Geosynchronous orbit actually wouldn't be very good: you'd need a more powerful transmitter, you'd be fighting with other users for the available orbital slots, and you'd need to put some of the satellites out of the equatorial plane (with all the complications that entails).
Low orbit would reduce the power of the transmitters needed, but would greatly increase the number of satellites needed, and atmospheric drag limits satellite life (or requires providing the satellite with much more station-keeping fuel).
Half-synchronous orbit is a good tradeoff: the transmitters don't need to be as powerful as geosynchronous transmitters would need to be, fewer satellites are needed than would be needed in low orbit, there's no atmospheric drag and little competition for orbital slots, and each satellite follows the same ground track each day.
"When", for the initial wave, is almost as easy as you say: it's mostly a factor of distance and speed. "How big" is much, much harder. You need to take into account the source (a point source such as a landslide needs to be treated differently from a line source such as an earthquake fault), reflections (a wave might bounce off the Japanese coastline leading to a second, delayed tsunami in Hawaii), refraction (a wave front bending around Hawaii might increase the wave energy arriving at San Francisco while reducing the energy at Los Angeles), interference patterns (wave patterns in San Francisco Bay might destroy coastal Oakland while sparing Richmond), multipath effects (a reflection off the Alaska coast might stack with a refraction off Hawaii to amplify the wave height in Portland, and so on.
These people are parasites. They provide nothing of value to the world; they just take. This crap should be illegal.
If they're successfully trading at picosecond resolution, they're providing something of value: a technological or scientific breakthrough. It takes about ten picoseconds for a signal to travel from one side of a CPU core to the other. In order to get a trading resolution of a tenth that, they either need to make CPUs much smaller than they are today, or they need to send signals faster than the speed of light.
Trademarks should be restricted to what they were invented for: Identifying products. If I sell a soft drink and claim it's Coke when it isn't, that's bad. This is what trademark infringement was invented against. But if I make a button saying "I like Coke" or "I hate Coke" or "I didn't have a Coke today", or if I write a book with the title "My first Coke", then this should not be a trademark infringement.
And you know what? It is not trademark infringement. This story is not about trademark law causing problems, it is about the Tolkein estate greatly over-reaching what what trademark law allows them to do.
While we have since discovered denser things, gold is still cheaper than them (And a good percentage of them are radioactive!), so it still can't be forged in any useful way.
Tungsten has virtually the same density as gold, but (according to Wolfram Alpha) is 1/6746 as expensive.
I recently had someone inspect a home I was looking to buy. He uses a tablet computer for making inspection notes (and has for most of a decade) because it's the best tool for the job. It has the same handling characteristics as the clipboard of blank inspection forms he used to carry around, while being waterproof and involving fewer dead trees.
Usenet and the underlying UUCP protocol were designed around propagation times measured in hours to days. They'll work just fine inside the solar system, while the problems with interstellar use stem from the social expectations layered on top of it rather than from the technology itself.
One of the passwords turned out to be a 16-character password made of 2 dictionary words with a non-letter character between the 2 words.
There's your problem right there. My non-rainbow-table cracker would get that password on the fourth pass (about ten seconds in).
First pass: The list of common passwords (the list has about 200,000 entries, including the entire dictionary) Second pass: Common passwords with a one-character suffix Third pass: Common passwords with a one-character prefix Fourth pass: Common password pairs with a one-character infix.
The true measure of the strength of a password is its Kolmogorov complexity, which is incomputable. Any other measure is simply an approximation, and that approximation breaks down if the person creating the password is using a method that the person creating the measuring algorithm didn't think of, but that an attacker did think of.
That's because of a failure of haptics and resolution. It's not because the concept is invalid.
Try the following: Stand up. Stick your right hand out in front of you at shoulder level with your arm fully extended. Hold that pose for five minutes.
Now, reconsider your opinion of the validity of gesture interfaces.
Well, one of those palette entries can be transparent, so if you just stack enough GIF images on top of each other...
I've seen something very similar to this done to create a 65536-color GIF. Yes, the GIF palette is limited to 256 colors, but an animated GIF can have a different palette for each frame. With non-overlapping frames or careful use of transparency, you can get a true-color GIF.
Well, typically until you get to the hospital insurance company doesn't know much about you - may be your age, sex, may be height and weight, but they don't typically ask for this info when you sign up for insurance.
When I applied for private health insurance (as opposed to company-provided insurance), part of the application was six pages of "Have you been treated by a medical professional for such-and-such in the past one year, three years, or ten years?". This was in addition to things like age, sex, smoking status (not only "are you a smoker?", but also "if you quit, how long ago?"), and so on.
The thing is, if a town is big enough to warrant a sign on the road that is more than 25 miles away, then it's probably big enough to have a gas station too.
That's a bad assumption. Distance signs on the interstate highways give three distances: the distance to the next exit (not always an inhabited location), the distance to the inhabited location after that, and the distance to the next major city. For example (numbers are approximate):
Racetrack: 7 Warm Springs: 13 Butte: 75
Racetrack is two buildings beside the road, Warm Springs isn't much bigger; Butte is a small city. You won't see "Anaconda: 17" until you pass Racetrack, but Anaconda is a town big enough to support an airport, a hospital, and several gas stations.
I'm reasonably familiar with that stretch of I-90. It sounds like you missed the "Next services: 95 miles" sign. When you're driving out west, it's not uncommon for the next gas station to be 50 miles away or more, so keep an eye out for those signs -- they're not kidding.
(And if you're driving off the main roads, don't count on those signs being there. Instead, make sure you've got at least a half-tank of gas at all times.)
For those who have forsworn KDE due to bad experiences with the 4.x line, let this be a formal request to reconsider your aversion. The initial KDE 4 releases were unusable, and this has greatly hurt their image and reputation. However, as of KDE SC 4.5, it is ready to replace other desktop environments. I promise you, to both GNOME users and KDE3.5 clingers: it is worth your time to try KDE SC 4.5 (or 4.6), and you will not be disappointed.
They said this about KDE 4.2. They were wrong.
They said this about KDE 4.3. They were wrong.
I'm sorry, but you only get so many chances. KDE has used theirs up.
As I said, Sun quad-port Ethernet cards often come with all four ports defaulting to the same MAC address. I believe they are typically used to create a high-bandwidth bonded connection to a single switch, so having four ports with the same address isn't a problem.
(In my case, I'm using the cards to *create* a switch, so having the same MAC address still isn't a network problem. It did take me a while to convince udev to give the ports stable interface names, though.)
Debian (and its derivatives, including Ubuntu) have been taking a less disruptive approach to this for years now by assigning persistent ethN device names based on MAC addresses. For example, if the system has no device names assigned and sees 01:23:45:67:89:ab as the first Ethernet device's address, that becomes eth0 from that point forward. The next Ethernet device that gets enumerated is going to be eth1, and so forth. This means it handles the USB device case in the way most users would expect.
And this works just fine, right up until someone installs a Sun multiport Ethernet card in the machine. How do you handle four ports, all with the same MAC address?
If they have a self-sufficient moon base, the whole "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) theory of avoiding nuclear war with the soviets go away.
Back in the 1960s, the US Air Force wanted to station missiles on the Moon to ensure MAD would work.
Consider: if all your missiles are on Earth, the minimum time from launch until impact is about 15 minutes (for SLBMs). If you can't get off a launch order in that time period, your missiles and command infrastructure are destroyed and you've just lost the war; if your enemy thinks you can't launch in that time period, the "assurance" part of MAD is gone, leading to an unstable standoff.
The three-day travel time to the Moon restores stability. It is impossible to launch a stealth first strike against a Moonbase; by the same token, a Moonbase cannot launch a stealth first strike. By ensuring that any attack, even a surprise attack, will result in retaliation arriving three days later, the "assurance" part is restored.
Of course, in order to be truly stable, both parties need to be able to deliver a three-days-later retaliatory attack without being able to launch a fifteen-minute attack on the retaliation forces, but the Air Force didn't address that.
The "professional" camcorder copies of movies are created by the projectionist. They'll put a high-quality camera up next to the projector (so, no distortion) and will connect the projector's monitor audio out to the camera's audio in (so, high-quality stereo sound). The result isn't as good as a professionally-produced DVD, but it's far better than most camcorder copies.
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I love spam.
Geosynchronous orbit actually wouldn't be very good: you'd need a more powerful transmitter, you'd be fighting with other users for the available orbital slots, and you'd need to put some of the satellites out of the equatorial plane (with all the complications that entails).
Low orbit would reduce the power of the transmitters needed, but would greatly increase the number of satellites needed, and atmospheric drag limits satellite life (or requires providing the satellite with much more station-keeping fuel).
Half-synchronous orbit is a good tradeoff: the transmitters don't need to be as powerful as geosynchronous transmitters would need to be, fewer satellites are needed than would be needed in low orbit, there's no atmospheric drag and little competition for orbital slots, and each satellite follows the same ground track each day.
"When", for the initial wave, is almost as easy as you say: it's mostly a factor of distance and speed. "How big" is much, much harder. You need to take into account the source (a point source such as a landslide needs to be treated differently from a line source such as an earthquake fault), reflections (a wave might bounce off the Japanese coastline leading to a second, delayed tsunami in Hawaii), refraction (a wave front bending around Hawaii might increase the wave energy arriving at San Francisco while reducing the energy at Los Angeles), interference patterns (wave patterns in San Francisco Bay might destroy coastal Oakland while sparing Richmond), multipath effects (a reflection off the Alaska coast might stack with a refraction off Hawaii to amplify the wave height in Portland, and so on.
If they're successfully trading at picosecond resolution, they're providing something of value: a technological or scientific breakthrough. It takes about ten picoseconds for a signal to travel from one side of a CPU core to the other. In order to get a trading resolution of a tenth that, they either need to make CPUs much smaller than they are today, or they need to send signals faster than the speed of light.
And you know what? It is not trademark infringement. This story is not about trademark law causing problems, it is about the Tolkein estate greatly over-reaching what what trademark law allows them to do.
It says things too vile to repeat.
Tungsten has virtually the same density as gold, but (according to Wolfram Alpha) is 1/6746 as expensive.
I recently had someone inspect a home I was looking to buy. He uses a tablet computer for making inspection notes (and has for most of a decade) because it's the best tool for the job. It has the same handling characteristics as the clipboard of blank inspection forms he used to carry around, while being waterproof and involving fewer dead trees.
Usenet and the underlying UUCP protocol were designed around propagation times measured in hours to days. They'll work just fine inside the solar system, while the problems with interstellar use stem from the social expectations layered on top of it rather than from the technology itself.
There's your problem right there. My non-rainbow-table cracker would get that password on the fourth pass (about ten seconds in).
First pass: The list of common passwords (the list has about 200,000 entries, including the entire dictionary)
Second pass: Common passwords with a one-character suffix
Third pass: Common passwords with a one-character prefix
Fourth pass: Common password pairs with a one-character infix.
The true measure of the strength of a password is its Kolmogorov complexity, which is incomputable. Any other measure is simply an approximation, and that approximation breaks down if the person creating the password is using a method that the person creating the measuring algorithm didn't think of, but that an attacker did think of.
Try the following: Stand up. Stick your right hand out in front of you at shoulder level with your arm fully extended. Hold that pose for five minutes.
Now, reconsider your opinion of the validity of gesture interfaces.
I've seen something very similar to this done to create a 65536-color GIF. Yes, the GIF palette is limited to 256 colors, but an animated GIF can have a different palette for each frame. With non-overlapping frames or careful use of transparency, you can get a true-color GIF.
Thank you for proving my point. I say "good-looking woman", and you automatically assume I mean "actress" or "model".
When I applied for private health insurance (as opposed to company-provided insurance), part of the application was six pages of "Have you been treated by a medical professional for such-and-such in the past one year, three years, or ten years?". This was in addition to things like age, sex, smoking status (not only "are you a smoker?", but also "if you quit, how long ago?"), and so on.
I'm sure there's a kink they don't have covered: attraction towards good-looking women.
That's a bad assumption. Distance signs on the interstate highways give three distances: the distance to the next exit (not always an inhabited location), the distance to the inhabited location after that, and the distance to the next major city. For example (numbers are approximate):
Racetrack: 7
Warm Springs: 13
Butte: 75
Racetrack is two buildings beside the road, Warm Springs isn't much bigger; Butte is a small city. You won't see "Anaconda: 17" until you pass Racetrack, but Anaconda is a town big enough to support an airport, a hospital, and several gas stations.
I'm reasonably familiar with that stretch of I-90. It sounds like you missed the "Next services: 95 miles" sign. When you're driving out west, it's not uncommon for the next gas station to be 50 miles away or more, so keep an eye out for those signs -- they're not kidding.
(And if you're driving off the main roads, don't count on those signs being there. Instead, make sure you've got at least a half-tank of gas at all times.)
Franklin was a sufficiently successful ladies' man that he never needed to purchase their affections. Blow maybe, but not hookers.
You can combine 2 and 3: consider an incompetent security expert who honestly believes that DRM is possible.
You can also combine 1 and 3: consider a competent security expert who wants to extract money by selling snake oil to companies.
They said this about KDE 4.2. They were wrong.
They said this about KDE 4.3. They were wrong.
I'm sorry, but you only get so many chances. KDE has used theirs up.
As I said, Sun quad-port Ethernet cards often come with all four ports defaulting to the same MAC address. I believe they are typically used to create a high-bandwidth bonded connection to a single switch, so having four ports with the same address isn't a problem.
(In my case, I'm using the cards to *create* a switch, so having the same MAC address still isn't a network problem. It did take me a while to convince udev to give the ports stable interface names, though.)
And this works just fine, right up until someone installs a Sun multiport Ethernet card in the machine. How do you handle four ports, all with the same MAC address?
Back in the 1960s, the US Air Force wanted to station missiles on the Moon to ensure MAD would work.
Consider: if all your missiles are on Earth, the minimum time from launch until impact is about 15 minutes (for SLBMs). If you can't get off a launch order in that time period, your missiles and command infrastructure are destroyed and you've just lost the war; if your enemy thinks you can't launch in that time period, the "assurance" part of MAD is gone, leading to an unstable standoff.
The three-day travel time to the Moon restores stability. It is impossible to launch a stealth first strike against a Moonbase; by the same token, a Moonbase cannot launch a stealth first strike. By ensuring that any attack, even a surprise attack, will result in retaliation arriving three days later, the "assurance" part is restored.
Of course, in order to be truly stable, both parties need to be able to deliver a three-days-later retaliatory attack without being able to launch a fifteen-minute attack on the retaliation forces, but the Air Force didn't address that.
My congratulations to the Facebook developers. They've made a website that faceblind people like me cannot use -- I didn't think that was possible.
I wonder if I can sue them under the Americans with Disabilities act...
The "professional" camcorder copies of movies are created by the projectionist. They'll put a high-quality camera up next to the projector (so, no distortion) and will connect the projector's monitor audio out to the camera's audio in (so, high-quality stereo sound). The result isn't as good as a professionally-produced DVD, but it's far better than most camcorder copies.