What *I* want to know about is how effective this material is as a radiation shield. Something that can both protect you from radiation and generate electricity seems awfully handy. The material consists of a layer of gold followed by some light stuff to catch the electrons. I bet the layer of gold would do >50% of the radiation shielding, so that should get you in the right ballpark. Gold is very good radiation shield, I can certainly recommend that we use that around our reactors instead of the concrete that is popular today.
How much voltage could it generate at 10cm an hour? Voltage? As much as you want. Either energy or power would probably be more useful. So anyway, 25 kg lifted 10cm has a potential energy of 25kg*0.1m*9.82m/s^2, or 25J. If it dropped in one second, that would be 25J/s or 25W, a very useful amount of power. If it dropped in one hour, it would be 7mW.
Once again, blame the industry and the consumers. I prefer blaming copyright on software. It is hardly surprising that government-granted monopolies lead to the rise of a monopoly.
How about: The contract you're working under specifies that your product will meet the standard. You generally don't get to make moral judgements about contracts after the fact. The issue is out of your hands, as long as the other party to the contract is informed about the implications.
Its not a specific situation that you can easily make a decision on, its one where you should have to imagine different scenarios where there might be a real conflict between the two with no good answer. I just have trouble finding a case where security doesn't take priority.
Showing someone a 1080p Blu-Ray feature next to the 480p DVD feature on the same television is going to be a pretty convincing show. Does Blu-Ray do 1080p? AFAIK, it's stuck with 1080i but it can show the same picture in both half-frames. Then the display can start guessing whether the material is really 1080p broken into 1080i, and there's a gazillion ways that can go wrong. Just like with DVD.
I'm talking about in general should you follow an insecure standard, or break it to make it more secure? Do you find that to be a difficult question to answer?
Um.. so? It's not like mice are expensive. Include one, and a mousing surface that straps to your leg in the box. You really believe that is a solution? I bet >50% of the console gamers won't find playing with a mouse acceptable. People like their controllers.
When the first linux patch came out to use more than 1GB of memory, As far as I know, Linux supported >1GB of memory as soon as the Alpha port was done. No special patch needed, and no slowdown. The only reason why you might have needed a patch is >1GB of memory with a 32-bit architecture. The solution is right there in the problem description.
How difficult would it be to use USB peripherals and have mouse-control (or trackball) as an option for FPSs, anyway? It would completely ruin the game difficulty. Mouse aiming is so much more precise that an FPS designed for the controller would be boringly easy. Multi-player would be an even worse joke.
It is extremely easy for a program run as root/admin to bring down any system without having bugs. If not how can you upgrade system files or even shut down. Not all programs with "root" privileges need the ability to shut down the system. There is no fundamental need to have an all-powerful root account, or indeed a root account at all. It's just hard to remove the root account and still feel like Unix-like to administrators -- e.g. SELinux tries to make a compromise that doesn't trip up too many people, but basically everyone turn it off anyway.
Anyway, I was just trying to fight the myth that userspace can't kill a Linux kernel.
Are USB serial ports made by the Department of Redundancy Department? Nope, you're just being deliberately stupid. Would a PCI-E serial port be equally redundant to you? In both cases, they're RS-232 serial ports connected by a non-RS-323 serial bus.
OK, I challenge you to find a user-space program that brings linux down using strcpy (as opposed to just crashing that particular program). This is extremely easy if the program runs as root.
It costs a certain amount of money (~ $1K) to process a silicon wafer. We brought down the cost of ICs by making them smaller, so we get more of them for our $1K. But that trick doesn't work with solar cells. Solar cells collect photons over their surface. You can make one smaller, sure, but then it collects fewer photons and produces less energy. Yes, this is why 50" TV's still cost $10,000.
No, really, they aren't. If you just read block 2000 from flash media, a subsequent read of block 2001 and a subsequent read of block 546725 execute in exactly the same amount of time. In the beginning, back in the days of interleave, hard drives were pretty close to random access. Tape drives had around the ratio of transfer speed to seek speed that hard drives have today. At one time RAM was truly random access as well, now reading the next byte is often more than 10 times faster than reading a random one. The same thing is happening to flash. Of course it will be decades before the problem will be as big as the one we have with hard drives now, but it will happen.
Is there some limiting problem for SD cards that prevents them from being 20GB or so? Kingston has 16GB, is that close enough? The limiting problem is simply physical size. As flash cells shrink, more will fit. The latest jump just happened, so it'll probably be a year before we see the next doubling.
I'm working on adding IPv6 support to a server package written in java. Part of what it does is use a subnet mask to discriminate LAN and WAN clients. If you are doing this by making RFC-1918-space (192.168.0.0/16 and the others) imply LAN, and everything else WAN, it's broken already. There are still organisations with public addresses on the LAN's.
An absolute limit for 1 NAT can be worked mathematically. 2^16 TCP connections / (maximum TCP connections/user) = Maximum number of users, assuming TCP is the limiting factor (and assuming they all use this same mythical "maximum TCP connections"). There is no limit of 2^16 TCP connections, unless they all happen to be to say www.yahoo.com, and www.yahoo.com only resolves to one IP address.
The problem is much worse on laptops actually. Most laptops have some sort of CardBus slot nowadays. This is basically a PCI interface. The idea is to create a CardBus interface which allows you to dump the physical memory of the laptop using DMA. It's generally easier to just buy a firewire cable. Admittedly that only works if the computer a) has a firewire port and b) has the driver loaded. That's true for a lot of laptops though.
Only a couple percent of satellites are geostationary. [citation needed]. Also, the interesting question isn't how many are geostationary, but how many aren't LEO. Anyway, as of February 13, 5,995 have been launched and 2,761 of those have decayed.
I didn't mean "must" in the "great hand of physics will pull the satellite to its inevitable doom" sense, but rather in the "we intentionally deorbit all our satellites after their useful life is over to avoid filling the skies with debris" sense. And how exactly does that happen? Geostationary satellites get pushed slightly higher so they don't take up space in the geostationary orbit, but they never bring enough fuel to be able to get back to Earth.
And even without intentionally deorbiting them, most satellites experience enough atmospheric drag (i.e. not 'nil') to bring them down in tens to hundreds of years - not a legacy you'd like to leave your grandchildren. Again, wrong for geostationary (and lots of other orbits).
It's not like they spend the university operating budget on research. I should hope that they do spend the university operating budget on research. Otherwise, why do we have universities? Shut them down and turn them into trade schools. But maybe this already happened, and they just forgot to change the names.
Considering that the laws of physics scale uniformly with size (as long as we're talking about objects bigger than a molecule and smaller than a planet) this shouldn't matter. Where do you get this junk from? Mass increases cubically when wing area increases quadratically (and wing span increases linearly).
Were an enormous 11,000kg unladen swallow to exist, it should exhibit pretty much the same characteristics as the 10g swallow, with a slight penalty for increased air resistance. With the slight difference that the 11,000kg swallow would not be able to stand up, much less fly.
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All the HIGHMEM and BIGMEM crap is for 32 bit. If you need >1GB for anything serious, go 64 bit. You have been able to since the mid 90's.
Anyway, I was just trying to fight the myth that userspace can't kill a Linux kernel.
Many USB serial ports need drivers under Vista. Some actually don't have Vista drivers. So we still get to laugh at Vista's ridiculous driver system.
We brought down the cost of ICs by making them smaller, so we get more of them for our $1K.
But that trick doesn't work with solar cells.
Solar cells collect photons over their surface.
You can make one smaller, sure, but then it collects fewer photons and produces less energy. Yes, this is why 50" TV's still cost $10,000.