If you believe that temperature varies spontaneously, maybe you also believe that the atmosphere also cycles naturally between Oxygen/Nitrogen and Ammonia/Methane, that meteor impacts are as frequent now as they were a billion years ago, etc., etc.
Nope, warming/cooling cycles don't happen spontaneously, they have causes behind them. Mostly it's things which change the chemistry of the atmosphere.
In the past it may have been a new species of plant which grew on a massive scale and sucked all the CO2 out of the air, stuff like that.
"...look at 100 or 200 years of monitored weather"
Thing is... we're not looking at "200 years".
We can look at the exact composition of the atmosphere over millions of years by sampling antarctic ice.
We can very accurately calculate average temperatures going back tens of thousands of years by looking at tree rings.
We can make pretty good guesses at average temperatures going back much further by looking at pretty much anything which deposits layers of organic material.
We can judge average sea temperatures by looking at calcium deposits, etc., etc.
IOW, the real scientists are doing real science. That guy with the website? He isn't.
Back in the '70s they didn't have hundreds of weather satellites accurately monitoring average temperatures at a global level. Mostly all they had were mercury thermometers in built-up areas (because they had to be read daily by real people).
They also didn't have the ability to analyze any great quantity of data, as all data had to be entered by hand into the computers of that era.
Without good data, and the ability to visualize it, it's not surprising their predictions weren't very accurate.
Let me ask you this: When you grew up the weather forecasts were the butt of many a joke, right? I've got TV programs from the '70s where they joke about it and my parents tell me that they were mostly wrong.
Well, guess what? These days they're a lot more accurate...
I thing the point of this is to keep the rocket engines completely separate from the rover.
The rover doesn't need the weight of any engines when it's rolling around a planet. Maybe you could separate the engines from the rover once it's landed but that's probably more complex/risky than a winch and cable mechanism.
I tried one the other day, it even ran my 3D editor perfectly at speeds which would put one of those old SGI boxes to shame. It has VGA output for big-screen presentations and would have saved me a lot of shoulder ache from lugging a laptop around last month. I'm getting one as soon as I've got a few hundred bucks to spare.
The ONLY thing I can see that this thing has got going for it is the WIFI. With some custom applets it could do all sorts of cool things wirelessly.
The market for flying cars is vanishingly small. It makes a lot more sense to make special towns than to try and build a limited-production car which car which converts into a 'plane, along with all the compromises and complications that entails. It'll be a horrible 'plane and an even worse car.
CIA/Banks don't need public key cryptography (which is the only kind quantum computing could break, assuming they ever get it working).
If I was the CIA or a Swiss bank I'd be using 3DES - invented in the 70s and one of the most analyzed algorithms in all of history.
Like he says, the algorithm isn't the problem, it's the people who write choose crappy passwords. This is why the USA eventually dropped restrictions on crypto export - it's much easier to install a key logger or guess a password than to crack even a medium strength cipher.
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe that temperature varies spontaneously, maybe you also believe that the atmosphere also cycles naturally between Oxygen/Nitrogen and Ammonia/Methane, that meteor impacts are as frequent now as they were a billion years ago, etc., etc.
Nope, warming/cooling cycles don't happen spontaneously, they have causes behind them. Mostly it's things which change the chemistry of the atmosphere.
In the past it may have been a new species of plant which grew on a massive scale and sucked all the CO2 out of the air, stuff like that.
"...look at 100 or 200 years of monitored weather"
Thing is ... we're not looking at "200 years".
We can look at the exact composition of the atmosphere over millions of years by sampling antarctic ice.
We can very accurately calculate average temperatures going back tens of thousands of years by looking at tree rings.
We can make pretty good guesses at average temperatures going back much further by looking at pretty much anything which deposits layers of organic material.
We can judge average sea temperatures by looking at calcium deposits, etc., etc.
IOW, the real scientists are doing real science. That guy with the website? He isn't.
Back in the '70s they didn't have hundreds of weather satellites accurately monitoring average temperatures at a global level. Mostly all they had were mercury thermometers in built-up areas (because they had to be read daily by real people).
They also didn't have the ability to analyze any great quantity of data, as all data had to be entered by hand into the computers of that era.
Without good data, and the ability to visualize it, it's not surprising their predictions weren't very accurate.
Let me ask you this: When you grew up the weather forecasts were the butt of many a joke, right? I've got TV programs from the '70s where they joke about it and my parents tell me that they were mostly wrong.
Well, guess what? These days they're a lot more accurate...
Forests absorb C02 and absorb sunlight in order to do so.
RAID 5 will still be orders of magnitude more reliable than just having a single disk.
That thing looks mean! I'd pay 25k to be the only person in the office with one of those.
Big difference: The space shuttle is going 18,000mph when it starts re-entry.
Spaceship one isn't, so it can easily do things more gently.
I thing the point of this is to keep the rocket engines completely separate from the rover.
The rover doesn't need the weight of any engines when it's rolling around a planet. Maybe you could separate the engines from the rover once it's landed but that's probably more complex/risky than a winch and cable mechanism.
Is it more expensive than a high-end Windows machine? Not really.
Who buys those high-end Windows machines? Nobody with any sense.
Does Apple offer $500 laptops? Nope.
Ergo, Apple is expensive.
It doesn't feel pity or remorse, and it will absolutely will not stop, ever...until our disks are full.
I tried one the other day, it even ran my 3D editor perfectly at speeds which would put one of those old SGI boxes to shame. It has VGA output for big-screen presentations and would have saved me a lot of shoulder ache from lugging a laptop around last month. I'm getting one as soon as I've got a few hundred bucks to spare.
The ONLY thing I can see that this thing has got going for it is the WIFI. With some custom applets it could do all sorts of cool things wirelessly.
Then again, so could an Eee PC...
They could spend it on Lawyers and tell the RIAA to go screw itself.
It's "quarter VGA", ie. 320x200. It's pretty useless, no wonder they had to use acronym to disguise it.
RAM? Even worse - 64Mb.
It's nothing more than a geek toy - looks good, but it functionally useless. I'm not even sure it would make an interesting MP3 player.
The Eee PC 701 is being marked down in price now the 901 is out and it's a zillion times better.
I'm pretty sure my Model M is transmitting kilowatt-range signals but maybe the cast-iron chassis absorbs them...?
I can the sense of printing out all my avi files as flipbooks, but what about the sound?
Sounds like a winner to me!
A backup of my PC will only be about five million pages or so.
If the disk ever goes down then rescanning the pages will be a doddle.
Which platforms are available? XP and Vista?
Given the price of fuel needed to keep a machine in the air, I doubt anybody who can afford to fly to work every day will worry about airport fees.
Small towns with their own runway so you can land and taxi directly to your own garage? Apparently there's about 300 of them in the USA now.
eg. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DF123AF933A2575AC0A96F948260
The market for flying cars is vanishingly small. It makes a lot more sense to make special towns than to try and build a limited-production car which car which converts into a 'plane, along with all the compromises and complications that entails. It'll be a horrible 'plane and an even worse car.
Why is any TSA employee allowed to leave the baggage area with a laptop under his arm?
Search the employees on the way out, problem solved.
The original name for "DXTC" was .... "S3TC"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_compression
Bucky paper cleans like no other and leaves a starfish you could eat your dinner off.
Seriously, is there anything carbon nanotubes can't do?
http://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/autoexpressnews/202144/electric_elise_is_a_socket_rocket.html
Much cheaper (in a couple of years), better performance, better range.
Remember fighting those green spider things in the dark by throwing flares around and lighting up little areas?
Let's not confuse that with "suddenly make a loud noise in a quiet bit".
Even 3DES (or variations on it) is strong enough for all practical security problems.
AES was mainly developed because software DES is very inefficient, not because DES was broken*.
It's hard to see a practical benefit to developing new algorithms. Much better to devote the effort to analyzing the existing ones.
[*] Obviously plain 56-bit DES is quite weak these days but 3DES is still secure for the foreseeable future.
CIA/Banks don't need public key cryptography (which is the only kind quantum computing could break, assuming they ever get it working).
If I was the CIA or a Swiss bank I'd be using 3DES - invented in the 70s and one of the most analyzed algorithms in all of history.
Like he says, the algorithm isn't the problem, it's the people who write choose crappy passwords. This is why the USA eventually dropped restrictions on crypto export - it's much easier to install a key logger or guess a password than to crack even a medium strength cipher.