Here is a better link for Mars Direct. I suggest that people concerned about how this actually works study up on the in-situ propellant production. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Yes, I've heard of the hydrogen bomb. I was under the impression that most nuclear bombs are Uranium (and fission) based, as they have much more destructive power than H-bombs. Yes, I know, H-bombs were what ended WW2.
I won't repeat the insults, but until you have actually done some study on this matter, use this as your mantra: Everything I know is wrong.
The most powerful nuclear devices yet invented are fusion-based; they get the majority of their energy by assembling atoms of helium from isotopes of hydrogen.
All nuclear bombs have uranium or plutonium in them. "Atom" (fission) bombs go no further, while "hydrogen" (fusion) bombs use the energy from the fission reaction to initiate a fusion reaction.
Fission bombs are pretty easy to make, if you have highly-enriched uranium. All you need is to make a sub-critical mass with a slug missing from the middle, such that the mass is prompt-supercritical when the slug is added. You fire the slug into it with what amounts to a zip gun, and it goes boom. This is how the "Little Boy" bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki worked.
Plutonium is much touchier stuff, and requires an implosion design (collapse of a spherical shell of fissionable material to form a supercritical mass) to get things to work well. Implosion designs require precise timing of the explosive charges which do the work of assembling the mass. The "Fat Man" bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was an implosion device.
Making a hydrogen bomb not only requires you to get a healthy fission reaction going, you have to somehow couple the energy (and a bunch of the neutrons) to a mass of lithium deuteride. Li-6 captures neutrons and forms helium-4 and tritium. The tritium can then fuse with the deuterium, forming helium-4, a very high-energy neutron, and about 18 million electron-volts of excess energy overall. Unlike a fission bomb, you don't have to worry about exceeding any "critical mass" threshold so you can make a fusion bomb just about as big as you like... once you have figured out how to do it at all.
Note, the fusion energy available from a molecule of lithium deuteride is about 18 MeV, and it has a molecular mass of about 8. The fission energy from an atom of U-235 is only 191 MeV, and it is almost 30 times heavier. Fusion has a lot more punch for the mass. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
In response #66, Kaa makes a pretty good case for why that might not work. If all the routers between you and your destinations won't route your packets, you will be effectively unplugged. Whatever you do has to be compatible with the rest of the world; more to the point, if the protocol in the router you connect to can be jiggered to send copies of your traffic to a snooper, they can "tap" (even if they can't immediately understand) everything that goes between you and the Internet. This is pretty important for the snoops, because traffic analysis carries a lot of intelligence even without having access to the content. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
I'm not disagreeing with anything you said; I know that treading too close to a trademark with intent to mislead is infringement. However, two entities can trademark (or incorporate under) the same name/phrase if they are in different areas of business, or different geographical zones (the latter being irrelevant on the Internet, I know). My point is, strengthening the hand of trademark owners allows them to grab names already being used by others in non-infringing ways -- and this was already a problem before this legislation. Done wrong (and I expect it to be done wrong, because it's in the interest of the big-money lobbies to do it that way) the little guy gets screwed even more. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
My point is that/. describing this as a "bill to facilitate taking away individuals' domain names" is fairly inflammatory language, and I'd like to hear the basis for this claim.
Remember the guy, name of Newton, who did business on a web site under his own surname? Then Apple decided their hand-held was going to be called the Newton, and pushed NSI to take the domain name away from the little guy. I believe he went to court to try to stop it. Of course, Apple had a lot more money than he did.
Want to guess where newton.com points to now? Click on it and weep. Note, this is *after* the demise of the Newton.
The "trademarks and popular names" clause is just going to mean that small businesses, who do not have the exposure to justify going to the PTO to register names, are going to be shoved out of cyberspace by the big guys. And that's just wrong. This cybersquatting bill needs to have a safe-harbor clause for "natives" like Newton, and hefty statutory damages for name-grabs like Apple's. Without that, it should be scrapped. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
(Drat, page won't reload right now - can't see if this has been posted already. I hate being redundant.) -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
cypherpunks is gone, but slashdoted/slashdot works. Remember to nuke your cookie after doing your reading. -- Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
ATMs (at least in the US) use a standard menu structure and the same configuration of buttons.
If you learn once, you've learned for all of them.
This isn't necessarily true. I encountered (to my utter disgust) *advertising* inserted into some NorWest ATMs. It demanded an extra keystroke to pass the ad, which was in the middle of the sequence. There was no audio indication that you had to do something different this time. A blind person would have no clue as to how to navigate the new sequence.
Hmmm. If the ADA can be used to force banks to skip those extra prompts (and put the English/Espanol preference on the card where it belongs) it could be a big win for consumers tired of these nuisances. --
Dude, it isn't stale until it stops happening. This one is abso-freakin-lutely poppin' fresh. Just because your school isn't going nuts over non-events like this doesn't mean hundreds of others are not, or that yours won't tomorrow. --
No, you're not. And while I despise tort lawyers as a class, I can think of even more despicable objects for them to attack: that school, its principal, Mrs. Harris the teacher and the judge. This kind of outrageous reaction must be punished. Having the kid visit with a school counselor to ask if he meant anything would have been fine. Throwing him into jail, giving him emotional scars for showing his feelings and making him fodder for the media is unforgivable. --
Processing power has to be expended on every message, or else Echelon will fail.
Implementing the kind of sorting that's necessary to find the wheat among the chaff is sufficient to get rid of this stuff.
A terrorist could send out junk mail with junk tripwords in it for a few years, then be relatively secure from the NSA's snooping. That is the problem with this type of system. You have to watch everything, all the time or else you'll miss the most important event, the one you're looking for.
You have to scan everything all the time, and that gets twice as cheap every 18 months. What you don't have to do is read it. For instance, take these "Eschelon keyword lists" that people love. They usually have zero grammatical content, and any string that registers 80% trigger-words (esp. with no coherent subject-verb-object structure) is probably going to be tossed by the analyzer on the first pass. It will definitely be flagged as "boring" the second and subsequent times, no human intervention required; saying the same thing over and over again carries no information.
Now, I'm no intelligence analyst; let me state that up front. But if I was trying to get a coherent picture of various people's activities (whether terrorist, commercial or political) I'd have a system that analyzed traffic first and foremost; not what was sent, but who sent things to whom how often. It would look for particular words/names and count them, to see what's important in their communications (and thus to the person being monitored). It would flag the appearance of new names/objects, and watch to see when these things were mentioned in communications to different people (likely indicating when something was becoming more important). Et cetera. This is way more sophisticated than you need to take phrases crafted to pop up, and ignore them.
Someone using a phrase like "Eschelon is an invasion of privacy" is not news, and probably does nothing more than flag the user's ID in a file somewhere which tracks potential enemies of the NSA. It would probably be far more effective to use something like Racter to write a little screed in somewhat different words every day; it would require a much more sophisticated filter to dump it automagically than a canned line repeated on every post. Even so, people trying to grab attention usually aren't the ones who need to be watched, and I bet the NSA's techniques are way beyond what's necessary to deal with this stuff effectively. --
"Oh, well, that happens in Australia because their system of government isn't as good as ours. It won't ever happen here." When deep down most Americans know that it could very well happen here and indeed does quite often.
Except that here, the courts can strike the laws down. And they do; witness the so-called Communications Decency Act. Shot down in flames. The Australians have no such escape hatch.
No government is perfect. On the other hand, this is a perfect example of one place that the United States' system is demonstrably superior to that of Australia. --
In a report commissioned by the European Parliament he produced evidence that the NSA snooped on phone calls from a French firm bidding for a contract in Brazil. They passed the information on to an American competitor, which won the contract.
If this is true (somehow I smell yellow journalism), why is the NSA spending the time and money to help out private corporations make money?
Because the French use their intelligence apparatus exactly the same way, to promote their own country's businesses with the industrial intelligence that falls out of their other activities.
This also means that the intelligence budget gets the political support of the business community; in other words, it's damned smart politics. (And it has exactly the same fishlike smell, don't it?) --
I've long been frustrated by the lack of information in meta-moderation.If something is moderated "redundant", I have no idea if it actually is or not because the context is missing.Ditto "overrated"; I do not have the score information on the page to make an independent evaluation.I almost always avoid rating those.
Keep refining the system, it'll get there someday. --
To use an analogy, car manufacturers have known for years how to create a car so durable, so safe, so secure to the passengers of the car, that a passenger can pretty much walk away from a 120+MPH collision with a brick wall.
No they haven't; hitting a wall (head-on) at 120 MPH, even in an Indy car, is simply not survivable.What the Indy car can do is bounce off the wall at maybe 50-60 MPH speed (perpendicular to the wall; speed parallel to the wall doesn't affect the impact severity much) and dissipate the energy by crumpling and shedding the wheels and suspension, meanwhile sliding to a stop along the asphalt; it can manage this because the wheels are stuck out on struts, well away from the driver's quarters.In a vehicle built for the street you must remain inside lanes too narrow to accomodate the extra crush space, so you can't get the safety factors which can be built into the race car (unless you want to drive something like a single-seat Hummer). --
It will make money but it'll lose ISP's and web companies.
Yes, but ISP's and web companies are the future of computing. Besides, the more they are pushed to Linux/*BSD by financial pressures, the more expertise they'll have (at least ISPs will) to support customers. When Linux/*BSD start to take over the desktops of the newbies, you can get out your shovel.
How big a hole will it take to bury Microsoft, anyway? --
The settlement of the Toshiba suit, and the copycat suits against Compaq, HP et al.
The patent on "date windowing" and the legal action over it.
The growing political awareness and clout of tech companies in Washington.
The tech sector of the economy may be the only force in America which has more money to throw around than the trial lawyers. With the ATLA putting its sights on Silicon Valley, this is going to come down to war. The ATLA has been playing the legislation game far longer than the tech sector, but money is a great leveller. When this shakes out, we may actually have two things which are near and dear to all our hearts:
Tort liability reform, where the "lottery" aspect is dealt with, and
Patent reform, which puts more emphasis on genuine novelty and cuts the term of protection down to something sensible for the industry (or imposes mandatory licensing).
Unfortunately, getting there means that the tech sector has to speak with one voice. That's going to be awfully hard for this fractions, contentious, individualistic bunch to do... but it's very important if we're to have a future! --
Maybe there'll be a checkbox on the 1040 forms with "Lawsuits" as primary source of income...
Damage awards don't count; they're supposed to be compensation for harm you suffered, so they aren't taxable. I don't know about punitive damages; is there a CPA in the house? --
Toshiba chose to circumvent the legal system by settling. Can't pin that one on America.
Actually, you can. The rules of tort law keep getting changed, by court precedent and legislation; it was legislation in Florida which opened the door to charging the tobacco companies $Billions for incidents which occurred years or decades before the passage of the law (no "ex post facto" safe harbor in liability law, only in criminal law). In Japan, Toshiba would never have been sued for this.
What this country needs is a healthy dose of tort reform. Anything (well, almost) that gets people out of the business of suing other people and into something productive can only be good for the nation. (That especially includes legal maneuvering over ridiculously obvious patents... but that's another thread.) --
If you don't think that it costs you anything to keep track of the issues, you're dreaming! If the public voted on every issue, everything would be decided by the activist fringes who actually cared enough about the issue to get out and vote for it. You think things are determined by extremists now... just watch. --
Securing the system completely is probably impossible; if nothing else, without a physical polling place you can't tell who is actually casting the vote. Fraud and duress become issues. And then there is the graveyard vote; it's a lot harder to challenge someone voting from six feet beneath a headstone when even the polling officials can't tell if they're a human or a dog. With a list of eligible voters and the actual polling lists, plus an insider to send the registration numbers my way, I could probably make a poor district in New York City or Chicago poll for John McCain.
On the other hand, if we had adequate security measures in place (e.g. digital signatures generated with personally-registered smart cards, the kind of thing that would suffice for official ID), these issues should not be problematic. We just don't have the infrastructure to do this yet. --
I've lived through some changes, and all I can tell you is it's hard to see very far ahead. But if I were you I'd try to get some coursework in neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic. --
200 years? You're a hopeless pessimist. Try 30, 50 at the outside. Hell, there are people today who don't know what to do with a phone with a dial on it.
I guess the valley will have to come up with a new name.
You're assuming that the valley would remain the center of the new technology, like the old. However, the Valley's fortunes grew as its offerings displaced those of other industries. It may be that the biomolecular revolution will be centered someplace else, like Austin or Minneapolis.
If it does manage to remain the place to be, I'd suggest Assembler Alley, Polymer Pass (too chemical, maybe) or Nanogate Notch. --
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a better link for Mars Direct. I suggest that people concerned about how this actually works study up on the in-situ propellant production.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
- The most powerful nuclear devices yet invented are fusion-based; they get the majority of their energy by assembling atoms of helium from isotopes of hydrogen.
- All nuclear bombs have uranium or plutonium in them. "Atom" (fission) bombs go no further, while "hydrogen" (fusion) bombs use the energy from the fission reaction to initiate a fusion reaction.
- Fission bombs are pretty easy to make, if you have highly-enriched uranium. All you need is to make a sub-critical mass with a slug missing from the middle, such that the mass is prompt-supercritical when the slug is added. You fire the slug into it with what amounts to a zip gun, and it goes boom. This is how the "Little Boy" bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki worked.
- Plutonium is much touchier stuff, and requires an implosion design (collapse of a spherical shell of fissionable material to form a supercritical mass) to get things to work well. Implosion designs require precise timing of the explosive charges which do the work of assembling the mass. The "Fat Man" bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was an implosion device.
- Making a hydrogen bomb not only requires you to get a healthy fission reaction going, you have to somehow couple the energy (and a bunch of the neutrons) to a mass of lithium deuteride. Li-6 captures neutrons and forms helium-4 and tritium. The tritium can then fuse with the deuterium, forming helium-4, a very high-energy neutron, and about 18 million electron-volts of excess energy overall. Unlike a fission bomb, you don't have to worry about exceeding any "critical mass" threshold so you can make a fusion bomb just about as big as you like... once you have figured out how to do it at all.
Note, the fusion energy available from a molecule of lithium deuteride is about 18 MeV, and it has a molecular mass of about 8. The fission energy from an atom of U-235 is only 191 MeV, and it is almost 30 times heavier. Fusion has a lot more punch for the mass.--
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In response #66, Kaa makes a pretty good case for why that might not work. If all the routers between you and your destinations won't route your packets, you will be effectively unplugged. Whatever you do has to be compatible with the rest of the world; more to the point, if the protocol in the router you connect to can be jiggered to send copies of your traffic to a snooper, they can "tap" (even if they can't immediately understand) everything that goes between you and the Internet. This is pretty important for the snoops, because traffic analysis carries a lot of intelligence even without having access to the content.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
I'm not disagreeing with anything you said; I know that treading too close to a trademark with intent to mislead is infringement. However, two entities can trademark (or incorporate under) the same name/phrase if they are in different areas of business, or different geographical zones (the latter being irrelevant on the Internet, I know). My point is, strengthening the hand of trademark owners allows them to grab names already being used by others in non-infringing ways -- and this was already a problem before this legislation. Done wrong (and I expect it to be done wrong, because it's in the interest of the big-money lobbies to do it that way) the little guy gets screwed even more.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
Want to guess where newton.com points to now? Click on it and weep. Note, this is *after* the demise of the Newton.
The "trademarks and popular names" clause is just going to mean that small businesses, who do not have the exposure to justify going to the PTO to register names, are going to be shoved out of cyberspace by the big guys. And that's just wrong. This cybersquatting bill needs to have a safe-harbor clause for "natives" like Newton, and hefty statutory damages for name-grabs like Apple's. Without that, it should be scrapped.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
(Drat, page won't reload right now - can't see if this has been posted already. I hate being redundant.)
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
cypherpunks is gone, but slashdoted/slashdot works. Remember to nuke your cookie after doing your reading.
--
Advertisers: If you attach cookies to your banner ads,
If I had moderator points right now, you'd have an "insightful".
--
Hmmm. If the ADA can be used to force banks to skip those extra prompts (and put the English/Espanol preference on the card where it belongs) it could be a big win for consumers tired of these nuisances.
--
Dude, it isn't stale until it stops happening. This one is abso-freakin-lutely poppin' fresh. Just because your school isn't going nuts over non-events like this doesn't mean hundreds of others are not, or that yours won't tomorrow.
--
No, you're not. And while I despise tort lawyers as a class, I can think of even more despicable objects for them to attack: that school, its principal, Mrs. Harris the teacher and the judge. This kind of outrageous reaction must be punished. Having the kid visit with a school counselor to ask if he meant anything would have been fine. Throwing him into jail, giving him emotional scars for showing his feelings and making him fodder for the media is unforgivable.
--
Now, I'm no intelligence analyst; let me state that up front. But if I was trying to get a coherent picture of various people's activities (whether terrorist, commercial or political) I'd have a system that analyzed traffic first and foremost; not what was sent, but who sent things to whom how often. It would look for particular words/names and count them, to see what's important in their communications (and thus to the person being monitored). It would flag the appearance of new names/objects, and watch to see when these things were mentioned in communications to different people (likely indicating when something was becoming more important). Et cetera. This is way more sophisticated than you need to take phrases crafted to pop up, and ignore them.
Someone using a phrase like "Eschelon is an invasion of privacy" is not news, and probably does nothing more than flag the user's ID in a file somewhere which tracks potential enemies of the NSA. It would probably be far more effective to use something like Racter to write a little screed in somewhat different words every day; it would require a much more sophisticated filter to dump it automagically than a canned line repeated on every post. Even so, people trying to grab attention usually aren't the ones who need to be watched, and I bet the NSA's techniques are way beyond what's necessary to deal with this stuff effectively.
--
No government is perfect. On the other hand, this is a perfect example of one place that the United States' system is demonstrably superior to that of Australia.
--
This also means that the intelligence budget gets the political support of the business community; in other words, it's damned smart politics. (And it has exactly the same fishlike smell, don't it?)
--
--
I've long been frustrated by the lack of information in meta-moderation.If something is moderated "redundant", I have no idea if it actually is or not because the context is missing.Ditto "overrated"; I do not have the score information on the page to make an independent evaluation.I almost always avoid rating those.
Keep refining the system, it'll get there someday.
--
--
How big a hole will it take to bury Microsoft, anyway?
--
- The settlement of the Toshiba suit, and the copycat suits against Compaq, HP et al.
- The patent on "date windowing" and the legal action over it.
- The growing political awareness and clout of tech companies in Washington.
The tech sector of the economy may be the only force in America which has more money to throw around than the trial lawyers. With the ATLA putting its sights on Silicon Valley, this is going to come down to war. The ATLA has been playing the legislation game far longer than the tech sector, but money is a great leveller. When this shakes out, we may actually have two things which are near and dear to all our hearts:- Tort liability reform, where the "lottery" aspect is dealt with, and
- Patent reform, which puts more emphasis on genuine novelty and cuts the term of protection down to something sensible for the industry (or imposes mandatory licensing).
Unfortunately, getting there means that the tech sector has to speak with one voice. That's going to be awfully hard for this fractions, contentious, individualistic bunch to do... but it's very important if we're to have a future!--
--
What this country needs is a healthy dose of tort reform. Anything (well, almost) that gets people out of the business of suing other people and into something productive can only be good for the nation. (That especially includes legal maneuvering over ridiculously obvious patents... but that's another thread.)
--
If you don't think that it costs you anything to keep track of the issues, you're dreaming! If the public voted on every issue, everything would be decided by the activist fringes who actually cared enough about the issue to get out and vote for it. You think things are determined by extremists now... just watch.
--
On the other hand, if we had adequate security measures in place (e.g. digital signatures generated with personally-registered smart cards, the kind of thing that would suffice for official ID), these issues should not be problematic. We just don't have the infrastructure to do this yet.
--
I've lived through some changes, and all I can tell you is it's hard to see very far ahead. But if I were you I'd try to get some coursework in neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic.
--
If it does manage to remain the place to be, I'd suggest Assembler Alley, Polymer Pass (too chemical, maybe) or Nanogate Notch.
--