Encryption strength depends on the key, not the algorithm. You can study the source of GnuPG all you want, but you can't break the encryption without the private key.
Assuming you're using a private/public key system for this application, you don't need the private key to decrypt. The private key encrypts the video, the public key decrypts it. And the public key has to reside somewhere in memory because the whole point of the system is to decrypt the video so you can watch it.
That's the fundamental problem with DRM. In regular encryption, Betty wants to send messages to Andy without Charlie eavesdropping. In DRM, Charlie (the viewer) is the intended recipient while Andy (the DVD player) is just an intermediary. Current DRM is just security through obscurity - hide how Andy decrypts the video stream. If you open source it, that obscurity disappears, thus making DRM impossible.
Well they're not the holy grail of computing, but they're the natural evolution of the clipboard. A lot of tasks need to be done while moving around, not sitting at a desk. A keyboard doesn't work for those tasks because you'd have to support the netbook with one hand while typing with the other. Clipboards were invented as a combination desk + writing surface for these situations. Tablets are the same thing for computing.
The problem IMHO is people are still trying to make tablets too much like a desktop computer. It needs to be small, thin, light, and of course cheap with rudimentary pen-based data entry. It doesn't need to be a super-powerful computer which can run the latest version of Windows and calculate Pi to 1 million digits in 30 seconds. The most processor-intensive task it should have to handle is handwriting recognition. In that respect I think an OLPC tablet would be closer to the ideal than the 4-pound $1k tablets on the market today (ebook readers are getting there too). Make something which can replace the clipboard, and businesses will buy them in droves, I think.
For Internet Explorer, only IE8 is still growing, but its rate of growth is significantly slower than Firefox's. The headline may be misleading, but the the summary is right on the money. If these trends keep up, the headline may well become true a lot sooner than you seem to think.
I disagree. The plots for IE7 and IE8 are nearly inverses of each other, indicating it's mostly IE7 users switching to IE8. Same goes for FF3.0 and FF3.5 - most FF3.5 users are coming from FF3.0. But the two lines for FF3.0 and FF3.5 have already crossed (most FF3.0 users have already switched to 3.5). On the other hand, the two lines for IE have not crossed yet (most IE7 users have yet to switch). So while FF3.5 may have a faster rate of adoption right now, it should taper off sooner than IE8 adoption does. And IE8 will pass it again.
Of course really long term I'm hoping to see IE8 users switching to FF3.5.
I don't even understand why there should be early termination fees. If they want to subsidize the cost of the phone, just give the person a loan and add its repayment costs to the monthly charge. They already pull your credit report when you sign up for service anyway. If the customer leaves early, the remaining balance of the loan becomes due. Simple and keeps the numbers straight and legit.
The only reason the cellular companies play this subsidized phone and early termination fee charade is to take advantage of people like me. I've had the same phone for almost 4 years now. I've long since paid back any subsidy which lowered my initial purchase price. Yet I'm still paying the same monthly service fee (and hence subsidy repayment fee) as someone who got a brand spanking new smartphone last week.
First sale doctrine allows you to resell something you bought. Fair use allows to modify or extend something you bought beyond what the original copyright holder intended or wants in certain ways. Neither fair use nor first sale allows you to both modify and resell copyrighted material. The key word being 'and'. Copyright law expressly states that permission of the copyright holder is required before modification and redistribution is allowed.
I have my doubts about that. If it were true, your 5-year old could use page 153 of your Harry Potter book for toilet paper when you aren't looking, and it would be a violation of Copyright law to sell the book at a garage sale.
I think a better distinction is that Copyright law prohibits copying works for resale. i.e. You buy one copy, make duplicates, and sell the duplicates. At least that's what it was supposed to do. The current bastardization of Copyright law which we have now does all sorts of things which have nothing to do with promoting the arts and sciences.
Technically, that's illegal too. To publish an identifiable photo of a person, one typically needs a model release from that individual. Yes everybody does it, and most people don't care. But the fact that he owns Facebook and is making advertising money off the public exhibition of those photos could open him up to some juicy liability should anyone in those photos wish to pursue it.
Unfortunately, that is a distinction the ISPs have successfully obfuscated. Back when the net neutrality debate first started, it was primarily about delaying traffic from a certain web site (e.g ISPs wanting to charge Google if Google wanted the ISP's customers to be able to visit google.com), or within a type of traffic depending on destination (e.g. a VoIP service which competed with the ISP's). But then the ISPs started talking about bandwidth throttling (e.g. giving bittorrent a lower priority than VoIP), and now a not-insignificant number of people incorrectly think net neutrality means all customers should have the same bandwidth regardless of amount paid.
And, can they give you control without feeling sensation? Because that would totally feel like somebody else's hand...
Heck, go whole hog. Have two amputees chatting with each other via webcams connect to each other's artificial arm over the Internet. Cybersex will never be the same.
You're rich, so you should be able to pollute more? Interesting philosophy.
You're arbitrarily comparing based on number of people rather than amount of productivity. Based on PPP GDP, a U.S. citizen is like a farmer who grows 9 acres of wheat using 4 sacks of fertilizer. The Chinese citizen is like a farmer who grows 1 acre of wheat using 1 sack of fertilizer.
Yes the first farmer is producing 4 times the amount of groundwater pollution per citizen as the second. But per bushel of wheat produced, he's only producing half the groundwater pollution of the second farmer. In other words, the overall amount of CO2 generated by the world would actually decrease if the Chinese adopted the American production methods, not the other way around.
Put another way, if we all went back to living in caves and thatch huts, plowing our fields with yoked cows, and hunting with bows and arrows, yes the amount of CO2 production per person would drop by a lot. But our productivity per person would drop by even more, resulting in a regression in the standard of living which would far outweigh the gain in reduced CO2 production. The trick is coming up with ways to maintain the standard of living while still reducing CO2 production.
Hardly. It might raise some ethical conundrums, but it certainly won't make colonization any more difficult.
If we ever colonize mars, we're going to start by building habitats. We'll have hundreds of years to live on a planet which we haven't even begun to terraform. That will give us plenty of time to have the People for the Ethical Treatment of Martian Lifeforms present a convincing case for why we should abandon an entire planet to a bunch of alien microbes. If they fail in convincing the rest of humanity, then we'll carry on with our terraforming effort, and the Martian bacteria will be relegated to sample jars, museums, and computer databases.
Yeah, that sounds great if you're the one doing the terraforming. I suppose you'll have no problem when the Vogons come by to eliminate Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass, relegating all of Earth to a computer database entry of "Mostly harmless"?
Hey. I've got a brilliant Idea. Let's construct a thermonuclear fusion reactor at the center of the solar system. We will collect the radiation energy with photovoltaic cells pointed to the sky. As there are no moving parts, it wouldn't require much maintainence either. Why hasn't anybody implemented such a brilliant idea?
Solar energy is very low density. It's used in spacecraft (out til about Mars) because except for RTGs it's a lot cheaper than launching fuel into orbit. For terrestrial applications however, sunlight only has an energy density of 1500 Watts/m^2 in space, dropping to about 800 W/m^2 on earth. Factor in the 15% efficiency of mass-produced commercial PV (photovoltaics) and you're only talking about 120 W/m^2 peak production. Next factor in the movement of the sun (since you specified no moving parts) and weather, and realistically you're looking at maybe 50-70 W/m^2 on average during the day (halve this if you want average output over 24 hours). This is semi-reasonable for static applications (e.g. houses) where you can plaster a large area with PV panels. A house's average 36 kW-h daily energy use could be satisfied with about 40-60 m^2 of panels. (You'd still want to be on the grid though, so you could do things like heat the house when fresh snowfall covered up your panels.)
But it's useless for mobile and space-constrained applications. A typical sedan requires about 20-25 hp to maintain cruise speed on the highway. That's about 15-19 kW. If you go with the lower figure, if you covered the entire upward-facing surface of your car with PV (about 6-7 m^2), parking it on a sunny 8-hour workday would capture about 5 kW-h of energy in the battery. Or enough to drive your solar car at highway speeds for all of 15-20 minutes (never mind accelerating).
Another idea a solar advocate pitched to me was powering street lamps entirely with PV mounted on top of the lamp post. The typical street lamp uses a 250 W bulb. If you assume the light needs to be on for 14 hours in winter, it'll use 3.5 kW-h of energy. A static panel which could capture that amount of energy in 10 hours of daylight at 70 W/m^2 would need to be 5 m^2. There's no way you're mounting that on top of a lamp post. LED lighting would have to improve to the point where a 25 Watt LED bulb could provide the same light to make the idea semi-reasonable. And you'd still be talking about a half m^2 panel which although not overly large would still be highly visible and unwieldy should the wind pick up.
... to park such a device at L4 or L5, where you wouldn't require *ANY* fuel to keep it in position?
The receiver/transmitter on these satellites and space probes are very small. Generally they transmit using only a few watts, and we rely on huge antennas like in the ubiquitous dishes in the Deep Space Network to gather enough of that minuscule signal to distinguish it from background noise. Going the other way, we use the same huge antennas to blast commands to these spacecraft at anywhere between 5-500 kW. By the time the signal reaches the spacecraft, it has dissipated substantially, but its original broadcast power was high enough that the spacecraft's relatively small antenna can still collect enough of it to distinguish the signal.
Putting a repeater spacecraft at the L4 or L5 points would place them a substantial distance from Mars. Consequently the repeater would need a very large antenna and large amounts of power (though not as big/much as earth-based antennas) in order to relay signals to/from a spacecraft on Mars. The idea presented in the paper is more akin to what we do right now with the two Mars Rovers and several of our Mars orbiters. The Rovers themselves have weak antennas and can't communicate directly with Earth except at low data rates. Instead, they transmit their data to the orbiters (same antenna can achieve higher bandwidth since the distance is much less), which then relay it to Earth using their much larger and more powerful antenna.
(Introduction to channel capacity for those who may be wondering what the relationship is between data transmission speed and signal to noise ratio.)
Or perhaps because they do understand it? Compared to wind energy, the initial cost are twice as much, operating costs thrice as much and fuel costs infinitely more. And that was 6 years ago, wind has come down since, while nuclear remains the energy of the future...
In a global survey of energy costs (PDF warning) looking at construction, operating, and fuel costs; nuclear costs about US$31-$53 per MWh. Wind ranges from about US$45 in the US to over $140 in the Czech Republic, about $65 per Mwh overall. The U.S. figures are lower because the U.S. amortizes wind farms' construction costs over 40 years, while the rest of the world does it over 30 years. So $60/MWh is probably a more realistic figure, putting Wind at about twice the cost of Nuclear.
Oh, and besides high costs and 8-12 years of construction time, nuclear energy has to deal with safety, waste and proliferation. Somehow it's just not what investors are looking for right now.
Most of these concerns are entirely political. The huge construction time is due to excessive regulation due to (mostly) unfounded fears over nuclear power's safety. Nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation man has invented (PDF, page 240-241). Even including Chernobyl, it has the fewest number of fatalities per GWh of electricity generated. (The most dangerous widely-used power source is actually hydro, with large numbers of fatalities associated with dam failures.) In 50+ years of commercial nuclear power generation in the U.S., there has not been a single fatality despite providing ~20% of our electricity. There have already been a few wind power maintenance-related fatalities despite their almost non-existent contribution to the power grid.
Nuclear waste is also a red herring. A 750 MW nuclear plant (about the electricity needed to power a city of a half million) produces about enough spent fuel in a year to fit in one or two bathtubs. Add in incidental irradiated material (concrete, etc) and it's about enough to fill your bathroom. That's all the waste there is for providing electricity to half a million people for a year
In comparison, a 750 MW coal plant will burn about 3-5 million tons of coal a year, producing 5-10 million tons of CO2, and releasing about 20% of the particulate matter into the atmosphere including a lot of radioactive trace elements. In fact, these trace radioactive materials contain more energy than the coal itself (that is to say, burning coal automatically produces more radioactive waste per MWh generated than nuclear). If you're truly worried about radioactive waste being released into the environment, you should be screaming for all the coal plants to be replaced by nuclear plants ASAP so at least the radioactivity is contained instead of released into the atmosphere.
Furthermore, a great deal of the spent fuel can actually be reused. Conventional nuclear plants only use about 5% of the energy contained in the fuel. The rest is treated as waste because...
Proliferation is the only real concern. Extracting the remaining ~95% of the energy from nuclear fuel thus far requires the use of breeder reactors, which unfortunately produce weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. There are some new reactor designs which try to minimize this (as well as an old design canceled in the 1970s).
Well, it does tell us something about ourselves: how easily we resort to fascism in times of war, and how tempting it will seem to do so.
I'm not sure that's historically accurate (we are talking about a movie, where the writer/director can make up pretty much anything they want). In modern history, it seems countries that are already fascist are more likely to go to war. Countries that are not fascist but go to war tend to become more fascist in their policies while fighting, but tend to come out of it pretty well; unless they lose.
Starship Troopers is an interesting franchise in this regard, since the original book was pretty pro-military, while the movie was rather anti-military. Personally, I'd argue that the biggest contributor towards being warlike isn't fascism or having fascist policies, but hatred towards and blaming others for whatever problems ail society.
Unless the people retesting are the same ones who submitted it in the first place (either via ghost writers, sham corporations, etc). Then it becomes like artificial sweeteners, where you have a mountain of evidence stating that it is safe (from the corporations, or people funded by the industry) and some research stating that it isn't safe, and the end result is people are confused and no one knows what to really believe.
While using ghostwriters is obviously wrong, I'm curious how exactly is an experimental drug or food additive supposed to get studies on it done if it isn't funded by the company developing it? Are the pharmaceutical companies supposed to go around to researchers asking, "Could you please do some studies on this new drug/food additive we're developing? We can't pay you or give you anything to compensate you for your time and effort, but it would really help us out if you did it. So could you do it, pretty please?" And you can't really rely on researchers who get interested on their own because (1) they usually only get interested after the drug/food additive is in widespread use and think "Hmm, this stuff seems to be everywhere. I wonder if it's really safe?", and (2) they are often interested because they have an agenda of their own (if the company making/selling the stuff isn't funding it, someone else has to be funding it).
Obviously there's a lot of room for improvement to the process. But it seems to me an outright rejection of any corporate-sponsored research is just as flawed as blind acceptance of corporate-sponsored research. The funding for it has to come from somewhere, and the logical choice to make pay for it is the company developing it. Getting the FDA to act as a blind (accepting the funding with one hand while conducting the research with the other) seems like it could be a solution. But for a drug to even be considered by the FDA, the FDA requires you to give them research results which show the drug is promising.
Aluminum oxide (corundum) is a ceramic (as are all glasses) and is rather brittle. It doesn't have the malleability, ductility, and fracture toughness (plastic deformation beyond the yield strength instead of complete failure) which makes metals a desirable structural material. Currently, when we need a transparent material with these properties we use plastics, but they tend to be lower strength and much more flexible (bendy) than metals. A transparent metal would be awesome because it could serve the same function with less volume of material and less need for structural stiffening.
U.S. Imports from China accounted for about $338 billion in 2008. Exports were about $70 billion. The U.S. GDP in 2008 was about $14.2 trillion, so trade with China accounted for about 2.9% of the U.S. economy. China holds about $800 billion in U.S. treasury securities. Even if you add that (which you shouldn't since it's a dollar amount while the other figures are dollars/year, but let's do it since we're talking about them hypothetically dumping all their securities on the market), China's impact on the U.S. GDP is only 8.5%.
China's GDP in 2008 $3.9-$4.4 trillion, so their trade with the U.S. accounted for about 9.3%-10.5% of their economy.
So economically, China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China.
Finally, FWIW, I subscribe to the two level theory of war. The first level is the infantry, the second level is everything else: it exists to support the infantry since only the infantry can take and hold ground. Artillery, sea power, aviation, even tanks can deny the enemy ground, but only the infantry can hold it. So more A-10s putting more ordance where the infantry needs it seems a better deal than F-22's holding air superiority over a non-existant enemy air force. IMHO.
This has been a longtime problem with the U.S.' multi-tiered military. The USAF brass likes shiny fighter planes because they're cool. They're like movie stars - all glamor and glitz and catch everyone's attention. But in a war their job is simply support. Actually it's support for support - they clear the air for bombers, who drop bombs to support the infantry. The Army has been begging the USAF for more close air support aircraft like the A-10. But the USAF brass sees it as shiny new fighter vs. ugly old flying tank, so the shiny fighter gets the money instead of the needed ugly tank. They wouldn't even install an infrared camera on it, forcing the pilots to use the IR camera on one of their munitions (a Maverick missile) for nighttime operations.
I was interning at Lockheed in 1990-1991 when the then-YF-22 was selected over the YF-23. The project was started in 1981, with specifications given to the manufacturers in 1986. So the plane really is designed with the cold war in mind - to fight a war against the Soviet Union. As cool as I think it is, I totally agree that its original design conditions no longer apply, and there is no justification for making more F-22s than the original production run. Also, the Pentagon didn't want any more. It was the senators and congresscritters in the districts where the planes are made who were trying to get production increased.
As for your arguments about ISP's overselling their bandwidth, well yeah, we all know that, and we all know about the near-universal lack of competition, but those issues are generally separate from Quality of Service and Network Neutrality.
Technically they are separate issues, but legally it's pretty common to link two different things which act in opposite directions - covering a bitter pill with a sugar coating. I don't see a problem with making QoS illegal unless the ISP also meets some minimum guidelines for bandwidth overselling (e.g. your actual capacity must be at least 10% theoretical peak bandwidth). The ISPs want the QoS but not the overselling guideline, while the customer wants both. Legally tying the two together eliminates this disparity between what the ISP wants and what the customer wants, in favor of the customer.
The only real problem I can see with it would be the "10%" number would have to be decided by some government agency. But by highlighting it as a single number, you also bring it to the forefront. Instead of protecting it as a trade secret like ISPs currently do, they'd be encouraged to advertise it. e.g. If it was widely felt that the standard was too low, an ISP could advertise that "our capacity is twice the government minimum!" as a selling point. And if the minimum were too high, the usage logs from various ISPs would provide objective quantifiable evidence to help them lobby the government to lower it.
When I got my new Nexus card it came with a foil case (looks like fairly thick copper foil) and documentation explaining the case is a security measure to prevent ID theft by remote reading of the RFID tag in the card. I've waved it in front of the Nexus readers with and without the case, and it works (at least on those readers). It's actually pretty handy as it's barely bigger than the card, adds almost no thickness, and prevents the card from getting all scratched up like my credit cards.
Do the passport cards not come with these foil sheaths? Or is this just a matter of people ignoring instructions and not using the case.
That should be "scientific research". The research line in the graph is generally the science. The development line is generally DoD projects, which are have been decreasing ever since the cold war ended.
The real problem with scientists and the gop is that the gop has for the last 20 years engaged in an antiscience crusade. They're the party that tries to teach creationism. They're the party that denies the overwhelming evidence of man made global warming. They're the party that band the creation of useful stem cell lines for research. Why? Because they're for the status quo. There's simply no reason why anyone who even has a passing interest in the advancement of science should vote republican.
I think there's a lot of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that. The recent Bush administration increased federal spending on scientific R&D to its highest levels in 30+ years. The President who decreased it to its lowest level was actually Clinton. But most people (including I suspect most scientists) probably think the opposite because that's what they expect from the preconceived bias you just outlined.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming you're using a private/public key system for this application, you don't need the private key to decrypt. The private key encrypts the video, the public key decrypts it. And the public key has to reside somewhere in memory because the whole point of the system is to decrypt the video so you can watch it.
That's the fundamental problem with DRM. In regular encryption, Betty wants to send messages to Andy without Charlie eavesdropping. In DRM, Charlie (the viewer) is the intended recipient while Andy (the DVD player) is just an intermediary. Current DRM is just security through obscurity - hide how Andy decrypts the video stream. If you open source it, that obscurity disappears, thus making DRM impossible.
Well they're not the holy grail of computing, but they're the natural evolution of the clipboard. A lot of tasks need to be done while moving around, not sitting at a desk. A keyboard doesn't work for those tasks because you'd have to support the netbook with one hand while typing with the other. Clipboards were invented as a combination desk + writing surface for these situations. Tablets are the same thing for computing.
The problem IMHO is people are still trying to make tablets too much like a desktop computer. It needs to be small, thin, light, and of course cheap with rudimentary pen-based data entry. It doesn't need to be a super-powerful computer which can run the latest version of Windows and calculate Pi to 1 million digits in 30 seconds. The most processor-intensive task it should have to handle is handwriting recognition. In that respect I think an OLPC tablet would be closer to the ideal than the 4-pound $1k tablets on the market today (ebook readers are getting there too). Make something which can replace the clipboard, and businesses will buy them in droves, I think.
I disagree. The plots for IE7 and IE8 are nearly inverses of each other, indicating it's mostly IE7 users switching to IE8. Same goes for FF3.0 and FF3.5 - most FF3.5 users are coming from FF3.0. But the two lines for FF3.0 and FF3.5 have already crossed (most FF3.0 users have already switched to 3.5). On the other hand, the two lines for IE have not crossed yet (most IE7 users have yet to switch). So while FF3.5 may have a faster rate of adoption right now, it should taper off sooner than IE8 adoption does. And IE8 will pass it again.
Of course really long term I'm hoping to see IE8 users switching to FF3.5.
I don't even understand why there should be early termination fees. If they want to subsidize the cost of the phone, just give the person a loan and add its repayment costs to the monthly charge. They already pull your credit report when you sign up for service anyway. If the customer leaves early, the remaining balance of the loan becomes due. Simple and keeps the numbers straight and legit.
The only reason the cellular companies play this subsidized phone and early termination fee charade is to take advantage of people like me. I've had the same phone for almost 4 years now. I've long since paid back any subsidy which lowered my initial purchase price. Yet I'm still paying the same monthly service fee (and hence subsidy repayment fee) as someone who got a brand spanking new smartphone last week.
I have my doubts about that. If it were true, your 5-year old could use page 153 of your Harry Potter book for toilet paper when you aren't looking, and it would be a violation of Copyright law to sell the book at a garage sale.
I think a better distinction is that Copyright law prohibits copying works for resale. i.e. You buy one copy, make duplicates, and sell the duplicates. At least that's what it was supposed to do. The current bastardization of Copyright law which we have now does all sorts of things which have nothing to do with promoting the arts and sciences.
Technically, that's illegal too. To publish an identifiable photo of a person, one typically needs a model release from that individual. Yes everybody does it, and most people don't care. But the fact that he owns Facebook and is making advertising money off the public exhibition of those photos could open him up to some juicy liability should anyone in those photos wish to pursue it.
Unfortunately, that is a distinction the ISPs have successfully obfuscated. Back when the net neutrality debate first started, it was primarily about delaying traffic from a certain web site (e.g ISPs wanting to charge Google if Google wanted the ISP's customers to be able to visit google.com), or within a type of traffic depending on destination (e.g. a VoIP service which competed with the ISP's). But then the ISPs started talking about bandwidth throttling (e.g. giving bittorrent a lower priority than VoIP), and now a not-insignificant number of people incorrectly think net neutrality means all customers should have the same bandwidth regardless of amount paid.
But they're not in power right now...
Heck, go whole hog. Have two amputees chatting with each other via webcams connect to each other's artificial arm over the Internet. Cybersex will never be the same.
You're arbitrarily comparing based on number of people rather than amount of productivity. Based on PPP GDP, a U.S. citizen is like a farmer who grows 9 acres of wheat using 4 sacks of fertilizer. The Chinese citizen is like a farmer who grows 1 acre of wheat using 1 sack of fertilizer.
Yes the first farmer is producing 4 times the amount of groundwater pollution per citizen as the second. But per bushel of wheat produced, he's only producing half the groundwater pollution of the second farmer. In other words, the overall amount of CO2 generated by the world would actually decrease if the Chinese adopted the American production methods, not the other way around.
Put another way, if we all went back to living in caves and thatch huts, plowing our fields with yoked cows, and hunting with bows and arrows, yes the amount of CO2 production per person would drop by a lot. But our productivity per person would drop by even more, resulting in a regression in the standard of living which would far outweigh the gain in reduced CO2 production. The trick is coming up with ways to maintain the standard of living while still reducing CO2 production.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_intensity
Yeah, that sounds great if you're the one doing the terraforming. I suppose you'll have no problem when the Vogons come by to eliminate Earth to make room for a hyperspace bypass, relegating all of Earth to a computer database entry of "Mostly harmless"?
Solar energy is very low density. It's used in spacecraft (out til about Mars) because except for RTGs it's a lot cheaper than launching fuel into orbit. For terrestrial applications however, sunlight only has an energy density of 1500 Watts/m^2 in space, dropping to about 800 W/m^2 on earth. Factor in the 15% efficiency of mass-produced commercial PV (photovoltaics) and you're only talking about 120 W/m^2 peak production. Next factor in the movement of the sun (since you specified no moving parts) and weather, and realistically you're looking at maybe 50-70 W/m^2 on average during the day (halve this if you want average output over 24 hours). This is semi-reasonable for static applications (e.g. houses) where you can plaster a large area with PV panels. A house's average 36 kW-h daily energy use could be satisfied with about 40-60 m^2 of panels. (You'd still want to be on the grid though, so you could do things like heat the house when fresh snowfall covered up your panels.)
But it's useless for mobile and space-constrained applications. A typical sedan requires about 20-25 hp to maintain cruise speed on the highway. That's about 15-19 kW. If you go with the lower figure, if you covered the entire upward-facing surface of your car with PV (about 6-7 m^2), parking it on a sunny 8-hour workday would capture about 5 kW-h of energy in the battery. Or enough to drive your solar car at highway speeds for all of 15-20 minutes (never mind accelerating).
Another idea a solar advocate pitched to me was powering street lamps entirely with PV mounted on top of the lamp post. The typical street lamp uses a 250 W bulb. If you assume the light needs to be on for 14 hours in winter, it'll use 3.5 kW-h of energy. A static panel which could capture that amount of energy in 10 hours of daylight at 70 W/m^2 would need to be 5 m^2. There's no way you're mounting that on top of a lamp post. LED lighting would have to improve to the point where a 25 Watt LED bulb could provide the same light to make the idea semi-reasonable. And you'd still be talking about a half m^2 panel which although not overly large would still be highly visible and unwieldy should the wind pick up.
The receiver/transmitter on these satellites and space probes are very small. Generally they transmit using only a few watts, and we rely on huge antennas like in the ubiquitous dishes in the Deep Space Network to gather enough of that minuscule signal to distinguish it from background noise. Going the other way, we use the same huge antennas to blast commands to these spacecraft at anywhere between 5-500 kW. By the time the signal reaches the spacecraft, it has dissipated substantially, but its original broadcast power was high enough that the spacecraft's relatively small antenna can still collect enough of it to distinguish the signal.
Putting a repeater spacecraft at the L4 or L5 points would place them a substantial distance from Mars. Consequently the repeater would need a very large antenna and large amounts of power (though not as big/much as earth-based antennas) in order to relay signals to/from a spacecraft on Mars. The idea presented in the paper is more akin to what we do right now with the two Mars Rovers and several of our Mars orbiters. The Rovers themselves have weak antennas and can't communicate directly with Earth except at low data rates. Instead, they transmit their data to the orbiters (same antenna can achieve higher bandwidth since the distance is much less), which then relay it to Earth using their much larger and more powerful antenna.
(Introduction to channel capacity for those who may be wondering what the relationship is between data transmission speed and signal to noise ratio.)
In a global survey of energy costs (PDF warning) looking at construction, operating, and fuel costs; nuclear costs about US$31-$53 per MWh. Wind ranges from about US$45 in the US to over $140 in the Czech Republic, about $65 per Mwh overall. The U.S. figures are lower because the U.S. amortizes wind farms' construction costs over 40 years, while the rest of the world does it over 30 years. So $60/MWh is probably a more realistic figure, putting Wind at about twice the cost of Nuclear.
Most of these concerns are entirely political. The huge construction time is due to excessive regulation due to (mostly) unfounded fears over nuclear power's safety. Nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation man has invented (PDF, page 240-241). Even including Chernobyl, it has the fewest number of fatalities per GWh of electricity generated. (The most dangerous widely-used power source is actually hydro, with large numbers of fatalities associated with dam failures.) In 50+ years of commercial nuclear power generation in the U.S., there has not been a single fatality despite providing ~20% of our electricity. There have already been a few wind power maintenance-related fatalities despite their almost non-existent contribution to the power grid.
Nuclear waste is also a red herring. A 750 MW nuclear plant (about the electricity needed to power a city of a half million) produces about enough spent fuel in a year to fit in one or two bathtubs. Add in incidental irradiated material (concrete, etc) and it's about enough to fill your bathroom. That's all the waste there is for providing electricity to half a million people for a year
In comparison, a 750 MW coal plant will burn about 3-5 million tons of coal a year, producing 5-10 million tons of CO2, and releasing about 20% of the particulate matter into the atmosphere including a lot of radioactive trace elements. In fact, these trace radioactive materials contain more energy than the coal itself (that is to say, burning coal automatically produces more radioactive waste per MWh generated than nuclear). If you're truly worried about radioactive waste being released into the environment, you should be screaming for all the coal plants to be replaced by nuclear plants ASAP so at least the radioactivity is contained instead of released into the atmosphere.
Furthermore, a great deal of the spent fuel can actually be reused. Conventional nuclear plants only use about 5% of the energy contained in the fuel. The rest is treated as waste because...
Proliferation is the only real concern. Extracting the remaining ~95% of the energy from nuclear fuel thus far requires the use of breeder reactors, which unfortunately produce weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. There are some new reactor designs which try to minimize this (as well as an old design canceled in the 1970s).
I'm not sure that's historically accurate (we are talking about a movie, where the writer/director can make up pretty much anything they want). In modern history, it seems countries that are already fascist are more likely to go to war. Countries that are not fascist but go to war tend to become more fascist in their policies while fighting, but tend to come out of it pretty well; unless they lose.
Starship Troopers is an interesting franchise in this regard, since the original book was pretty pro-military, while the movie was rather anti-military. Personally, I'd argue that the biggest contributor towards being warlike isn't fascism or having fascist policies, but hatred towards and blaming others for whatever problems ail society.
While using ghostwriters is obviously wrong, I'm curious how exactly is an experimental drug or food additive supposed to get studies on it done if it isn't funded by the company developing it? Are the pharmaceutical companies supposed to go around to researchers asking, "Could you please do some studies on this new drug/food additive we're developing? We can't pay you or give you anything to compensate you for your time and effort, but it would really help us out if you did it. So could you do it, pretty please?" And you can't really rely on researchers who get interested on their own because (1) they usually only get interested after the drug/food additive is in widespread use and think "Hmm, this stuff seems to be everywhere. I wonder if it's really safe?", and (2) they are often interested because they have an agenda of their own (if the company making/selling the stuff isn't funding it, someone else has to be funding it).
Obviously there's a lot of room for improvement to the process. But it seems to me an outright rejection of any corporate-sponsored research is just as flawed as blind acceptance of corporate-sponsored research. The funding for it has to come from somewhere, and the logical choice to make pay for it is the company developing it. Getting the FDA to act as a blind (accepting the funding with one hand while conducting the research with the other) seems like it could be a solution. But for a drug to even be considered by the FDA, the FDA requires you to give them research results which show the drug is promising.
Aluminum oxide (corundum) is a ceramic (as are all glasses) and is rather brittle. It doesn't have the malleability, ductility, and fracture toughness (plastic deformation beyond the yield strength instead of complete failure) which makes metals a desirable structural material. Currently, when we need a transparent material with these properties we use plastics, but they tend to be lower strength and much more flexible (bendy) than metals. A transparent metal would be awesome because it could serve the same function with less volume of material and less need for structural stiffening.
U.S. Imports from China accounted for about $338 billion in 2008. Exports were about $70 billion. The U.S. GDP in 2008 was about $14.2 trillion, so trade with China accounted for about 2.9% of the U.S. economy. China holds about $800 billion in U.S. treasury securities. Even if you add that (which you shouldn't since it's a dollar amount while the other figures are dollars/year, but let's do it since we're talking about them hypothetically dumping all their securities on the market), China's impact on the U.S. GDP is only 8.5%.
China's GDP in 2008 $3.9-$4.4 trillion, so their trade with the U.S. accounted for about 9.3%-10.5% of their economy.
So economically, China needs the U.S. more than the U.S. needs China.
This has been a longtime problem with the U.S.' multi-tiered military. The USAF brass likes shiny fighter planes because they're cool. They're like movie stars - all glamor and glitz and catch everyone's attention. But in a war their job is simply support. Actually it's support for support - they clear the air for bombers, who drop bombs to support the infantry. The Army has been begging the USAF for more close air support aircraft like the A-10. But the USAF brass sees it as shiny new fighter vs. ugly old flying tank, so the shiny fighter gets the money instead of the needed ugly tank. They wouldn't even install an infrared camera on it, forcing the pilots to use the IR camera on one of their munitions (a Maverick missile) for nighttime operations.
I was interning at Lockheed in 1990-1991 when the then-YF-22 was selected over the YF-23. The project was started in 1981, with specifications given to the manufacturers in 1986. So the plane really is designed with the cold war in mind - to fight a war against the Soviet Union. As cool as I think it is, I totally agree that its original design conditions no longer apply, and there is no justification for making more F-22s than the original production run. Also, the Pentagon didn't want any more. It was the senators and congresscritters in the districts where the planes are made who were trying to get production increased.
Kinda makes all their protestations about piracy ring hollow. How dare someone else screw them out of a profit.
Technically they are separate issues, but legally it's pretty common to link two different things which act in opposite directions - covering a bitter pill with a sugar coating. I don't see a problem with making QoS illegal unless the ISP also meets some minimum guidelines for bandwidth overselling (e.g. your actual capacity must be at least 10% theoretical peak bandwidth). The ISPs want the QoS but not the overselling guideline, while the customer wants both. Legally tying the two together eliminates this disparity between what the ISP wants and what the customer wants, in favor of the customer.
The only real problem I can see with it would be the "10%" number would have to be decided by some government agency. But by highlighting it as a single number, you also bring it to the forefront. Instead of protecting it as a trade secret like ISPs currently do, they'd be encouraged to advertise it. e.g. If it was widely felt that the standard was too low, an ISP could advertise that "our capacity is twice the government minimum!" as a selling point. And if the minimum were too high, the usage logs from various ISPs would provide objective quantifiable evidence to help them lobby the government to lower it.
When I got my new Nexus card it came with a foil case (looks like fairly thick copper foil) and documentation explaining the case is a security measure to prevent ID theft by remote reading of the RFID tag in the card. I've waved it in front of the Nexus readers with and without the case, and it works (at least on those readers). It's actually pretty handy as it's barely bigger than the card, adds almost no thickness, and prevents the card from getting all scratched up like my credit cards.
Do the passport cards not come with these foil sheaths? Or is this just a matter of people ignoring instructions and not using the case.
That should be "scientific research". The research line in the graph is generally the science. The development line is generally DoD projects, which are have been decreasing ever since the cold war ended.
I think there's a lot of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that. The recent Bush administration increased federal spending on scientific R&D to its highest levels in 30+ years. The President who decreased it to its lowest level was actually Clinton. But most people (including I suspect most scientists) probably think the opposite because that's what they expect from the preconceived bias you just outlined.
I'm curious what happens if I set up a website streaming my own music.