thats true... but this will only serve to push more people into using encryption and more websites into automatically setting up and sending session key encrypted data to any browser that requests it.
secondly, this legislation has no effect on users that would simply hop on one of the many available open wifi hotspots. all this will serve to do is to make things more difficult for law abiding citizens while exposing them to all sorts of privacy invasions at the same time...
100 pounds capacity is enough to shuttle supplies to ground troops in forward areas, or to take a surveilance camera into an occupied building, or down a street that is under fire, or even to quickly clear a path through a minefield.
The conflicts today and in the near future are not going to involve large scale movements; they will likely be in civilian areas and involve activities that are more akin to policing and patrol. M1A1 tanks and even Striker APC's will simply be too large to move around in the types of urban settings where are troops are likely to be needed.
These sorts of conflicts will require lots of ground troops to go in on foot and patrol in areas where they may not be able to tell enemy combatants from civilians and in these cases, a mobile robotic platform will be invaluable. Just imagine troops moving into an unsecured area. They will send in a few dozen segbots that will move ahead into position, see around corners and down alleys and even remotly fire tear gas. If a sniper fires a single shot, the units will automatically and instantly triangulate the position of the shooter and report it back so that the troops can quickly respond. If troops come under heavy fire, the units can be sent right to the enemy as a sort of ground strike force to quickly respond with any choice of weapons.
By using the segway platform as a base, the developers now have the entire mobility issue taken care from the start and instead can focus on the (more difficult) task of developing a robust navigation system. the segway is proven to be reliable so that is one less aspect to worry about on what is obviously a very complex project.
the total bandwidth for the xm spectrum is 4.8 MB/s.
given that, the average bitrate per channel is 48kb/s. of course, talk and news channels will be given less bandwidth and music channels given more. xm HAS been experimenting with different codecs/bitrates and has the capability to change them on the fly.
perhaps the reduction in quality that you are hearing is simply a channel that has had its bitrate lowered so that another could be raised.
actually, that is not true: both xm radio and sirius use additional terrestrial repeaters to solve the problem of signal loss inside buildings: xm has several hundred repeater nationwide while sirius has significantly less; this is primarily due to the fact that sirius uses an 3 sat elliptical constillation that allows receivers much more coverage due to the higher inclination of the sat in respect to the listner compared to xm's two geostationary sats.
either way, the terrestrial repeaters solve the problem with the exception of some signal loss when the antenna is deep inside a building where the 2330 mhz signals simply do not propogate well.
the new units will be very small; this is due to a new chipset that shrinks down the needed board size by about half of what was needed by the old one (which was produced by st-thompson and needed 3 chips beside the main processor). also the antenna has been minaturized to about the size of a small gps antenna; about 1" x 1" x 1/3". but the most important advance is that the new chipset and antenna uses drastically less power than the st chips and that was the main reason why we have not seen a portable until now.
The xm service is truly an exellent service when compared to what is out there, i.e. fm radio. while it is not cd quality, that was never the goal. xm's entire bandwidth for all 100 channels is 4.8 MB/s which means that each channel averages 48 kb/s. the fact that they can get music that sounds like a 96k mp3 with that bandwidth is pretty damn good. that not withstanding, the real reason to listen to xm (or sirius) is that you actually get some programming choice; with the fm dial being owned almost exclusively by clearchannel and playing the same crap over and over, you actully get a chance to listen to something that you might want to hear...
i have talked a few times with someone who worked in the TSCM business (surveillance countermeasures). these are the real guys, not the ones you see with the $99 bug detector. the standard range that they now perform sweeps in goes from DC-300 ghz. i was naturally very interested in what they would be looking for above 30ghz and while the person i talked to admitted that he never personally found anything up in those frequencies, it was well known in their community that such devices were known to exist though they would likely be the domain of only the top government agencies. at any rate the device that he described would look something like the size of a coin and be able to send data in the high ghz range using spread spectrum burst communications directly to an overhead LEO satellite; essentially the ability to bug someone from space using areas of the spectrum that most would never look at and even if they did would likely never actually "see' the transmission unless they were lucky enough to see it transmitting and then only if they were knowledgable enough to recognize the signal from the surrounding noise.
scary, huh...
it really depends on how many asic's are being used. true the design costs are very high but it still becomes economically more desirable to use the asic platform as long as the production run is high enough (100K units and up). the cost of a production run asic is so low compared to fpga that even with the design costs factored in, its the less expensive way to go.
that being said, it probably will not stay that way much longer; the 8 bit microcontroller market for years offered up the devices in flash for small runs or masked rom for large runs. Since the manufacturers naturally want the devices to be as inexpensive as poossible, they tend to migrate the flash devices to the smallest/newest fab technologies which brings the price down alot. We are now seeing flash devices being used for large production runs as well with the programming being handled right on the production line with the added benefits of things like chip serialization being easily handled which was difficult to do with a masked chip.
This has not happened yet with FPGA's; the main reason being that FPGA's have considerably larger gate counts but even so it wont be much longer until we see FPGA's being used in all but the most price-critical and the highest volume applications where a few thousand gates and/or a few cents make the difference. a good example of this is the xm radio chipset which has a very high gate count and yet needs to be offered up in a device that will retail at $49. an FPGA would simply cost too much and be too large ad the devices get smaller and cheaper.
The other reason why we have not seen more FPGA usage has to do with competition; the 8 bit market has a large number of players who are all offering up products that are in direct competition with eachother and that has naturally driven down the costs and at the same time offered up much in the way of innovation and new features. the FPGA market, while growing does not have quite the same number of players although that is changing as well. a few more years and most of the players will be producing FPGA products and thats when things will really start to get interesting.
its even better: ALL xm chipsets are rs-232 controllable; its just a matter of setting up an interface and then you're all set. also, the "xm direct" has just been released which is basically a receiver that is designed to be controlled via an adapter to any number of xm-ready vehicle radios. it will be very simple to come up with an adapter that turns the xm direct into a clone of the PCR.
exactly; if what we have to look forward to is an existance where we dont have to think, whats the point. incidently, why is it that whenever someone dreams up their "world of tomorrow" montage, they never talk about what happens when the power goes out... mine goes something like this:
" and of course, in 2014, rolling blackouts will be a part of everyday existance, and since all of the new wonder technologies do everything for us, life will grind to a halt, society will collapse and people will die since their "neural overlay implants" will stop working..."
the likely way that it will be encrypted depends on what trsnsport chip is going to be used in the dvd player: most dvd players (read 95%) use the 55xx chip made by ST thompson and that chip uses standard DES to decrypt the encrypted mpeg-2 stream.
their plan is likely to be to have each member dvd/player pair use a different 8 byte key so as to ensure that they stay paired. the only problem with this is that anyone who knows the ST chip (and there are quite a few in the hacker community that do) will have the firmware and eeprom dumped from the players in about an hour. and the key recovered not long after. once you have the key, the player is no longer needed to extract the mpeg data.
do this to 2 separate players and now you can extract the data from seperate dvd's and run the difference to remove the earmarking...
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thats true... but this will only serve to push more people into using encryption and more websites into automatically setting up and sending session key encrypted data to any browser that requests it. secondly, this legislation has no effect on users that would simply hop on one of the many available open wifi hotspots. all this will serve to do is to make things more difficult for law abiding citizens while exposing them to all sorts of privacy invasions at the same time...
no but two wrights made an airplane...
100 pounds capacity is enough to shuttle supplies to ground troops in forward areas, or to take a surveilance camera into an occupied building, or down a street that is under fire, or even to quickly clear a path through a minefield.
The conflicts today and in the near future are not going to involve large scale movements; they will likely be in civilian areas and involve activities that are more akin to policing and patrol. M1A1 tanks and even Striker APC's will simply be too large to move around in the types of urban settings where are troops are likely to be needed.
These sorts of conflicts will require lots of ground troops to go in on foot and patrol in areas where they may not be able to tell enemy combatants from civilians and in these cases, a mobile robotic platform will be invaluable. Just imagine troops moving into an unsecured area. They will send in a few dozen segbots that will move ahead into position, see around corners and down alleys and even remotly fire tear gas. If a sniper fires a single shot, the units will automatically and instantly triangulate the position of the shooter and report it back so that the troops can quickly respond. If troops come under heavy fire, the units can be sent right to the enemy as a sort of ground strike force to quickly respond with any choice of weapons.
By using the segway platform as a base, the developers now have the entire mobility issue taken care from the start and instead can focus on the (more difficult) task of developing a robust navigation system. the segway is proven to be reliable so that is one less aspect to worry about on what is obviously a very complex project.
the total bandwidth for the xm spectrum is 4.8 MB/s.
given that, the average bitrate per channel is 48kb/s. of course, talk and news channels will be given less bandwidth and music channels given more. xm HAS been experimenting with different codecs/bitrates and has the capability to change them on the fly.
perhaps the reduction in quality that you are hearing is simply a channel that has had its bitrate lowered so that another could be raised.
actually, that is not true: both xm radio and sirius use additional terrestrial repeaters to solve the problem of signal loss inside buildings: xm has several hundred repeater nationwide while sirius has significantly less; this is primarily due to the fact that sirius uses an 3 sat elliptical constillation that allows receivers much more coverage due to the higher inclination of the sat in respect to the listner compared to xm's two geostationary sats. either way, the terrestrial repeaters solve the problem with the exception of some signal loss when the antenna is deep inside a building where the 2330 mhz signals simply do not propogate well. the new units will be very small; this is due to a new chipset that shrinks down the needed board size by about half of what was needed by the old one (which was produced by st-thompson and needed 3 chips beside the main processor). also the antenna has been minaturized to about the size of a small gps antenna; about 1" x 1" x 1/3". but the most important advance is that the new chipset and antenna uses drastically less power than the st chips and that was the main reason why we have not seen a portable until now. The xm service is truly an exellent service when compared to what is out there, i.e. fm radio. while it is not cd quality, that was never the goal. xm's entire bandwidth for all 100 channels is 4.8 MB/s which means that each channel averages 48 kb/s. the fact that they can get music that sounds like a 96k mp3 with that bandwidth is pretty damn good. that not withstanding, the real reason to listen to xm (or sirius) is that you actually get some programming choice; with the fm dial being owned almost exclusively by clearchannel and playing the same crap over and over, you actully get a chance to listen to something that you might want to hear...
i have talked a few times with someone who worked in the TSCM business (surveillance countermeasures). these are the real guys, not the ones you see with the $99 bug detector. the standard range that they now perform sweeps in goes from DC-300 ghz. i was naturally very interested in what they would be looking for above 30ghz and while the person i talked to admitted that he never personally found anything up in those frequencies, it was well known in their community that such devices were known to exist though they would likely be the domain of only the top government agencies. at any rate the device that he described would look something like the size of a coin and be able to send data in the high ghz range using spread spectrum burst communications directly to an overhead LEO satellite; essentially the ability to bug someone from space using areas of the spectrum that most would never look at and even if they did would likely never actually "see' the transmission unless they were lucky enough to see it transmitting and then only if they were knowledgable enough to recognize the signal from the surrounding noise. scary, huh...
it really depends on how many asic's are being used. true the design costs are very high but it still becomes economically more desirable to use the asic platform as long as the production run is high enough (100K units and up). the cost of a production run asic is so low compared to fpga that even with the design costs factored in, its the less expensive way to go. that being said, it probably will not stay that way much longer; the 8 bit microcontroller market for years offered up the devices in flash for small runs or masked rom for large runs. Since the manufacturers naturally want the devices to be as inexpensive as poossible, they tend to migrate the flash devices to the smallest/newest fab technologies which brings the price down alot. We are now seeing flash devices being used for large production runs as well with the programming being handled right on the production line with the added benefits of things like chip serialization being easily handled which was difficult to do with a masked chip. This has not happened yet with FPGA's; the main reason being that FPGA's have considerably larger gate counts but even so it wont be much longer until we see FPGA's being used in all but the most price-critical and the highest volume applications where a few thousand gates and/or a few cents make the difference. a good example of this is the xm radio chipset which has a very high gate count and yet needs to be offered up in a device that will retail at $49. an FPGA would simply cost too much and be too large ad the devices get smaller and cheaper. The other reason why we have not seen more FPGA usage has to do with competition; the 8 bit market has a large number of players who are all offering up products that are in direct competition with eachother and that has naturally driven down the costs and at the same time offered up much in the way of innovation and new features. the FPGA market, while growing does not have quite the same number of players although that is changing as well. a few more years and most of the players will be producing FPGA products and thats when things will really start to get interesting.
its even better: ALL xm chipsets are rs-232 controllable; its just a matter of setting up an interface and then you're all set. also, the "xm direct" has just been released which is basically a receiver that is designed to be controlled via an adapter to any number of xm-ready vehicle radios. it will be very simple to come up with an adapter that turns the xm direct into a clone of the PCR.
exactly; if what we have to look forward to is an existance where we dont have to think, whats the point. incidently, why is it that whenever someone dreams up their "world of tomorrow" montage, they never talk about what happens when the power goes out... mine goes something like this: " and of course, in 2014, rolling blackouts will be a part of everyday existance, and since all of the new wonder technologies do everything for us, life will grind to a halt, society will collapse and people will die since their "neural overlay implants" will stop working..."
the likely way that it will be encrypted depends on what trsnsport chip is going to be used in the dvd player: most dvd players (read 95%) use the 55xx chip made by ST thompson and that chip uses standard DES to decrypt the encrypted mpeg-2 stream. their plan is likely to be to have each member dvd/player pair use a different 8 byte key so as to ensure that they stay paired. the only problem with this is that anyone who knows the ST chip (and there are quite a few in the hacker community that do) will have the firmware and eeprom dumped from the players in about an hour. and the key recovered not long after. once you have the key, the player is no longer needed to extract the mpeg data. do this to 2 separate players and now you can extract the data from seperate dvd's and run the difference to remove the earmarking...