You think a precise calculation of Pi isn't useful? Fine! When you next want to slingshot a particle beam around a black hole and hit an opposing beam head-on, you'll have to figure it out all over again!
It was an excellent made film wrapped around a seriously flawed plot (ignoring that "clone your workers and keep them in the dark to ostensibly save money" schtick has been done over and over anyway). It was as if they changed their minds about the jamming mechanic and Gertie's benevolence/malevolence a few times as the film progressed, leaving it internally inconsistent. After going to the trouble of getting the arcing of lunar dust correct, why then go the "stick an unprotected guy in an unpressurised hypervelocity bulk cargo launcher" route? I can only guess that made a wonderful, bleak, internally consistent film, then went back and rewrote parts of it to get a happy ending.
WELL worth seeing for the truly excellent model-work and attention to technical detail in the set and props, but not really film-of-the-year material.
If I'm guessing correctly, what's sent is essentially the cyphertext and a series of URLs that point to what makes up the key (e.g. go to page x, take every third character from the 27th line, etc). The idea being that the pages chosen should change often enough that anyone who intercepts the message, and LATER attempts to decypher it, will be unable to.
Basically, the only time this will offer protection is when the following conditions are all met:
a) The URLs chosen are not cached anywhere
b) The URLs chosen cycle regularly and randomly (the random part is important, and unlikely)
c) The message is NOT read by the attacker until after the key has disappeared. This will probably only occur if the keylinks & cyphertext are posted on a forum or similar, and which the attacker visits later. If the message is emailed/IMed/etc, then intercepting it at the time would make automatic decyphering trivial.
This all hinges on the assumption that the service does not hinge on a set of specially operated key generating servers (loss of which would prevent the service from operating). Such a service would provide properly randomised key fragments, but faces other issues. The fragments must be publicly accessible, change only after an 'acceptable' time period (implied to be a few hours), and remain constant for these few hours. This would make caching of the keys trivial. And would still not prevent decyphering upon interception within the time limit.
I suppose the key servers could require a key as part of the message itself to provide the correct key fragment, but this would only solve the caching attack, not interception.
Eve also suffers hugely for it. Take exploration, for example. Eve has a huge, persistent and singular (no server shards) universe. But it is essentially impossible for you to actually explore it without carting around your own battlefleet.
Solo play is different from group play. The two are not mutually exclusive in an MMO.
And Vista was leaked in exactly the same way. The difference now is that the new driver architecture that was introduced in Vista (and was the root cause of the vast majority of stability complaints) has been around long enough for any lingering bugs to be ironed out, and for anyone with truly ancient hardware to have decided to stick with XP anyway. Thus, windows 7 builds have been comparatively more stable and useful than Vista builds at the same state (and only a little more wobbly than a properly updated Vista install is now).
Then when someone PMs you saying your image is down, re-uplaod it to one of the five million other free image hosts. Because nobody is foolish enough to 'store' an semi-important image on a Generic Ad-Supported free Imagehost, right?
Let's put it this way: If you have images that are actually important, then it's almost certain the site you're running has hosting where you should be placing these images. A forum avatar or a 'witty' animated signature image are not important images.
Even assuming that image hosting alone is required, regardless of the site that links to them, then a paid service (e.g S3, where the hosting costs would be pennies per month) makes a lot more sense than a free ad-supported service if the images are actually important.
If you look closely at some (not all) 3D movies, you'll notice that anything beyond the near foreground is flat. Instead of rendering everything from two viewpoints, a series of depth planes are rendered, and these planes are shifted horizontally go get the stereoscopic effect. It cuts down on render time significantly, is (relatively) easy to bodge in using the z-buffer, and you can still cheat somewhat with layers of planar SFX rendering.
I'm guessing you don't remember Net Yaroze? Or the PS2 linux kit? The PS3, as you hopefully do know, is ready to have linux installed on it out-of-the-box.
If you have to open administrative tools and disable it's scheduled task just to turn it off, it's pretty damn evil. As is bundling it with every application, with no clean version available (or at least, no clean version that aren't buried in a forum link somewhere).
An anecdote: last time I installed Google Earth, I immediately ran the uninstaller for Google update (incidentally, the Google Earth installer makes no mention that it is installing the Google Updater for you). Not a few minutes later, Comodo is warning me that Google Updater is trying to access the internet. 3 killed process later, and no problems. Until about half an hour passes, and those processes are back again. Removing the scheduled tasks this time stopped the processes from returning.
This is Slashdot. 'Average people' don't come into it. Most Slashdotters could probably tell you the difference between a Teller-Ullam design and an Implosion Trigger, because high-energy physics is interesting, rather than because everyone has a desire to nuke everyone else.
And according to his site, he's managed to spend $5000 on a valve. This guy has been around for a long while, made plenty of wild claims, and demonstrated absolutely nothing. Several times in the past he's attempted to sell this ting on ebay, and failed every time. He's basically a laughing stock.
I guess it could act as the catch/release point for a Rotovator/Skyhook, but I doubt a stationary point at a measly 15Km up would help much. Maybe if you could fire something laterally at mach 13 or so from the top of the tower to the lower tip of the Rotovator it might help, but you may as well just fly up there.
The major failing of current motion control systems (wiimote, Natal, whatever the PS3 system is called) is that there's no feedback. You're waving about, and simply hope that the game gets it right. By removing the layer of abstraction the controller provides, you're making things LESS immersive by starkly revealing that the game cannot respond to you in ways other than the visual or the audio.
Until cheap, reliable haptic control systems emerge (not a for about half a decade if things like the Falcon, and the cost of more flexiable systems, is anything to go by), motion control will be limited in usefulness to a few casual games that don't require fast and accurate responses.
Slashdot Mirror
You think a precise calculation of Pi isn't useful? Fine! When you next want to slingshot a particle beam around a black hole and hit an opposing beam head-on, you'll have to figure it out all over again!
The FELICA system. Used to pay for train fairs, coffee, vending machines, etc.
It was an excellent made film wrapped around a seriously flawed plot (ignoring that "clone your workers and keep them in the dark to ostensibly save money" schtick has been done over and over anyway). It was as if they changed their minds about the jamming mechanic and Gertie's benevolence/malevolence a few times as the film progressed, leaving it internally inconsistent. After going to the trouble of getting the arcing of lunar dust correct, why then go the "stick an unprotected guy in an unpressurised hypervelocity bulk cargo launcher" route? I can only guess that made a wonderful, bleak, internally consistent film, then went back and rewrote parts of it to get a happy ending.
WELL worth seeing for the truly excellent model-work and attention to technical detail in the set and props, but not really film-of-the-year material.
For older hardware with well-known errata, yes. Why do you think modern fighter aircraft and spacecraft run on 486-derivatives and the like?
You could at least post the obligatory XKCD link.
You're assuming an oxygenated environment, a solid crust, a certain range of gravitational pull, composition from cells that divide, etc.
So, essentially the piezoelectric shotgun rounds that are already in development then.
Only if the person you're aiming at happens to have hooked the correct resonant antenna into their muscles.
If I'm guessing correctly, what's sent is essentially the cyphertext and a series of URLs that point to what makes up the key (e.g. go to page x, take every third character from the 27th line, etc). The idea being that the pages chosen should change often enough that anyone who intercepts the message, and LATER attempts to decypher it, will be unable to.
Basically, the only time this will offer protection is when the following conditions are all met:
a) The URLs chosen are not cached anywhere
b) The URLs chosen cycle regularly and randomly (the random part is important, and unlikely)
c) The message is NOT read by the attacker until after the key has disappeared. This will probably only occur if the keylinks & cyphertext are posted on a forum or similar, and which the attacker visits later. If the message is emailed/IMed/etc, then intercepting it at the time would make automatic decyphering trivial.
This all hinges on the assumption that the service does not hinge on a set of specially operated key generating servers (loss of which would prevent the service from operating). Such a service would provide properly randomised key fragments, but faces other issues. The fragments must be publicly accessible, change only after an 'acceptable' time period (implied to be a few hours), and remain constant for these few hours. This would make caching of the keys trivial. And would still not prevent decyphering upon interception within the time limit.
I suppose the key servers could require a key as part of the message itself to provide the correct key fragment, but this would only solve the caching attack, not interception.
The Library of Congress is a unit of data storage, not a unit of volume!
Eve also suffers hugely for it. Take exploration, for example. Eve has a huge, persistent and singular (no server shards) universe. But it is essentially impossible for you to actually explore it without carting around your own battlefleet. Solo play is different from group play. The two are not mutually exclusive in an MMO.
And Vista was leaked in exactly the same way. The difference now is that the new driver architecture that was introduced in Vista (and was the root cause of the vast majority of stability complaints) has been around long enough for any lingering bugs to be ironed out, and for anyone with truly ancient hardware to have decided to stick with XP anyway. Thus, windows 7 builds have been comparatively more stable and useful than Vista builds at the same state (and only a little more wobbly than a properly updated Vista install is now).
Then when someone PMs you saying your image is down, re-uplaod it to one of the five million other free image hosts. Because nobody is foolish enough to 'store' an semi-important image on a Generic Ad-Supported free Imagehost, right?
Let's put it this way: If you have images that are actually important, then it's almost certain the site you're running has hosting where you should be placing these images. A forum avatar or a 'witty' animated signature image are not important images. Even assuming that image hosting alone is required, regardless of the site that links to them, then a paid service (e.g S3, where the hosting costs would be pennies per month) makes a lot more sense than a free ad-supported service if the images are actually important.
If I used ImageShack to host important images
Then you're a bit of a prat?
If you look closely at some (not all) 3D movies, you'll notice that anything beyond the near foreground is flat. Instead of rendering everything from two viewpoints, a series of depth planes are rendered, and these planes are shifted horizontally go get the stereoscopic effect. It cuts down on render time significantly, is (relatively) easy to bodge in using the z-buffer, and you can still cheat somewhat with layers of planar SFX rendering.
I'm guessing you don't remember Net Yaroze? Or the PS2 linux kit? The PS3, as you hopefully do know, is ready to have linux installed on it out-of-the-box.
It WAS worth the risk! Would you rather that industrial revolution never happened?
Those were not taken by Herschel's main camera, as that was only uncovered a few days ago.
If you have to open administrative tools and disable it's scheduled task just to turn it off, it's pretty damn evil. As is bundling it with every application, with no clean version available (or at least, no clean version that aren't buried in a forum link somewhere).
An anecdote: last time I installed Google Earth, I immediately ran the uninstaller for Google update (incidentally, the Google Earth installer makes no mention that it is installing the Google Updater for you). Not a few minutes later, Comodo is warning me that Google Updater is trying to access the internet. 3 killed process later, and no problems. Until about half an hour passes, and those processes are back again. Removing the scheduled tasks this time stopped the processes from returning.
Why is HD TV being foisted on us?
HDTV and digital broadcasting are unrelated.
average person
This is Slashdot. 'Average people' don't come into it. Most Slashdotters could probably tell you the difference between a Teller-Ullam design and an Implosion Trigger, because high-energy physics is interesting, rather than because everyone has a desire to nuke everyone else.
And according to his site, he's managed to spend $5000 on a valve. This guy has been around for a long while, made plenty of wild claims, and demonstrated absolutely nothing. Several times in the past he's attempted to sell this ting on ebay, and failed every time. He's basically a laughing stock.
I guess it could act as the catch/release point for a Rotovator/Skyhook, but I doubt a stationary point at a measly 15Km up would help much. Maybe if you could fire something laterally at mach 13 or so from the top of the tower to the lower tip of the Rotovator it might help, but you may as well just fly up there.
The major failing of current motion control systems (wiimote, Natal, whatever the PS3 system is called) is that there's no feedback. You're waving about, and simply hope that the game gets it right. By removing the layer of abstraction the controller provides, you're making things LESS immersive by starkly revealing that the game cannot respond to you in ways other than the visual or the audio.
Until cheap, reliable haptic control systems emerge (not a for about half a decade if things like the Falcon, and the cost of more flexiable systems, is anything to go by), motion control will be limited in usefulness to a few casual games that don't require fast and accurate responses.