It is not that we have programs, but that we spend on one thing instead of another.
Who is this WE you speak of?
Virgin is a private company. They will sell their services to whoever pays them. Or are you suggesting someone like you should get to dictate where they spend their money?
Money is never WASTED.
All the money Virgin spends is spent here on Earth, in the US, putting people to work all up and down the supply chain. How is this different than having the government taking from Virgin to give to some homeless drunk? Oh, wait, Virgin will be taxed, as will the space tourists, and the engineers, and the guy that sweeps Virgin's hangers, and waters their corporate lawn, and those taxes will prop up the drunkard, and the salary for those that support him, and we get both frivolous space tourism AND social programs.
You see, there is humidity in the air everywhere. Your house is not at the same humidity level 24/7, nor is it at the same temperature 24/7. So when the humidity rises, and then the temperature falls, you would have condensation all over your electronics. Leave that window open in your office over night after a warm muggy day, and you will arrive in the morning to find your computer completely shorted out and your case rusted.
See how silly this sounds?
You bag it in plastic and forget it. There won't be enough moisture in there to hurt anything. Stop trying to make this into a problem. Its not.
Hint: computers, and manufactured stuff in general, was designed to operate on planet earth.
Most people buy computers fully assembled which means that the original box is in fact designed to handle fully assembled machines with drives and processors and video cards all installed.
Your video card is the LEAST likely thing to come loose, its slotted and screwed in. Old school slot mounted CPU-daughter cards maybe, but seriously, those things went out 10 years ago.
Having moved from one state to another, which included an ocean passage in a shipping container, plus subsequent trucking half way across the country, I can assure you disassembly is simply not warranted.
That you can quote a horror story about a slap-dash home build machine in a cheesy white-box case, improperly packed, does not surprise me.
Which is why if you want to Honor the "Apple Sense of Style" you should be celebrating Ive's birthday, not Jobs's death. Jobs never had a sense of style.
I'd take them out and take them in personal luggage. May not be safer, but then you won't have to wait weeks to get access to them.
You probably will have to wait weeks. Carrying loose hard drives is far more suspicious than carrying complete computers. Depending on the country of destination, carrying loose drives on board an airplane is far more likely to get them seized for analysis at customs.
You expected cultists to be aware of anything outside of their own little world view?
The sad part of this is we have to look forward to this Chairman Mao sort of cult worship for years. This is how religions are born. I'm waiting for the push for a national holiday.
Put it in sealed plastic bags, and forget about it.
Why bother to remove the hard drives and graphics cards? Just bag the computer and ship it intact with sufficient padding for normal handling. Containers aren't totally humidity proof, but they aren't going to have ocean waves flowing thru your stuff either. They are close enough to being sealed that simply bagging against humidity is sufficient. Silica gel is unnecessary. Bag it. Tape it. Pad it. Box it. done.
Pack it like you would for motor freight from one end of your country to the other. Ocean passage is five nines uneventful. Occasionally large waves take entire tiers of containers off ships, but this is exceedingly rare, and that is what insurance is for.
Your stuff is more at risk sitting in the freight yard pre and post passage, than it is on the ship. Not from any real damage, but rather from pilferage.
So Android is becoming the next Windows with regards to user intelligence?
Android at least assumes user intelligence, even if it fails to materialize. Apple just denies the possibility of user intelligence and spoon feeds you. For their customer base, they are probably correct.
checking the box in android puts up a sufficiently scary warning first. if you aren't going to read that or choose to ignore it, then you'll get what's coming to you. in the same way you will if you enter your root / admin password every time it pops up in windows / mac / linux.
Yup, another click thru message that nobody reads, and fewer understand.
The claim was made:
If you are smart enough to install non-market Android apps, you know what you are getting into.
And nothing you've said convinces me that statement is true.
All evidence suggests you don't need to be smart to install non-market apps, and the warning solves nothing. In fact intelligence is contraindicated for the installation of non-market apps.
The malware sets the phone to use third party SMS gateways Those gateways deliver the SMS message to the recipient's carrier, and bills that carrier for the service. You might be none the wiser, but your carrier is paying for that incoming message via bilateral agreements or "Hubbing".
If you are smart enough to install non-market Android apps, you know what you are getting into.
Unfortunately, that is not true. If it did require smarts there wouldn't be a problem.
There are far too many people that are duped into downloading from other than trusted sources. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to check that box in settings that allows installation from untrusted sources. Most of these dodgy websites explain exactly what to check and uncheck to get their malware to install. Your average 14 year old teenager as well as your mom can make this change with four screen taps, and install the fake (but free) copy of an app in about 12 seconds flat.
As always, buying from the Play Store or Amazon presents minimal risk, they will detect the malicious payload it before you even hear about it. (Yes there have been one or two situations where something snuck thru, but these are rare anomalies).
Its simply greed on the part of handset owners to try to scam a $2.00 app for nothing.
Clearly the customers here are Governments. One of the first orbits to be cleared would probably be around the ISS.
John Campbell of Iridium spoke at a June 2007 forum discussing the difficulty of handling all the notifications they were getting regarding close approaches, which numbered 400 per week (for approaches within 5 km) for the entire Iridium constellation. He estimated the risk of collision per conjunction as one in 50 million. Yet in 2009, less than two years after he made his prediction, his company lost Iridium 33 to a collision. To date, there have been eight known high-speed collisions in all, most of which were only noticed well after the fact.
Actually, for those sats that share orbits, this would be a problem, which is why they use a gas that would disperse in short order.
Presumably any sats that were not targets, but still close enough to the gas cloud, would eventually need a slight nudge to correct their orbit, but then that kind of orbit correction happens occasionally anyway. (One definition of a dead satellite is one that has no maneuvering fuel left to do station keeping.). So if your satellite is still operational it probably would not be affected by the gas.
This ability to affect a large area actually works in your favor. You can deorbit entire debris fields with this technique. However, some space junk deorbited this way could drift into conflict with low earth orbit satellites, like weather sats and GPS sats. So some planning would be necessary. And since the gas is designed to ever so slowly deorbit the junk, your ability to control this is minimal at best, because it could take years.
I'm glad Boeing patented this because they actually have the ability to deliver, whereas some patent troll could just use it to extract money. I'd be happier if they just built one and and demonstrated it, and then offered it for sale. Even happier if they just declared the patent free to the world.
Who said anything about BIG. The beauty of this approach is that the gas delivery vehicle need not be all that big to hurry the orbital decay of lots of dead sats and space junk.
Slowing debris down in the manner you have described is going to be very fuel intensive if you expect this disposable satellite to speed up to catch another piece of debris and slow down, rinse and repeat. I assume you aren't proposing disposable satellites for each piece of space debris.
That's what I was thinking. Just releasing the gas in the path of the target satellite would slow down or speed up your vehicle enough to require course corrections. If you were to have enough gas on board to do two simultaneous releases on opposite sides of the vehicle you might be able to mitigate this.
But simply getting to the proper place for EACH of the thousands of sats and space junk targets would take a lot of maneuvering.
This seems overly complex and subtle. Its main advantage seems to be that it leaves no debris in orbit.
It also assumes that there aren't any energy advancements that are so far out of our understanding right now that they wouldn't seem like magic if we possessed them. Our assumptions are limited by our current understanding. In the next thousand years we could see all kinds of advancements that render building a Dyson sphere completely unnecessary.
Dyson never heard of Fusion other than used as a weapon. It was a pipe dream back then. The first commercial nuclear fission reactors has only operational for a few years at great cost.
This is just another pipe-dream solution to a problem that will never appear.
You can not harness the full power of the sun and bring even a fraction of it to earth without melting the planet.
Of course, this presumes that advanced civilizations will simply re-radiate the left-over thermal energy, it's entirely possible that they would have close to 100% efficient systems or have a economically sensible way of storing thermal energy to re-use at a later date.
It also presumes that advanced civilizations would waste their time and resources building such a contraption, when, given the technology necessary to do so, it would be far easier to find another planet.
The level of sophistication necessary to deploy such a thing would require a level of technology where Fusion is childs play. There would be no energy shortage.
It doesn't matter is google was making them available online in whole, in part, or not at all. They violated copyright when they copied them in the first place. And they copied books they didn't even own! They waltzed into public librarians, took over a room, some tables, and a library employee for a couple of weeks, and photographed every book they could find. "It's ok, we're allowed to do this because we're Google!"
No they didn't.
Copyright allows you to copy your own copy of a book, AND It allows you to give Fair Use Excerpts to your friends for free.
In most cases for current production books, they just bought them off the shelf.
They didn't waltz in to libraries, they asked, and they paid big grant money, and had the consent of the librarians who were all on board with the project.
Don't confuse the ancient out of print book effort with the scanning of current books in your haste to post the hate.
Slashdot Mirror
Find a technical solution, not a legal "solution"
Laser seeking small missiles should do the trick.
Professional survey lasers generally do not point skyward.
There should also be massive penalties for massacring the English language. "Becoming endemic", not "becoming epidemic".
"Becoming pandemic" makes more sense for what the story is trying to convey.
Endemic implies a specific place pandemic implies everywhere.
It is not that we have programs, but that we spend on one thing instead of another.
Who is this WE you speak of?
Virgin is a private company. They will sell their services to whoever pays them.
Or are you suggesting someone like you should get to dictate where they spend their money?
Money is never WASTED.
All the money Virgin spends is spent here on Earth, in the US, putting people to work all up and down the supply chain. How is this different than having the government taking from Virgin to give to some homeless drunk? Oh, wait, Virgin will be taxed, as will the space tourists, and the engineers, and the guy that sweeps Virgin's hangers, and waters their corporate lawn, and those taxes will prop up the drunkard, and the salary for those that support him, and we get both frivolous space tourism AND social programs.
Money is never WASTED.
None of this is essential.
You see, there is humidity in the air everywhere.
Your house is not at the same humidity level 24/7, nor is it at the same temperature 24/7.
So when the humidity rises, and then the temperature falls, you would have condensation all over your electronics.
Leave that window open in your office over night after a warm muggy day, and you will arrive in the morning to find your computer completely shorted out and your case rusted.
See how silly this sounds?
You bag it in plastic and forget it. There won't be enough moisture in there to hurt anything.
Stop trying to make this into a problem. Its not.
Hint: computers, and manufactured stuff in general, was designed to operate on planet earth.
I recommend the silica it's super cheap if bought from the right place. I buy 1 pound for >$10 that should do it.
You recommend it because its cheap? Rice is cheaper. Sand is free.
None of them is needed.
Most people buy computers fully assembled which means that the original box is in fact designed to handle fully assembled machines with drives and processors and video cards all installed.
Your video card is the LEAST likely thing to come loose, its slotted and screwed in.
Old school slot mounted CPU-daughter cards maybe, but seriously, those things went out 10 years ago.
Having moved from one state to another, which included an ocean passage in a shipping container, plus subsequent trucking half way across the country, I can assure you disassembly is simply not warranted.
That you can quote a horror story about a slap-dash home build machine in a cheesy white-box case, improperly packed, does not surprise me.
Exactly.
Which is why if you want to Honor the "Apple Sense of Style" you should be celebrating Ive's birthday, not Jobs's death.
Jobs never had a sense of style.
I'd take them out and take them in personal luggage. May not be safer, but then you won't have to wait weeks to get access to them.
You probably will have to wait weeks.
Carrying loose hard drives is far more suspicious than carrying complete computers.
Depending on the country of destination, carrying loose drives on board an airplane is far more likely to get them seized for analysis at customs.
Exactly. What happened to honoring the Apple sense of style?
Jonathan Ive isn't dead.
GangNAM Style
You expected cultists to be aware of anything outside of their own little world view?
The sad part of this is we have to look forward to this Chairman Mao sort of cult worship for years.
This is how religions are born. I'm waiting for the push for a national holiday.
Put it in sealed plastic bags, and forget about it.
Why bother to remove the hard drives and graphics cards? Just bag the computer and ship it intact with sufficient padding for normal handling.
Containers aren't totally humidity proof, but they aren't going to have ocean waves flowing thru your stuff either. They are close enough to being
sealed that simply bagging against humidity is sufficient. Silica gel is unnecessary. Bag it. Tape it. Pad it. Box it. done.
Pack it like you would for motor freight from one end of your country to the other.
Ocean passage is five nines uneventful. Occasionally large waves take entire tiers of containers
off ships, but this is exceedingly rare, and that is what insurance is for.
Your stuff is more at risk sitting in the freight yard pre and post passage, than it is on the ship. Not from any real damage, but rather from pilferage.
Moth balls? At sea?
The IQ test is performed at the sales counter.
So Android is becoming the next Windows with regards to user intelligence?
Android at least assumes user intelligence, even if it fails to materialize.
Apple just denies the possibility of user intelligence and spoon feeds you. For their customer base, they are probably correct.
checking the box in android puts up a sufficiently scary warning first. if you aren't going to read that or choose to ignore it, then you'll get what's coming to you. in the same way you will if you enter your root / admin password every time it pops up in windows / mac / linux.
Yup, another click thru message that nobody reads, and fewer understand.
The claim was made:
If you are smart enough to install non-market Android apps, you know what you are getting into.
And nothing you've said convinces me that statement is true.
All evidence suggests you don't need to be smart to install non-market apps, and the warning solves nothing.
In fact intelligence is contraindicated for the installation of non-market apps.
The malware sets the phone to use third party SMS gateways
Those gateways deliver the SMS message to the recipient's carrier, and bills that carrier for the service. You might be none the wiser, but your carrier is paying for that incoming message via bilateral agreements or "Hubbing".
A platform with lots of viruses. How quaint. Android truly is the Windows PC of mobile phones. The answer is a single walled garden.
Actually, the answer is reading comprehension.
But, yes, this is slashdot, so nobody reads TFA, and even fewer comprehend.
If you are smart enough to install non-market Android apps, you know what you are getting into.
Unfortunately, that is not true. If it did require smarts there wouldn't be a problem.
There are far too many people that are duped into downloading from other than trusted sources.
And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to check that box in settings that allows installation from untrusted sources. Most of these dodgy websites explain exactly what to check and uncheck to get their malware to install. Your average 14 year old teenager as well as your mom can make this change with four screen taps, and install the fake (but free) copy of an app in about 12 seconds flat.
As always, buying from the Play Store or Amazon presents minimal risk, they will detect the malicious payload it before you even hear about it. (Yes there have been one or two situations where something snuck thru, but these are rare anomalies).
Its simply greed on the part of handset owners to try to scam a $2.00 app for nothing.
Clearly the customers here are Governments.
One of the first orbits to be cleared would probably be around the ISS.
John Campbell of Iridium spoke at a June 2007 forum discussing the difficulty of handling all the notifications they were getting regarding close approaches, which numbered 400 per week (for approaches within 5 km) for the entire Iridium constellation. He estimated the risk of collision per conjunction as one in 50 million. Yet in 2009, less than two years after he made his prediction, his company lost Iridium 33 to a collision.
To date, there have been eight known high-speed collisions in all, most of which were only noticed well after the fact.
Actually, the patent does not mention anything about the size of the delivery vehicle.
1000 kg is well within the lift capabilities of even the smallest launch vehicles still in operation. Only marginally bigger than Opportunity Rover, which was delivered to mars by an Atlas V 451, which can easily put 10,000kg in LEO.
That is not big by standard of satellites in orbit.
Actually, for those sats that share orbits, this would be a problem, which is why they use a gas that would disperse in short order.
Presumably any sats that were not targets, but still close enough to the gas cloud, would eventually need a slight nudge to correct their orbit, but then that kind of orbit correction happens occasionally anyway. (One definition of a dead satellite is one that has no maneuvering fuel left to do station keeping.). So if your satellite is still operational it probably would not be affected by the gas.
This ability to affect a large area actually works in your favor. You can deorbit entire debris fields with this technique.
However, some space junk deorbited this way could drift into conflict with low earth orbit satellites, like weather sats and GPS sats. So some planning would be necessary. And since the gas is designed to ever so slowly deorbit the junk, your ability to control this is minimal at best, because it could take years.
I'm glad Boeing patented this because they actually have the ability to deliver, whereas some patent troll could just use it to extract money.
I'd be happier if they just built one and and demonstrated it, and then offered it for sale. Even happier if they just declared the patent free to the world.
Who said anything about BIG.
The beauty of this approach is that the gas delivery vehicle need not be all that big to hurry the orbital decay of lots of dead sats and space junk.
Think of it as a tire spike strip for space.
Slowing debris down in the manner you have described is going to be very fuel intensive if you expect this disposable satellite to speed up to catch another piece of debris and slow down, rinse and repeat. I assume you aren't proposing disposable satellites for each piece of space debris.
That's what I was thinking.
Just releasing the gas in the path of the target satellite would slow down or speed up your vehicle enough to require course corrections. If you were to have enough gas on board to do two simultaneous releases on opposite sides of the vehicle you might be able to mitigate this.
But simply getting to the proper place for EACH of the thousands of sats and space junk targets would take a lot of maneuvering.
This seems overly complex and subtle. Its main advantage seems to be that it leaves no debris in orbit.
It also assumes that there aren't any energy advancements that are so far out of our understanding right now that they wouldn't seem like magic if we possessed them. Our assumptions are limited by our current understanding. In the next thousand years we could see all kinds of advancements that render building a Dyson sphere completely unnecessary.
Dyson never heard of Fusion other than used as a weapon. It was a pipe dream back then. The first commercial nuclear fission reactors has only operational for a few years at great cost.
This is just another pipe-dream solution to a problem that will never appear.
You can not harness the full power of the sun and bring even a fraction of it to earth without melting the planet.
Of course, this presumes that advanced civilizations will simply re-radiate the left-over thermal energy, it's entirely possible that they would have close to 100% efficient systems or have a economically sensible way of storing thermal energy to re-use at a later date.
It also presumes that advanced civilizations would waste their time and resources building such a contraption, when, given the technology necessary to do so, it would be far easier to find another planet.
The level of sophistication necessary to deploy such a thing would require a level of technology where Fusion is childs play. There would be no energy shortage.
It doesn't matter is google was making them available online in whole, in part, or not at all.
They violated copyright when they copied them in the first place. And they copied books they didn't even own! They waltzed into public librarians, took over a room, some tables, and a library employee for a couple of weeks, and photographed every book they could find. "It's ok, we're allowed to do this because we're Google!"
No they didn't.
Copyright allows you to copy your own copy of a book, AND It allows you to give Fair Use Excerpts to your friends for free.
In most cases for current production books, they just bought them off the shelf.
They didn't waltz in to libraries, they asked, and they paid big grant money, and had the consent of the librarians who were all
on board with the project.
Don't confuse the ancient out of print book effort with the scanning of current books in your haste to post the hate.