Certainly if we judge outcomes, the system seems to work very well. What more can we ask?
Reading further you certainly saw points, what doesn't work very well. Besides the obvious "less accidentially shot pets and farm animals" and such. A hunter nearly missed my friend, when he was riding on a bike. Another friend's horse was shot. Thank you for this kind of protection.
That argument is just plain silly.
Yes, "I don't see what could possibly go wrong?" and "We're doing this for ages, why should we change anything?" Whole civilisations died and empires fell because of using these counter-arguments to those who saw the danger.
I'm hypocritical am I? "hunters don't kill off the predators" "You might think that ceasing all hunting would allow the population to rebound faster, but the hunting feeds much-needed dollars into various conservation efforts, such as building road crossings for the animals." "the deer population still hasn't fully recovered to normal levels, though it's getting there through nice, sustainable, controlled growth, encouraged by more aggressive wildlife management policies (more hunting)." "The net effect is that hunting is crucial to the maintenance of healthy herds."
Lies, slippery twisting the facts, bragging with all the good your money does, a range of fallacious arguments. I'm still not sure if hunters tell all these lies in cool blood or do they really convince themselves and believe they are true. If the former, there's no point in arguing. If the latter - analyse each of the sentences above and find the fallacies.
I don't enjoy pain and suffering of animals.
So you don't. I've heard enough hunters boasting how painfully their victims died. Of course when asked publicly, they all say they don't enjoy causing pain. Only around the campfire, passing drinks to other hunters, all this "non-enjoying" goes away and most messy and gory stories attract most interest.
And by the way, -comparison- - do you know such a word? I'm not equating apples to oranges. I'm comparing contexts. Exagerrating to make certain dependencies more obvious. Bicycle riding at speed of light thing. Reduce children to rabbits, $1mln to license fee, slippery means of getting alibi to legal license, and "some charity" to DWR, and you get the same chain of dependencies. Values may differ. Things that were horrid may be just a bit disgusting. But the lies are still the same.
...when the first virus spreading over the Microsoft Antivirus system is written...
BTW, will it be free? If not, I'd say, brillant strategy. First sell them system vulnerable to viruses, then sell them protection against them. Microsoft should start charging for security updates downloads too.
No worries. By now I'd say I have about a glass of beer total sitting in my keyboard (spilled at VARIOUS occasions) and it still works, no problem. Beer seems to be harmless to keyboards.
and many falls. After some time, some keys stopped working. So I've grown some nice plants and flowers in the fertile soil between the keys of my first keyboard. The second one got too close to a warming bulb, keys twisted in all kinds of Bosh'esque curves, but after replacing F1-F3 with PrtScn-Pause and some cutting of edges of Tab, it still works. I got the model M, but it's "reserve" one - a bit too noisy for nightly use. Actually, got it used from a discount store, from after-flood salvage - this one was least covered with mud. But a warm bath and some drying later it worked just fine. Right now for the second PC I use a cool-looking cheap multimedia keyboard, that unfortunately is made from very poor plastic. The corner broke off after the first fall, but keeps working. The broken plastic was sharp though, hurting my wrist, so I decided to bend and smooth it using a lighter... have you ever been extinguishing your keyboard? Ah, there were these keyboards at my univ, with enter key falling off. In some of them the key has gone missing. So I got smart, I was coming to classes with my own enter key, inserting it for my use, and taking it with me when the classes ended.
All I'm saying is that controlled, managed hunting as it is done where I live cannot be rationally criticized on the grounds that it hurts the animal populations.
The problem is that this hunting is NOT done in rational way. People who should do the best for the animals, do the best for themselves. Keyword: Corruption.
"preserving the population" should mean keeping it on a self-sustainable level, which could go unattended for years, unless something like especially harsh winter happens.
Why? Because if for some reason the forces behind it vanish (e.g. a serious war begins and most hunters join the army) or because of some other reasons the regulation of the population ceases, it results in ecological disaster. You've already given example, in your original post, what are the results of ceasing the hunts in such an area without leaving the population at a -regulated- level. Massive losses in wildlife, agriculture, numerous problems caused by starving animals seeking food amongst humans. Keyword: Irresponsiblity.
Funding preservation of wildlife should be an act of good will Because otherwise it's encouraging this two-facedness, where in one hand you play a great nature lover and great protector, in the other you enjoy pain and suffering of the animals. That's the same league as "defense by pre-emptive attack", and all the lies you face in business and politics. Keyword: Hipocrisy.
I think you've confused hunters with university students. Either you don't know the hunter society or you play that you don't.
I don't think you'll find many who would claim they'd donate money to the DWR. I really don't know where you get this crap. You're trying to imply hypocrisy where none exists.
Well, I found one here - you. And quite a few in the past. Claiming hunting is ah-so-noble because their money goes to DWR and funds all the useful stuff. Say, I organise a hunt on homeless children. Hand out guns, let people kill the kids, find some twisted way to make it legal. $1mln/shot. All going to the Salvation Army or some other charity. How would you feel about them boasting they donated SO much money to the charity, to help the poor?
In case of "non-expiring" licenses, yes, they -shouldn't- get anulled (I wouldn't be surprised if they are though, e.g. the keys memory being powered from the same source as the timer). In case of "rental-like" downloads (pay for download, get the song for 3 months), that would make sense. Same for As for backing up the key on the computer - this would miss the whole purpose, just redistribute the same key with the song. Actually, what iTunes does is decrypting the song in the computer before uploading it. That's why it's hackable - you just need to intercept the decrypted stream between iPod and iTunes. I'm not completely sure if this design flaw was result of incompetence or a friendly gesture from the Apple engineers towards the community. More likely though, the players will all have NVRAM-based RTC, with battery charge sufficient for 10 years of operation. No clock skew...
If you're subscriber, sure, you're as good as new. The new key with correct expiration date is uploaded. If your subscription has expired in the meantime, sorry, hard luck. If you pay per download, same. Pay again, download again.
It wouldn't resolve impurities in the materials. Contaminations to the wafer or the chemistry used in production would still be a problem - but as they are a small problem compared to the particles in the atmosphere now, they would remain the same small problem, while the big one would vanish. (I'm not in the industry but I read some "pro" magazines from the domain and know what problems are currently addressed most. Gas contamination is #1 far ahead from all the rest.) As for cubic kilometers, I rather thought of storage of resources for production (so single unit damage isn't all that big loss) - more of number than size... No problem about "driving bigger projectiles" - you still seem to miss how huge the mass has to be to create noticable gravity - gravity of 1 cubic kilometer of steel won't be noticable by anything but extremely precise devices. So, most of slower junk caught by aerogel pillow, bigger one either shot down by some missiles or laser cannons upon detection, or just the storage moved around a bit to make a passage for the piece of junk. The fastest small ones would still hit, but even then passing through 1% of the store volume would destroy maybe 5% of the stored products, not 60% like what is currently discarded because of failures caused by impurities in gasses.
In current production it's impurities of the gas filling the cleanrooms that is the problem, not dust or microbes (these were maybe 5-10 years ago...). Collisions with junk are a problem, but shielding with stuff like aerogel can prevent most of them. Radiation... Yes, a problem, but I don't think it would be a "blocker". I wouldn't worry about the craft microgravity - after all, 1) it would be really minimal, 2) the mass still can be laid out in such a way that the microgravity would null-out itself. (the actual production taking place in the centre of mass)
Take out the battery for 10 years? Most likely upon detecting clock skew it will cancel your key immediately. And most likely they have their ass covered by license in case this happens accidentially.
Connect to AD output, you get crap. Thing is lossy compression, twice, results in total crap. Get a CD. Sounds fine. Encode as MP3. Sounds fine. Decode and burn to CD. Still sounds fine. Encode to MP3 again. Sounds like crap. The DRM'd formats are compressed already. Recompressing them will result in huge quality loss. Of course if you could tap into the AD input, we're home. Except you won't, it will be inside the chip. The portable devices can't connect. The PC can. So if you want to upload any songs, you plug it into the PC and it manages all the networking stuff, providing only a neat high-level tunnel to the remote host. Sure there are electronic microscopes and if you can actually read -data- of the ROM with them (not just the physical structure of the memory device), you can crack DRM, just by recovering the secret key of your device. Then you could authenticate any arbitrary device with the keyserver using that key. Code with backdoors won't be approved as DRM-compatibile. Most probably, since the code is all there, the backdoor may require some manufacturer secret key. Good luck obtaining it.
Today it's about even, thanks to the crossings and fences constructed by the Dept. of Wildlife Resources with money from hunters.
Less killed by cars, more left for shooting? Keeping -roads- safe being the business of dept. of Wildlife Resources? Sounds like a bad pun. Or at least there's a serious flaw in this way of thinking.
People simply won't donate the kind of money that they'll pay for hunting licenses, because they get more out of the latter.
"people" meaning You. The hunters. The "nature lovers". These who claim they do it all from love to the nature, to help maintain the population levels, to protects the farms... Who would count all the things they are obligated to do by law as their great contributions to The Nature. That's the base of the hipocrisy: You cover up your will for killing with different noble aims. But remove the ability to kill, and suddenly all the will for noble aims is gone. No. You pay, because you want to kill. Bloodlust. You don't care if the money goes to preserving wildlife or to funding a villa for some politician. You don't care if the people living near the forests are safe or if the farms are damaged. You just care that there should always be enough game to hunt and enough good publicity (FUD) to still be able to kill. A rogue man-killing mountain lion is not your civil service for protecting people, but an exciting hunt. And that directly influences the rest of the points. I'm not saying hunters aren't needed. I'm not saying culling is unnecessary. But I'm saying all the aims of the current-day hunting are directed at the above. All the noble things you talk about, just a cover-up for a bloody entertainment, which is the highest priority. "preserving the population" should mean keeping it on a self-sustainable level, which could go unattended for years, unless something like especially harsh winter happens. Not at levels that produce most game, and left unattended lead to disasters. Funding preservation of wildlife should be an act of good will, not an obligatory pay for license to kill. And what to say about all the cows and dogs with huge "COW" or "DOG" painted on them, so they wouldn't get shot by drunken hunters during the season? How does that contribute towards safety? You are not defending noble vigilantes, good citizens who do this all from love for Nature. You are defending a bunch of rogues, a mob that has a lot to say about how much good they do, except they do something completely different. Confront all the "humanitarian killing" with hunter tales "how painfully the bastard was dying". The noble traditions with amount of alcohol they drink. All their contributions to the wildlife, with how much would they give without being able to kill - and how much they spend on guns and equipment.
1) Buran, not Braun. 2) You need very little to haul cargo into space, and most of it is so cheap that it simply doesn't pay to care about its safe return to Earth - let it burn in the atmosphere. 3) There's still one advantage a shuttle has over any other solutions - it's able to haul bigger things not designed for reentry back to earth. But one hardly ever needs that.
Actually with getting transport costs down enough, and some extra research, the orbit could be a great place for some ultra-precise manufacturing. Want a perfect sphere from your material? Just release it in freefal and let the viscosity forces hold it in that shape. Want cleanroom? Just open the airlock. Want superconductivity? Just shield the wall from the side of the Sun and you're in temperatures of supeconductivity. Stepper motors don't have to lift the weight of the robotic arms, you can concentrate on precision or load the extra power into speed. Storage? Whole cubic miles of free storage space, no weather problems. There's a whole range of problems with manufacturing that are present only Earth. The only serious problem with the space is transport. Sure, cars or such aren't what could be produced in space. But electronics? Chips? Medical devices? Optics? Just think of a perfect lens that could be achieved by spinning some molten glass at specific speed in freefall. And of course finally getting some reasonable superconductor-based processing power, where 0K is dirt-cheap.
1) Prevent explosion of the line upon disconnect. 2) 1/3 of the fuel is A LOT. Actually, 1/3 of the solid state fuel in the helper rockets. Not pumpable and even if it was, way too much to be pumped in such a short time. 3) They are disconnected really fast after, so that's not much of the problem anyway.
The suggested solution is much more radical: get the shuttle some 10 miles up by a jet plane and then launch it from there.
The evil genius behind some of DRM is that it's hardly crackable (except with some serious quality loss.) If it's in software, it probably will be crackable. If in hardware, much harder. The idea is that you get all the data encrypted. You can copy, share, spread, mangle, edit it, whatever - it's useless like that anyway. When you want to play it on a DRM-based device, you must first connect to a key server. Your device identifies itself, a secure handshake is performed (man in the middle won't help much, public keys of the device and the server have been exchanged at the manufacture time), then receives the key to decrypt the song, so it can be played. Of course the key may include additional instructions like limit, so you can play it within next 10h and then it should be disabled, or you can play it once only (pay per view), or such, and the device must obey them (otherwise it wouldn't be DRM-approved). In software you should be able to intercept the key, then bundling it with the song, or releasing it decrypted you could keep copying it. For embedded devices it's much harder because you won't be able to authenticate as the keyserver or the device and the key is transferred by secure means. All you can do is to re-encode the analog output, i.e the video or audio that is being sent to screen/speakers. With obvious quality loss. Anyway, still, to obtain the key you must "purchase" it by some legal means, i.e. the DRM'd song contains unique ID with a flag "paid", then you get the key and the ID is removed from the "paid" list so when the key expires for some reason (i.e. pay per view), you need to pay again. Also, someone else with a copy of your song won't get the same key again without paying again...
1) Which WMA? They are quite incompatibile. 2) It means it won't work for at least half of us. 50% of the customers out in the cold. Compare that to IE-only websites...
The problem is, either it's DRM'd or "very few songs". The condition for obtaining permission for selling many of the songs (from RIAA) is that they are DRM'd. But in the other hand, I wonder if they could go with a hybrid service - DRM only what has to be DRM'd, release the rest as "open". (even if that "only" was to mean 80% of their catalogue)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not expert, but I guess makefiles are optional.
Certainly if we judge outcomes, the system seems to work very well. What more can we ask?
Reading further you certainly saw points, what doesn't work very well. Besides the obvious "less accidentially shot pets and farm animals" and such. A hunter nearly missed my friend, when he was riding on a bike. Another friend's horse was shot. Thank you for this kind of protection.
That argument is just plain silly.
Yes, "I don't see what could possibly go wrong?" and "We're doing this for ages, why should we change anything?"
Whole civilisations died and empires fell because of using these counter-arguments to those who saw the danger.
I'm hypocritical am I?
"hunters don't kill off the predators"
"You might think that ceasing all hunting would allow the population to rebound faster, but the hunting feeds much-needed dollars into various conservation efforts, such as building road crossings for the animals."
"the deer population still hasn't fully recovered to normal levels, though it's getting there through nice, sustainable, controlled growth, encouraged by more aggressive wildlife management policies (more hunting)."
"The net effect is that hunting is crucial to the maintenance of healthy herds."
Lies, slippery twisting the facts, bragging with all the good your money does, a range of fallacious arguments. I'm still not sure if hunters tell all these lies in cool blood or do they really convince themselves and believe they are true. If the former, there's no point in arguing. If the latter - analyse each of the sentences above and find the fallacies.
I don't enjoy pain and suffering of animals.
So you don't. I've heard enough hunters boasting how painfully their victims died. Of course when asked publicly, they all say they don't enjoy causing pain. Only around the campfire, passing drinks to other hunters, all this "non-enjoying" goes away and most messy and gory stories attract most interest.
And by the way, -comparison- - do you know such a word? I'm not equating apples to oranges. I'm comparing contexts. Exagerrating to make certain dependencies more obvious. Bicycle riding at speed of light thing. Reduce children to rabbits, $1mln to license fee, slippery means of getting alibi to legal license, and "some charity" to DWR, and you get the same chain of dependencies. Values may differ. Things that were horrid may be just a bit disgusting. But the lies are still the same.
...when the first virus spreading over the Microsoft Antivirus system is written...
BTW, will it be free? If not, I'd say, brillant strategy. First sell them system vulnerable to viruses, then sell them protection against them. Microsoft should start charging for security updates downloads too.
No worries. By now I'd say I have about a glass of beer total sitting in my keyboard (spilled at VARIOUS occasions) and it still works, no problem. Beer seems to be harmless to keyboards.
Just pour in more liquor. Pure spirit actually.
and many falls. After some time, some keys stopped working. So I've grown some nice plants and flowers in the fertile soil between the keys of my first keyboard. The second one got too close to a warming bulb, keys twisted in all kinds of Bosh'esque curves, but after replacing F1-F3 with PrtScn-Pause and some cutting of edges of Tab, it still works. I got the model M, but it's "reserve" one - a bit too noisy for nightly use. Actually, got it used from a discount store, from after-flood salvage - this one was least covered with mud. But a warm bath and some drying later it worked just fine. Right now for the second PC I use a cool-looking cheap multimedia keyboard, that unfortunately is made from very poor plastic. The corner broke off after the first fall, but keeps working. The broken plastic was sharp though, hurting my wrist, so I decided to bend and smooth it using a lighter... have you ever been extinguishing your keyboard? Ah, there were these keyboards at my univ, with enter key falling off. In some of them the key has gone missing. So I got smart, I was coming to classes with my own enter key, inserting it for my use, and taking it with me when the classes ended.
Damn you. Because of you I got noodle over my monitor. Seriously.
All I'm saying is that controlled, managed hunting as it is done where I live cannot be rationally criticized on the grounds that it hurts the animal populations.
The problem is that this hunting is NOT done in rational way. People who should do the best for the animals, do the best for themselves. Keyword: Corruption.
"preserving the population" should mean keeping it on a self-sustainable level, which could go unattended for years, unless something like especially harsh winter happens.
Why? Because if for some reason the forces behind it vanish (e.g. a serious war begins and most hunters join the army) or because of some other reasons the regulation of the population ceases, it results in ecological disaster.
You've already given example, in your original post, what are the results of ceasing the hunts in such an area without leaving the population at a -regulated- level. Massive losses in wildlife, agriculture, numerous problems caused by starving animals seeking food amongst humans. Keyword: Irresponsiblity.
Funding preservation of wildlife should be an act of good will
Because otherwise it's encouraging this two-facedness, where in one hand you play a great nature lover and great protector, in the other you enjoy pain and suffering of the animals. That's the same league as "defense by pre-emptive attack", and all the lies you face in business and politics. Keyword: Hipocrisy.
I think you've confused hunters with university students.
Either you don't know the hunter society or you play that you don't.
I don't think you'll find many who would claim they'd donate money to the DWR. I really don't know where you get this crap. You're trying to imply hypocrisy where none exists.
Well, I found one here - you. And quite a few in the past. Claiming hunting is ah-so-noble because their money goes to DWR and funds all the useful stuff. Say, I organise a hunt on homeless children. Hand out guns, let people kill the kids, find some twisted way to make it legal. $1mln/shot. All going to the Salvation Army or some other charity. How would you feel about them boasting they donated SO much money to the charity, to help the poor?
In case of "non-expiring" licenses, yes, they -shouldn't- get anulled (I wouldn't be surprised if they are though, e.g. the keys memory being powered from the same source as the timer). In case of "rental-like" downloads (pay for download, get the song for 3 months), that would make sense. Same for As for backing up the key on the computer - this would miss the whole purpose, just redistribute the same key with the song.
Actually, what iTunes does is decrypting the song in the computer before uploading it. That's why it's hackable - you just need to intercept the decrypted stream between iPod and iTunes. I'm not completely sure if this design flaw was result of incompetence or a friendly gesture from the Apple engineers towards the community.
More likely though, the players will all have NVRAM-based RTC, with battery charge sufficient for 10 years of operation. No clock skew...
If you're subscriber, sure, you're as good as new. The new key with correct expiration date is uploaded. If your subscription has expired in the meantime, sorry, hard luck. If you pay per download, same. Pay again, download again.
It wouldn't resolve impurities in the materials. Contaminations to the wafer or the chemistry used in production would still be a problem - but as they are a small problem compared to the particles in the atmosphere now, they would remain the same small problem, while the big one would vanish. (I'm not in the industry but I read some "pro" magazines from the domain and know what problems are currently addressed most. Gas contamination is #1 far ahead from all the rest.)
As for cubic kilometers, I rather thought of storage of resources for production (so single unit damage isn't all that big loss) - more of number than size... No problem about "driving bigger projectiles" - you still seem to miss how huge the mass has to be to create noticable gravity - gravity of 1 cubic kilometer of steel won't be noticable by anything but extremely precise devices. So, most of slower junk caught by aerogel pillow, bigger one either shot down by some missiles or laser cannons upon detection, or just the storage moved around a bit to make a passage for the piece of junk. The fastest small ones would still hit, but even then passing through 1% of the store volume would destroy maybe 5% of the stored products, not 60% like what is currently discarded because of failures caused by impurities in gasses.
This is so much easier to do in software!
#!/bin/bash
$0 &
$0 &
In current production it's impurities of the gas filling the cleanrooms that is the problem, not dust or microbes (these were maybe 5-10 years ago...). Collisions with junk are a problem, but shielding with stuff like aerogel can prevent most of them. Radiation... Yes, a problem, but I don't think it would be a "blocker". I wouldn't worry about the craft microgravity - after all, 1) it would be really minimal, 2) the mass still can be laid out in such a way that the microgravity would null-out itself. (the actual production taking place in the centre of mass)
http://www.maxim-ic.com/alternatives.cfm/part/BQ48 22/pk/81
Take out the battery for 10 years?
Most likely upon detecting clock skew it will cancel your key immediately. And most likely they have their ass covered by license in case this happens accidentially.
Connect to AD output, you get crap. Thing is lossy compression, twice, results in total crap. Get a CD. Sounds fine. Encode as MP3. Sounds fine. Decode and burn to CD. Still sounds fine. Encode to MP3 again. Sounds like crap. The DRM'd formats are compressed already. Recompressing them will result in huge quality loss.
Of course if you could tap into the AD input, we're home. Except you won't, it will be inside the chip.
The portable devices can't connect. The PC can. So if you want to upload any songs, you plug it into the PC and it manages all the networking stuff, providing only a neat high-level tunnel to the remote host.
Sure there are electronic microscopes and if you can actually read -data- of the ROM with them (not just the physical structure of the memory device), you can crack DRM, just by recovering the secret key of your device. Then you could authenticate any arbitrary device with the keyserver using that key.
Code with backdoors won't be approved as DRM-compatibile. Most probably, since the code is all there, the backdoor may require some manufacturer secret key. Good luck obtaining it.
Today it's about even, thanks to the crossings and fences constructed by the Dept. of Wildlife Resources with money from hunters.
Less killed by cars, more left for shooting? Keeping -roads- safe being the business of dept. of Wildlife Resources? Sounds like a bad pun. Or at least there's a serious flaw in this way of thinking.
People simply won't donate the kind of money that they'll pay for hunting licenses, because they get more out of the latter.
"people" meaning You. The hunters. The "nature lovers". These who claim they do it all from love to the nature, to help maintain the population levels, to protects the farms... Who would count all the things they are obligated to do by law as their great contributions to The Nature. That's the base of the hipocrisy: You cover up your will for killing with different noble aims. But remove the ability to kill, and suddenly all the will for noble aims is gone.
No. You pay, because you want to kill. Bloodlust. You don't care if the money goes to preserving wildlife or to funding a villa for some politician. You don't care if the people living near the forests are safe or if the farms are damaged. You just care that there should always be enough game to hunt and enough good publicity (FUD) to still be able to kill. A rogue man-killing mountain lion is not your civil service for protecting people, but an exciting hunt.
And that directly influences the rest of the points. I'm not saying hunters aren't needed. I'm not saying culling is unnecessary. But I'm saying all the aims of the current-day hunting are directed at the above. All the noble things you talk about, just a cover-up for a bloody entertainment, which is the highest priority. "preserving the population" should mean keeping it on a self-sustainable level, which could go unattended for years, unless something like especially harsh winter happens. Not at levels that produce most game, and left unattended lead to disasters. Funding preservation of wildlife should be an act of good will, not an obligatory pay for license to kill. And what to say about all the cows and dogs with huge "COW" or "DOG" painted on them, so they wouldn't get shot by drunken hunters during the season? How does that contribute towards safety?
You are not defending noble vigilantes, good citizens who do this all from love for Nature. You are defending a bunch of rogues, a mob that has a lot to say about how much good they do, except they do something completely different. Confront all the "humanitarian killing" with hunter tales "how painfully the bastard was dying". The noble traditions with amount of alcohol they drink. All their contributions to the wildlife, with how much would they give without being able to kill - and how much they spend on guns and equipment.
...and then they said...
W3 AR TH3 M1CORZOVT D0G 0F B0RG! PR33P33R T00 B ASSIMILATED!
In the basement of the town hall. Be cautious, there is no stairs and the light is out.
1) Buran, not Braun.
2) You need very little to haul cargo into space, and most of it is so cheap that it simply doesn't pay to care about its safe return to Earth - let it burn in the atmosphere.
3) There's still one advantage a shuttle has over any other solutions - it's able to haul bigger things not designed for reentry back to earth. But one hardly ever needs that.
Actually with getting transport costs down enough, and some extra research, the orbit could be a great place for some ultra-precise manufacturing. Want a perfect sphere from your material? Just release it in freefal and let the viscosity forces hold it in that shape. Want cleanroom? Just open the airlock. Want superconductivity? Just shield the wall from the side of the Sun and you're in temperatures of supeconductivity. Stepper motors don't have to lift the weight of the robotic arms, you can concentrate on precision or load the extra power into speed. Storage? Whole cubic miles of free storage space, no weather problems. There's a whole range of problems with manufacturing that are present only Earth. The only serious problem with the space is transport. Sure, cars or such aren't what could be produced in space. But electronics? Chips? Medical devices? Optics? Just think of a perfect lens that could be achieved by spinning some molten glass at specific speed in freefall. And of course finally getting some reasonable superconductor-based processing power, where 0K is dirt-cheap.
1) Prevent explosion of the line upon disconnect.
2) 1/3 of the fuel is A LOT. Actually, 1/3 of the solid state fuel in the helper rockets. Not pumpable and even if it was, way too much to be pumped in such a short time.
3) They are disconnected really fast after, so that's not much of the problem anyway.
The suggested solution is much more radical: get the shuttle some 10 miles up by a jet plane and then launch it from there.
The evil genius behind some of DRM is that it's hardly crackable (except with some serious quality loss.) If it's in software, it probably will be crackable. If in hardware, much harder.
The idea is that you get all the data encrypted. You can copy, share, spread, mangle, edit it, whatever - it's useless like that anyway. When you want to play it on a DRM-based device, you must first connect to a key server. Your device identifies itself, a secure handshake is performed (man in the middle won't help much, public keys of the device and the server have been exchanged at the manufacture time), then receives the key to decrypt the song, so it can be played. Of course the key may include additional instructions like limit, so you can play it within next 10h and then it should be disabled, or you can play it once only (pay per view), or such, and the device must obey them (otherwise it wouldn't be DRM-approved). In software you should be able to intercept the key, then bundling it with the song, or releasing it decrypted you could keep copying it. For embedded devices it's much harder because you won't be able to authenticate as the keyserver or the device and the key is transferred by secure means. All you can do is to re-encode the analog output, i.e the video or audio that is being sent to screen/speakers. With obvious quality loss. Anyway, still, to obtain the key you must "purchase" it by some legal means, i.e. the DRM'd song contains unique ID with a flag "paid", then you get the key and the ID is removed from the "paid" list so when the key expires for some reason (i.e. pay per view), you need to pay again. Also, someone else with a copy of your song won't get the same key again without paying again...
How are iPods -any- part of the flash player market?
"Intel Pentium 4 have now 40% of the CPU market and 25% of the GPU market"?
1) Which WMA? They are quite incompatibile. 2) It means it won't work for at least half of us. 50% of the customers out in the cold. Compare that to IE-only websites...
The problem is, either it's DRM'd or "very few songs". The condition for obtaining permission for selling many of the songs (from RIAA) is that they are DRM'd.
But in the other hand, I wonder if they could go with a hybrid service - DRM only what has to be DRM'd, release the rest as "open". (even if that "only" was to mean 80% of their catalogue)