The people who ONLY want to go from NY to LA is a SMALL subset of the people who normally travel between those airports.
And let's not forget the hassles of check-in and such. Thanks to current security measures, even if you "just" want to go from NY to LA, you will probably get their faster if you go to Teterboro from NY and then take a private jet to Sacremento and then take a train/cab to L.A.
It's the fact that it's a big tube with nothing inside it.
A vacuum that large has quite a lot of potential energy.
Crack it and it implodes - Violently. Inertia says that the glass shards will eventually be flying outward instead of inward after passing through the center.
Normally not a problem with already-assembled hardware, but some ICs must be "cooked" at low temperatures before soldering so as to drive out all the moisture.
Forget to cook them, and POP goes the IC when you solder it.
This is the case with the power amp used on a low-power (2W) radio transceiver I assisted in designing as an undergrad.
After my cheapie Logitech at work died, I found an old AT&T variant of the Model M (I'm positive from the way this thing clicks and its shape that it's an OEMed Model M). It's yellowed from age, and works beautifully other than the contacts near / and . being a little worn... And actually over the past few months I think usage has removed the corrosion - Those keys work great now!
But someone broke off one of those little plastic things used to stand the keyboard up, so I have to put a textbook under the back to get a decent angle.:(
While I'm not a fan of frivolous lawsuits (For example, if the parents were suing Lucas to give them the role would be ridiculous.), I think that this is one of the situations where litigation is perfectly legitimate.
Yes, the legal system in the U.S. (And Canada too?) is way too open to abuse, and is abused frequently.
That doesn't mean that it's not there for a legitimate reason. This lawsuit is NOT an abuse of the system.
" Your logic is refuted by the fact that Concorde was in service for almost 30 years -- it carried its first passengers in 1976. The technical failures of the Russian project have no bearing on Concorde. "
No it's not. You're forgetting a major factor:
Pride. Concorde was put on government-subsidized life support because admitting that it was a failure was unacceptable to the British and French governments. Keeping Concorde alive was a matter of nationalistic pride, not of economics.
One of the other non-political problems with polar flight is the fact that cosmic radiation is much stronger at the poles due to the earth's magnetic field. The FAA was worried that this might interfere with navigation and flight control systems.
I really wish they had a Palm PQA version I could use with my Kyocera Smartphone to figure out of the C bus driver was taking another one of his hourly crack breaks.
" 1) Only CFD was used for design and analysis, no wind tunnel testing. This is a cardinal sin. Orbital Sciences has been burned twice for doing this, once on the first flight of the Pegasus XL, and recently on the first flight of the X-43A."
It's a known fact that Rutan is not in any way a proponent of windtunnel testing, and I'm not sure if ANY of his designs were windtunnel tested before first flight.
Despite this, his track record is stellar. Burt Rutan is someone you don't want to bet against.
I think Rutan and Carmack are receiving approximately equal coverage.
Carmack because of his fame within the community, Rutan because of his track record in aviation.
Burt Rutan is aviation's equivalent of John Carmack. A genius who is a leader and driving force within his field.
Someone else commented that he would not ever bet against either of the Rutans. (Burt is an amazing designer, Dick Rutan is an amazing test pilot.)
XCor also gets coverage on/. occasionally. At least one of their employees is a/. reader and poster. XCor is odd - Their goals are suborbital flight, but they have not stated any intentions of winning the X-Prize. (XCor and the X-Prize have no relation.)
I find it odd that these claims of "cracker attacks from China" are being made... At the same time that Blaster has been spreading like wildfire and stressing backbone routers worldwide with the obscene amount of traffic it generates? Oh, and there's a new worm going around too, Welchia. The second worm since I started work deemed important enough to send an email to employees asking them to run a special scan tool rather than relying on Nortan Antivirus Corporate Edition to catch it.
Any other time and I might believe them, but now, I can only say to Taiwan: Don't think you're special. You aren't.
"# 1 current release video game (3-30 hours of game play) # 2 older release video games (6-60 hours of game play)" If the games are crap, yes, maybe you're right.
But anything that's multiplayer is likely to be FAR more than that. I know I've racked up FAR more than 60 hours of gameplay with Quake 3 alone, and I STILL play it, nearly 4 years after I bought it.
And I'd rather listen to some of the Sonic Mayhem background tracks over and over again for hours than a Britney Spears CD.
OK, this shows how out-of-touch I am with the music industry. Weird Al released a CD and I didn't know about it.
Time to do some shopping.:)
Yes, this is part of the RIAA's problem - People are so sick of the crap they pump out that they no longer go to the stores to see if the artists they *LIKE* have released anything. I go to Best Buy every couple of weeks to look around at stuff. How many times have I stopped in the music section since it opened up over a year ago? Not once.
Check out http://www.di.fm/ - Lots of cool stuff, most of which you will NEVER hear in the U.S.
From what I've heard, Paul Oakenfold, one of the few european-style electronic/techno/whatever artists to make it in the U.S. is regarded as a crap-pumper on the order of Spears and Timberlake in Europe.
"Almost no one buys music blanks any more (unless they happen to own a Philips recorder)"
s/Philips recorde/any AHRA-compliant recorder/
Any standalone recorder, whether made by Philips or otherwise, is legally not permitted to record on "data" CD-Rs. This restriction is mandated by law with the Audio Home Recording Act.
"Considering cable modems weren't even available before 1997, availablitiy in 1998 is EARLY. I lived in Vail for a while and we just got in 2002." Comcast did a pretty heavy rollout in New Jersey in early 1997 or even 1996. (I remember it being my junior year or so in high school. I graduated in '98)
Of course, 30 minutes away, Cablevision customers didn't get jack until '02.
These are financed in the same way as cell phones - Dirt-cheap if you commit to a 1-2 year contract. (In this case, a contract for DirecTV satellite service.)
Also, it's a 35-hour unit, which means (approximately) 30-40 gigs of storage as opposed to the 250 or 500 gigs of these new Sonys.
When they renovated my high school, they installed a closed-circuit TV system in the building. Every room had a cable drop and a ceiling-mounted TV, and in the administration building there was an equipment rack that contained a number of RF modulators so that the A/V people could transmit up to 4-5 different channels of custom content on any arbitrary channel they chose. One was used for live feeds (Assemblies in the auditorium, Friday-morning school newscasts), and the rest were for displaying prerecorded content. We had a couple of upstream feeds from various rooms (Auditorium, gym, cafeteria) to the distribution center, and one could easily make one of these a wireless link. (So just one receiver/transmitter pair rather than many.)
Considering that Sony and Philips used to be the manufacturers of TiVo units, and TiVos are Linux-based - Are these just new TiVos with huge hard drives?
Re:GSM ... and CDMA?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"The question is can somebody deploy a off-the-shelf (or homebuilt) scanner and grab the conversations on-the-air? I know that a PR (pseudo random) number is used with the ESN and A-key to generate some keys for encrypting some of the communications, and that the voice channel is "scrambled", but is there a source where the security implications of this is discussed?"
In theory, anything is possible.
Off-the-shelf scanner - Definately not. Unless you're talking about high-end five-figure and even six-figure sums. A Rohde and Schwartz FSIQ would probably be 90% of the hardware needed to crack a CDMA signal, but FSIQs run $75k used ($120k or so new). An Agilent E4406A VSA starts at $32000 and cdmaOne and CDMA2000 options are extra $$$. And these might not even be sufficient for realtime monitoring and demodulation. It would be possible to build custom equipment for much less, but only a M.S. or Ph. D. in EE would be able to design a system to do adequate realtime demodulation of CDMA.
Non-realtime (capture the signals and post-process them) - Much easier. The hardware is $1000-2000 off-the-shelf (see GNU Radio), and the software is $99 if you're a student (Matlab), although you'll still need thorough knowledge of CDMA and some communications systems background to write the demodulation algorithms.
I don't know about the datastream-level encryption, but CDMA is much tougher to demodulate than the TDMA scheme used by GSM. (Given a captured baseband signal, I could probably tweak my old ECE 467 projects to demodulate GSM down to its datastreamin not too long, while CDMA would be a LOT harder.
On the other hand, if you like either of the following two artists (there are, of course, many more, but these are ones I have personal experience with)
Dave Matthews Band - You will hear some MEAN tenor sax improv solos that are simply fscking amazing. I honestly don't listen to DMB recordings that much, but I saw them at the Tibetan Freedom Concert 4-5 years ago and they were *simply amazing*, by far one of the best performers. (I've heard R.E.M. is good live too, but I missed them thanks to a lightning strike cancelling the last half of the Saturday portion of the concert.)
They Might Be Giants - Going to a concert is worth hearing the live version of "The Sun Is Hot" alone. And the rest of their show is great too.
Partly due to the nature of recordings... I've yet to hear a concert recording that didn't sound like ass. To get good audio onto a CD, you need a strictly controlled environment, otherwise it sounds like shite.
A concert is anything BUT a strictly controlled environment.
Admittedly, in some cases you can get a lot of the "concert experience" from a concert recording. (I believe there's a "live" version of TMBG's The Sun Is Hot, which is SO much better than the normal recorded version. TSIH utterly sucks on their regular recordings, but in concert it's one of their best songs.)
Plus some bands (TMBG included) perform their songs somewhat different each time. (Including even changes in instrumentation depending on if they have one of their instrumentalists absent.)
Slashdot Mirror
The people who ONLY want to go from NY to LA is a SMALL subset of the people who normally travel between those airports.
And let's not forget the hassles of check-in and such. Thanks to current security measures, even if you "just" want to go from NY to LA, you will probably get their faster if you go to Teterboro from NY and then take a private jet to Sacremento and then take a train/cab to L.A.
It's the fact that it's a big tube with nothing inside it.
A vacuum that large has quite a lot of potential energy.
Crack it and it implodes - Violently. Inertia says that the glass shards will eventually be flying outward instead of inward after passing through the center.
Normally not a problem with already-assembled hardware, but some ICs must be "cooked" at low temperatures before soldering so as to drive out all the moisture.
Forget to cook them, and POP goes the IC when you solder it.
This is the case with the power amp used on a low-power (2W) radio transceiver I assisted in designing as an undergrad.
After my cheapie Logitech at work died, I found an old AT&T variant of the Model M (I'm positive from the way this thing clicks and its shape that it's an OEMed Model M). It's yellowed from age, and works beautifully other than the contacts near / and . being a little worn... And actually over the past few months I think usage has removed the corrosion - Those keys work great now!
:(
But someone broke off one of those little plastic things used to stand the keyboard up, so I have to put a textbook under the back to get a decent angle.
While I'm not a fan of frivolous lawsuits (For example, if the parents were suing Lucas to give them the role would be ridiculous.), I think that this is one of the situations where litigation is perfectly legitimate.
Yes, the legal system in the U.S. (And Canada too?) is way too open to abuse, and is abused frequently.
That doesn't mean that it's not there for a legitimate reason. This lawsuit is NOT an abuse of the system.
" Your logic is refuted by the fact that Concorde was in service for almost 30 years -- it carried its first passengers in 1976. The technical failures of the Russian project have no bearing on Concorde. "
No it's not. You're forgetting a major factor:
Pride. Concorde was put on government-subsidized life support because admitting that it was a failure was unacceptable to the British and French governments. Keeping Concorde alive was a matter of nationalistic pride, not of economics.
One of the other non-political problems with polar flight is the fact that cosmic radiation is much stronger at the poles due to the earth's magnetic field. The FAA was worried that this might interfere with navigation and flight control systems.
Since I'm starting grad classes at RU.
Doesn't seem to work this semester.
I really wish they had a Palm PQA version I could use with my Kyocera Smartphone to figure out of the C bus driver was taking another one of his hourly crack breaks.
" 1) Only CFD was used for design and analysis, no wind tunnel testing. This is a cardinal sin. Orbital Sciences has been burned twice for doing this, once on the first flight of the Pegasus XL, and recently on the first flight of the X-43A."
It's a known fact that Rutan is not in any way a proponent of windtunnel testing, and I'm not sure if ANY of his designs were windtunnel tested before first flight.
Despite this, his track record is stellar. Burt Rutan is someone you don't want to bet against.
I think Rutan and Carmack are receiving approximately equal coverage.
/. occasionally. At least one of their employees is a /. reader and poster. XCor is odd - Their goals are suborbital flight, but they have not stated any intentions of winning the X-Prize. (XCor and the X-Prize have no relation.)
Carmack because of his fame within the community, Rutan because of his track record in aviation.
Burt Rutan is aviation's equivalent of John Carmack. A genius who is a leader and driving force within his field.
Someone else commented that he would not ever bet against either of the Rutans. (Burt is an amazing designer, Dick Rutan is an amazing test pilot.)
XCor also gets coverage on
I find it odd that these claims of "cracker attacks from China" are being made... At the same time that Blaster has been spreading like wildfire and stressing backbone routers worldwide with the obscene amount of traffic it generates? Oh, and there's a new worm going around too, Welchia. The second worm since I started work deemed important enough to send an email to employees asking them to run a special scan tool rather than relying on Nortan Antivirus Corporate Edition to catch it.
Any other time and I might believe them, but now, I can only say to Taiwan: Don't think you're special. You aren't.
"# 1 current release video game (3-30 hours of game play)
# 2 older release video games (6-60 hours of game play)"
If the games are crap, yes, maybe you're right.
But anything that's multiplayer is likely to be FAR more than that. I know I've racked up FAR more than 60 hours of gameplay with Quake 3 alone, and I STILL play it, nearly 4 years after I bought it.
And I'd rather listen to some of the Sonic Mayhem background tracks over and over again for hours than a Britney Spears CD.
"recent Weird Al Yankovic CD, "Poodle Hat""
:)
OK, this shows how out-of-touch I am with the music industry. Weird Al released a CD and I didn't know about it.
Time to do some shopping.
Yes, this is part of the RIAA's problem - People are so sick of the crap they pump out that they no longer go to the stores to see if the artists they *LIKE* have released anything. I go to Best Buy every couple of weeks to look around at stuff. How many times have I stopped in the music section since it opened up over a year ago? Not once.
Check out http://www.di.fm/ - Lots of cool stuff, most of which you will NEVER hear in the U.S.
From what I've heard, Paul Oakenfold, one of the few european-style electronic/techno/whatever artists to make it in the U.S. is regarded as a crap-pumper on the order of Spears and Timberlake in Europe.
"Almost no one buys music blanks any more (unless they happen to own a Philips recorder)"
s/Philips recorde/any AHRA-compliant recorder/
Any standalone recorder, whether made by Philips or otherwise, is legally not permitted to record on "data" CD-Rs. This restriction is mandated by law with the Audio Home Recording Act.
PC equipment happens to be exempt from this law.
"Considering cable modems weren't even available before 1997, availablitiy in 1998 is EARLY. I lived in Vail for a while and we just got in 2002."
Comcast did a pretty heavy rollout in New Jersey in early 1997 or even 1996. (I remember it being my junior year or so in high school. I graduated in '98)
Of course, 30 minutes away, Cablevision customers didn't get jack until '02.
In addition, most security systems can get away with low framerates (1-5 fps vs. 30), which REALLY reduces HD space.
You want a hardware MPEG encoder.
Which means $150 for a capture card. (WinTV-PVR 250)
Note that he mentioned a DirecTiVo
These are financed in the same way as cell phones - Dirt-cheap if you commit to a 1-2 year contract. (In this case, a contract for DirecTV satellite service.)
Also, it's a 35-hour unit, which means (approximately) 30-40 gigs of storage as opposed to the 250 or 500 gigs of these new Sonys.
See if you can get a grant for funding.
When they renovated my high school, they installed a closed-circuit TV system in the building. Every room had a cable drop and a ceiling-mounted TV, and in the administration building there was an equipment rack that contained a number of RF modulators so that the A/V people could transmit up to 4-5 different channels of custom content on any arbitrary channel they chose. One was used for live feeds (Assemblies in the auditorium, Friday-morning school newscasts), and the rest were for displaying prerecorded content. We had a couple of upstream feeds from various rooms (Auditorium, gym, cafeteria) to the distribution center, and one could easily make one of these a wireless link. (So just one receiver/transmitter pair rather than many.)
Considering that Sony and Philips used to be the manufacturers of TiVo units, and TiVos are Linux-based - Are these just new TiVos with huge hard drives?
"The question is can somebody deploy a off-the-shelf (or homebuilt) scanner and grab the conversations on-the-air? I know that a PR (pseudo random) number is used with the ESN and A-key to generate some keys for encrypting some of the communications, and that the voice channel is "scrambled", but is there a source where the security implications of this is discussed?"
In theory, anything is possible.
Off-the-shelf scanner - Definately not. Unless you're talking about high-end five-figure and even six-figure sums. A Rohde and Schwartz FSIQ would probably be 90% of the hardware needed to crack a CDMA signal, but FSIQs run $75k used ($120k or so new). An Agilent E4406A VSA starts at $32000 and cdmaOne and CDMA2000 options are extra $$$. And these might not even be sufficient for realtime monitoring and demodulation. It would be possible to build custom equipment for much less, but only a M.S. or Ph. D. in EE would be able to design a system to do adequate realtime demodulation of CDMA.
Non-realtime (capture the signals and post-process them) - Much easier. The hardware is $1000-2000 off-the-shelf (see GNU Radio), and the software is $99 if you're a student (Matlab), although you'll still need thorough knowledge of CDMA and some communications systems background to write the demodulation algorithms.
I don't know about the datastream-level encryption, but CDMA is much tougher to demodulate than the TDMA scheme used by GSM. (Given a captured baseband signal, I could probably tweak my old ECE 467 projects to demodulate GSM down to its datastreamin not too long, while CDMA would be a LOT harder.
I've heard that some bands suck in concert.
On the other hand, if you like either of the following two artists (there are, of course, many more, but these are ones I have personal experience with)
Dave Matthews Band - You will hear some MEAN tenor sax improv solos that are simply fscking amazing. I honestly don't listen to DMB recordings that much, but I saw them at the Tibetan Freedom Concert 4-5 years ago and they were *simply amazing*, by far one of the best performers. (I've heard R.E.M. is good live too, but I missed them thanks to a lightning strike cancelling the last half of the Saturday portion of the concert.)
They Might Be Giants - Going to a concert is worth hearing the live version of "The Sun Is Hot" alone. And the rest of their show is great too.
It's one of those human-nature questions.
In many cases, a concert is just *better*.
Partly due to the nature of recordings... I've yet to hear a concert recording that didn't sound like ass. To get good audio onto a CD, you need a strictly controlled environment, otherwise it sounds like shite.
A concert is anything BUT a strictly controlled environment.
Admittedly, in some cases you can get a lot of the "concert experience" from a concert recording. (I believe there's a "live" version of TMBG's The Sun Is Hot, which is SO much better than the normal recorded version. TSIH utterly sucks on their regular recordings, but in concert it's one of their best songs.)
Plus some bands (TMBG included) perform their songs somewhat different each time. (Including even changes in instrumentation depending on if they have one of their instrumentalists absent.)
Could you please point me to an example of a RAM-based player?
Every player I know of uses flash memory, with the exception of MP3 CD and HD players using RAM for a buffer.