Like just about any major software project, getting the basics down and being able to accomplish about 90% to 95% of all of the objectives takes about 10% of the work. It is those last little bits that always seem to get you, and in the world of web browsers that would be the killer part.
Dealing with the basic text formatting rules (making different font sizes, displaying bold, italics, hyperlinks (in another color), colorizing backgrounds, etc. can be done fairly quickly. Adding images would be a little more daunting, but still can be done along similar lines. A real challenge would be to add buttons, list boxes, and other input fields. Finally, dealing with http post queries and mapped regions would add yet more complexity. By the time you start adding Javascript, other scripting interfaces like Java itself, and even further adding general plug-ins for movie codecs and other fun stuff you then finally got almost a commercial web browser.
That is the trick. A basic HTML renderer for some sub-set of HTML is easy enough. The quirky "bugs" in some web browser that some web designers take advantage of (I.E. designing only for Internet Explorer, for example) to make a web page look "neat" can also be a headache to try and reproduce. Often most web browser designers don't deal with compatability, but instead try to just stick with W3C specs, and only try for this unstandard compatability as a very secondary issue.
If it can be changed with software (I.E. through any application you can point and click with), and depending on your current user privilege settings (I.E. if you are logged in as Administrator... very common for a single-user situation, less likely in a multi-user work situation or as a student in a well-run computer lab), that software can alter any settings just as if you had clicked on anything in the control panel.
Yes, that is scary.
In fact, the security zoning is just changing a few flags in some minor API calls, and a good hacker knows how to flip bits. It really is that simple, and you can in theory set yourself up as an administrator even if you don't have "Administrator" priveleges. Microsoft officially "discourages" this sort of behavior, but it still can be done.
This mess is far worse than you can possibly imagine in this regard.
I (embaressingly) discontinued my AOL service recently and had to describe some of the "reasons" for my disatisfaction. I was tactful, but basically said "I hate the f#%*&(@#%&*( service!"
The operator I was talking to (you can sign up on-line, but they try to talk you out of disconnecting so that option has to be done by phone) tried to see if I was disappointed with the web service, and specifically any security problems.
I happened to mention that I would recommend that people doing and web browsing should use any web browser other than Internet Explorer. He said "Really?"
I replied "Absolutely! That is the single largest security hole on a Windows-based computer system."
He replied "Seriously. I want to know about this for my own personal reasons, not having to do with AOL."
I went over some of the cookie issues, the DCOM issues, and scripting problems that can bring a virus into your system even if you are reading a normal information page. I also mentioned I used Mozilla. Remember, this is AOL, the parent company of Netscape.
He replied at that point "Where do I get Mozilla?". I told him it was a free download from mozilla.org
He then thanked me for this "revelation", and by the tone of his voice it really was news to him.
I still got the service disconnected, but in this case I got at least one more person clued in on these problems. And that was about 2 months ago I had this conversation.
P.S. I originally got AOL because it was easy for my wife to use it at home, and she was in fact the one who got it installed in the first place. My current ISP is considerably cheaper and has a much better terms of use policy, not to mention much higher quality of service. It is just much more geek-orientated, particularly compared to AOL, and she (my wife) is still trying to totally understand that the ISP and the web browser don't have to be from the same company.
That is not what they are talking about. Internet Explorer allows you to embed IE inside of another application. You can even put a different name on the taskbar and call it another application, even with your own icon. In theory, some scam artist could write their own "web browser" in about 15 minutes. The problem here is that you really are using Internet Explorer, even if you are claiming to be some other application.
More often this is used in applications like AOL (IE is the default browser in AOL), where they use this ActiveX component to display web content. I think AOL uses their own e-mail system, however. You can also see this in the Real Player application, again if they are going to display web content instead of playing music or an audio/video clip. (Try this if you have Real Player.) Other application also use this, in things like About boxes or even a cool splash screen when you start an application. Sometimes they even do full TCP/IP http requests for content, including machine-specific data. A good security hole if I ever heard of one, and a cheap and easy spy app as well.
Mozilla does not use the I.E. rendering engine... they have their very own, so they don't need it. A while back it was a common task for CS instructors to assign students to make their own HTML rendering engine. I wrote one myself just to see if it could be done. Not a beginner task, but still something well within the capabilities of any recent CS college graduate (if they actually taught you anything).
The problem here is that the fraud charges really don't get filed all that often. Or at least some managers try to get away with it as much as they can.
I know of local restaruants who have been shut down because of health code violations, and that usually means open sewers, mice/rats crawling through supplies, and not cleaning the grill for several weeks. I mean real winners of a restaurant.
On something so obsure like you are describing, I can see that happening all the time. I had some experiences with a gas station in NYC (I live in Utah) that got ahold of my credit card. They charged over $300 dollars (which was my credit limit). The credit card company refunded the theft, but to the best of my knowledge never did anything to the folks that stole my number. Oh, and the card was stolen directly out of the mail in NYC itself.
This is slightly offtopic, (although simoniker did sort of throw the bone out regarding Simpsons episodes) but I'd like to point out that "Homer Goes To College" was also one of the very first popular cultural references to the internet. Although it doesn't describe it directly, they are refering to USENET discussion groups.
Simpsons does a pretty good job regarding a reflection of popular American culture, even better than the Flintstones or Jetsons (of admittedly a much earlier era). The episode of "Marge vs. the Monorail" shows a common popular conception regarding mass-transit proposals and in particular common perception of monorails. That a monorail is also an amusement park ride at Disneyland makes it all that more "unreal" and the stuff of bloated budgets.
What the Las Vegas monorail does here is that it "legitimizes" the concept of a monorail as a mass transit system, particularly if it starts to go places off of the strip. UNLV and the airport are particularly positive signs that this can be a very real transportation hub transfer system.
IMHO, one reason that railroads are suffering in the USA is because they didn't really link up too well with other transportation systems, particularly airports. I like the fact that O'Hare airport in Chicago has an "El" station right in the airport. JFK International in NYC also does this with the NYC subway. In most other cases major airports are only connected to freeways at best, with all other transportation systems ignored, which at the present time also tends to kill off the other transportation systems that can't get there. If Las Vegas links up with the airport, it can be used as a major transportation system, and not just a casino play toy.
Fortunately, unfortunately that is going to be the extent of it. I hope that sometime before the end of THIS century some sort of probe will actually make it to Saturn, this time exclusively to study the ring systems themselves. It would be cool to intentionally do a rendevous with one of the moons within the ring system, and perhaps even try to land, or even do a little "moon hopping" around the ring system. The is much to learn about what is going on.
From my own look of the rings, there are some strong mathmatical harmonics going on... worthy of at least a few master's degrees if not a couple of PhDs with these photos alone. Perhaps the most intriguing are the scalloped rings that were found. This is going to be a career maker for somebody when they finally figure out the celestial mechanics regarding how this could have been done. This photo also seems to have a moire pattern between the pixel resolution of the CCD camera and the rings on Ring A. That is a significant finding in itself, and can be used to determine the approximate size of the smaller ringlets that form Ring A. (I.E. rougly the same arc angle that a single pixel would have on the probe camera... that is quite tiny to be honest, and suggests some uniformity of the ringlets as well, or even suggesting mean particle size in the rings.)
That is just my casual observations as a very amature astronomer. The Pros are certainly going to have a fun couple of months ahead, particularly if they are into planetary astronomy.
It has to start somewhere, but I hope it doesn't get "terminated" from ever getting expanded like the Space Needle monorail in Seattle.
I regret that Salt Lake City didn't go this route. There have already been several deaths due to light rail in downtown SLC on a relitvely new system, with a major expansion being proposed. Downtown SLC is totally messed up now, and much of that could have/should have been dealt with by having an elevated platform of some sort instead. Monorails would have made it fit in around many of the buildings there including the historic Temple Square district. The overhead wires also tend to distract from the view as well when looking from street-level.
As a passenger on a BART train once that was stuck at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, I could tell you of an experience where we were "trapped" there for three hours. The motor burned out and you could smell a strong scent of Ozone. Finally they hooked another train to the one I was riding on and "towed" the train to a station, where we got out... no apologies or anything.
I would have to agree though that passenger evacuation via catwalks are there mainly to give an illusion to safety, and generally they wouldn't be used except for during heavy maintainence, in which case you are probably walking around on the track itself anyway (as a maintainence worker). The same would also be true for monorails in terms of rail service (checking for cement cracks, replacing deteriorating sections, etc.)
I'm not even sure if the "Paris Gun" could hit 50,000 feet. (The gun that the Germans used in WWI to hit Paris from 20 miles out). I think that you would have to have some missiles or something similar, and even then it would have to be a class "M" engine to get that high. With a pretty good guidance system as well (not just a quick up and down rocket like a typical hobbiest would have). Blimps capable of doing anything worthwhile for wireless coverage would have to be about that high, although altitude would vary quite a bit depending on the time of day and current weather conditions (primarily temperature... at the upper altitudes as well.)
This is precisely why I pounded on RMS last time I saw him regarding open-source specifications. In some ways, if you perpetuate propritary specs (like DVD-Video or even GIF), even if your software is free and open source, it still can be killed. Only specs like Morse Code are truly in the public domain due to age, and the RFCs can be just as killer as the ECMA documents.
BTW, this includes almost universal specs like RS-232 or even PCI. Personally, I think specifications should be uncopyrightable, but that is a totally seperate issue than what is being talked about here. Spec books can be copyrighted, but the specs themselves (pin ID's, function names, expected parameters, etc.) should be in theory capable of being copied and sent to anybody as long as you make original materials describing these specs. This isn't necessarily the case at the moment.
P.S. RMS didn't think it was really that big of a deal, and at the time (about 2 years ago) he thought that free software could get along just fine with propriatary specifications. I don't know if he or any "leaders" of the FOSS movement have given it much thought either.
Mono is only going for the ECMA standards. If Microsoft decides to push hard and change what dotNET does, either it will be pulled into Mono very quickly (the entire underlying subsystem is already in place for Mono), or it will be ignored, much to the regret of Microsoft.
In the world of API libraries, it is developer mindshare, and I don't think you can ignore Mono and be considered a good dotNet programmer. With Mono being open source, I don't see it getting killed as a project.
I expect that you will start seeing many software developer positions asking for 3+ years of programming experience in Mono real soon. It would be interesting if that happens.
The key to making sure software is portable using C# is making sure you are sticking with ECMA standard library features. If you use a Windows API library function, you are sunk and stuck to the Win32 platform (potentially Wine or ReactOS, but more likely just WinXP).
You might be surprised, however, with USB. Many port I/O routines are common to both Windows and Linux (from the perspective of a C#/CLR program), so you might not have to worry so much about that as an issue. More than likely the big problems would come from the GUI compatability issues, which are not trivial.
Right now, in that respect, Mono is still a little rough. Keep in mind that this is open-source software, so if you help write some routines that can help improve the cross-platform compatability issues, it would be greatly appreciated. It is through efforts like the one that you are mentioning that have made Mono where it is right now.
First of all, Microsoft has been directly helping the Mono project, in terms of technical assistance. While this doesn't solve the patent issue, it does show a certain culpability on the part of Microsoft, and it would be a big fly in the ointment if MS decided to file a lawsuit.
Also, Mono is much closer to a "clean-room" development model, based almost exclusively on the API libraries and reverse engineering of data formats to become more compatable with MS function calls. Although Mono started with the core components being compiled with the free dotNet compiler from MS, it has been self-compiling for some time now.
The anti-trust issues won't help out MS either if they file a lawsuit against Novell. Novell has some relatively deep pockets, and it would be in their interest to get into a legal fight with Microsoft, particuarly one that MS initiated. From a sheer anti-trust viewpoint it would not be a good thing for MS to engage in something like this directly, and it could only be a direct threat from MS that would amount to be worth anything, unlike the SCO fiasco. No hiding behind serrogates for this fight. Furthermore, MS would risk a counter suit from several parties (Miguel to start with) if they tried to get the software pulled, potentially costing MS quite a bit of money.
Almost all of mono is derived from the ECMA documents, which also state rather clearly (with formal waivers signed by Microsoft) that anybody is free to create their own implementation of those standards.
Where the Mono Project could run into problems is if somebody (in a really stupid moment) decided to include some "shared source" source code from MS into Mono. This would be the same issue that Linux is facing from SCO, and when that goes to court it will have a final court ruling on that issue. If SCO wins by some act of God, it will become a huge issue for almost all open source/free software projects, not just Mono. I don't know if the courts have the political will to shut down a multi-billion dollar industry that easily over a technical ruling. Besides, the remedies to fix an issue like that are very easily done, and can even be done in a very pristine "clean room" atmosphere to replace any code that caused problems like that.
I would have no problem testifying in court that Mono and dotNet are two totally different pieces of software, from benchmarks and I/O behavior to variable names and even Mono-only software classes.
What is going to be interesting is that Mono, now that they are at version 1.0, is going to be in a position to actually drive mindshare with this system. I predict that you will seem MS backporting some of the mono class features (including method names... even a mono.* class naming system) into standard dotNet. The question would then become who is driving the development for whom?
Yes, I dont trust Microsoft, and won't rely upon their goodwill. True as well, if you had developed a completely independent virtual OS (like dotNet or Java), there might not be as much to argue here, but then again, you might even be in more danger of violating a patent, simply because you weren't aware of it.
I think a much bigger threat for a submarine patent that would threaten Mono would come from Sun, or even some silly 3rd party that filed a patent 5-10 years ago covering virtual operating systems. The concern then is not with Microsoft, but with the USPTO instead.
They still sold millions of the things as recently as the 1970's. As soon as the EPA started to get involved with the auto industry, they disappeared.
That is the point I'm making, that the anti-SVU folks totally dismiss what happened to this line of vehicles. SUV's are the station wagons of the 21st Century.
Station Wagons offered much better road stability than SUVs, and in general offered about the same safety factors (mainly because they were so big). If your Dad has a negative reaction to them, ask why? I bet he never took one to a drive-in movie then.:)
As a kid I was a part of a scrum of almost 15 kids that squeezed into one on a weekly basis for some kids-type activity. This would be totally illegal today for many reasons, but was commonly accepted. The #1 problem with station wagons was in regards to the rear door, that often moved in two directions... sometimes simultaneously (when you didn't want it to that). Seats would fold down in a manner similar to most SUVs do today, so you could haul a bunch of stuff.
Look, that was something of the past, and I'll admit that. They aren't around though, not because consumers wouldn't buy them but rather because the government screwed up the markets to the point nobody could buy cars like this. Station wagons are technically cars, and have much stricter emmissions and economy standards. Car companies simply couldn't make them because of these regulations.
You also forget the death of the Station Wagon. It is the loss of this vehicle class (primarily due to fuel economy regulations) that has pushed SUVs into the mainstream. If you have more than a couple of kids, you need to have a larger vehicle and an SUV is now the only choice you have, unless you buy a bus.
The station wagon was a standard staple of middle America for many years, and helped haul millions of children to football and baseball practice. If a car company wants to sell them in America, they are forced by regulations to sell several cheap cars (like the Geo Metro). SUVs don't have this same restriction. Mini Vans also help cover some of this, but even a Mini Van doesn't deal with everything you could haul in an old fashion station wagon. That's why I drive an SUV right now.
I think the analogy is more like trying to sail between Oahu and Midway, but yeah, there still is a pretty big gap of ocean there.
Check out this webpage to get further details. It is going to travel between the "F" and "G" rings, which are pretty faint by themselves. There will be a larger likely hood of running into something in that region of space, probabaly an order of magnitude higher than would normally be found within the Saturnian system of moons, but still fairly low.
It had nothing to do with "Big Money". While the concepts that went into VCDs and CDi certainly were used to make DVD-Video, it really is a totally different system. This is more like trying to compare ProDOS for the Apple ][ to Windows NT or Linux.
What makes me disapointed with the fact that the DVD-Video spec is so closed up is the fact that I know a bunch of hacker types would have a bunch of fun working with the format, and some really creative people could turn a DVD disc into something incredible using just a typical home DVD system. VCD wasn't nearly so versatile, has a much lower quality standard for both video and audio, and when using CD-ROM you need multiple discs in order to watch a movie at reasonable resolution.
There are multiple reasons for why VCD didn't catch on in the USA, which is another reason early DVD players didn't "play" VCD discs: There was absolutely no reason to get it to work and technically it was more junk to throw in the firmware anyway, becasue VCD really is signficantly different from DVD-Video on the data organization level. It had absolutely nothing to do with some "corrupt" Hollywood movie industry, but raw electrical engineering and software development. Have you ever thought about what it would take for you to design a DVD-Video player?
One other thing that also was a big factor in the early DVD players was the fact that the lasers used to read a DVD disc are tuned to a different frequency than what is commonly used for CDs. This is mainly due to the fact that with DVDs, the pits that mark "1s" and "0s" are much closer together. If you havn't really paid attention to the material science aspects of optical discs, the pits are so close together that an individual pit is close to the wavelength of visible light. That isn't accidental either. The reader head for DVDs had to get a second laser (tuned to a totally different frequency) added to the design so they could read CDs, particularly CD-R (which is where most of the heartburn came in the DVD industry... commercially pressed CDs were able to get detected with the DVD laser... something Hollywood would have prefered and did.) Mind you, if you have multiple lasers for error correction, each one of these redundant lasers also had to have an auxarilly laser coupled with them, and required seperate focusing adjustments, etc. All of this takes time and money.
FYI, do you know why the new "enhanced" DVD discs are called "BlueRay" or something like that? It is because the pits are so close together that now they have to use either a blue or ultraviolet laser in order to read the pits off of the disc. Of course, UV light has the tendancy of breaking down plastic polymers as well, so trying to find a good substrait that will hold the pits is also an issue. UVA light (one "color" of the ultraviolet band) isn't quite as destructive as say UVB, but it is an issue. It is one thing to use high energy radiation in a chip fab, but in a consumer electronic device, it starts to become a major issue.
Basically, the issues that you are talking about are due to physics and engineering, and not like some "greedy" person who can build a 100 MPG SUV with a simple redesign of the carborator but refuses to do so. And besides, most current DVD players will play a VCD, won't they?
I am kicking myself now for forgetting his name too.
I met him at COMDEX while I was visiting the Toshiba booth back in '97. I was in the process of writing a DVD-Video authoring system, and it was refreshing at the time to talk to somebody who actually had a clue regarding the internals of the format, and I got a few pointers from him at the time. What was particularly interesting, besides having him wander around the corporate booth unescorted by salesmen, was the fact he was hiding out in a comparatively obscure corner of the 10,000 sq. foot booth hanging around a bunch of chips and data sheets. A definite/. type geek here. If anybody can remember his name, I (and the/. crowd here) would totally appreciate it.
While Lieberfarb may get the credit, it was a bunch of geeks working primarily for the founders of the DVD Forum that actually got it working, and it was not an easy accomplishment. The Kareoke features of DVD, in particular, as well as oriental character encoding (which is why DVD uses sub-pictures rather than ASCII to encode text... a good idea BTW), show a strong bias toward Japanese companies and some really strange bureaucratic design compromises. I wish I knew more about the history of DVD-Video, but the format certainly whent through several design changes before it was formally released, including some major design goals that changed mid-way through the development process. I would like to see that story fully told.
I would have to agree with you. I saw this on the headlines and I thought "This is totally stupid to have on/.". Back when the 9/11 attacks themselves occured, the/. staff was hesitant about even putting something about it on the site, but because it did have a profound impact on geeks (including some/. readers in the WTC reading/. when the attacks took place... read the postings for more details). The news about the WTC attacks was posted simply becuase of widespread geek interest, and one of the few times I saw slashdot get slashdotted in a major way that was a hardcore test of the/. servers.
What does this movie have to do with "news for nerds"? It is controvercial and guarenteed to get a bunch of flaming replies all over the place. The techniques that Michael Moore used to make the film are not ground breaking in a technological sense, and other than having a clue about how to use a movie camera he doesn't really seem to really care about technology at all anyway. That isn't the point of this film.
The whole point of this film is to enflame people to discuss what is happening with the Bush administration, for good or ill. This is a political statement that should be discussed in a political setting. Discussions on MoveOn.org or RushLimbaugh.com are totally appropriate. Not on/.
Please don't do this. What is needed is for individuals to really study the issue, show that you have more than one or two brain cells, and intelligently explain why you may support/not support the new policy changes, and potentially suggest new directions to look at with this.
There are many very intelligent individuals here on/. of a very diverse background. What is needed here is not raw activism of the typical D.C. type, but rather people from outside the "weather" industry that can thoughtfully explain how data should not be kept locked up by private companies but needs to be kept free.
There seems to be a kneejerk reaction here with the/. crowd thinking NOAA is going to close up the electronic data products and make them only available to private industry for a high per user cost (like much else in the computer industry from stock quotes to mapping data). The truth is that I don't see any of this sort of thing going on, but rather some very hard working people in a low profit-margin business (even the most profitable companies don't really make that much money off of weather related products, and there is quite a bit of competition, not to mention relatively low barriers to entry, particularly compared to other industries). They are asking for legitimate debate, so study the facts first.
Honestly, I don't know what the issue is about specialized data formats other than XML. XML has its uses, but it is not necessarily the best data format for every situation. If you are a software developer worth anything, you should be able to take data in any binary data format, even if encrypted, and be able to pull all of the data out of that data format. XML is only one way to provide that data.
I will say that in addition to having much of the weather data collecting/processing being done at taxpayer expense, much of the weather data collection is done through a system that is largly volunteers. If you are interested in monitoring weather conditions, particularly if you live in a largely rural area (although urban areas can be of interest as well... it is just that there are many more people per sq. mile), you can volunteer to set up a weather station in your backyard and send the weather data to NOAA. Depending on the equipment you are willing to purchase, you can measure just about any atmospheric information that you can imagine, from pollution levels to current temperature and rainfall levels. Every data point that gives more detailed information helps to make the forecasting models more accurate. Sometimes NOAA will provide equipment, but you don't have wait for them to get it to you if you really want to volunteer and do this yourself (it just takes you own money if you go that route.) This is a stealthy Seti@Home like data project that has been going on for over 100 years, which is why you don't hear too much about it.
Some commercial enterprises (particularly local radio and television stations, as well as a few private airports, seaports, and trucking companies) have their own weather stations that even by themselves could provide a local forecast, but there is a data sharing agreement between everybody involved (even competing TV stations, for example) to share weather related data. Obviously this can be a very bandwidth intensive operation if you really think about all of the information that can be collected. Who pays for this bandwidth? There is nothing in the current proposals that would stop a distributed P2P weather data group from forming, and indeed it would probabaly be encouraged if you could come up with a good system. Really. The commercial weather guys would love it on many levels.
DISCLAIMER: I am not currently in the commercial weather industry. I had to help a couple of companies that were in the commerical weather industry to interface their products with some stuff that I was helping to develop, so I got a pretty good glimpse at some of the stuff they are developing, and some of the issues they d
If you are talking about a "capacitor" that would both store and dissapate energy, it would be the elevator cabling itself. Presumably, based on the design of the cabling, you could have several "cars" going both up and down the length.
This is where the tensile strength is so important (and the real technology killer item here if this is going to work). The cable has to be able to handle not only generalized stresses, but also localized stresses from individual cars. Portions of the cable would be moving either towards the earth's rotation or against it (depending on where the imbalence is occuring. In practice, this would have the cable with a "wavy" appearance going up to the end of the cable. The "broker" would have to be at far end of the cable, which would have to add extra delta-v or remove it if the cable got unbalanced too much.
One problem I can see right now is trying to dampen the "waves" that would come from the vehicles going up or down. This is a similar problem that electric utilities have to deal with when you add or remove equipment to the power grid: Extra power has to be generated when more stuff is added to the grid load (like a whole subdivision turning on their air conditioners), so to keep things balanced they have to start back-up generators or open more flood gates at the local hydro plant. Similar problems happen to try and keep the power at a nice 60 cycle sine wave, because some customers (like computer users) have equipment that really makes a mess of that power generation scheme. Other equipment requires that nice simple generation patter, so compensators are in the utility grid to smooth out those rough spots. This is one way to tell what a good electric utility is vs. one who doesn't care (with either situation above.)
This could also be "smoothed out" by giving just a slightly bit more mass to the cabling itself as well, adding redudancy and safety factors as well as allowing for heavier loads.
The real question is if there could be a "Tacoma Narrows" incident with a space elevator?
Estes rockets are essentially classified as fireworks rated for personal use. They have so many restrictions on how powerful they will go that they are considered "harmless" by the Federal government.
Now if you try to get a type "E" engine or type "F" (or worse yet, something rated even higher), that is when you have to start to draw blood and delivery instructions for your first born child.
I was mainly talking about Hurricanes and other storms, sea swells, and other weather/atmospheric problems that happen when you are out at sea. Most intelligent sea captains will steer their ships well out of harm's way and try to avoid the really nasty storms. If you are floating in one spot (like a giant city at sea), it is much harder to move to get away from those environmental issues. When 40' waves start to pound on you, how do you deal with them? A small craft simply rides out the storm, and a large boat simply ignores the waves. Of course you havn't see anything until you've seen a Nimitz-class Aircraft carrier get tossed around as if it were a child's toy. I don't even know how the pilots land on the ship in such weather, but I know it happens and have seen video footage of it happening. Raw skill and luck is my guess.
One other issue that you've neglected is dealing with resources. Water in particular, fresh clean drinking water and stuff needed to run a city in general, is going to be quite scarce although that can be taken care of with a desalinization plant. Food can be grown out in the middle of the ocean, including most of what you would like to eat. Growing space would have to be cultivated with an intensity that would rival Japanese farmers, simply because "real estate" is going to be a very precious commodity when at sea. Sure, there is plenty of acerage available for expansion, but to do that expansion is going to be very expensive, and will require materials that can't be made in that floating city immediately. A city of this nature could in theory become totally self-sufficient, but growing trees that would be strong enough for "expanding" the "raft" would still take quite a long period of time to grow.
I would grant that the level of technology necessary to maintain such a floating city is not nearly as great as maintaining a city in space. That said, there is a good reason this isn't happening, and perhaps we should try to see what other issues are involved in preventing such a floating city from actually happening.
While I can't think of what to extract from Mars, I can think of many things that would make it very convient to go to several asteroids, particularly to extract minerals that on Earth are scarace and/or in countries that may be hostile to the interests of one or more other countries on the Earth. I'm not talking just petroluem either. You can look at a periodic table and seem elements that are difficult to obtain on the Earth that in space can be extracted and found in different amounts, some to be mined extreamly cost-effectively with really the only real expense after the extraction is to somehow make a re-entry vehicle (actually, just an Earth Entry vehicle... it was never there to start with) that would safely bring in cargo. Ballistic trajectories would make sure it lands where you want it to be, and you can even put it on a glider-like vehicle. If it burns up accidently, all you've lost is a single shippment anyway, not bad for bulk goods.
As far as law-enforcement in concerned: This is an issue that is largely based on the size of the population. Once a group of people hits a certain size, they start needing police officers (under whatever name you want to use) to deal with the nut cases. In a small society you just get your neighbors to agree that the nut needs to be kicked out, and he is forced to leave and live without community support...the original definition of "Outlaw", where that person was out side the juristiction of the law, and if you wanted to do anything to an outlaw, the law would not stop you (including killing an outlaw just for the fun of it).
What stops a neighbor from taking over my land? A common agreement among the rest of the neighbors that he can't, or as a community we will punish somehow the agressive neighbor. If he is a real prick, I'll try to kill him first. That is life, and human societies at a real raw fundimental level. If I'm living in a society with professional law enforcement, I'll leave the ugly business to them.
You also mention that the majority of U.S. citizens don't see a motivation to move to Mars. I would also like to point out that a majority of Europeans also saw no reason for moving to America, even though many knew of individuals who did. And that is different about Mars how?
The critical thing to worry about is the 1/2 of 1% of the population that is very creative and really is the strength of any nation. This is the group that is more than likely (at least some elements of this group) that is going to be doing the move to outer space, not the majority of the population. Mass population movements like you are talking about only happen when it is forced, usually through war or extreame political oppression (like some stuff Hitler or Stalin did... or the U.S. Army for that matter).
When this very creative group moves into space, and they will regardless of whom is providing the transportation to get there, a great many things are going to start happening in space that will change all of mankind as a whole. Simply because it is a different environment will give new perspectives to approach problems that until now havn't been solved on the Earth.
I'm sorry if you don't see your freedoms being steped upon, but it is happening. I am trying to work within the American political system to try and reverse the trend, but it is not always successful. Now that the population of the USA can be measured as a substantial fraction of a billion people, societal scructures that I don't particularly like have formed and I want to get out. If you want to deal with what I'm leaving behind, go ahead, I'm not stopping you. Just try to stay out of my way while I'm leaving and don't put up any roadblocks or walls to stop me from leaving.
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Like just about any major software project, getting the basics down and being able to accomplish about 90% to 95% of all of the objectives takes about 10% of the work. It is those last little bits that always seem to get you, and in the world of web browsers that would be the killer part.
Dealing with the basic text formatting rules (making different font sizes, displaying bold, italics, hyperlinks (in another color), colorizing backgrounds, etc. can be done fairly quickly. Adding images would be a little more daunting, but still can be done along similar lines. A real challenge would be to add buttons, list boxes, and other input fields. Finally, dealing with http post queries and mapped regions would add yet more complexity. By the time you start adding Javascript, other scripting interfaces like Java itself, and even further adding general plug-ins for movie codecs and other fun stuff you then finally got almost a commercial web browser.
That is the trick. A basic HTML renderer for some sub-set of HTML is easy enough. The quirky "bugs" in some web browser that some web designers take advantage of (I.E. designing only for Internet Explorer, for example) to make a web page look "neat" can also be a headache to try and reproduce. Often most web browser designers don't deal with compatability, but instead try to just stick with W3C specs, and only try for this unstandard compatability as a very secondary issue.
If it can be changed with software (I.E. through any application you can point and click with), and depending on your current user privilege settings (I.E. if you are logged in as Administrator... very common for a single-user situation, less likely in a multi-user work situation or as a student in a well-run computer lab), that software can alter any settings just as if you had clicked on anything in the control panel.
Yes, that is scary.
In fact, the security zoning is just changing a few flags in some minor API calls, and a good hacker knows how to flip bits. It really is that simple, and you can in theory set yourself up as an administrator even if you don't have "Administrator" priveleges. Microsoft officially "discourages" this sort of behavior, but it still can be done.
This mess is far worse than you can possibly imagine in this regard.
I (embaressingly) discontinued my AOL service recently and had to describe some of the "reasons" for my disatisfaction. I was tactful, but basically said "I hate the f#%*&(@#%&*( service!"
The operator I was talking to (you can sign up on-line, but they try to talk you out of disconnecting so that option has to be done by phone) tried to see if I was disappointed with the web service, and specifically any security problems.
I happened to mention that I would recommend that people doing and web browsing should use any web browser other than Internet Explorer. He said "Really?"
I replied "Absolutely! That is the single largest security hole on a Windows-based computer system."
He replied "Seriously. I want to know about this for my own personal reasons, not having to do with AOL."
I went over some of the cookie issues, the DCOM issues, and scripting problems that can bring a virus into your system even if you are reading a normal information page. I also mentioned I used Mozilla. Remember, this is AOL, the parent company of Netscape.
He replied at that point "Where do I get Mozilla?". I told him it was a free download from mozilla.org
He then thanked me for this "revelation", and by the tone of his voice it really was news to him.
I still got the service disconnected, but in this case I got at least one more person clued in on these problems. And that was about 2 months ago I had this conversation.
P.S. I originally got AOL because it was easy for my wife to use it at home, and she was in fact the one who got it installed in the first place. My current ISP is considerably cheaper and has a much better terms of use policy, not to mention much higher quality of service. It is just much more geek-orientated, particularly compared to AOL, and she (my wife) is still trying to totally understand that the ISP and the web browser don't have to be from the same company.
That is not what they are talking about. Internet Explorer allows you to embed IE inside of another application. You can even put a different name on the taskbar and call it another application, even with your own icon. In theory, some scam artist could write their own "web browser" in about 15 minutes. The problem here is that you really are using Internet Explorer, even if you are claiming to be some other application.
More often this is used in applications like AOL (IE is the default browser in AOL), where they use this ActiveX component to display web content. I think AOL uses their own e-mail system, however. You can also see this in the Real Player application, again if they are going to display web content instead of playing music or an audio/video clip. (Try this if you have Real Player.) Other application also use this, in things like About boxes or even a cool splash screen when you start an application. Sometimes they even do full TCP/IP http requests for content, including machine-specific data. A good security hole if I ever heard of one, and a cheap and easy spy app as well.
Mozilla does not use the I.E. rendering engine... they have their very own, so they don't need it. A while back it was a common task for CS instructors to assign students to make their own HTML rendering engine. I wrote one myself just to see if it could be done. Not a beginner task, but still something well within the capabilities of any recent CS college graduate (if they actually taught you anything).
The problem here is that the fraud charges really don't get filed all that often. Or at least some managers try to get away with it as much as they can.
I know of local restaruants who have been shut down because of health code violations, and that usually means open sewers, mice/rats crawling through supplies, and not cleaning the grill for several weeks. I mean real winners of a restaurant.
On something so obsure like you are describing, I can see that happening all the time. I had some experiences with a gas station in NYC (I live in Utah) that got ahold of my credit card. They charged over $300 dollars (which was my credit limit). The credit card company refunded the theft, but to the best of my knowledge never did anything to the folks that stole my number. Oh, and the card was stolen directly out of the mail in NYC itself.
This is slightly offtopic, (although simoniker did sort of throw the bone out regarding Simpsons episodes) but I'd like to point out that "Homer Goes To College" was also one of the very first popular cultural references to the internet. Although it doesn't describe it directly, they are refering to USENET discussion groups.
Simpsons does a pretty good job regarding a reflection of popular American culture, even better than the Flintstones or Jetsons (of admittedly a much earlier era). The episode of "Marge vs. the Monorail" shows a common popular conception regarding mass-transit proposals and in particular common perception of monorails. That a monorail is also an amusement park ride at Disneyland makes it all that more "unreal" and the stuff of bloated budgets.
What the Las Vegas monorail does here is that it "legitimizes" the concept of a monorail as a mass transit system, particularly if it starts to go places off of the strip. UNLV and the airport are particularly positive signs that this can be a very real transportation hub transfer system.
IMHO, one reason that railroads are suffering in the USA is because they didn't really link up too well with other transportation systems, particularly airports. I like the fact that O'Hare airport in Chicago has an "El" station right in the airport. JFK International in NYC also does this with the NYC subway. In most other cases major airports are only connected to freeways at best, with all other transportation systems ignored, which at the present time also tends to kill off the other transportation systems that can't get there. If Las Vegas links up with the airport, it can be used as a major transportation system, and not just a casino play toy.
Fortunately, unfortunately that is going to be the extent of it. I hope that sometime before the end of THIS century some sort of probe will actually make it to Saturn, this time exclusively to study the ring systems themselves. It would be cool to intentionally do a rendevous with one of the moons within the ring system, and perhaps even try to land, or even do a little "moon hopping" around the ring system. The is much to learn about what is going on.
From my own look of the rings, there are some strong mathmatical harmonics going on... worthy of at least a few master's degrees if not a couple of PhDs with these photos alone. Perhaps the most intriguing are the scalloped rings that were found. This is going to be a career maker for somebody when they finally figure out the celestial mechanics regarding how this could have been done. This photo also seems to have a moire pattern between the pixel resolution of the CCD camera and the rings on Ring A. That is a significant finding in itself, and can be used to determine the approximate size of the smaller ringlets that form Ring A. (I.E. rougly the same arc angle that a single pixel would have on the probe camera... that is quite tiny to be honest, and suggests some uniformity of the ringlets as well, or even suggesting mean particle size in the rings.)
That is just my casual observations as a very amature astronomer. The Pros are certainly going to have a fun couple of months ahead, particularly if they are into planetary astronomy.
It has to start somewhere, but I hope it doesn't get "terminated" from ever getting expanded like the Space Needle monorail in Seattle.
I regret that Salt Lake City didn't go this route. There have already been several deaths due to light rail in downtown SLC on a relitvely new system, with a major expansion being proposed. Downtown SLC is totally messed up now, and much of that could have/should have been dealt with by having an elevated platform of some sort instead. Monorails would have made it fit in around many of the buildings there including the historic Temple Square district. The overhead wires also tend to distract from the view as well when looking from street-level.
As a passenger on a BART train once that was stuck at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay, I could tell you of an experience where we were "trapped" there for three hours. The motor burned out and you could smell a strong scent of Ozone. Finally they hooked another train to the one I was riding on and "towed" the train to a station, where we got out... no apologies or anything.
I would have to agree though that passenger evacuation via catwalks are there mainly to give an illusion to safety, and generally they wouldn't be used except for during heavy maintainence, in which case you are probably walking around on the track itself anyway (as a maintainence worker). The same would also be true for monorails in terms of rail service (checking for cement cracks, replacing deteriorating sections, etc.)
I'm not even sure if the "Paris Gun" could hit 50,000 feet. (The gun that the Germans used in WWI to hit Paris from 20 miles out). I think that you would have to have some missiles or something similar, and even then it would have to be a class "M" engine to get that high. With a pretty good guidance system as well (not just a quick up and down rocket like a typical hobbiest would have). Blimps capable of doing anything worthwhile for wireless coverage would have to be about that high, although altitude would vary quite a bit depending on the time of day and current weather conditions (primarily temperature... at the upper altitudes as well.)
This is precisely why I pounded on RMS last time I saw him regarding open-source specifications. In some ways, if you perpetuate propritary specs (like DVD-Video or even GIF), even if your software is free and open source, it still can be killed. Only specs like Morse Code are truly in the public domain due to age, and the RFCs can be just as killer as the ECMA documents.
BTW, this includes almost universal specs like RS-232 or even PCI. Personally, I think specifications should be uncopyrightable, but that is a totally seperate issue than what is being talked about here. Spec books can be copyrighted, but the specs themselves (pin ID's, function names, expected parameters, etc.) should be in theory capable of being copied and sent to anybody as long as you make original materials describing these specs. This isn't necessarily the case at the moment.
P.S. RMS didn't think it was really that big of a deal, and at the time (about 2 years ago) he thought that free software could get along just fine with propriatary specifications. I don't know if he or any "leaders" of the FOSS movement have given it much thought either.
Mono is only going for the ECMA standards. If Microsoft decides to push hard and change what dotNET does, either it will be pulled into Mono very quickly (the entire underlying subsystem is already in place for Mono), or it will be ignored, much to the regret of Microsoft.
In the world of API libraries, it is developer mindshare, and I don't think you can ignore Mono and be considered a good dotNet programmer. With Mono being open source, I don't see it getting killed as a project.
I expect that you will start seeing many software developer positions asking for 3+ years of programming experience in Mono real soon. It would be interesting if that happens.
The key to making sure software is portable using C# is making sure you are sticking with ECMA standard library features. If you use a Windows API library function, you are sunk and stuck to the Win32 platform (potentially Wine or ReactOS, but more likely just WinXP).
You might be surprised, however, with USB. Many port I/O routines are common to both Windows and Linux (from the perspective of a C#/CLR program), so you might not have to worry so much about that as an issue. More than likely the big problems would come from the GUI compatability issues, which are not trivial.
Right now, in that respect, Mono is still a little rough. Keep in mind that this is open-source software, so if you help write some routines that can help improve the cross-platform compatability issues, it would be greatly appreciated. It is through efforts like the one that you are mentioning that have made Mono where it is right now.
First of all, Microsoft has been directly helping the Mono project, in terms of technical assistance. While this doesn't solve the patent issue, it does show a certain culpability on the part of Microsoft, and it would be a big fly in the ointment if MS decided to file a lawsuit.
Also, Mono is much closer to a "clean-room" development model, based almost exclusively on the API libraries and reverse engineering of data formats to become more compatable with MS function calls. Although Mono started with the core components being compiled with the free dotNet compiler from MS, it has been self-compiling for some time now.
The anti-trust issues won't help out MS either if they file a lawsuit against Novell. Novell has some relatively deep pockets, and it would be in their interest to get into a legal fight with Microsoft, particuarly one that MS initiated. From a sheer anti-trust viewpoint it would not be a good thing for MS to engage in something like this directly, and it could only be a direct threat from MS that would amount to be worth anything, unlike the SCO fiasco. No hiding behind serrogates for this fight. Furthermore, MS would risk a counter suit from several parties (Miguel to start with) if they tried to get the software pulled, potentially costing MS quite a bit of money.
Almost all of mono is derived from the ECMA documents, which also state rather clearly (with formal waivers signed by Microsoft) that anybody is free to create their own implementation of those standards.
Where the Mono Project could run into problems is if somebody (in a really stupid moment) decided to include some "shared source" source code from MS into Mono. This would be the same issue that Linux is facing from SCO, and when that goes to court it will have a final court ruling on that issue. If SCO wins by some act of God, it will become a huge issue for almost all open source/free software projects, not just Mono. I don't know if the courts have the political will to shut down a multi-billion dollar industry that easily over a technical ruling. Besides, the remedies to fix an issue like that are very easily done, and can even be done in a very pristine "clean room" atmosphere to replace any code that caused problems like that.
I would have no problem testifying in court that Mono and dotNet are two totally different pieces of software, from benchmarks and I/O behavior to variable names and even Mono-only software classes.
What is going to be interesting is that Mono, now that they are at version 1.0, is going to be in a position to actually drive mindshare with this system. I predict that you will seem MS backporting some of the mono class features (including method names... even a mono.* class naming system) into standard dotNet. The question would then become who is driving the development for whom?
Yes, I dont trust Microsoft, and won't rely upon their goodwill. True as well, if you had developed a completely independent virtual OS (like dotNet or Java), there might not be as much to argue here, but then again, you might even be in more danger of violating a patent, simply because you weren't aware of it.
I think a much bigger threat for a submarine patent that would threaten Mono would come from Sun, or even some silly 3rd party that filed a patent 5-10 years ago covering virtual operating systems. The concern then is not with Microsoft, but with the USPTO instead.
They still sold millions of the things as recently as the 1970's. As soon as the EPA started to get involved with the auto industry, they disappeared.
:)
That is the point I'm making, that the anti-SVU folks totally dismiss what happened to this line of vehicles. SUV's are the station wagons of the 21st Century.
Station Wagons offered much better road stability than SUVs, and in general offered about the same safety factors (mainly because they were so big). If your Dad has a negative reaction to them, ask why? I bet he never took one to a drive-in movie then.
As a kid I was a part of a scrum of almost 15 kids that squeezed into one on a weekly basis for some kids-type activity. This would be totally illegal today for many reasons, but was commonly accepted. The #1 problem with station wagons was in regards to the rear door, that often moved in two directions... sometimes simultaneously (when you didn't want it to that). Seats would fold down in a manner similar to most SUVs do today, so you could haul a bunch of stuff.
Look, that was something of the past, and I'll admit that. They aren't around though, not because consumers wouldn't buy them but rather because the government screwed up the markets to the point nobody could buy cars like this. Station wagons are technically cars, and have much stricter emmissions and economy standards. Car companies simply couldn't make them because of these regulations.
You also forget the death of the Station Wagon. It is the loss of this vehicle class (primarily due to fuel economy regulations) that has pushed SUVs into the mainstream. If you have more than a couple of kids, you need to have a larger vehicle and an SUV is now the only choice you have, unless you buy a bus.
The station wagon was a standard staple of middle America for many years, and helped haul millions of children to football and baseball practice. If a car company wants to sell them in America, they are forced by regulations to sell several cheap cars (like the Geo Metro). SUVs don't have this same restriction. Mini Vans also help cover some of this, but even a Mini Van doesn't deal with everything you could haul in an old fashion station wagon. That's why I drive an SUV right now.
I think the analogy is more like trying to sail between Oahu and Midway, but yeah, there still is a pretty big gap of ocean there.
Check out this webpage to get further details. It is going to travel between the "F" and "G" rings, which are pretty faint by themselves. There will be a larger likely hood of running into something in that region of space, probabaly an order of magnitude higher than would normally be found within the Saturnian system of moons, but still fairly low.
It had nothing to do with "Big Money". While the concepts that went into VCDs and CDi certainly were used to make DVD-Video, it really is a totally different system. This is more like trying to compare ProDOS for the Apple ][ to Windows NT or Linux.
What makes me disapointed with the fact that the DVD-Video spec is so closed up is the fact that I know a bunch of hacker types would have a bunch of fun working with the format, and some really creative people could turn a DVD disc into something incredible using just a typical home DVD system. VCD wasn't nearly so versatile, has a much lower quality standard for both video and audio, and when using CD-ROM you need multiple discs in order to watch a movie at reasonable resolution.
There are multiple reasons for why VCD didn't catch on in the USA, which is another reason early DVD players didn't "play" VCD discs: There was absolutely no reason to get it to work and technically it was more junk to throw in the firmware anyway, becasue VCD really is signficantly different from DVD-Video on the data organization level. It had absolutely nothing to do with some "corrupt" Hollywood movie industry, but raw electrical engineering and software development. Have you ever thought about what it would take for you to design a DVD-Video player?
One other thing that also was a big factor in the early DVD players was the fact that the lasers used to read a DVD disc are tuned to a different frequency than what is commonly used for CDs. This is mainly due to the fact that with DVDs, the pits that mark "1s" and "0s" are much closer together. If you havn't really paid attention to the material science aspects of optical discs, the pits are so close together that an individual pit is close to the wavelength of visible light. That isn't accidental either. The reader head for DVDs had to get a second laser (tuned to a totally different frequency) added to the design so they could read CDs, particularly CD-R (which is where most of the heartburn came in the DVD industry... commercially pressed CDs were able to get detected with the DVD laser... something Hollywood would have prefered and did.) Mind you, if you have multiple lasers for error correction, each one of these redundant lasers also had to have an auxarilly laser coupled with them, and required seperate focusing adjustments, etc. All of this takes time and money.
FYI, do you know why the new "enhanced" DVD discs are called "BlueRay" or something like that? It is because the pits are so close together that now they have to use either a blue or ultraviolet laser in order to read the pits off of the disc. Of course, UV light has the tendancy of breaking down plastic polymers as well, so trying to find a good substrait that will hold the pits is also an issue. UVA light (one "color" of the ultraviolet band) isn't quite as destructive as say UVB, but it is an issue. It is one thing to use high energy radiation in a chip fab, but in a consumer electronic device, it starts to become a major issue.
Basically, the issues that you are talking about are due to physics and engineering, and not like some "greedy" person who can build a 100 MPG SUV with a simple redesign of the carborator but refuses to do so. And besides, most current DVD players will play a VCD, won't they?
I am kicking myself now for forgetting his name too.
/. type geek here. If anybody can remember his name, I (and the /. crowd here) would totally appreciate it.
I met him at COMDEX while I was visiting the Toshiba booth back in '97. I was in the process of writing a DVD-Video authoring system, and it was refreshing at the time to talk to somebody who actually had a clue regarding the internals of the format, and I got a few pointers from him at the time. What was particularly interesting, besides having him wander around the corporate booth unescorted by salesmen, was the fact he was hiding out in a comparatively obscure corner of the 10,000 sq. foot booth hanging around a bunch of chips and data sheets. A definite
While Lieberfarb may get the credit, it was a bunch of geeks working primarily for the founders of the DVD Forum that actually got it working, and it was not an easy accomplishment. The Kareoke features of DVD, in particular, as well as oriental character encoding (which is why DVD uses sub-pictures rather than ASCII to encode text... a good idea BTW), show a strong bias toward Japanese companies and some really strange bureaucratic design compromises. I wish I knew more about the history of DVD-Video, but the format certainly whent through several design changes before it was formally released, including some major design goals that changed mid-way through the development process. I would like to see that story fully told.
I would have to agree with you. I saw this on the headlines and I thought "This is totally stupid to have on /.". Back when the 9/11 attacks themselves occured, the /. staff was hesitant about even putting something about it on the site, but because it did have a profound impact on geeks (including some /. readers in the WTC reading /. when the attacks took place... read the postings for more details). The news about the WTC attacks was posted simply becuase of widespread geek interest, and one of the few times I saw slashdot get slashdotted in a major way that was a hardcore test of the /. servers.
/.
What does this movie have to do with "news for nerds"? It is controvercial and guarenteed to get a bunch of flaming replies all over the place. The techniques that Michael Moore used to make the film are not ground breaking in a technological sense, and other than having a clue about how to use a movie camera he doesn't really seem to really care about technology at all anyway. That isn't the point of this film.
The whole point of this film is to enflame people to discuss what is happening with the Bush administration, for good or ill. This is a political statement that should be discussed in a political setting. Discussions on MoveOn.org or RushLimbaugh.com are totally appropriate. Not on
Please don't do this. What is needed is for individuals to really study the issue, show that you have more than one or two brain cells, and intelligently explain why you may support/not support the new policy changes, and potentially suggest new directions to look at with this.
/. of a very diverse background. What is needed here is not raw activism of the typical D.C. type, but rather people from outside the "weather" industry that can thoughtfully explain how data should not be kept locked up by private companies but needs to be kept free.
/. crowd thinking NOAA is going to close up the electronic data products and make them only available to private industry for a high per user cost (like much else in the computer industry from stock quotes to mapping data). The truth is that I don't see any of this sort of thing going on, but rather some very hard working people in a low profit-margin business (even the most profitable companies don't really make that much money off of weather related products, and there is quite a bit of competition, not to mention relatively low barriers to entry, particularly compared to other industries). They are asking for legitimate debate, so study the facts first.
There are many very intelligent individuals here on
There seems to be a kneejerk reaction here with the
Honestly, I don't know what the issue is about specialized data formats other than XML. XML has its uses, but it is not necessarily the best data format for every situation. If you are a software developer worth anything, you should be able to take data in any binary data format, even if encrypted, and be able to pull all of the data out of that data format. XML is only one way to provide that data.
I will say that in addition to having much of the weather data collecting/processing being done at taxpayer expense, much of the weather data collection is done through a system that is largly volunteers. If you are interested in monitoring weather conditions, particularly if you live in a largely rural area (although urban areas can be of interest as well... it is just that there are many more people per sq. mile), you can volunteer to set up a weather station in your backyard and send the weather data to NOAA. Depending on the equipment you are willing to purchase, you can measure just about any atmospheric information that you can imagine, from pollution levels to current temperature and rainfall levels. Every data point that gives more detailed information helps to make the forecasting models more accurate. Sometimes NOAA will provide equipment, but you don't have wait for them to get it to you if you really want to volunteer and do this yourself (it just takes you own money if you go that route.) This is a stealthy Seti@Home like data project that has been going on for over 100 years, which is why you don't hear too much about it.
Some commercial enterprises (particularly local radio and television stations, as well as a few private airports, seaports, and trucking companies) have their own weather stations that even by themselves could provide a local forecast, but there is a data sharing agreement between everybody involved (even competing TV stations, for example) to share weather related data. Obviously this can be a very bandwidth intensive operation if you really think about all of the information that can be collected. Who pays for this bandwidth? There is nothing in the current proposals that would stop a distributed P2P weather data group from forming, and indeed it would probabaly be encouraged if you could come up with a good system. Really. The commercial weather guys would love it on many levels.
DISCLAIMER: I am not currently in the commercial weather industry. I had to help a couple of companies that were in the commerical weather industry to interface their products with some stuff that I was helping to develop, so I got a pretty good glimpse at some of the stuff they are developing, and some of the issues they d
If you are talking about a "capacitor" that would both store and dissapate energy, it would be the elevator cabling itself. Presumably, based on the design of the cabling, you could have several "cars" going both up and down the length.
This is where the tensile strength is so important (and the real technology killer item here if this is going to work). The cable has to be able to handle not only generalized stresses, but also localized stresses from individual cars. Portions of the cable would be moving either towards the earth's rotation or against it (depending on where the imbalence is occuring. In practice, this would have the cable with a "wavy" appearance going up to the end of the cable. The "broker" would have to be at far end of the cable, which would have to add extra delta-v or remove it if the cable got unbalanced too much.
One problem I can see right now is trying to dampen the "waves" that would come from the vehicles going up or down. This is a similar problem that electric utilities have to deal with when you add or remove equipment to the power grid: Extra power has to be generated when more stuff is added to the grid load (like a whole subdivision turning on their air conditioners), so to keep things balanced they have to start back-up generators or open more flood gates at the local hydro plant. Similar problems happen to try and keep the power at a nice 60 cycle sine wave, because some customers (like computer users) have equipment that really makes a mess of that power generation scheme. Other equipment requires that nice simple generation patter, so compensators are in the utility grid to smooth out those rough spots. This is one way to tell what a good electric utility is vs. one who doesn't care (with either situation above.)
This could also be "smoothed out" by giving just a slightly bit more mass to the cabling itself as well, adding redudancy and safety factors as well as allowing for heavier loads.
The real question is if there could be a "Tacoma Narrows" incident with a space elevator?
Estes rockets are essentially classified as fireworks rated for personal use. They have so many restrictions on how powerful they will go that they are considered "harmless" by the Federal government.
Now if you try to get a type "E" engine or type "F" (or worse yet, something rated even higher), that is when you have to start to draw blood and delivery instructions for your first born child.
I was mainly talking about Hurricanes and other storms, sea swells, and other weather/atmospheric problems that happen when you are out at sea. Most intelligent sea captains will steer their ships well out of harm's way and try to avoid the really nasty storms. If you are floating in one spot (like a giant city at sea), it is much harder to move to get away from those environmental issues. When 40' waves start to pound on you, how do you deal with them? A small craft simply rides out the storm, and a large boat simply ignores the waves. Of course you havn't see anything until you've seen a Nimitz-class Aircraft carrier get tossed around as if it were a child's toy. I don't even know how the pilots land on the ship in such weather, but I know it happens and have seen video footage of it happening. Raw skill and luck is my guess.
One other issue that you've neglected is dealing with resources. Water in particular, fresh clean drinking water and stuff needed to run a city in general, is going to be quite scarce although that can be taken care of with a desalinization plant. Food can be grown out in the middle of the ocean, including most of what you would like to eat. Growing space would have to be cultivated with an intensity that would rival Japanese farmers, simply because "real estate" is going to be a very precious commodity when at sea. Sure, there is plenty of acerage available for expansion, but to do that expansion is going to be very expensive, and will require materials that can't be made in that floating city immediately. A city of this nature could in theory become totally self-sufficient, but growing trees that would be strong enough for "expanding" the "raft" would still take quite a long period of time to grow.
I would grant that the level of technology necessary to maintain such a floating city is not nearly as great as maintaining a city in space. That said, there is a good reason this isn't happening, and perhaps we should try to see what other issues are involved in preventing such a floating city from actually happening.
While I can't think of what to extract from Mars, I can think of many things that would make it very convient to go to several asteroids, particularly to extract minerals that on Earth are scarace and/or in countries that may be hostile to the interests of one or more other countries on the Earth. I'm not talking just petroluem either. You can look at a periodic table and seem elements that are difficult to obtain on the Earth that in space can be extracted and found in different amounts, some to be mined extreamly cost-effectively with really the only real expense after the extraction is to somehow make a re-entry vehicle (actually, just an Earth Entry vehicle... it was never there to start with) that would safely bring in cargo. Ballistic trajectories would make sure it lands where you want it to be, and you can even put it on a glider-like vehicle. If it burns up accidently, all you've lost is a single shippment anyway, not bad for bulk goods.
As far as law-enforcement in concerned: This is an issue that is largely based on the size of the population. Once a group of people hits a certain size, they start needing police officers (under whatever name you want to use) to deal with the nut cases. In a small society you just get your neighbors to agree that the nut needs to be kicked out, and he is forced to leave and live without community support...the original definition of "Outlaw", where that person was out side the juristiction of the law, and if you wanted to do anything to an outlaw, the law would not stop you (including killing an outlaw just for the fun of it).
What stops a neighbor from taking over my land? A common agreement among the rest of the neighbors that he can't, or as a community we will punish somehow the agressive neighbor. If he is a real prick, I'll try to kill him first. That is life, and human societies at a real raw fundimental level. If I'm living in a society with professional law enforcement, I'll leave the ugly business to them.
You also mention that the majority of U.S. citizens don't see a motivation to move to Mars. I would also like to point out that a majority of Europeans also saw no reason for moving to America, even though many knew of individuals who did. And that is different about Mars how?
The critical thing to worry about is the 1/2 of 1% of the population that is very creative and really is the strength of any nation. This is the group that is more than likely (at least some elements of this group) that is going to be doing the move to outer space, not the majority of the population. Mass population movements like you are talking about only happen when it is forced, usually through war or extreame political oppression (like some stuff Hitler or Stalin did... or the U.S. Army for that matter).
When this very creative group moves into space, and they will regardless of whom is providing the transportation to get there, a great many things are going to start happening in space that will change all of mankind as a whole. Simply because it is a different environment will give new perspectives to approach problems that until now havn't been solved on the Earth.
I'm sorry if you don't see your freedoms being steped upon, but it is happening. I am trying to work within the American political system to try and reverse the trend, but it is not always successful. Now that the population of the USA can be measured as a substantial fraction of a billion people, societal scructures that I don't particularly like have formed and I want to get out. If you want to deal with what I'm leaving behind, go ahead, I'm not stopping you. Just try to stay out of my way while I'm leaving and don't put up any roadblocks or walls to stop me from leaving.