It occured to me that if anyone does something like this it may be more effective to go after the ISPs rather than the spammers. If ISPs realized that hosting spammers could cost them a lot of money they might be a little more selective about who's money they take. A massive DDoS stream of several gigabytes per second consisting of the string "just say no to spammers" might do the trick.
Still, I wouldn't like to be one of the innocent legitimate customers of the target ISP or one of those whose machines are hijacked to act as zombies for the attack.
The Fairey Rotodyne
on
Fanwing Planes?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Another aircraft that combined many of the advantages of helicopters and airplanes was the Fairey Rotodyne. It was an autogyro that converted temporarily to helicopter mode for vertical takeoff and landing.
This was back in the 1950s.
An autogyro generates lift using an unpowered rotor that rotates in the airstream. It is probably the safest type of aircraft because it can land by autorotation. Some helicopters can also do that but they are much more difficult to control. An autogyro can fly faster than a helicopter, though not as fast as an airplane. Autogyros are also more fuel-efficient than helicopters.
The big drawback of autogyros is that they can't take off and land vertically. They need a short runway.
The Rotodyne overcame this limitation by using small jets at the tips of the rotor blades that converted it to a helicopter for the duration of the takeoff and landing.
See this page if you want to know more about the history of the Rotodyne and why we don't have regular Rotodyne passenger flights between city hubs today.
You are still going to need a shield system, and it may be bigger if they are more energetic.
Not if you choose an isotope that radiates only alpha and/or beta. A very thin shield will be sufficient.
But the technology you refer to would be much more suitable for larger, high power systems.
Actually it works just fine for very small, low power applications. A variation on this technique (patented by Lucent) uses tritium-doped silicon to create a power source with a lifetime of decades that can be embedded right on the silicon chip. Digital watches are a potential application.
It is possible to convert the radioactive decay directly into electric energy without going through heat. Alpha and Beta particles are charged and they are released at relativistic speeds. This create a magnetic field that can be harnessed.
See U.S patent 4,835,433 "Apparatus for direct conversion of radioactive decay energy to electrical energy".
This technology has been demonstrated to be an order of magnitude more efficient that RTGs.
If you want to get to know more about the lesser known sides of Edgar Allan Poe go see Once Upon a Midnight. John Astin (yes, Gomez Adams from the old TV show) gives a fantastic solo performance as the tormented poet.
Possible in theory, but not in practice. The reconstruction filter is integrated into the DAC so it cannot be bypassed. And besides, if you are opening the player anyway why not just tap the digital interface between the DSP and DAC and connect an S/PDIF transmitter there? I won't be surprised if mod kits for doing this will start appearing on the internet pretty soon.
"Yes! you can now use your expensive external DAC with your new DVD-audio player!"
Next thing you know they're gonna put a crytographic handshake between the DSP and DAC...
In Vernor Vinge's sci-fi novel A fire upon the deep, he presents the idea of "software archeology". Vinge's future has software engineers spending large amounts of time digging through layers of decades-old code in a computer system - like layers of dirt and rubbish in real-world archeology - to find out how, or why, something works.
Actually, it's not decades old - it's millenia and even millions of years old and was maintained by multiple civilizations of sentient beings ("sophonts") that built layers upon layers of translation.
In Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky the control code for the slower-than-light spaceships of the Qeng-Ho space traders is "merely" thousands of years old and written by humans only.
The Qeng-Ho measure time in seconds (kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc). They say that the reference time is the landing of man on the moon but can't account for an error on the order of magnitude of 10 megaseconds. (it's actually 14 megaseconds - the time from the moon landing to the Unix epoch)
For propulsion purposes you would need an extremely powerful beam with megawatts of power. Phased array antennas still have pretty strong side lobes. Even if they are attenuated by as much as 40db it would still have enough energy to cook everything in their vicinity. The main lobe of a phased array antenna will still have divergence that will make it ineffective for distances in space.
Masers are coherent and therefore capable of creating an extremely narrow beam with virtually no side lobes. New technologies for masers bring their efficiency from the low single digits to around 50%.
Your chances of dying as a result of an asteroid hit are similar to your chances of dying from an earthquake or flood. And yet people have flood insurance but no asteroid hit insurance.
The reason for that is that floods and earthquares are local and therefore you can hear about them happining somewhere else and perceive them as a threat. When an asteroids hits Earth there will be no "somewhere else".
Re:The problems with Gnutella 1
on
Gnutella2?
·
· Score: 2
Not possible. The only way it could work is if the third party connection acted as a proxy for all of the data, because neither side can initiate the TCP transfer.
I've seen an article somewhere describing a system that exploits the little-known TCP feature of simultaneously opening a connection from both sides to allow two machines behind NATs to talk TCP to each other. It's very tricky and starting the connection requires the assistance of a third party that is capable of sending packets with spoofed IP addresses. After the connection is open, though, the two participants can talk directly without additional help.
There is also no such thing as reputation, money or birthdays.
If enough people believe that something is a fundamental right then it is. The poster was just trying to convince more people to believe in his version of fundamental rights which happens to include encryption. You are trying to convince more people to believe that they have no way to affect what our society considers to be fundamental rights and give up in despair.
Even the GPL does not require anyone to distribute their customized in-house modifications.
I do hope that some employees who are exposed to open source, its benefits and the values of the community behind it contribute to open source projects in some way.
Water logic and nuclear engineering
on
Water Computing
·
· Score: 2
I found an old book from the 50s about water logic on my father's bookshelf. He was an argriculture engineer that worked on advanced irrigation systems. I especially remember the flip-flops - they were actually simpler than the logic gates and consisted of a simple bifurcation of a water pipe. The water flow would tend to cling to one side or the other and could be flipped by a water pulse perpendicular to the flow.
In the 50s, nuclear engineering was in vogue. Water logic was perceived as the ideal solution for the control logic of nuclear power plants. Electronic components would fail too quickly because of the intense radiation.
If they just outright stopped linking to a given site, is that still their right?
Sure. And it's my right to switch to Teoma or another search engine. I find this scenario quite unlikely, though. True reputation is hard to build, easy to destroy.
Why is it that fake reputation created by continously bombarding people with your name in advertising seems nearly unaffected by the worst scandals?
Run the whole thing in an improvised glovebox filled with dry nitrogen gas at slightly higher than ambient pressure. Boiling liquid nitrogen results in large quantities of totally dry nitrogen gas.
Now the only problem remaining is how to avoid condensation on the glovebox itself so you can see what's going on inside:-)
I wonder what would be the effect of making all shareholders in a publicly traded company proportionally liable for actions done with their money even if they do not serve as an officer or director of the company. "I didn't know" or "I wasn't involved" will no longer be an excuse.
This will make all investments more expensive by the liability insurance premium. In order to ensure that new inventments will not be stifled investors could be given a tax break on the returns of their insured investments.
When I give my money to someone in return for a percentage of the venture I expect them to take certain calculated risks and I know that I may not get my money back. I am free to take this risk. What cannot be ignored, though, is that by encouraging someone to take risks I put not only my own money at risk. Thousands of lives may be affected by these risks. Why should I be able to walk away from a failure and just write it off as a lost investment?
I thought boards were supposed to be held in check by the stockholders. When boards act irresponsibly wouldn't the board members be sued for malpractice? Surely not all all stock is owned by the insiders themselves or small investors that can't afford a lawsuit - a big chunk is owned by large institutional investors that were supposed to know better.
Were the stockholders so blinded by the inflation of stock values that they didn't check whether the company is using their money to create value instead of lining the pockets of management?
Encryption at these speeds with custom hardware is not too expensive.
I don't think anyone is going to be broadcasting data on the 120GHz band, though. At these frequencies radio is strictly line-of-sight. Encryption and key management is relatively simple in a point-to-point application.
I don't understand why you equate doing what you want to do with hedonism. This is true only if you assume that people not capable of wanting anything except immediate pleasure. Are you *that* cynical about human nature?
At work I've got a 49000 line Microsoft Visual C++ project that compiles in 5.5 minutes on a 1700 MHz Pentium 4. That's right, about 150 lines per second.
Turbo Pascal used to compile at thousands of lines per second on machines with a clock nearly two orders of magnitude slower that tool several cycles per instruction instead of running several instructions per cycle.
Before you say something like "hey, but moderns compilers have optimizations yadda yadda" perhaps I should mention that this compilation time was with no optimizations and features like updating browser files disabled. With optimization it's even slower.
We're talking about four orders of magnitude difference in efficiency here. It's not all the compiler's fault, of course. The libraries and code use complex templates and multiple levels of definitions that make the compiler work much harder.
At each one of these layers someone probably said "It's OK if this is 10 times slower. It's easier to write and maintain, I'm more productive (or lazy) and the CPU is fast enough". Each one of these decisions may be justified *in itself* but they add up (or rather multiply up) to a 1/10000 difference in efficiency. Slowing the edit/compile/debug cycle reduces programmer productivity and code quality. Reduced code quality to more code bloat and even slower edit/compile/debug cycle and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
The kind of pilot that can't dead stick is a pilot partially incapacitated by some on-board accident, medical condition or just panic.
Passengers can also hit the emergency button if the pilot is totally incapacitated or even dead.
It occured to me that if anyone does something like this it may be more effective to go after the ISPs rather than the spammers. If ISPs realized that hosting spammers could cost them a lot of money they might be a little more selective about who's money they take. A massive DDoS stream of several gigabytes per second consisting of the string "just say no to spammers" might do the trick.
Still, I wouldn't like to be one of the innocent legitimate customers of the target ISP or one of those whose machines are hijacked to act as zombies for the attack.
Another aircraft that combined many of the advantages of helicopters and airplanes was the Fairey Rotodyne. It was an autogyro that converted temporarily to helicopter mode for vertical takeoff and landing.
This was back in the 1950s.
An autogyro generates lift using an unpowered rotor that rotates in the airstream. It is probably the safest type of aircraft because it can land by autorotation. Some helicopters can also do that but they are much more difficult to control. An autogyro can fly faster than a helicopter, though not as fast as an airplane. Autogyros are also more fuel-efficient than helicopters.
The big drawback of autogyros is that they can't take off and land vertically. They need a short runway.
The Rotodyne overcame this limitation by using small jets at the tips of the rotor blades that converted it to a helicopter for the duration of
the takeoff and landing.
See this page if you want to know more about the history of the Rotodyne and why we don't have regular Rotodyne passenger flights between city hubs today.
You are still going to need a shield system, and it may be bigger if they are more energetic.
Not if you choose an isotope that radiates only alpha and/or beta. A very thin shield will be sufficient.
But the technology you refer to would be much more suitable for larger, high power systems.
Actually it works just fine for very small, low power applications. A variation on this technique (patented by Lucent) uses tritium-doped silicon to create a power source with a lifetime of decades that can be embedded right on the silicon chip. Digital watches are a potential application.
It is possible to convert the radioactive decay directly into electric energy without going through heat. Alpha and Beta particles are charged and they are released at relativistic speeds. This create a magnetic field that can be harnessed.
See U.S patent 4,835,433 "Apparatus for direct conversion of radioactive decay energy to electrical energy".
This technology has been demonstrated to be an order of magnitude more efficient that RTGs.
People also use "iso", "rs" and "ansi" for "ISO 9660", "EIA RS-232", and "ANSI X3.64", respectively.
I guess that the name of the standards organization should be enough. No need for these pesky numbers.
Here
If you want to get to know more about the lesser known sides of Edgar Allan Poe go see Once Upon a Midnight. John Astin (yes, Gomez Adams from the old TV show) gives a fantastic solo performance as the tormented poet.
Possible in theory, but not in practice. The reconstruction filter is integrated into the DAC so it cannot be bypassed. And besides, if you are opening the player anyway why not just tap the digital interface between the DSP and DAC and connect an S/PDIF transmitter there? I won't be surprised if mod kits for doing this will start appearing on the internet pretty soon.
"Yes! you can now use your expensive external DAC with your new DVD-audio player!"
Next thing you know they're gonna put a crytographic handshake between the DSP and DAC...
In Vernor Vinge's sci-fi novel A fire upon the deep, he presents the idea of "software archeology". Vinge's future has software engineers spending large amounts of time digging through layers of decades-old code in a computer system - like layers of dirt and rubbish in real-world archeology - to find out how, or why, something works.
Actually, it's not decades old - it's millenia and even millions of years old and was maintained by multiple civilizations of sentient beings ("sophonts") that built layers upon layers of translation.
In Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky the control code for the slower-than-light spaceships of the Qeng-Ho space traders is "merely" thousands of years old and written by humans only.
The Qeng-Ho measure time in seconds (kiloseconds, megaseconds, etc). They say that the reference time is the landing of man on the moon but can't account for an error on the order of magnitude of 10 megaseconds. (it's actually 14 megaseconds - the time from the moon landing to the Unix epoch)
For propulsion purposes you would need an extremely powerful beam with megawatts of power. Phased array antennas still have pretty strong side lobes. Even if they are attenuated by as much as 40db it would still have enough energy to cook everything in their vicinity. The main lobe of a phased array antenna will still have divergence that will make it ineffective for distances in space.
Masers are coherent and therefore capable of creating an extremely narrow beam with virtually no side lobes. New technologies for masers bring their efficiency from the low single digits to around 50%.
Your chances of dying as a result of an asteroid hit are similar to your chances of dying from an earthquake or flood. And yet people have flood insurance but no asteroid hit insurance.
The reason for that is that floods and earthquares are local and therefore you can hear about them happining somewhere else and perceive them as a threat. When an asteroids hits Earth there will be no "somewhere else".
Not possible. The only way it could work is if the third party connection acted as a proxy for all of the data, because neither side can initiate the TCP transfer.
I've seen an article somewhere describing a system that exploits the little-known TCP feature of simultaneously opening a connection from both sides to allow two machines behind NATs to talk TCP to each other. It's very tricky and starting the connection requires the assistance of a third party that is capable of sending packets with spoofed IP addresses. After the connection is open, though, the two participants can talk directly without additional help.
It may not be practical, but it is possible.
Sure will, it will deter people from becoming your customers.
That would require (god forbid!) some actual *competition* in the broadband market.
There is also no such thing as reputation, money or birthdays.
If enough people believe that something is a fundamental right then it is. The poster was just trying to convince more people to believe in his version of fundamental rights which happens to include encryption. You are trying to convince more people to believe that they have no way to affect what our society considers to be fundamental rights and give up in despair.
Good luck to both of you.
Even the GPL does not require anyone to distribute their customized in-house modifications.
I do hope that some employees who are exposed to open source, its benefits and the values of the community behind it contribute to open source projects in some way.
I found an old book from the 50s about water logic on my father's bookshelf. He was an argriculture engineer that worked on advanced irrigation systems. I especially remember the flip-flops - they were actually simpler than the logic gates and consisted of a simple bifurcation of a water pipe. The water flow would tend to cling to one side or the other and could be flipped by a water pulse perpendicular to the flow.
In the 50s, nuclear engineering was in vogue. Water logic was perceived as the ideal solution for the control logic of nuclear power plants. Electronic components would fail too quickly because of the intense radiation.
The founder's presence is not a guarantee at all for the flourishing of a company
But if a company being run by the founder is flourishing it would probably be a bad idea to hire "professional" management to replace the founder.
If they just outright stopped linking to a given site, is that still their right?
Sure. And it's my right to switch to Teoma or another search engine. I find this scenario quite unlikely, though. True reputation is hard to build, easy to destroy.
Why is it that fake reputation created by continously bombarding people with your name in advertising seems nearly unaffected by the worst scandals?
Run the whole thing in an improvised glovebox filled with dry nitrogen gas at slightly higher than ambient pressure. Boiling liquid nitrogen results in large quantities of totally dry nitrogen gas.
:-)
Now the only problem remaining is how to avoid condensation on the glovebox itself so you can see what's going on inside
I wonder what would be the effect of making all shareholders in a publicly traded company proportionally liable for actions done with their money even if they do not serve as an officer or director of the company. "I didn't know" or "I wasn't involved" will no longer be an excuse.
This will make all investments more expensive by the liability insurance premium. In order to ensure that new inventments will not be stifled investors could be given a tax break on the returns of their insured investments.
When I give my money to someone in return for a percentage of the venture I expect them to take certain calculated risks and I know that I may not get my money back. I am free to take this risk. What cannot be ignored, though, is that by encouraging someone to take risks I put not only my own money at risk. Thousands of lives may be affected by these risks. Why should I be able to walk away from a failure and just write it off as a lost investment?
I thought boards were supposed to be held in check by the stockholders. When boards act irresponsibly wouldn't the board members be sued for malpractice? Surely not all all stock is owned by the insiders themselves or small investors that can't afford a lawsuit - a big chunk is owned by large institutional investors that were supposed to know better.
Were the stockholders so blinded by the inflation of stock values that they didn't check whether the company is using their money to create value instead of lining the pockets of management?
I guess I've answered by own question.
Encryption at these speeds with custom hardware is not too expensive.
I don't think anyone is going to be broadcasting data on the 120GHz band, though. At these frequencies radio is strictly line-of-sight. Encryption and key management is relatively simple in a point-to-point application.
I don't understand why you equate doing what you want to do with hedonism. This is true only if you assume that people not capable of wanting anything except immediate pleasure. Are you *that* cynical about human nature?
At work I've got a 49000 line Microsoft Visual C++ project that compiles in 5.5 minutes on a 1700 MHz Pentium 4. That's right, about 150 lines per second.
Turbo Pascal used to compile at thousands of lines per second on machines with a clock nearly two orders of magnitude slower that tool several cycles per instruction instead of running several instructions per cycle.
Before you say something like "hey, but moderns compilers have optimizations yadda yadda" perhaps I should mention that this compilation time was with no optimizations and features like updating browser files disabled. With optimization it's even slower.
We're talking about four orders of magnitude difference in efficiency here. It's not all the compiler's fault, of course. The libraries and code use complex templates and multiple levels of definitions that make the compiler work much harder.
At each one of these layers someone probably said "It's OK if this is 10 times slower. It's easier to write and maintain, I'm more productive (or lazy) and the CPU is fast enough". Each one of these decisions may be justified *in itself* but they add up (or rather multiply up) to a 1/10000 difference in efficiency. Slowing the edit/compile/debug cycle reduces programmer productivity and code quality. Reduced code quality to more code bloat and even slower edit/compile/debug cycle and so on.
Damn, it's depressing.