My problem is that, even with the metal case, I still get quite a bit of RFI and it really messes with the TV antenna. If I were to attach copper screening on the inside of the two metal sides, would this help at all? Or would it not be enough to notice?
If you bonded the sides of the case to the ends and bottom at close intervals with something electrically conductive (like screws), you'd probably be able to reduce the leakage from the case. Unless you address the problem rising from lack of electrical contact, copper isn't going to help you.
Unfortunately, that's not the only way for RF to leak out. Any conductor which goes through a hole in the case can carry RF right through it. To get rid of this you need to shield or bypass (or both) every cable going out of the case. Keyboard and mouse cables should have the little ferrite rat-in-boa-constrictor chokes on them right next to the case. Your video cable should be fully shielded. Bypass the cables going into your modem and sound card. --
Would it be sufficient to line the inside of the case with properly grounded aluminium foil?
To do a really good job of blocking RFI, merely grounding the foil won't do. You need to seal all gaps in the foil so that they are connected to the adjacent foil/metal either by direct conductive connection or by such high capacitance (overlap, very tight gap) that the impedance is low enough to pass the circulating current as an almost-short.
The point is to keep any voltages from appearing on the outside of the shield. A Faraday cage does this by surrounding the device to be shielded with a conductive barrier with any holes kept considerably smaller than the wavelength of the emissions to be blocked. A gap between two sections of foil, even a slit the height of the case, is enough to allow considerable RF emission (these are actually built deliberately and called "slot antennas"). To keep your radio and other things happy, you need to avoid anything like this. If you try it, good luck. --
Some of us prefer MS-DOS to Windoze. There are still a wide variety of shareware, binary-only programs available for MS-DOS but not Linux. Being able to emulate DOS allows one to run this code. I am an embedded systems developer, and I run into this all the time. If I can run the assembler, linker and debugger under Linux it leaves me better access to editing and analysis tools for the source code and emulator dumps. It also removes one reason to boot Windoze.
If I can someday get through a week on a relatively complex job without having to boot Windoze because I need Doze-specific software, I will be pleased as punch. --
Web vandals tend to use only a handful of exploits to compromise vulnerable sites just enough to post digital graffiti.
Those "handful of exploits" are analogous to a handful of unlocked doors in a building that's supposed to be secure. The question nobody seems to be asking is, "Why are those doors unlocked?"
Why did Microsoft ever have a scripting facility with no security checks? Why do products still have buffer-overflow issues? Sloppy design and coding. Until the bar is raised for the production of software (ala OpenBSD), this will continue.
The REAL problem is that people have no understanding of the origin of these problems. Once it is common knowledge that sloppiness in design is responsible for the Love Bug virus and web-site hacks, people will demand better software and be willing to trade some convenience for security. Current design holes are the equivalent of buttons all over a car which will unlock the doors, un-latch the steering column and start the engine. Nobody would tolerate a car that is so open to theft, and nobody will tolerate software that is equally bad (as so much software is today) once the public is sophisticated enough to know the difference. --
I'm especially impressed that VA Linux is donating machinery to help.
Are you kidding? It's one of the best marketing moves they could have made. You can't buy publicity like that. Even if they weren't really nice guys they'd probably be doing it for the free advertising. --
Do you blame the guys who invented atomic fission for this?
Sorry, but uranium fission is a natural phenomenon. Even for the sustained fission chain reaction, nature has prior art. See articles about the natural reactor at Oklo in Gabon. --
Marrying a model won't get you a "superman" child. Genetic engineering will.
So what's the problem with this? The price of gene-sequencing has been falling much faster than even semiconductors, and gene manipulation won't be far behind once we have a use for it. The cost of raising a child is far greater than the cost of making one. This means everybody will be able to afford "superman" children.
The real deal is that you can't be "superman" in everything. The body that makes a champion basketball player doesn't make a winning football quarterback or a gymnastics medalist. The kind of brain that makes an Einstein probably doesn't make a Robert Frost or a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Then there's the unpredictability of nature vs. nurture; not everybody is going to grow up to use 100% of everything they have (a la GATTACA). There's plenty of room for variations even in a world where everyone is what we would consider "super" in many ways. --
you are saying that the owner of a research company in a field which has not yet produced any obvious practical applications should be a household word!?
It's impossible. "Hunkapiller" has too many syllables for the Ally McBeal-watching, talk-radio-listening, fast-food-eating American public to be able to remember. "Bill Gates" is a household name because it's short.
By extension, if Billy G. changed his name to "Theophilus Quentin Hasenpfeffer" he would no longer have any legal woes. --
People will get the children they can afford to construct! .... Have you read Brave New World? That's the society you're trying to create here.
In BNW, the government decided what traits would go into the population. This is the opposite of "what people can afford" (and by implication, desire enough to buy). And in case you haven't noticed, the rich can already buy genetic superiority. Rich people can afford to attract superior mates. Far from being new, this is as old as sex itself.
I believe in total equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.
So everyone has to have Down's Syndrome so that nobody will have more opportunities than the poor folks who got shuffled an extra chromosome 21? As long as we're throwing science-fiction scenarios around, I'll tell you that what you want is the world of Harrison Bergeron. And have a nice day.;-) --
At least if everyone had a sequencer, they would probably have some control over their genetic information.
If you had a sequencer on your desk, what would you do with it? Sequence your DNA three times a day to see if you might qualify as an X-man this week?
Don't be silly. If you sequence your DNA once, that's about all you'll need. Ubiquitous sequencers might have uses for scanning pathogens (especially in a world where genetically engineered biowarfare bugs are commonplace), but in reality most people with personal sequencers would scan everything that came into their vicinity. This means that everyone you ran into would have a scan of your DNA. In other words, you have the consequences backwards. --
How about tinkering with your own genes to make subtle changes? (IANA Geneticist but...) Say somebody was going on a hike, they could tickle a gene or two to increase their stamina. Winter coming? Flip a gene and put on a little more fat for warmthm, we'll take it back off when summer comes so the bathing suit'll fit again.
Trying to re-program a whole body full of cells is an enormous undertaking. You're probably better off using the knowledge of your own genotype to promote or suppress the activity of certain genes using hormones or analogues. The real trick is knowing exactly what to do to get the desired effect without causing harm, and having a gene map is a huge shortcut on the way to that goal. --
Nobody has voted on whether he or she wants to live in a world with only healthy, cheerful, smart and attractive inhabitants.
Guess what. Nobody voted on whether or not s/he wanted to live in a world full of people scribbling on Palm pilots in between spasms of beepilepsy when their phones and pagers go off, either. It came about because of millions of individual decisions. It's this little concept called freedom; maybe you've heard of it?
While I can't think of anything good coming out of pagers squealing and cell-phone conversations in restaurants, libraries and theaters, I think that embryonic prenatal genetic testing can do nothing but good. People will get children with better potential rather than the luck of the draw. Knowledge of the way that certain genes work is all but certain to lead to ways to work around defects; if you can administer a drug to cut the expression of genes on chromosome 21 in the developing embryo and fetus, Down's Syndrome (caused by a redundant chromosome 21) could disappear! That's just one example.
Trying to prevent us from knowing ourselves at the genetic level, and using that knowledge, means throwing away every possible benefit in addition to (maybe) holding off the ills. You can look back into history and see what previous attempts to stop the clock would have done; how would you like a shirt to cost a week's wages? That's what you're voting for when you mindlessly oppose all change. Opposition must be targeted to real problems or it will be neither credible nor effective.
Work for a better world. Vote with your offspring. --
Why do you think "Privacy Manager" services are desirable? It's because the phone companies make them desirable; they are allowed to screw us, instead of shutting off the phone-spammers and being done with it. But that doesn't make them any more money...
At first it was CLID that was supposed to deliver us from telescum. Now we need "Privacy Manager", because so many telescum refuse to provide CLID information. Someone mentioned that some phone companies are selling the equivalent of a privacy-manager-defeat to the telescum. I think it is high time for a class-action suit against any RBOC that has done such a thing, because they have represented their service as doing X and then gone right out and made it NOT do X, for a fee. This appears to fall into the category of "sharp practices", allowing triple damages. The amount of damages can start with the total amount all subscribers have ever paid for "Privacy Manager" services, and go up from there.
After we have won on that, we can demand as part of the settlement that the RBOC's refuse to connect PBX's which do not send out a legitimate originating number and company name. Suddenly, Privacy Manager services become superfluous, telescum no longer have any way to hide, and people can enjoy their peace. --
Even worse, the unidentified calls canNOT be traced using "call trace". I want to get an order forbidding these companies from calling me and hanging up, and the phone company will not tell me who they are!
It is long past time for us to have the legal right to either get onto a company's do-not-call list the FIRST time they call (whether they get the answering machine or a human, and whether they have a marketer available to talk or not), or have some other means of rejecting advertising calls pre-emptively. It is also long past time for advertising companies to have to supply CLID information on all their calls, like all us normal schmucks. Anyone for a letter-writing campaign to Congress? --
Talk about slicing up your palms:) - grabbing a sharp aluminum wire moving at a 15,000 km/h...
People have already thought about that, and the trick is to spin the tether end over end like spokes on a wheel so that when it comes down it's almost not moving. Bring it down to 50 miles and a mile or so a second, and it wouldn't take much of a craft to go up and meet it. Latch on, and it carries you up into orbit. You ride it back down the same way, leaving your borrowed energy and angular momentum with the tether. --
Hmm, I was thinking more of Arthur C. Clark's "The Fountains of Paradise" (1979).
That's a geosynchronous anchored tether, aka a "skyhook". It's a somewhat different beast.
Why launch to orbit when you can just lift?
If you know integral calculus, you can figure how much material you would need for different values of the tensile strength and density. I did the numbers for a steel skyhook once; it would have out-weighed the Earth. To make the material quantities (let alone the capital costs!) within reason, we need materials which are quite a bit stronger than what we've got readily available today. --
I dont know if this would work as well for general solar system travel, the suns magnetosphere is less dense out here than earths is, so youd need more power or a longer tether.
The real problem is that the magnetic field we see from the Sun is carried in the solar wind, and has neither a consistent strength nor a consistent direction. Since you can only push at right angles to the field, this means you're at the mercy of the immediate conditions. --
Just when there wasn't enough space junk in orbit.
Tethers will do a lot to help get rid of space junk, actually. The problem with space junk is that there's no easy way to get it down. With a conductive tether, unwanted objects - say, spent boosters or old satellites - can deploy a "generator" which turns energy from their orbital motion into electric power (which can be used, or dumped). This causes drag against the satellite's motion, which causes it to fall towards Earth. This allows you to de-orbit a satellite in weeks or days, without using any rocket fuel, without having to wait for air drag, and without having to have any control over the satellite's attitude as you do for a rocket. Had the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory been carrying one of these, it could have been left up until the gyros completely died instead of bringing it down as a precaution.
In practice, this means that boosters and satellites won't be in orbit much longer than their useful life. Without spent rocket stages blowing up, shedding paint and leaving other junk in orbit, orbit will be cleaner for the things we do want to leave up there.
There's another couple tricks that make tethers useful for space stations. The first is orbital reboost; by hooking a tether to a visiting spacecraft, e.g. a Shuttle, and lowering it toward Earth on its departure before finally unhooking, some of the energy and momentum from the visitor is transferred to the space station. This is a "free" reboost for the station and also a "free" retrofire for the visitor. If the station is in too high an orbit after this maneuver, it can then use a conductive tether in "generator" mode to turn some of its orbital motion into electric power. This might be useful for running high-powered experiments that don't need microgravity, like perhaps large-scale high-vaccum sputtering. And if the station gets too low, you divert power from the solar panels and run the tether in "motor" mode to push the station back up. The extra solar panels to do that are probably cheaper than shipping up low-energy propellants.
Unfortunately, NASA isn't likely to do this anytime soon. That's one of the problems with NASA; contrary to people's claims that they are off on the bleeding edge of things, they are actually not running far enough ahead to really get anywhere. A pity. --
You can avoid large objects, but there are lots of things down to the size of paint flecks which can't be tracked, let alone avoided.
The problem with dragging a wire is that the wire is smaller than the size of the hole many pieces of micro-debris would make. This means 1 impact = broken tether. To avoid this, at least one company is working on a "mesh" tether which has multiple redundant load paths and is interconnected at relatively close spacings. If one strand of the mesh is broken, other strands take up the load. This greatly extends the lifespan of the tether even in a hazard-rich environment. --
One time pads are back to the whole rsa type problem since data encrypted with them looks like encrypted data.
1 megabyte out of 600 megabytes = 1 byte out of 600 = 1 pixel out of 25 24-bit pixels. If there isn't enough randomness in a normal picture to hide one pseudorandomly-selected pixel out of each 25 which has the least-significant bit (of ONE color plane) munged, you must be taking pictures of fresh paint. --
I wouldnt live there... as soon as I was old enough to realize I lived someplace that was that dangerous I would leave...
Had you been born as a peasant in Colombia and grown up illiterate, harvesting bananas for cash and getting your dinner from crops on the hillside your father cleared, you'd have realized that you were in danger from trends in climate change and deforestation which could bring entire mountainsides down as landslides, burying family, home, farm and employment all at once. Uh-huh. Whatever you say...
I'm only going to say this one more time: I DONT CARE I DONT CARE I DONT CARE I DONT CARE I DONT CARE I DONT CARE... Did you hear it that time? I'll pay for gas until it is $3.00 a gallon.. by then we'll have a replacement I'd bet my life on it.
Don't you mean "I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE I HAVE NO CONSCIENCE"? (See previous paragraph.) If you're so unconcerned about money for fuel, why are you bitching about a small increase in rent? And as one of the people trying to be on the leading edge of things, isn't it smart to be toward the front of the pack when confronting things you know will have to change, instead of taking up the rear?
My one indulgence besides women, is my car..
That also happens to be the one indulgence whose consequences reach the farthest, and affect those least able to handle it.
I'm happy that you're starting to learn that events like the Thames and the Potomac catching fire are recent history, not fiction. Things have gotten a lot better, and they got better through "nazi like activism" (I invoke Godwin's Law, I win!) which brought about the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other laws and international treaties. But there's still a lot left to do.
For your further edification, here's some layman's level material from one of the most unbiased news sources in the English language, the BBC. I couldn't find the item on the borehole-temperature readings which confirmed the historical record of ground-based thermometers (must not be using the right search terms, and I'm having problems connecting to the search engine today), but I should be able to scare up that URL next week. In the mean time, here are some items on disasters in the making:
Relevant to the problems global warming is threatening to the arctic, see http://new s6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid%5F552 000/552327.stm. That one in particular mentions that warming temperatures and increased freshwater may shut down the North Atlantic Elevator, which drives the Gulf Stream current. Without that, Europe becomes a lot colder. How'd you like to have a few million English, French and Germans all keen to move to Maine because the homeland is suddenly too cold for them? Anyway, enjoy the food for thought. If it gives you an appreciation that it might suddenly have consequences which force themselves into your life, you might start feeling a little less cocky. --
In this posting which was apparently posted at +2 and is currently at -1, Enoch Root wrote:
Now, obviously, Americans being the hypocrites they are, they'll censor him in the name of human rights, when they're supposed to hold free speech sacred above all else.
Talk about moderators Not Getting The Point, indeed. I bet at least two out of those three moderators rooted for Terrence and Phillip and booed Kyle's mom, too. Irony, how delicious. --
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, that's not the only way for RF to leak out. Any conductor which goes through a hole in the case can carry RF right through it. To get rid of this you need to shield or bypass (or both) every cable going out of the case. Keyboard and mouse cables should have the little ferrite rat-in-boa-constrictor chokes on them right next to the case. Your video cable should be fully shielded. Bypass the cables going into your modem and sound card.
--
The point is to keep any voltages from appearing on the outside of the shield. A Faraday cage does this by surrounding the device to be shielded with a conductive barrier with any holes kept considerably smaller than the wavelength of the emissions to be blocked. A gap between two sections of foil, even a slit the height of the case, is enough to allow considerable RF emission (these are actually built deliberately and called "slot antennas"). To keep your radio and other things happy, you need to avoid anything like this. If you try it, good luck.
--
If I can someday get through a week on a relatively complex job without having to boot Windoze because I need Doze-specific software, I will be pleased as punch.
--
Why did Microsoft ever have a scripting facility with no security checks? Why do products still have buffer-overflow issues? Sloppy design and coding. Until the bar is raised for the production of software (ala OpenBSD), this will continue.
The REAL problem is that people have no understanding of the origin of these problems. Once it is common knowledge that sloppiness in design is responsible for the Love Bug virus and web-site hacks, people will demand better software and be willing to trade some convenience for security. Current design holes are the equivalent of buttons all over a car which will unlock the doors, un-latch the steering column and start the engine. Nobody would tolerate a car that is so open to theft, and nobody will tolerate software that is equally bad (as so much software is today) once the public is sophisticated enough to know the difference.
--
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I'm setting my threshold to 1. If you bozos want me to watch your argument, you can at least put a name behind your words.
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The real deal is that you can't be "superman" in everything. The body that makes a champion basketball player doesn't make a winning football quarterback or a gymnastics medalist. The kind of brain that makes an Einstein probably doesn't make a Robert Frost or a Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Then there's the unpredictability of nature vs. nurture; not everybody is going to grow up to use 100% of everything they have (a la GATTACA). There's plenty of room for variations even in a world where everyone is what we would consider "super" in many ways.
--
By extension, if Billy G. changed his name to "Theophilus Quentin Hasenpfeffer" he would no longer have any legal woes.
--
It wasn't uncommon in 1984 to hear people talk about "PC" as if it was an IBM trademark.
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Don't be silly. If you sequence your DNA once, that's about all you'll need. Ubiquitous sequencers might have uses for scanning pathogens (especially in a world where genetically engineered biowarfare bugs are commonplace), but in reality most people with personal sequencers would scan everything that came into their vicinity. This means that everyone you ran into would have a scan of your DNA. In other words, you have the consequences backwards.
--
--
While I can't think of anything good coming out of pagers squealing and cell-phone conversations in restaurants, libraries and theaters, I think that embryonic prenatal genetic testing can do nothing but good. People will get children with better potential rather than the luck of the draw. Knowledge of the way that certain genes work is all but certain to lead to ways to work around defects; if you can administer a drug to cut the expression of genes on chromosome 21 in the developing embryo and fetus, Down's Syndrome (caused by a redundant chromosome 21) could disappear! That's just one example.
Trying to prevent us from knowing ourselves at the genetic level, and using that knowledge, means throwing away every possible benefit in addition to (maybe) holding off the ills. You can look back into history and see what previous attempts to stop the clock would have done; how would you like a shirt to cost a week's wages? That's what you're voting for when you mindlessly oppose all change. Opposition must be targeted to real problems or it will be neither credible nor effective.
Work for a better world. Vote with your offspring.
--
At first it was CLID that was supposed to deliver us from telescum. Now we need "Privacy Manager", because so many telescum refuse to provide CLID information. Someone mentioned that some phone companies are selling the equivalent of a privacy-manager-defeat to the telescum. I think it is high time for a class-action suit against any RBOC that has done such a thing, because they have represented their service as doing X and then gone right out and made it NOT do X, for a fee. This appears to fall into the category of "sharp practices", allowing triple damages. The amount of damages can start with the total amount all subscribers have ever paid for "Privacy Manager" services, and go up from there.
After we have won on that, we can demand as part of the settlement that the RBOC's refuse to connect PBX's which do not send out a legitimate originating number and company name. Suddenly, Privacy Manager services become superfluous, telescum no longer have any way to hide, and people can enjoy their peace.
--
I love it. HEY, EMBEDDED PROGRAMMERS! Here's something that would sell like hotcakes.
--
It is long past time for us to have the legal right to either get onto a company's do-not-call list the FIRST time they call (whether they get the answering machine or a human, and whether they have a marketer available to talk or not), or have some other means of rejecting advertising calls pre-emptively. It is also long past time for advertising companies to have to supply CLID information on all their calls, like all us normal schmucks. Anyone for a letter-writing campaign to Congress?
--
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--
--
In practice, this means that boosters and satellites won't be in orbit much longer than their useful life. Without spent rocket stages blowing up, shedding paint and leaving other junk in orbit, orbit will be cleaner for the things we do want to leave up there.
There's another couple tricks that make tethers useful for space stations. The first is orbital reboost; by hooking a tether to a visiting spacecraft, e.g. a Shuttle, and lowering it toward Earth on its departure before finally unhooking, some of the energy and momentum from the visitor is transferred to the space station. This is a "free" reboost for the station and also a "free" retrofire for the visitor. If the station is in too high an orbit after this maneuver, it can then use a conductive tether in "generator" mode to turn some of its orbital motion into electric power. This might be useful for running high-powered experiments that don't need microgravity, like perhaps large-scale high-vaccum sputtering. And if the station gets too low, you divert power from the solar panels and run the tether in "motor" mode to push the station back up. The extra solar panels to do that are probably cheaper than shipping up low-energy propellants.
Unfortunately, NASA isn't likely to do this anytime soon. That's one of the problems with NASA; contrary to people's claims that they are off on the bleeding edge of things, they are actually not running far enough ahead to really get anywhere. A pity.
--
The problem with dragging a wire is that the wire is smaller than the size of the hole many pieces of micro-debris would make. This means 1 impact = broken tether. To avoid this, at least one company is working on a "mesh" tether which has multiple redundant load paths and is interconnected at relatively close spacings. If one strand of the mesh is broken, other strands take up the load. This greatly extends the lifespan of the tether even in a hazard-rich environment.
--
--
I'm happy that you're starting to learn that events like the Thames and the Potomac catching fire are recent history, not fiction. Things have gotten a lot better, and they got better through "nazi like activism" (I invoke Godwin's Law, I win!) which brought about the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and other laws and international treaties. But there's still a lot left to do.
For your further edification, here's some layman's level material from one of the most unbiased news sources in the English language, the BBC. I couldn't find the item on the borehole-temperature readings which confirmed the historical record of ground-based thermometers (must not be using the right search terms, and I'm having problems connecting to the search engine today), but I should be able to scare up that URL next week. In the mean time, here are some items on disasters in the making:
http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south %5Fasia/newsid%5F683000/683566.stm details the death of the Ganges, caused in no small part by the vanishing of the Himalayan glaciers which feed its headwaters;2 000/372219.stm talks about climate change making life suddenly more hospitable for pathogens and their vectors (the West Nile Virus is now in New York, right next to you);3 000/613075.stm talks about the Bangladeshi Environment Minister telling what will happen if Bengalis actually do what you suggest they ought to do.
http://new s6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid%5F37
and http://new s6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid%5F61
In that vein, http://news6.thdo .bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/newsid_37000/37816.stm talks about people who won't be able to vote with their feet, because they'd have to swim (and they aren't happy about it). Nice little image there.
On the general theme of the world becoming more dangerous in general, look atp ecials/washington%5F200 0/newsid%5F647000/647831.stm, http://new s6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid%5F603 000/603707.stm /news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/news id%5F824000/824427.stm.
http://news6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/s
and http:/
Relevant to the problems global warming is threatening to the arctic, see http://new s6.thdo.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid%5F552 000/552327.stm. That one in particular mentions that warming temperatures and increased freshwater may shut down the North Atlantic Elevator, which drives the Gulf Stream current. Without that, Europe becomes a lot colder. How'd you like to have a few million English, French and Germans all keen to move to Maine because the homeland is suddenly too cold for them? Anyway, enjoy the food for thought. If it gives you an appreciation that it might suddenly have consequences which force themselves into your life, you might start feeling a little less cocky.
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