The experiment to see if it can be done is always fun, but I wonder what practicality can come out of this?
One of the useful things to come out of this is an idea of what a given chip design is capable of. If you look at the speeds liquid nitrogen cooling reaches at the beginning of a design's life cycle, that's the speed the chip will be selling at at the end of the life cycle.
There sure is. You're limited by how fast your signal can propagate through the gates and by how much heat your dissipate (power is proportional to clock frequency for any given IC, IIRC).
I think it's proportional to the square of the clock frequency.
Exactly, and there are 7000 turbines, so that makes little over 3 birds killed per turbine in 20 years, or 0.157... birds/year/turbine! Compare this to other mechanical devices killing animals, like cars running over hedgehogs, boats knocking fish on the head, animals killed after Chernobyl, or insects on your wind-shield and I'm impressed, 22000 is pretty low.
As a quick comparison, in the past year, three birds have died after running into the living-room window in my house. Those turbines are downright safe!
Ya you can talk about inputs to programs and how misc. and unwanted data get in there but watch for buffer overruns because thats what can really kill your program.
Where do you suppose the data for a buffer overrun comes from? Malicious input!
The Perl language has built-in "taint-checking" enabled via the -T command line switch which causes Perl to automatically keep track of all information that possibly came from a user input and not allow any of it to do anything harmful (basically end up on a command line or in a file name).
There are other harmful things that data can wind up doing that Perl can't check for. Things like being used as SQL queries, or the classic "pass the price as a CGI parameter" mistake. Taint checking is more useful as a reminder that you need to validate input than a way of keeping potentially bad input isolated.
From the New York Times' mandatory registration page: "We'll keep your information private. The following fields are required. NYTimes.com respects your privacy, so we will never share any personal information without your consent."
When I signed up, the "required fields" were a username, a password, and an e-mail address (I used a throwaway Hotmail account). Hardly "personal information".
Look harder, get a hobby, improve your resume.
on
Exporting Myself?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm in Spokane, a city suffering from chronic economic problems, and I didn't have any trouble getting a job. I sent out a grand total of a half-dozen resumes, got two job interviews, and one job offer (I accepted). A few major factors that helped me get a job were that my degree was a BS in Math and Computer Science, rather than straight CS, that I'd held jobs (computer programming and otherwise) before, and that I'd been involved in several major freeware projects as a hobby.
I expect this to be a much smaller problem than you portray it as. There are many things you can do without incurring a large monthly bill:
1) For $15 a month, you can get a reasonable chunk of land and a reasonable number of prims. This is plenty for small builds, and it's amazing what you can do with clever texturing.
2) For large builds (such as the Darkwood or Nexus Prime themed areas), you can get a group together to spread out the costs.
3) People who had paid for lifetime memberships before the latest changes get a large chunk of land and the associated prim rights for free. I expect these people to be in high demand for group projects.
4) In theory, it's possible to pay for land costs with in-world money. Right now, the pricing is high enough that almost no-one can afford it, but I expect the prices to be cut in half in the near future.
5) It's possible to create projects that aren't tied down to any one location (for example, the birds I've created to wander the world). These projects don't require land ownership.
Did you read the article? The target area is 70km long by 45km wide. I don't think there's any area on Mars that big that doesn't have at least one large crater.
I was going to shoot you down, but I see that their encryption is only 128-bit. Despite the fact that they use a new key for every stream, you only need to crack one stream to prove a copyright violation.
128-bit public/private or 128-bit symmetric key? The two are very different things.
It's quite possible to crack 512-bit public/private key encryption in a reasonable amount of time, since you just need to factor large numbers into their prime factors. 128-bit symmetric key encryption is much more secure, since every possible 128-bit number works as a key, and the only way to crack it is by trying every possible key. The distributed.net project took 5 years to crack 64-bit RC5 encryption, and it's looking like it'll take 500-1000 years to crack 72-bit RC5.
They are using the number of support calls to determine the security of an OS? Maybe the fact that they are using OSX immediately indicates that in many cases they are a more technical user and so are less likely to need support.
Macintosh computers are marketed towards people who are new to using computers, and to the casual user. If anything, Mac users tend to be less technical than the general population.
There's a loss for transmitting electricity, yes, but if you use the electricity to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, you can ship the hydrogen to where it's needed when it's needed. Losses are a lot smaller, and you don't need a huge bank of batteries to provide for cloudy days.
Has anyone thought of or has taken staps toward integrating a radar detector with wireless and GPS to create a long-range, fault tolerant radar/lidar detection network? Seems like this this is a patent wating to happen...
What's the point? Radar can already be detected far enough in advance, and you can't detect lidar until you've been nailed -- everyone will benefit from this network except the guy who actually detects the lidar gun.
"where sensors can automatically warn a motorist when another car is approaching, thus helping to avoid a collision."
Who would have guessed... they've invented traffic lights!
A traffic light can tell you that cars on the other street should be stopped. This system can tell you that there's an idiot about to run the red light.
What the hell is to stop this from becoming as useless as the current emergancy vehicle light switching system (ala traffic lights), that used infrared frequencies? Some schmoe is going to make a device that makes your car think you're going to rear-end someone at his whim... Until finally the whole system will have to be thrown out, due to abuse.
The problem with the traffic light changers is that there aren't (or at least weren't) any laws dealing with abuse. Interfering with traffic to the degree of potentially causing an accident is already covered under any number of laws; someone stupid enough to make a device to abuse this system will get his ass sued six ways from next Wednesday, and a lengthly prison sentence to boot.
What's next, putting people in helicopters that fly over highways to get the information to broadcast?
This sounds like it's car-to-car or base-station-to-car short-range broadcasts. Things like where your car is, or what color the traffic light at the next intersection is, or if there's a car in your blind spot. Stuff for automating highways.
Now that a proper study has been done on the topic, I imagine that I should start moving menus over to the left-hand side of the page. It might be less efficient, but even crappy standards are still standards.
A quick, non-scientific time-and-motion study shows that it requires about 1/3 of a second and a hand motion of less than an inch to move the mouse pointer from the right-hand scroll bar to the left-hand menu at Slashdot. It takes several seconds (but less hand motion) to locate a menu in a non-standard location.
I'm also worried that studies like this may be used to put advertising in different more annoying places in more annoying ways making it harder to block and ignore.
They've already got that. The main reason I block javascript-based ads was experience with an ad that placed itself squarely under the mouse pointer.
regulatory hassles? If those regulations weren't there, everyone and their dog would be building inter-continental ballistic missiles, and claiming to be contending for the 'X-Prize'...
I haven't yet finished the PDF linked in the article, but I've already noticed one rocket that bears a resemblance to a V2, and another one similar to an Atlas missile.
Slashdot Mirror
The experiment to see if it can be done is always fun, but I wonder what practicality can come out of this?
One of the useful things to come out of this is an idea of what a given chip design is capable of. If you look at the speeds liquid nitrogen cooling reaches at the beginning of a design's life cycle, that's the speed the chip will be selling at at the end of the life cycle.
There sure is. You're limited by how fast your signal can propagate through the gates and by how much heat your dissipate (power is proportional to clock frequency for any given IC, IIRC).
I think it's proportional to the square of the clock frequency.
Exactly, and there are 7000 turbines, so that makes little over 3 birds killed per turbine in 20 years, or 0.157... birds/year/turbine! Compare this to other mechanical devices killing animals, like cars running over hedgehogs, boats knocking fish on the head, animals killed after Chernobyl, or insects on your wind-shield and I'm impressed, 22000 is pretty low.
As a quick comparison, in the past year, three birds have died after running into the living-room window in my house. Those turbines are downright safe!
Ya you can talk about inputs to programs and how misc. and unwanted data get in there but watch for buffer overruns because thats what can really kill your program.
Where do you suppose the data for a buffer overrun comes from? Malicious input!
The Perl language has built-in "taint-checking" enabled via the -T command line switch which causes Perl to automatically keep track of all information that possibly came from a user input and not allow any of it to do anything harmful (basically end up on a command line or in a file name).
There are other harmful things that data can wind up doing that Perl can't check for. Things like being used as SQL queries, or the classic "pass the price as a CGI parameter" mistake. Taint checking is more useful as a reminder that you need to validate input than a way of keeping potentially bad input isolated.
NO fscking SHIT!
jesus christ on a pogo stick... somebody had to put this in an fsking security magazine?
Given that every single way to compromise security involves bad input, it's not surprising that it's in a security magazine.
From the New York Times' mandatory registration page: "We'll keep your information private. The following fields are required. NYTimes.com respects your privacy, so we will never share any personal information without your consent."
When I signed up, the "required fields" were a username, a password, and an e-mail address (I used a throwaway Hotmail account). Hardly "personal information".
I'm in Spokane, a city suffering from chronic economic problems, and I didn't have any trouble getting a job. I sent out a grand total of a half-dozen resumes, got two job interviews, and one job offer (I accepted). A few major factors that helped me get a job were that my degree was a BS in Math and Computer Science, rather than straight CS, that I'd held jobs (computer programming and otherwise) before, and that I'd been involved in several major freeware projects as a hobby.
I expect this to be a much smaller problem than you portray it as. There are many things you can do without incurring a large monthly bill:
1) For $15 a month, you can get a reasonable chunk of land and a reasonable number of prims. This is plenty for small builds, and it's amazing what you can do with clever texturing.
2) For large builds (such as the Darkwood or Nexus Prime themed areas), you can get a group together to spread out the costs.
3) People who had paid for lifetime memberships before the latest changes get a large chunk of land and the associated prim rights for free. I expect these people to be in high demand for group projects.
4) In theory, it's possible to pay for land costs with in-world money. Right now, the pricing is high enough that almost no-one can afford it, but I expect the prices to be cut in half in the near future.
5) It's possible to create projects that aren't tied down to any one location (for example, the birds I've created to wander the world). These projects don't require land ownership.
Did you read the article? The target area is 70km long by 45km wide. I don't think there's any area on Mars that big that doesn't have at least one large crater.
I was going to shoot you down, but I see that their encryption is only 128-bit. Despite the fact that they use a new key for every stream, you only need to crack one stream to prove a copyright violation.
128-bit public/private or 128-bit symmetric key? The two are very different things.
It's quite possible to crack 512-bit public/private key encryption in a reasonable amount of time, since you just need to factor large numbers into their prime factors. 128-bit symmetric key encryption is much more secure, since every possible 128-bit number works as a key, and the only way to crack it is by trying every possible key. The distributed.net project took 5 years to crack 64-bit RC5 encryption, and it's looking like it'll take 500-1000 years to crack 72-bit RC5.
They are using the number of support calls to determine the security of an OS? Maybe the fact that they are using OSX immediately indicates that in many cases they are a more technical user and so are less likely to need support.
Macintosh computers are marketed towards people who are new to using computers, and to the casual user. If anything, Mac users tend to be less technical than the general population.
There's a loss for transmitting electricity, yes, but if you use the electricity to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, you can ship the hydrogen to where it's needed when it's needed. Losses are a lot smaller, and you don't need a huge bank of batteries to provide for cloudy days.
Has anyone thought of or has taken staps toward integrating a radar detector with wireless and GPS to create a long-range, fault tolerant radar/lidar detection network? Seems like this this is a patent wating to happen...
What's the point? Radar can already be detected far enough in advance, and you can't detect lidar until you've been nailed -- everyone will benefit from this network except the guy who actually detects the lidar gun.
"where sensors can automatically warn a motorist when another car is approaching, thus helping to avoid a collision."
Who would have guessed... they've invented traffic lights!
A traffic light can tell you that cars on the other street should be stopped. This system can tell you that there's an idiot about to run the red light.
What the hell is to stop this from becoming as useless as the current emergancy vehicle light switching system (ala traffic lights), that used infrared frequencies? Some schmoe is going to make a device that makes your car think you're going to rear-end someone at his whim... Until finally the whole system will have to be thrown out, due to abuse.
The problem with the traffic light changers is that there aren't (or at least weren't) any laws dealing with abuse. Interfering with traffic to the degree of potentially causing an accident is already covered under any number of laws; someone stupid enough to make a device to abuse this system will get his ass sued six ways from next Wednesday, and a lengthly prison sentence to boot.
What's next, putting people in helicopters that fly over highways to get the information to broadcast?
This sounds like it's car-to-car or base-station-to-car short-range broadcasts. Things like where your car is, or what color the traffic light at the next intersection is, or if there's a car in your blind spot. Stuff for automating highways.
Exactly!
ok when do i get to go to the moon. seriously. what the max it could cost? two or three billion?
If you want NASA to do it, it'll cost well over $50 billion.
Now that a proper study has been done on the topic, I imagine that I should start moving menus over to the left-hand side of the page. It might be less efficient, but even crappy standards are still standards.
A quick, non-scientific time-and-motion study shows that it requires about 1/3 of a second and a hand motion of less than an inch to move the mouse pointer from the right-hand scroll bar to the left-hand menu at Slashdot. It takes several seconds (but less hand motion) to locate a menu in a non-standard location.
I'm also worried that studies like this may be used to put advertising in different more annoying places in more annoying ways making it harder to block and ignore.
They've already got that. The main reason I block javascript-based ads was experience with an ad that placed itself squarely under the mouse pointer.
I can't find it right now, but I recall seeing a patent relating to kissing.
One general shape, yes, but many variations on that shape.
Their report in the PDF file says that they'll be doing the space shot sometime in the summer or fall of 2004.
regulatory hassles? If those regulations weren't there, everyone and their dog would be building inter-continental ballistic missiles, and claiming to be contending for the 'X-Prize'...
I haven't yet finished the PDF linked in the article, but I've already noticed one rocket that bears a resemblance to a V2, and another one similar to an Atlas missile.