Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to connect and read advertisements they don't want, while calling each other "asshats".
Sounds painfully like Fark.com to me.. and to a lesser extent, Slashdot.
No, it is not a solution to the fact that you can't make a GPU act like a CPU, it is a solution for those who need redundancy, sometimes want to emphasise graphics (allthought less than a full blown GPU might offer) and sometimes wants to emphasise raw processing power, and who might want the flexibility such a solutin might give them.
And it isn't that different from a quad-pentium system, apart from the fact that I suggest reassigning the CPUs according to what the system needs - ie dedicating one, two or even three of the CPUs to act as GPUs if you need graphics, having them act as SPUs (Sound Processing Units) if you want lots of sound processed and as ordinary CPU if you just want to process data. You may even want to run them as two or four seperate computers (thats what I meant when I called them 'cores') if you desire. It's distrebuted computing inside your own boxen.
I'm not saying it's a good idea for a homesystem. I'm not saying it's a new idea. I'm just saying it's the idea that popped into my head as I read the article.
For those heavily into graphics and games, using a GPU as a CPU (or a CPU as a GPU) might not be all that good a solution, as the GPU is a specialised bit of silicon whereas the CPU is a general piece of silicon.
However, I got this sudden flash of the obvious, where you build a "multi-core" computer, ie a computer with several CPUs. one or more CPU(s) can be assigned to work as the GPU(s) if needed, and then be reassigned to work as ordinary CPUs when raw processingpower is more needed than graphics output. True, such a system would need a total rewrite of the OS, but I'm sure we'll have a Linux-port running on it quickly enought.
While this idea might not yield the raw graphicspower a seperate GPU can offer us, it would allow us to have a computer that would upgrade or degrade it's capabilities as needed, and with enought 'cores' and a well written OS, we could have redundancy against all sorts of damage and so forth. Something for the spaceprograme / military / missioncritical server assembly perhaps?
While ignoring the problem of getting Joe Blow (or as we call him here, Ola Dunk) to install and use PGP or a simular piece of software to encrypt / decrypt our emails, I see one huge problem with your suggestion.
Your public key has to be listed somewhere in order to let people send you mail. Not only does this gives away your key to the spammers, but you'll be likely to list your e-mail next to it (at least, thats what the one keysite I have taken a look at did) so you also gives the spammer your working e-mail adress...
Yes, they may 'burn throught a whole lot of clock cycles' to get the spam out, but so would we do in decrypting it and the rest of our mail. And since the spammer is likely to be able to afford mewer, better, faster hardware than Joe Blow (or Ola Dunk for that matter) are...
Nice idea, but it won't fly. If you can make encrypted e-mail the accepted standard, if the avrage, non-geek user is able to both install and use it, then the spammers would just throw money at the problem until it wasn't a problem for them any more.
Re:Monty's House of Lords
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Say what you want about the britsh parliment, but they got style. Boored with the debate? Put your feet on the table. Dislike what the fellow is talkign about? Boo on him. Time for a vote? Ring bells like a victorian firebrigade and walk thru one of two doors.
It may be oldfashioned (the two sides are two swordslength apart I'm told, to stop the representatives from killing one another), but it works rather well at taking the will of the people and turning it into practical politics (as opposed to the will of the cooperations).
Meaningless trivea; I'm told you only need three lords in the House of Lords for it to be a legal session - which means that two crazy lords can plunge the UK into chaos.
I assume that the mediaplayers he tried to use (which, judging by the way the article is worded, is the default player on each system) failed to 'pick it up' when he inserted the disc. Most, if not all, CD-burning software I am aware of is able to make a copy of a CD even if the format isn't recogniced - usefull when I copy a CD with a linux-distro on it on a Win9x box.
Having just skimmed the bit about the N-gage.. It is a phone.. with a small gameboy-like device built into it. or possible a hand held gameconsolle with a phone inside - same difference.
So, either some bastard will call me just as I'm about to beat the highscore... or the batteries will be dead from me playing to much games, so I'll miss that vital call. Neitehr sounds like a deal to me.
I may be old skool here, but I much prefer my handheld game to be seperate from my phone, and both to be seperate from my PDA (even thought I do play some games on the later). That way, I'll never miss my calls or have to end my game to take the phone.. and as every old skool nerd knows; the more gadgets, the better. Still, I can see how this may go down well with those who gets a device just because it is new and thus cool - and it looks pretty neat too. Have anyone here one of these and can give some info on how it is in actuall use?
Intrestingly enought, european money seem to be more focused towards making it hard to copy as well as making it easy to see if it's a counterfeight. Many of the ideas used in the swiss note is used in Norwegian
banknotes as well:
Portrait watermark and security thread. When the banknote
is held up to the light, you can see the security thread,
a dark line bearing the text Norges Bank.
Fluorescent print on the front. In addition, a narrow
strip on both sides of the foil stripe will light up in
ultraviolet light.
Intaglio print, meaning that the print is slightly raised
(try that on a inkjet...)
Foil hologram stripe
Snowflake with a hidden N, tilt the note to
spot it
Mother-of-pearl effect, tilt the note and marvel at the
changing colours
A register mark on both sides of the banknote. If the
banknote is held up to the light, the mark will be
completely filled and the ornament will appear
symmetrical.
When the banknote is exposed to ultraviolet light, part
of the print as well as small fibres in the paper become
fluorescent.
Microtext hidden in parts of the design.
I like the idea of a raised section for the visually impared thought.. lets hope that comes in the Series VIII notes... which should come about 2015 or thereabouts.
As for your last comment... without saying anything more on the issue, I think the avrage US citizen is up for a rude surprice one of these days. Suddenly, their money is worth a lot less...
A lot of nations are doing this these days... here in Norway we have a hologram as one of the security
feature of the 200 kroner note (roughtly worth 29½USD as of today), but then all our notes except the fifty has it. And I recoon the fifty will have it soon as well.
It stands up very well against everyday wear and tear - even survived a trip in the washingmachine wihtout any trouble (so did the rest of the bill).
While I'm not sure what other nations does, I expect most of them to do something simular to how Norway does
it:
Norges Bank withdraws certain notes and coins from circulation by issuing regulations, which are publicly announced in the Legal Gazette. The Bank also runs advertisements in Norway's largest dailies to inform the public. The notes and coins continue to be legal tender for one year from the date of the public announcement. According to the Act on Norges Bank and the Monetary System, the Bank is obliged to redeem notes and coins for another ten years.
The public is encouraged to turn in withdrawn banknotes and coins by contacting banks or Norges Bank in Oslo before the deadline.
Norges Bank will, however, redeem withdrawn banknotes and coins for some time after the statutory deadline. After this, it may be necessary to apply for ex gratia payment for expired notes and coins. The application for ex gratia payment must contain information about why the notes and coins were not redeemed within the deadline date.
So you got eleven years to take those notes out of your mattres, walk down to the bank and exchange them into newer, safer notes. Or you could do like everyone else and keep the money in a bankaccount where they'll earn you interest. After all, private bank deposits are garanteed by the nation - even if the bank should topple your money is safe there... or rather, here.
Yeah, they're including new security features. That's cool and all, but how often do people really check them?
That's the most troublesome thing about it, IMO....goes on quoting the bit about leaching, ie washing away the ink to print a higher value note on the same paper.
I'm not going to make any friends here today, but honestly I find US notes to be boring and unimagninative. All the same size, rougthly the same design (even thought that is changing for the better with this new 20) and - from an european, or rather norwegian, point of view - all to easy to make a passable, if not perfect, copy off.
Lets compare this to a currence which I'm very familiar with, ie the Norwegian notes (click on each note to bring up more information on each)
and coins. While the coins could be counterfitted relatively easily, the cost of doing so would mean you would spend more money than you made. As for the notes, all except the fifty has more or less the same securit
feature as the 200 kroner note (roughtly worth 29½USD as of
today). The fifty will be updated soon I guess, to give it a Intaglio print and foil hologram stripe like the others have. The amount of counterfeited notes has dropped significantly since the introduction of this single measure... as it is impossible to scan, let alone print, without specialised equipment.
So it's (relatively) easy to make money that is hard to counterfeit, easy to tell apart, easy to see if it the real deal, impossible to 'leach', and - to quote my girlfriend from West Virginia - looks very pretty. The only thing stopping you is the inertia in the system...
Off topic, but the dollar has been falling like a rock the last few days... good news for me who's just about to go on vacation to the US, bad news for Norway, who earn a lot of cash selling oil...
He played the snotty little whizzkid who managed to get into everybody's hair and save the Enterprice at tyhe same time... and no, I didn't particulary like his character.
Then again, I have found TNG to be all but filled with onedimensinal characters and all too simple, often recycled plots... even if Troi - in her non-standard Starfleet uniform - fetured in a a couple of boyhood dreams.
...as well as deathtreats, flaming dog-do on your front door and drive-by TPing of your home; don't spam or otherwise piss off a lot of geeks.
Or, if you live in Norway (and I recon several other places offer this as well), tell the postal service that you don't want the junkmail... It still won't stop the rest of the nasties, but your postbox won't fill up as you stomp out the burning poo.
Why settle for second best when you can write in the klingon
alphabet? If there has to be a written record of what the patient speaks, and the patient for some reason only speaks klingon, then we may assume that he also reads it.. and at least here there is a rule that says that a patient can demand to see his papers - and then they better be in a launguage he understands.
...getting a low score on your SAT means you're stupid*, unless you want to score low, in which cause a low score is nerdy... it makes a weid kind of sense.
Disclaimer: We don't have SATs in Norway. However, we do run all our raw military recruits (and remeber we have a military system based on conscriptions) thru a simular sets of tests which includes mathskills, skills in norwegian, skills in english, logicskills and a light touch at the physical sciences. Never heard of anyone willingly aiming for a bad score, as that would land them in a shitty job...
*) Wether a person is 'stupid' or 'smart' has little to do with raw inteligense.
Even hydraulic actuators have electromechanical servo valves...
Close, but not always true. Having worked with several kinds of aircraft, both old and older (F-16, F-5, Dassult Jetfalcon and C-130 to mention the fixedwings), I know for a fact that while a fly-by-wire system, ie; a system where the controllsignals are transmitted via electric signals, have electromechanical servo valves. Every fly-by-real-wire (aka fly-by-steelrope) system I've worked on however, have purely mechanical servovalves, operated by what we refers to as a 'quadrant' - a simple mechanical analog computer which takes it inputs from the strearingsignal, the position of the aerodynamic surface (this is known as the feedback signal) and other sources (gear down or not & flaps down or not in the case of the F-5's tailplane and ailerons) and sends a mechanical signal to the servo which then opens a valve to operate the hydraulic sylinder. As the sylinder moves, the aerodynamic surface move, which changes the feedbacksignal, until the aerodynamic surface is at the commanded position and the output from the quadrant is nil - ie; closing the servovalve.
So yes, an HERF gun could possible mess up the servoactuators in modern aircraft - but it wouldn't and couldn't affect the servoactuators of a non-fly-by-electric-wire aircraft. It can still play merry hell with the avionics though.
Interesting.. I thought I knew what those words meant until I started thinking about it... but that won't stop me from giving it a stab:
unauthorized: Exposure of information / access to systems to / by individuals not authorized to receive it / access the system.
access: 1. The ability and means necessary to store data in, to retrieve data from, to communicate with, or to make use of any resource of a system. 2. To obtain the use of a resource. 3. [The] capability and opportunity to gain detailed knowledge of or to alter information or material. 4. [The] ability and means to communicate with (i.e. , input to or receive output from), or otherwise make use of any information, resource, or component in an AIS. Note [for 3 and 4]: An individual does not have "access" if the proper authority or a physical, technical, or procedural measure prevents him/her from obtaining knowledge or having an opportunity to alter information, material, resources, or components. 5. An assigned portion of system resources for one data stream of user communications or signaling.
But if we found life on Titan, it would likely be in the very early stages and it wouldn't be particularly interesting. So I don't see why we're making a huge fuss over it.
Taking this logic to the extreme, we should only bother to look for not just life, but actuall civilications at least as advanced as our own.. right?
Wrong! By looking somewhere close and looking for something roughtly simular to the various forms of life we know from earth we can learn a lot. First and foremost, we'll learn that the earth isn't anything special. There is life out there, not just in our imagination, not just around distant stars, but basicly right out there in our own back yard. True, there could exist siliconbased life in the volcanoes on Venus - possible with a life-chemestry analog to the one we find in creatures here on earth that lives near black smokers - but it's a good idea to go look places where we and our probes can surive first, isn't it?
And maybe we are looking in the right place for the right thing. You never know before you actually takes a look...
I'm all for civilians building and launcing their own suborbital or orbital crafts, but it'll never recapture the thrill of the early spaceflights. Unless, off course, someone with money gets the same idea as I just got as I read the article:
The Gusmobile, better known as Gemeni, is close to the perfect 'light spaceship'. All around the Gemini was considered the ultimate 'pilot's spacecraft', and it was also popular with engineers because of its extremely light weight. It ought to be possible with todays advances in electronics and metalurgy to build a replica - or better; a fleet of replicas - that are semiautomatic and reusable. Bring back the Rogallo wing (basicly a cross between a paraglider and a hangglider) it was intended to have in the first place to fasilitate GPS guided landings on dry land. Launch it with a semi-reusable rocket (first stage reusable, possible solid, second stage disposable).
Now here is the core of the idea; don't offer people just a ride with five or ten minutes of microgravity. Offer them some basic training to let them control the attitude of their craft during non-vital parts of the flight (vital parts should be guided by a onboard computer or from the ground), and offer them a day or a week in space. It won't be cheap, but it'll give people a change to really experience the thrill of spaceflight.
Off course, I don't have the money to realise this idea, and it probaly ain't that original anyhow. But I'll place it in the public domain - if anyone reading this wants to do it, you have my blessing and my best wishes.
And you derive that from one conversation with one person?
No, I derive that from years of knowing several people from the US, being part of the HNST (Host Nation Support Team) a number of thimes when US troops have visited Norway for various excercises and having a fiance / inlaws from West Virginia. I just used a recent encounter with one to make a point. As a general rule, people in the US is quite nice, polite and fun to party with. But also, as a general rule, they show a disturbing lack of knowledge of the world outside of the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Since its inception almost 30 years ago, the internet has been transformed from a primitive device for sharing thoughts and ideas, into a massive network where people pay to connect and read advertisements they don't want, while calling each other "asshats".
Sounds painfully like Fark.com to me.. and to a lesser extent, Slashdot.
No, it is not a solution to the fact that you can't make a GPU act like a CPU, it is a solution for those who need redundancy, sometimes want to emphasise graphics (allthought less than a full blown GPU might offer) and sometimes wants to emphasise raw processing power, and who might want the flexibility such a solutin might give them.
And it isn't that different from a quad-pentium system, apart from the fact that I suggest reassigning the CPUs according to what the system needs - ie dedicating one, two or even three of the CPUs to act as GPUs if you need graphics, having them act as SPUs (Sound Processing Units) if you want lots of sound processed and as ordinary CPU if you just want to process data. You may even want to run them as two or four seperate computers (thats what I meant when I called them 'cores') if you desire. It's distrebuted computing inside your own boxen.
I'm not saying it's a good idea for a homesystem. I'm not saying it's a new idea. I'm just saying it's the idea that popped into my head as I read the article.
For those heavily into graphics and games, using a GPU as a CPU (or a CPU as a GPU) might not be all that good a solution, as the GPU is a specialised bit of silicon whereas the CPU is a general piece of silicon.
However, I got this sudden flash of the obvious, where you build a "multi-core" computer, ie a computer with several CPUs. one or more CPU(s) can be assigned to work as the GPU(s) if needed, and then be reassigned to work as ordinary CPUs when raw processingpower is more needed than graphics output. True, such a system would need a total rewrite of the OS, but I'm sure we'll have a Linux-port running on it quickly enought.
While this idea might not yield the raw graphicspower a seperate GPU can offer us, it would allow us to have a computer that would upgrade or degrade it's capabilities as needed, and with enought 'cores' and a well written OS, we could have redundancy against all sorts of damage and so forth. Something for the spaceprograme / military / missioncritical server assembly perhaps?
While ignoring the problem of getting Joe Blow (or as we call him here, Ola Dunk) to install and use PGP or a simular piece of software to encrypt / decrypt our emails, I see one huge problem with your suggestion.
Your public key has to be listed somewhere in order to let people send you mail. Not only does this gives away your key to the spammers, but you'll be likely to list your e-mail next to it (at least, thats what the one keysite I have taken a look at did) so you also gives the spammer your working e-mail adress...
Yes, they may 'burn throught a whole lot of clock cycles' to get the spam out, but so would we do in decrypting it and the rest of our mail. And since the spammer is likely to be able to afford mewer, better, faster hardware than Joe Blow (or Ola Dunk for that matter) are...
Nice idea, but it won't fly. If you can make encrypted e-mail the accepted standard, if the avrage, non-geek user is able to both install and use it, then the spammers would just throw money at the problem until it wasn't a problem for them any more.
Say what you want about the britsh parliment, but they got style. Boored with the debate? Put your feet on the table. Dislike what the fellow is talkign about? Boo on him. Time for a vote? Ring bells like a victorian firebrigade and walk thru one of two doors.
It may be oldfashioned (the two sides are two swordslength apart I'm told, to stop the representatives from killing one another), but it works rather well at taking the will of the people and turning it into practical politics (as opposed to the will of the cooperations).
Meaningless trivea; I'm told you only need three lords in the House of Lords for it to be a legal session - which means that two crazy lords can plunge the UK into chaos.
I assume that the mediaplayers he tried to use (which, judging by the way the article is worded, is the default player on each system) failed to 'pick it up' when he inserted the disc. Most, if not all, CD-burning software I am aware of is able to make a copy of a CD even if the format isn't recogniced - usefull when I copy a CD with a linux-distro on it on a Win9x box.
Having just skimmed the bit about the N-gage.. It is a phone.. with a small gameboy-like device built into it. or possible a hand held gameconsolle with a phone inside - same difference.
So, either some bastard will call me just as I'm about to beat the highscore... or the batteries will be dead from me playing to much games, so I'll miss that vital call. Neitehr sounds like a deal to me.
I may be old skool here, but I much prefer my handheld game to be seperate from my phone, and both to be seperate from my PDA (even thought I do play some games on the later). That way, I'll never miss my calls or have to end my game to take the phone.. and as every old skool nerd knows; the more gadgets, the better. Still, I can see how this may go down well with those who gets a device just because it is new and thus cool - and it looks pretty neat too. Have anyone here one of these and can give some info on how it is in actuall use?
Intrestingly enought, european money seem to be more focused towards making it hard to copy as well as making it easy to see if it's a counterfeight. Many of the ideas used in the swiss note is used in Norwegian banknotes as well:
- Portrait watermark and security thread. When the banknote
is held up to the light, you can see the security thread,
a dark line bearing the text Norges Bank.
- Fluorescent print on the front. In addition, a narrow
strip on both sides of the foil stripe will light up in
ultraviolet light.
- Intaglio print, meaning that the print is slightly raised
(try that on a inkjet...)
- Foil hologram stripe
- Snowflake with a hidden N, tilt the note to
spot it
- Mother-of-pearl effect, tilt the note and marvel at the
changing colours
- A register mark on both sides of the banknote. If the
banknote is held up to the light, the mark will be
completely filled and the ornament will appear
symmetrical.
- When the banknote is exposed to ultraviolet light, part
of the print as well as small fibres in the paper become
fluorescent.
- Microtext hidden in parts of the design.
I like the idea of a raised section for the visually impared thought.. lets hope that comes in the Series VIII notes... which should come about 2015 or thereabouts.As for your last comment... without saying anything more on the issue, I think the avrage US citizen is up for a rude surprice one of these days. Suddenly, their money is worth a lot less...
A lot of nations are doing this these days... here in Norway we have a hologram as one of the security feature of the 200 kroner note (roughtly worth 29½USD as of today), but then all our notes except the fifty has it. And I recoon the fifty will have it soon as well.
It stands up very well against everyday wear and tear - even survived a trip in the washingmachine wihtout any trouble (so did the rest of the bill).
While I'm not sure what other nations does, I expect most of them to do something simular to how Norway does it:
So you got eleven years to take those notes out of your mattres, walk down to the bank and exchange them into newer, safer notes. Or you could do like everyone else and keep the money in a bankaccount where they'll earn you interest. After all, private bank deposits are garanteed by the nation - even if the bank should topple your money is safe there... or rather, here.
Yeah, they're including new security features. That's cool and all, but how often do people really check them? ...goes on quoting the bit about leaching, ie washing away the ink to print a higher value note on the same paper.
That's the most troublesome thing about it, IMO.
I'm not going to make any friends here today, but honestly I find US notes to be boring and unimagninative. All the same size, rougthly the same design (even thought that is changing for the better with this new 20) and - from an european, or rather norwegian, point of view - all to easy to make a passable, if not perfect, copy off.
Lets compare this to a currence which I'm very familiar with, ie the Norwegian notes (click on each note to bring up more information on each) and coins. While the coins could be counterfitted relatively easily, the cost of doing so would mean you would spend more money than you made. As for the notes, all except the fifty has more or less the same securit feature as the 200 kroner note (roughtly worth 29½USD as of today). The fifty will be updated soon I guess, to give it a Intaglio print and foil hologram stripe like the others have. The amount of counterfeited notes has dropped significantly since the introduction of this single measure... as it is impossible to scan, let alone print, without specialised equipment.
So it's (relatively) easy to make money that is hard to counterfeit, easy to tell apart, easy to see if it the real deal, impossible to 'leach', and - to quote my girlfriend from West Virginia - looks very pretty. The only thing stopping you is the inertia in the system...
Off topic, but the dollar has been falling like a rock the last few days... good news for me who's just about to go on vacation to the US, bad news for Norway, who earn a lot of cash selling oil...
Easy - I still don't own my first PC
Easier, I still use mine to program and play on. ;
He played the snotty little whizzkid who managed to get into everybody's hair and save the Enterprice at tyhe same time... and no, I didn't particulary like his character.
Then again, I have found TNG to be all but filled with onedimensinal characters and all too simple, often recycled plots... even if Troi - in her non-standard Starfleet uniform - fetured in a a couple of boyhood dreams.
...as well as deathtreats, flaming dog-do on your front door and drive-by TPing of your home; don't spam or otherwise piss off a lot of geeks.
Or, if you live in Norway (and I recon several other places offer this as well), tell the postal service that you don't want the junkmail... It still won't stop the rest of the nasties, but your postbox won't fill up as you stomp out the burning poo.
Why settle for second best when you can write in the klingon alphabet? If there has to be a written record of what the patient speaks, and the patient for some reason only speaks klingon, then we may assume that he also reads it.. and at least here there is a rule that says that a patient can demand to see his papers - and then they better be in a launguage he understands.
"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."
Honestly, while it's all fun and games, did this bit of science learn us anything new?
Unless they sign up for officer-training? No.
...getting a low score on your SAT means you're stupid*, unless you want to score low, in which cause a low score is nerdy... it makes a weid kind of sense.
Disclaimer: We don't have SATs in Norway. However, we do run all our raw military recruits (and remeber we have a military system based on conscriptions) thru a simular sets of tests which includes mathskills, skills in norwegian, skills in english, logicskills and a light touch at the physical sciences. Never heard of anyone willingly aiming for a bad score, as that would land them in a shitty job...
*) Wether a person is 'stupid' or 'smart' has little to do with raw inteligense.
Even hydraulic actuators have electromechanical servo valves...
Close, but not always true. Having worked with several kinds of aircraft, both old and older (F-16, F-5, Dassult Jetfalcon and C-130 to mention the fixedwings), I know for a fact that while a fly-by-wire system, ie; a system where the controllsignals are transmitted via electric signals, have electromechanical servo valves. Every fly-by-real-wire (aka fly-by-steelrope) system I've worked on however, have purely mechanical servovalves, operated by what we refers to as a 'quadrant' - a simple mechanical analog computer which takes it inputs from the strearingsignal, the position of the aerodynamic surface (this is known as the feedback signal) and other sources (gear down or not & flaps down or not in the case of the F-5's tailplane and ailerons) and sends a mechanical signal to the servo which then opens a valve to operate the hydraulic sylinder. As the sylinder moves, the aerodynamic surface move, which changes the feedbacksignal, until the aerodynamic surface is at the commanded position and the output from the quadrant is nil - ie; closing the servovalve.
So yes, an HERF gun could possible mess up the servoactuators in modern aircraft - but it wouldn't and couldn't affect the servoactuators of a non-fly-by-electric-wire aircraft. It can still play merry hell with the avionics though.
Interesting.. I thought I knew what those words meant until I started thinking about it... but that won't stop me from giving it a stab:
unauthorized: Exposure of information / access to systems to / by individuals not authorized to receive it / access the system.
access: 1. The ability and means necessary to store data in, to retrieve data from, to communicate with, or to make use of any resource of a system. 2. To obtain the use of a resource. 3. [The] capability and opportunity to gain detailed knowledge of or to alter information or material. 4. [The] ability and means to communicate with (i.e. , input to or receive output from), or otherwise make use of any information, resource, or component in an AIS. Note [for 3 and 4]: An individual does not have "access" if the proper authority or a physical, technical, or procedural measure prevents him/her from obtaining knowledge or having an opportunity to alter information, material, resources, or components. 5. An assigned portion of system resources for one data stream of user communications or signaling.
Thanks to google and Federal Standard 1037C.
But if we found life on Titan, it would likely be in the very early stages and it wouldn't be particularly interesting. So I don't see why we're making a huge fuss over it.
Taking this logic to the extreme, we should only bother to look for not just life, but actuall civilications at least as advanced as our own.. right?
Wrong! By looking somewhere close and looking for something roughtly simular to the various forms of life we know from earth we can learn a lot. First and foremost, we'll learn that the earth isn't anything special. There is life out there, not just in our imagination, not just around distant stars, but basicly right out there in our own back yard. True, there could exist siliconbased life in the volcanoes on Venus - possible with a life-chemestry analog to the one we find in creatures here on earth that lives near black smokers - but it's a good idea to go look places where we and our probes can surive first, isn't it?
And maybe we are looking in the right place for the right thing. You never know before you actually takes a look...
Chutes and waterlanding also menas you need a lot of vessels out on the water to pick it up, which will drive up the costs considerable.
Tonight on Scrapheap Challenge: Two teams build and launch manned suborbital capsules - from what they can find on the scrapheap!
I'm all for civilians building and launcing their own suborbital or orbital crafts, but it'll never recapture the thrill of the early spaceflights. Unless, off course, someone with money gets the same idea as I just got as I read the article:
The Gusmobile, better known as Gemeni, is close to the perfect 'light spaceship'. All around the Gemini was considered the ultimate 'pilot's spacecraft', and it was also popular with engineers because of its extremely light weight. It ought to be possible with todays advances in electronics and metalurgy to build a replica - or better; a fleet of replicas - that are semiautomatic and reusable. Bring back the Rogallo wing (basicly a cross between a paraglider and a hangglider) it was intended to have in the first place to fasilitate GPS guided landings on dry land. Launch it with a semi-reusable rocket (first stage reusable, possible solid, second stage disposable).
Now here is the core of the idea; don't offer people just a ride with five or ten minutes of microgravity. Offer them some basic training to let them control the attitude of their craft during non-vital parts of the flight (vital parts should be guided by a onboard computer or from the ground), and offer them a day or a week in space. It won't be cheap, but it'll give people a change to really experience the thrill of spaceflight.
Off course, I don't have the money to realise this idea, and it probaly ain't that original anyhow. But I'll place it in the public domain - if anyone reading this wants to do it, you have my blessing and my best wishes.
And you derive that from one conversation with one person?
No, I derive that from years of knowing several people from the US, being part of the HNST (Host Nation Support Team) a number of thimes when US troops have visited Norway for various excercises and having a fiance / inlaws from West Virginia. I just used a recent encounter with one to make a point. As a general rule, people in the US is quite nice, polite and fun to party with. But also, as a general rule, they show a disturbing lack of knowledge of the world outside of the US.