsewhere. Even ignoring the usual asshats, given the number of players WoW has the odds aren't bad that there's at least one serial killer playing the game; you can't change that, and giving crazy people an easy means of tracking you down is not a good idea.
Sure, odds are it won't happen to _you_, but only one person needs to be harassed in real life by an asshat for this to be a hugely retrograde step. And if it does happen to you, then telling Ted Bundy that you blame his individual abhorrent behaviour will probably give him a moment of amusement before he kills you.
There's a difference between making a mistake and doing something that anyone with more than a room temperature IQ should immediatley understand to be an insanely stupid idea.
And I'm talking room temperature in Celcius, not Kelvin.
Because it would be a barrier to entry for the assholes.
Why would they care whether their forum name is D1ckH3ad or Joe Bloggs?
SOE link forum accounts to game accounts so you can only have one and bad behaviour on the forums can be linked back to the game account that you're paying money for. That's a far more effective solution.
None of this harms Skype's existing security in any way. Encryption, if properly implemented, is secure even when all of the mechanisms are known
ROT13 isn't secure when it's known.
Like ROT13, RC4 is an antiquated cipher with many known issues; and a modified version of RC4 could be even less secure than the vanilla implementation. No-one should be using it these days when there are much better alternatives available.
The environmental movement seems focused on behavioral change, things like, making us recycle things, using less gasoline, etc. It doesn't seem to have a balanced approach to protecting our natural resources and doing all the other things that we want to do in a highly industrialized society.
You seem to believe that most 'Greens' actually care about the environment and the demands for behavioural change are a side effect rather than the goal. 'Green' is where the 'Reds' went after the Soviet Union collapsed and no-one could take communism seriously anymore.
As for 'recycling', the only time it makes any sense is when companies are paying for our junk instead of expecting us to pay to take it away... if no-one is willing to pay for it then it's clearly economically damaging.
Umm apparently you never seen SSDs back when they were like 5k
$5k? My first SSD was $50k, had a capacity of 128MB and lost all the data when you powered it down... it sure made Windows 3.1. start up fast once you'd copied the files over though.
In fact I'd say the improvement back then compared to a hard drive was much greater than the improvement of my modern SSD relative to a modern hard drive.
3 minutes sounds long for boot time. I've never had the need to time it, but around a minute would seem more typical to me.
Three minutes to a usable desktop where you can actually do stuff seems about right for the average prebuilt Windows system that's loaded with manufacturer's crapware. Sure, Windows may boot to the login screen in under a minute, but who gives a crap about that when it chugs for two minutes after logging in before it starts responding to anything you want to do?
I have a single-core Atom with a hard drive that boots to a usable Linux desktop in under 45 seconds, and a dual-core Atom with an SSD that boots to xbmc on Linux in about 25 seconds. So if you use a decent operating system I'm not convinced that there's really enough benefit when you consider the high cost of the SSD.
Slashdot Mirror
And you've gotten to 30,000 feet - there's no particular reason to leave the safety of the capsule for the complexity and risk of ejecting or otherwise departing the capsule for a parachute jump. Might as well come all the way to the surface.
But you're assuming a capsule which does not exist; if you have a full reentry capsule then you're going to ride it all the way to the ground as there's little sense in having the crew eject when the weight of ejection seats would probably be more than the weight of a parachute capable of landing the whole capsule.
I presume this is intended for a MOOSE-style system which would be an emergency means of escaping from the shuttle or a similar vehicle, which means it has to be very light and very small, not a full-size capsule. And in that case, once you've inflated your heat-shield and it's brought you down to 100,000 feet it's a liability you're safer without.
A high altitude jump like this may give us some useful data, but it does very little to pave the way for an individual descent from orbit.
However, re-entry is largely a solved problem, whereas high-altitude parachuting isn't. If we had a need for an emergency system to bring astronauts down to 100,000 feet we could probably build a suitable heat-shield and reaction jet control system in a few months, but it won't help if their parachute fails after that.
If they can actually get astronauts down from "space" with no vehicle, that is cool.
and it can probably help with efficiency (no worries about a return vehicle).
MOOSE was planning to do it in the 60s, but I somehow doubt that the average astronaut would prefer sticking a foam heat-shield on their back to using a real return vehicle.
Plus I think Trent Reznor was pushing for this with Nine Inch Nails? Or something like that.
Nine Inch Nails have been releasing their music under a CC license for a few years now, as well as selling it from their web site in FLAC format (I think) or on CD. I'm guessing they probably make more money from that than they did from their 2.3% cut of RIAA CD sales.
There will be some very talented folks that are also independently wealthy (or have gotten rich from when their music had value) that can afford to work for nothing. The rest of the world is going to do something that pays the rent and the grocery bill.
I know plenty of people making movies, software and music that will never make them any money. I know about three million people writing novels that will never make them any money.
I also know one person who does make money from making movies who's publically stated that he thinks P2P helps his sales because people see one of ihs movies and then buy others. Of course he doesn't pay his actors $200,000,000 for six weeks' work.
No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to get rid of the distribution companies.
In a digital world the only benefit that distributors provide is advertising; people see your music/song/novel on that distributor's site and buy it. Otherwise you can just sell from your own web site.
"They" have speculated that electric cars could be used for load leveling. In other words, the car's charger would be controlled by the power company ... just like all your other large appliances..
Yeah, I really want the power company deciding whether or not I'll be allowed to drive to work in the morning.
Not only were half the programs running in 32 bit mode
Only half of them? Is there any 64-bit software that the average Windows user has installed other than IE, which is useless due to lack of Flash plugins?
Did Microsoft even recompile notepad and paint to 64-bit?
Firstly it requires applications to be modified to really see much benefit
Modified? You mean setting the 'allow me to see more than 2GB of RAM' bit on the executable? Which they should be doing in any case so that it works better on 64-bit Windows? That sounds like lots of work.
PAE is invisible to applications, has a small performance impact in the worst case and a significant performance benefit in the best case. Microsoft just chose not to support it because they didn't want the support calls when poorly-written drivers fell over.
ubuntu, arguably the most advanced desktop linux, won't play DVDs out of the box. the process for making it play DVDs wouldn't be discoverable / doable by the "normal" user.
I don't know about Windows 7, but XP 'won't play DVDs out of the box' either. The difference is that Ubuntu can easily be configured to do so and only doesn't come with DVD playback enable by default because of US laws.
no itunes. and so on.
things like that stop people dead in their tracks.
Given that iTunes is probably the worst media player in the known universe, I consider that a benefit.
I should really say that's where we are now. Cable/satellite, music, books/magazines, video, DVDs, games, etc. etc. etc. Paying a monthly fee to one or more providers for all-you-can-eat access to content.
Except it will never work because everyone wants to be the man in the middle sucking up their percentage and no-one wants to be commoditised by offering their media to multiple different services who'll offer it at discount prices.
Look at the number of digital download systems for games, for example: a few years back there was basically just Steam and any decent game was likely to go there, now there are dozens and even some games on Steam require you to log in to multiple different online gaming systems in order to run. It's going from convenient to a disaster zone as every company wants to be 'The One'.
$20 for Star Trek, Slumdog Millionaire, or other good movie on DVD
I don't remember the last time I paid more than $10 for a DVD... heck, last week I bought about $100 of Blu-Rays for $10 or less ech and you can get the whole 'Band of Brothers' series on Blu-Ray for about $25, which is one of the best TV shows ever made.
As the OP said, video is cheap and getting cheaper all the time; only rare movies and new releases cost anything like what a ten year old B-movie used to cost on VHS.
if there is a bug like this on a "dumb" phone (and, there are) the chances of getting it fixed are zero.
Which probably means that the QA is a lot better too, in order to ensure that it doesn't ship with crippling bugs.
Even crappy phones still have an OS.
But probably 5% as much code and therefore less than 5% as many bugs.
If you can't get the software under control, just make two devices in one. The electronics needed for a complete phone should be negligible compared to the rest of the portable computer.
This is why I like a phone which just, you know, makes phone calls. We don't use ours much but we've never had to reboot it or install OS upgrades just to be able to phone someone.
Why is everyone bitching that the guy got in trouble for downloading free music. I was taught "don't do the crime if you cant do the time." These guys broke the law and committed a felony. They are lucky they are not going to prison. I would gladly pay $60k and keep my ass out of the prison shower room.
I think the complaint is the disproportionate punishment for the crime. He apparently downloaded 30 songs, which is about 3 CDs worth... if he'd walked into a CD store and stolen three CDs with no previous criminal record, do you really think he'd be fined $67,000 or sent to jail?
You're going to be embarrassed when you see my handle... :)
I already saw that your handle is 'BobMcD'; that's not a real name unless your surname is really 'McD', nor is it likely to be your full name even if that's the case (most people have at least one middle name too).
And I note you cropped the rest of my request. Again, if you think anonymity is so bad, then what do you have to hide? Why won't you post your real name, birthdate, address, phone number, bank account details, government identfication number etc on every forum you frequent?
You don't get it in the real world. That'd be the point. In fact, in the real world people get to see your very face. They're privy to your ethnicity, age, likely occupation, etc, all at a glance.
In the real world I spend very little time around asshats. And if I do run into an asshat then they are unlikely to get my name or other identifying details which easily allow them to track me down.
I understand that anonymity has advantages, but AVOIDING DEATH simply IS NOT one of them.
Of course it is; you can't murder me if you can't find me. And avoiding harassment is a much larger benefit as there are many more asshats than murderers.
The problem really boils down to they have a very small number of real moderators and many many many posts, and the infrastructure really doesn't scale.
Then, uh, they could spend some of their trillion dollars a month income to hire more moderators and ban the asshats.
It is just disgusting. To save a single, hypothetical life, we're willing to sacrifice personal responsibility?
If you believe that posting your real information all over the Internet is such a great idea, why don't you include your real name, address, phone number, employment details, etc, in every Slashdot post?
If the number of WoW players is reason enough for anonymity, then why not in the real world as well?
Yes, anonymity is a very good idea in the real world; most of us understand that only asshats benefit from removing anonymity from non-asshats.
My greatest objection to Blizzard backing down on this issue is underscored by the notion above.
You're explicitly saying that the behavior you describe, physical retribution for digital offenses, is a foregone conclusion. You're implicitly saying it is normal, and by insisting that Blizzard take responsibility for it, you're effectively endorsing it.
There are crazy people everywhere and games with easy ganking PvP attract even more of them than elsewhere. Even ignoring the usual asshats, given the number of players WoW has the odds aren't bad that there's at least one serial killer playing the game; you can't change that, and giving crazy people an easy means of tracking you down is not a good idea.
Sure, odds are it won't happen to _you_, but only one person needs to be harassed in real life by an asshat for this to be a hugely retrograde step. And if it does happen to you, then telling Ted Bundy that you blame his individual abhorrent behaviour will probably give him a moment of amusement before he kills you.
because you never make mistakes, right?
There's a difference between making a mistake and doing something that anyone with more than a room temperature IQ should immediatley understand to be an insanely stupid idea.
And I'm talking room temperature in Celcius, not Kelvin.
Because it would be a barrier to entry for the assholes.
Why would they care whether their forum name is D1ckH3ad or Joe Bloggs?
SOE link forum accounts to game accounts so you can only have one and bad behaviour on the forums can be linked back to the game account that you're paying money for. That's a far more effective solution.
None of this harms Skype's existing security in any way. Encryption, if properly implemented, is secure even when all of the mechanisms are known
ROT13 isn't secure when it's known.
Like ROT13, RC4 is an antiquated cipher with many known issues; and a modified version of RC4 could be even less secure than the vanilla implementation. No-one should be using it these days when there are much better alternatives available.
The environmental movement seems focused on behavioral change, things like, making us recycle things, using less gasoline, etc. It doesn't seem to have a balanced approach to protecting our natural resources and doing all the other things that we want to do in a highly industrialized society.
You seem to believe that most 'Greens' actually care about the environment and the demands for behavioural change are a side effect rather than the goal. 'Green' is where the 'Reds' went after the Soviet Union collapsed and no-one could take communism seriously anymore.
As for 'recycling', the only time it makes any sense is when companies are paying for our junk instead of expecting us to pay to take it away... if no-one is willing to pay for it then it's clearly economically damaging.
Umm apparently you never seen SSDs back when they were like 5k
$5k? My first SSD was $50k, had a capacity of 128MB and lost all the data when you powered it down... it sure made Windows 3.1. start up fast once you'd copied the files over though.
In fact I'd say the improvement back then compared to a hard drive was much greater than the improvement of my modern SSD relative to a modern hard drive.
3 minutes sounds long for boot time. I've never had the need to time it, but around a minute would seem more typical to me.
Three minutes to a usable desktop where you can actually do stuff seems about right for the average prebuilt Windows system that's loaded with manufacturer's crapware. Sure, Windows may boot to the login screen in under a minute, but who gives a crap about that when it chugs for two minutes after logging in before it starts responding to anything you want to do?
I have a single-core Atom with a hard drive that boots to a usable Linux desktop in under 45 seconds, and a dual-core Atom with an SSD that boots to xbmc on Linux in about 25 seconds. So if you use a decent operating system I'm not convinced that there's really enough benefit when you consider the high cost of the SSD.