I wonder if the release of these documents will deter the conspiracy theorists?
Having read the first few posts on this story, do you consider your question answered?
NO answer from the government, nor indeed from anybody will quiet the conspiracy theorists:
"Here's all the documents on the base - see, no unusual activity." "Yeah, like you'd release the REAL documents rather than these forgeries!"
"Here's the documents - something landed, but we aren't sure what. Here's all the info we have." "SURE that's all the info you had - see, we told you there were hiding something, and they still are!"
"Greetings people of Earth. I am the ambassador from the Galactic Federation. Now that you have achieved the required levels of societal and technological advancement, we are allowed to make contact. Yes, you in the back..." "Have any aliens landed on Earth before this?" "No, that is completely forbidden under our laws." "SURE nobody else landed here - YOU ARE COVERING IT UP!" "Perhaps we jumped the gun on your societal evolution...."
Now this is interesting: they kill IE for Mac. They kill a product that allows a Linux/Sendmail based system to scan for viruses before they are delivered to the end user.
Question: has MS lost all fear of anti-trust action, and begun the final offensive against all competition?
Do bears excrete in the forest? Do trolls post on Slashdot?
I've said that one could probably plot very accurately the arrival and departure times of commercial aircraft at your average airport just by monitoring the cell sites.
Personally, unless you are in sales and live and die by being "in touch", I say it can wait.
True, a cell site puts most of its signal out horizontally, and receives horizontally.
That only makes the problem worse.
Consider: You are at 30000 feet, and your phone is on. Its listening for a control channel, and finds one. It does a registration.
Now, several factors are reducing the signal strength of the control channel to the phone: distance, the gain pattern of the site's antenna, and the fact the phone is in a big metal box with small holes in it. So the phone will have a very low RSSI (received signal strength indicator), and will put out maximum power to reach the site.
Now, because the altitude, the angle the signal comes in at and the distance are not going to be very much different for many cellsites - each is going to receive the phone about equally well. This actually tends to EXPAND the range of sites affected - the sites under the plane suffer from the gain pattern of the signal and the emission pattern from the plane (most of your signal is going out horizontally from the windows, modulo knife edge scattering), but get a boost from proximity. The sites far from the plane lose signal due to distance, but now the signal is coming from a lower angle and is in the higher gain portion of the antenna pattern.
Now, cell sites are laid out in a pattern - usually in most urban areas it is a hexagonal pattern, with adjacent cells using different frequencies and DCC (digital color code - basically a number that helps the phone tell the difference between sites). So there WILL be several sites that will match the frequency and DCC the phone is using.
Now, for CDMA systems ALL those sites have to swap data about the signal they are receiving (this is to implement "soft handoff" where the phone gradually changes which site it uses - for a time the phone is actually using 2 sites at once.) This GREATLY increases the data bandwidth used between sites.
For GSM it's a little different - but the upshot is you are STILL confusing the sites and forcing them to talk to each other over the landline connections.
Meanwhile, here is your phone blasting out bursts of RF at maximum power to try to register to the cell site it hears - only to have to register AGAIN a few seconds later because it has moved out of range.
So, your battery will go flat very quickly (the way these new phones keep battery life up is by not being on all the time - they only listen during their assigned time slot, normally. However, when the phone detects that is has changed sites, it must re-register and listen to ALL time slots until it gets one assigned.)
Also, you are tying up resources in the cell system.
Lastly, you are pumping out a fair amount of RF power inside this big metal box full of wires. What is another term for "wire" - ANTENNA. Each of the wires in that plane is detecting some of your radio's signal, and any non-linear element (corrosion, a semiconductor, etc.) can act as a detector to convert the RF into DC. (Think about the old style crystal radios, or the foxhole razor blade radio).
When you do EMI complience checks, you will be amazed at what can act as a receiver and make things go screwy. All sorts of things that you might think "this cannot interfere - it's gigahertz away!" start interfering.
Especially since for the longest time VilePlant-it was "Non-Windows Need Not Apply" - if you weren't running Exploiter and Windows you were SOL for access.
I also love how VilePlant-It was able to completely muscle out all other sources - every game site went to them and that was that.
Perhaps somebody will build BitTorrent into a game - you download the level and provide it as an upload as well...
#26 - Gamespy decides that all gamers run their desktops at 800x600, and forces all their pages to be 800 pixels wide.
Wowbagger - Yes, obviously gamers don't buy high-end video cards and monitors that can run at higher than 800x600. Gamers like to see lots of wasted space on their screens. </gamespy>
Criticize the/. crew all you want for the way they have coded/., but at least/. will use the full width of your browser window, rather than
forcing all your text into a few words per line because you are running high res and larger fonts so as to have a cleaner display.
Sorry, but MY ZIP+4 does indeed resolve to my house, and my house only.
True, maybe I over-generalized in saying that ZIP+4 resolves to a house - it does not ALWAYS resolve to a house, but it frequently DOES.
And that is why I made the point about ZIP vx. ZIP+4 - when ANYBODY says that "oh, we aggregate the data to a ZIP code, nothing to worry about", IF by "ZIP Code" they mean "ZIP+4 code" then their "aggregation" may be to a house level.
Sorry, but MY ZIP+4 does indeed resolve to my house, and my house only.
True, maybe I over-generalized in saying that ZIP+4 resolves to a house - it does not ALWAYS resolve to a house, but it frequently DOES.
And that is why I made the point about ZIP vx. ZIP+4 - when ANYBODY says that "oh, we aggregate the data to a ZIP code, nothing to worry about", IF by "ZIP Code" they mean "ZIP+4 code" then their "aggregation" may be to a house level.
f you don't have permissions to use network connections other than SSH, are you going to have permissions to mount a filesystem on the computer?
Could be: for example, where I work I'm behind a corporate firewall, but I have admin rights on my workstation. As a result, I could very easily mount a remote file system via SSH. In fact, since I administer an FTP server that is outside the firewall, being able to mount it as a file system in a secure fashion would be quite useful.
Just because network ingress is controlled does not mean that your workstation is controlled. In many ways, this is no different than you burning a CD of your files at home and bringing that into work - the infection/cracking risk is the same. If you are not allowed to mount an external file system then you should not be allowed to mount a local file system.
However, just because you CAN access your home machine does not mean you SHOULD.
Yes, but when the engine is producing much less than maximum power, the engine is not in it's most efficent operating mode - you are moving a smaller air charge with lower velocity, thus less turbulance in the chamber, thus less efficent propagation of the flame front from the spark.
By making the cylinders that are firing "think" they are running harder, you move the engine nearer to the sweet spot of efficency. True, you lose some efficency due to pumping losses from the dead cylinders, but the question is "Will in increase in efficency of the cylinders that are firing offset the pumping losses of the cylinders that are not?"
Most of the designs that I have seen for cylinder "feathering" have involved mucking with the valves as well as the fuel charge - that is why I asked if perhaps the industry has had a blind spot to a better method.
Lastly, allow me to slightly recast your final statement:
After spending 4 years working on high speed, low memory operating systems it really blows my mind how many backyard engineers think they can do better.
Many of the "backyard engineers" you so dismissively ignore are just as skilled as the folks working for Ford|GM|etc.
Yes, Cooter h@><0ring his engine may not come up with a better solution, but there are plenty of folks who might.
Do remember the two shade-tree mechanics who thought they had a better idea than the experts - who dismissed them as "just a couple of bicycle repairmen who cannot possibly know as much about flight as we do!"
That is why I want to modify the whole ECU program - so that when the engine is not firing each pass through, the ECU knows to expect a higher O2 level in the exhaust, and won't over-richen the mix.
A second point to this idea - in "8 stroke" mode, the exhaust would have a great deal more free 02, which in theory would help the catalytic converter burn whatever was left in the system.
This raises an interesting question - namely, when are we going to see more hacking done on modern engine control computers?
I don't mean the current crop of "chips" that increase horsepower by overriding emissions control code, or remove the rev limiter code, I mean real, creative hacks.
For example, a friend of mine and I were discussion this possible hack: On an engine with sequential multipoint injection (one injector per cylender, near the intake valve), could one modify the ECU so that, when the engine is under minimal load, instead of firing the injector on every intake stroke, it would fire on every other intake stroke - in effect changing a four stroke engine into an eight stroke engine?
In theory, this would allow you to run a leaner mix (leaner = hotter burning) without burning up the cylinder, and you could save fuel. When the ECU detected the engine being placed under more load, it would start firing on every intake stroke (and remap to a richer mix).
Of course, I suppose the reason we don't see this is because hotter combustion = more carbon monoxide produced instead of carbon dioxide.
Now, if I could just get anoncvs access to Ford...
I HATE GPIB. I loath it. I am forced to support GPIB when my project has a perfectly good Ethernet port.
National Instruments has a "driver" for their cards under Linux, but their "driver" does not do things in the One True Unix Way - the driver is more of a shared library you link against your program that provided a slew of functions to manipulate the card. What it does NOT provide is a/dev/gpib interface that you can select(), poll(), and such on.
I would ask this: if your goal is control, why not use TCL/Tk for the control? That way you get an environment that your end user (the scientists) can play around in without edit/compile/link/curse cycles. You also get a degree of portability.
Yes, the problem is that most hardware venders do not provide a lower-level programming model - a) because they are afraid of the competition cloning their board and b) because most folks developing software with them want a LabView|LabWindows|HPVEE|DCOM interface.
However, there is a small ray of hope: the government JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System) (the new software defined radio standard The Men In Green are wanting) uses CORBA to do all the module communication. Now, if we could just pursuade industry to follow that trend! I'd love to provide a CORBA interface for my network enabled device, rather than the current solutions!
Simple - where I work, we frequently pull down ISOs of RedHat. So it would be directly work related.
Also, at home I run a similar setup: firewall, then my main workstations. And I am even MORE paranoid about my personal network than our IT manager is about work.
Slashdot Mirror
Jean Luc Ponty. Anything by him. Great violin jazz.
That wouldn't happen. You see, I only insult intelligent lifeforms.
Having read the first few posts on this story, do you consider your question answered?
NO answer from the government, nor indeed from anybody will quiet the conspiracy theorists:
"Yeah, like you'd release the REAL documents rather than these forgeries!"
"SURE that's all the info you had - see, we told you there were hiding something, and they still are!"
"Have any aliens landed on Earth before this?"
"No, that is completely forbidden under our laws."
"SURE nobody else landed here - YOU ARE COVERING IT UP!"
"Perhaps we jumped the gun on your societal evolution...."
This is part of an interesting pattern of MS killing off competing products, esp. on competing platforms.
I submitted a story (which was rejected) about this little gem:
Microsoft has purchased the RAV antivirus program, and will discontinue the Linux version.
Now this is interesting: they kill IE for Mac. They kill a product that allows a Linux/Sendmail based system to scan for viruses before they are delivered to the end user.
Question: has MS lost all fear of anti-trust action, and begun the final offensive against all competition?
Do bears excrete in the forest?
Do trolls post on Slashdot?
Yes, WalMart will be moving into NetFlix's domain. However, WalMart will not completely replace NetFlix until they start spamming like NetFlix does.
So I say, until that day happens, "Go WalMart GO!"
Boycott NetFlix.
Well thank you - I certainly try to be worth reading.
But it DOES get very discouraging when you get flamed to death over a minor speling (sic) error when you are trying to make a point.
Excuse me, but I must fly out to Galveston to help Motorola install a trunked radio system now.
I've said that one could probably plot very accurately the arrival and departure times of commercial aircraft at your average airport just by monitoring the cell sites.
Personally, unless you are in sales and live and die by being "in touch", I say it can wait.
True, a cell site puts most of its signal out horizontally, and receives horizontally.
That only makes the problem worse.
Consider: You are at 30000 feet, and your phone is on. Its listening for a control channel, and finds one. It does a registration.
Now, several factors are reducing the signal strength of the control channel to the phone: distance, the gain pattern of the site's antenna, and the fact the phone is in a big metal box with small holes in it. So the phone will have a very low RSSI (received signal strength indicator), and will put out maximum power to reach the site.
Now, because the altitude, the angle the signal comes in at and the distance are not going to be very much different for many cellsites - each is going to receive the phone about equally well. This actually tends to EXPAND the range of sites affected - the sites under the plane suffer from the gain pattern of the signal and the emission pattern from the plane (most of your signal is going out horizontally from the windows, modulo knife edge scattering), but get a boost from proximity. The sites far from the plane lose signal due to distance, but now the signal is coming from a lower angle and is in the higher gain portion of the antenna pattern.
Now, cell sites are laid out in a pattern - usually in most urban areas it is a hexagonal pattern, with adjacent cells using different frequencies and DCC (digital color code - basically a number that helps the phone tell the difference between sites). So there WILL be several sites that will match the frequency and DCC the phone is using.
Now, for CDMA systems ALL those sites have to swap data about the signal they are receiving (this is to implement "soft handoff" where the phone gradually changes which site it uses - for a time the phone is actually using 2 sites at once.) This GREATLY increases the data bandwidth used between sites.
For GSM it's a little different - but the upshot is you are STILL confusing the sites and forcing them to talk to each other over the landline connections.
Meanwhile, here is your phone blasting out bursts of RF at maximum power to try to register to the cell site it hears - only to have to register AGAIN a few seconds later because it has moved out of range.
So, your battery will go flat very quickly (the way these new phones keep battery life up is by not being on all the time - they only listen during their assigned time slot, normally. However, when the phone detects that is has changed sites, it must re-register and listen to ALL time slots until it gets one assigned.)
Also, you are tying up resources in the cell system.
Lastly, you are pumping out a fair amount of RF power inside this big metal box full of wires. What is another term for "wire" - ANTENNA. Each of the wires in that plane is detecting some of your radio's signal, and any non-linear element (corrosion, a semiconductor, etc.) can act as a detector to convert the RF into DC. (Think about the old style crystal radios, or the foxhole razor blade radio).
When you do EMI complience checks, you will be amazed at what can act as a receiver and make things go screwy. All sorts of things that you might think "this cannot interfere - it's gigahertz away!" start interfering.
Especially since for the longest time VilePlant-it was "Non-Windows Need Not Apply" - if you weren't running Exploiter and Windows you were SOL for access.
I also love how VilePlant-It was able to completely muscle out all other sources - every game site went to them and that was that.
Perhaps somebody will build BitTorrent into a game - you download the level and provide it as an upload as well...
#26 - Gamespy decides that all gamers run their desktops at 800x600, and forces all their pages to be 800 pixels wide.
Wowbagger - Yes, obviously gamers don't buy high-end video cards and monitors that can run at higher than 800x600. Gamers like to see lots of wasted space on their screens.
</gamespy>
Criticize the
forcing
all your
text into
a few words
per line
because you are
running high res
and larger fonts
so as to have
a cleaner
display.
The output from this mod, after it has been running a while:
I frag, therefor I am.
How long until Valve adds this to HL2?
Perhaps this is what is holding up Duke Nukem Forever?
Sure, and while I am at it, why don't I give you my SSN, my telephone number, and post my email in an easily scrapable format as well.
Would you also like the root passwork to my firewall, its IP address, and my credit card numbers, as well?
I was trying to be brief and to the point.
First, you sentance no verb.
Second: No, it is called "Owning up to your mistakes" - somthing a troll won't do, but a polite person will.
(duping so the rest of /. will see it)
Sorry, but MY ZIP+4 does indeed resolve to my house, and my house only.
True, maybe I over-generalized in saying that ZIP+4 resolves to a house - it does not ALWAYS resolve to a house, but it frequently DOES.
And that is why I made the point about ZIP vx. ZIP+4 - when ANYBODY says that "oh, we aggregate the data to a ZIP code, nothing to worry about", IF by "ZIP Code" they mean "ZIP+4 code" then their "aggregation" may be to a house level.
Sorry, but MY ZIP+4 does indeed resolve to my house, and my house only.
True, maybe I over-generalized in saying that ZIP+4 resolves to a house - it does not ALWAYS resolve to a house, but it frequently DOES.
And that is why I made the point about ZIP vx. ZIP+4 - when ANYBODY says that "oh, we aggregate the data to a ZIP code, nothing to worry about", IF by "ZIP Code" they mean "ZIP+4 code" then their "aggregation" may be to a house level.
That would depend upon whether they use a standard ZIP or a ZIP+4 - because a ZIP+4 DOES resolve down to a single house.
Could be: for example, where I work I'm behind a corporate firewall, but I have admin rights on my workstation. As a result, I could very easily mount a remote file system via SSH. In fact, since I administer an FTP server that is outside the firewall, being able to mount it as a file system in a secure fashion would be quite useful.
Just because network ingress is controlled does not mean that your workstation is controlled. In many ways, this is no different than you burning a CD of your files at home and bringing that into work - the infection/cracking risk is the same. If you are not allowed to mount an external file system then you should not be allowed to mount a local file system.
However, just because you CAN access your home machine does not mean you SHOULD.
On behalf of anaerobic bacteria everywhere, I must ask you to stop your libelous assertion that lawyers are a form a anaerobic bacteria.
They would threaten to sue, but that would be too low for them.
A free Europe.
With cameras on every corner.
With ID cards for every serf^H^H^H^Hcitizen.
With manditory key escrow.
Hmmmm. This must be some new, European definition of "free" that hasn't yet spread to the US.
By making the cylinders that are firing "think" they are running harder, you move the engine nearer to the sweet spot of efficency. True, you lose some efficency due to pumping losses from the dead cylinders, but the question is "Will in increase in efficency of the cylinders that are firing offset the pumping losses of the cylinders that are not?"
Most of the designs that I have seen for cylinder "feathering" have involved mucking with the valves as well as the fuel charge - that is why I asked if perhaps the industry has had a blind spot to a better method.
Lastly, allow me to slightly recast your final statement:
Many of the "backyard engineers" you so dismissively ignore are just as skilled as the folks working for Ford|GM|etc.
Yes, Cooter h@><0ring his engine may not come up with a better solution, but there are plenty of folks who might.
Do remember the two shade-tree mechanics who thought they had a better idea than the experts - who dismissed them as "just a couple of bicycle repairmen who cannot possibly know as much about flight as we do!"
That is why I want to modify the whole ECU program - so that when the engine is not firing each pass through, the ECU knows to expect a higher O2 level in the exhaust, and won't over-richen the mix.
A second point to this idea - in "8 stroke" mode, the exhaust would have a great deal more free 02, which in theory would help the catalytic converter burn whatever was left in the system.
This raises an interesting question - namely, when are we going to see more hacking done on modern engine control computers?
I don't mean the current crop of "chips" that increase horsepower by overriding emissions control code, or remove the rev limiter code, I mean real, creative hacks.
For example, a friend of mine and I were discussion this possible hack:
On an engine with sequential multipoint injection (one injector per cylender, near the intake valve), could one modify the ECU so that, when the engine is under minimal load, instead of firing the injector on every intake stroke, it would fire on every other intake stroke - in effect changing a four stroke engine into an eight stroke engine?
In theory, this would allow you to run a leaner mix (leaner = hotter burning) without burning up the cylinder, and you could save fuel. When the ECU detected the engine being placed under more load, it would start firing on every intake stroke (and remap to a richer mix).
Of course, I suppose the reason we don't see this is because hotter combustion = more carbon monoxide produced instead of carbon dioxide.
Now, if I could just get anoncvs access to Ford...
I HATE GPIB. I loath it. I am forced to support GPIB when my project has a perfectly good Ethernet port.
/dev/gpib interface that you can select(), poll(), and such on.
National Instruments has a "driver" for their cards under Linux, but their "driver" does not do things in the One True Unix Way - the driver is more of a shared library you link against your program that provided a slew of functions to manipulate the card. What it does NOT provide is a
I would ask this: if your goal is control, why not use TCL/Tk for the control? That way you get an environment that your end user (the scientists) can play around in without edit/compile/link/curse cycles. You also get a degree of portability.
Yes, the problem is that most hardware venders do not provide a lower-level programming model - a) because they are afraid of the competition cloning their board and b) because most folks developing software with them want a LabView|LabWindows|HPVEE|DCOM interface.
However, there is a small ray of hope: the government JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System) (the new software defined radio standard The Men In Green are wanting) uses CORBA to do all the module communication. Now, if we could just pursuade industry to follow that trend! I'd love to provide a CORBA interface for my network enabled device, rather than the current solutions!
Incorrect. A troll with a lawyer is 2 trolls.
A troll with a law firm is a whole-mess-of-trolls.
Simple - where I work, we frequently pull down ISOs of RedHat. So it would be directly work related.
Also, at home I run a similar setup: firewall, then my main workstations. And I am even MORE paranoid about my personal network than our IT manager is about work.