The Voyager probes were sent out with a gold disc which contains, amongst other things, greetings from Kurt Waldheim (former Secretary-General of the UN) amongst ones in a bunch of languages, the "sounds of Earth", including Beethoven and Chuck Berry, the sound of waves against the shore, and various other things, and a bunch of images of Earth life, as well as some instructions as to how to play the disc. It was Carl Sagan's project, IIRC.
Of course, the odds of the probes ever being detected by extra-terrestrial intelligence is virtually zero, given their slow speed, tiny size, and the fact that they don't emit any signals (or more precisely won't by the time ET is in a position to spot them).
If you're careful and not doing anything too low-level and hacky, it's almost a recompile. The two things that got us when porting are, the sizeof(pointer) != sizeof(int) issue, and library issues. Endianness can also bite you.
When GnuCash was ported to Alpha, IIRC, the porters ran into issues where C pointers where converted into guile and back again. It wasn't that hard to fix, though.
"Touring Cars" used to be modified street cars, but these days the major touring car championship rules ensure the cars diverge from street cars almost as much as NASCARs do - at least in the major touring car series like V8 Supercars in Australia and DTM in Germany.
If you want to see cars which bear some resemblance to production race, it's either a production car category like Porsche Cup, or group N rally (the World Rally cars are very heavily modified).
My favourite racing categories are actually motocross bikes or dirt speedway racing, which in terms of spectator entertainment crap all over the open-wheel categories, NASCAR, Touring Cars, and even rallies (you don't get to see enough of the course in a rally, sadly). The other nice thing about supercross is that you can actually buy the bikes the pros use (well, not quite, but very, very close).
Wood heating certainly make sense in the colder parts of rural Australia.
When you've got a decent-size property with eucalypts on it, a fair number of of large branches and entire trees end up on the ground, and chopping them up and turning them into firewood is pretty much a no-brainer. On our property, we plant far more trees than are being removed, by the way (as it was overcleared in the past).
I agree entirely that it's not a mainstream solution, but it has its place in less densely-populated areas.
How much do you have to spend to get equipment where the sound quality actually makes a difference? If you need to spend $2000 on amps and speakers to be able to pick the difference, not that many people will ever be able to tell.
CDs and DVD-video offered an immediately obvious improvement of sound quality on the equipment people either already had or could easily afford. If SACD can't do that, it's not going to take off quickly.
This is enabling a market to work fairly (or some slightly closer approximation to fairly) by bitchslapping a 400-kilogram gorilla. This isn't imposing regulation on a working market.
When it comes to using a monopoly position to screw competitors out of the market, Telstra makes Microsoft look like an amateur. About the only difference is that rather than Microsoft buying politicians, the government owns 51% of Telstra.
And like Microsoft, the only way it's ever going to improve is if somebody takes a hacksaw to Telstra. They should seperate the retail business into a seperate entity, which pays the network provider just like all the other telcos.
Labor actually suggested this on the quiet (after they got themselves into a horrible mess over telecommunications policy) but I doubt they'll ever actually implement it.
It does mean that politicians are less able to skew their policies towards those more likely to vote, which is a good thing IMHO.
As to pork barrelling, that still occurs, but pork is aimed differently to that in the US. Our arliamentary system, particularly when you throw in proportional representation in the Senate and IRV in the lower house, are quite different to the US's presidential system, and trying to explain the different dynamics to people who've never had exposure to it is kind of complex.
Where's the innovation? It may be an impressive example of what existing car technologies are capable of, but what's new about it?
In any case, if you want acceleration thrills, may I suggest a decent Japanese motorcycle, which will accelerate just as quickly (up to 100 mph or so) and will feel a lot scarier doing so...and keep the other million dollars or so in your pocket:)
Sure, acting is a skill, but that doesn't mean everyone with that skill makes a career out of it. There's lots of people out there that could do a servicable job at a project like this who aren't professional actors, and have a lot of fun doing it. I know I had fun doing a couple of student plays, and while I don't kid myself I'm the next De Niro, everyone laughed in the right places.
I'm surprised Dubya isn't calling for the preemptive destruction of all NEAs because they might pose a threat somewhere beyond the range at which we can accurately predict orbits. Might be more useful than his current bee in a bonnet...
Water vapour stays frozen out of the atmosphere until you reach, well, 0 Celsius (or 273 Kelvin for the physicists). Carbon dioxide sublimes at -78. It's going to require much more heating to release water vapour than carbon dioxide.
However, IIRC much of the carbon dioxide on Mars is probably in the regolith rather than on the polar cap. It's just a lot harder to get to. It still might be possible to terraform Mars, but the job seems to be harder than first thought.
If you wanted to eliminate NAT, the ISP would have to provide an IPv6 address for every network interface in your house, and I'm going to assume they would tack on some sort of surcharge for each additional address.
Why would they have to? They could hand everybody on their network 16 (or 24) bits of subnet and still have untold billions of addresses left over.
You need to get your head around that with IPv6 there will never again be a shortage of IP addresses (with the assumption that mere stupidity rather than insanity prevails in handing them out). 128 bits is rather a lot:)
I'm no expert on parallel algorithms, but as I understand it, faster processors aren't going to make it any easier to parallelize problems. In fact, it may even reduce the gains from doing so as the communication overhead becomes a greater and greater part of the cost of the computation on your parallel machine.
But in my opinion the strengths of the film were entirely in the source material and had little to do with the screen adaptation.
Catherine Zeta-Jones, to give her credit, is sensational as Velma, and Renee Zellweger is passable as Roxie. Richard Gere is awful as the smarmy lawyer. Even Protools can't fix his singing, and he can't dance (why oh why didn't they cast Hugh Jackman, who aside from being a good actor is a fine singer and dancer). The support cast were fine (particularly Queen Latifah).
The visuals, however, were pretty unimaginative. What really killed it for me, however, was the director' propensity to stick dialogue straight over the top of the songs! He's working with one of the best musical scores in decades and he feels the need to layer inane dialogue over the friggin' top?
Do yourself a favour and go see the stage version instead.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but there seems to be a misinterpretation. My *personal* opinion is that The Two Towersisn't that great (aside from Gollum, who was an extremely impressive creation), and Chicago was quite good (though hardly Oscar-worthy). However, that is irrelevant to the main thrust of my post. The results don't have a great deal to do with the merits or otherwise of the movies, and a great deal to do with what Harvey Weinstein (the boss at Miramax) and a few other studio heavies want.
There was a article at Salon which discusses exactly why the Oscars are an absolute joke. The voters are subjected to massive marketing campaigns. They don't even have to have watched the films, for fsck's sake! They're also known to be extremely conservative in their tastes.
So don't get too offended when Spirited Away loses to Lilo & Sitch, and The Two Towers gets beaten by Chicago.
The general interpretation in the C language world is that you that if it's a library that gets compiled into the program (whether or not you use dynamic linking), that makes it the program a derivative work and thus you must distribute the program under the terms of the GPL.
By analogy, I would think that using a GPL'd JAR file would be treated similarly.
IANAL, nor do I play one on TV. Nor has anything GPL-related been really tested in court yet, so even If I Was A Lawyer, who knows what the courts might decide to do.
Lots of people here have posted a comment along the lines of "what a stupid design it must be if losing the box renders the system insecure". That is correct so far as it goes, but misses all the *other* information one could gain by obtaining this box intact.
Let's assume it's a crypto box for a start, and further assume it's a symmetric cypher. Now, if it turns out the algorithm and keylength is similar to what's out there in the open world, that would suggest that such a cypher is currently unbreakable. That wouldn't be assured, as it's possible that NSA might be able to break it but they are confident the rest of the world can't, but Occam's Razor would suggest that it was indeed secure against the best efforts of the world's military cryptographers.
Now, if it turns out that they are using a significantly different algorithm to the open world, the question arises, "Why?" Are they just particularly paranoid, or do they know something that renders current algorithms vulnerable to cryptanalysis? What extra tricks does the algorithm use? What do those tricks prevent?
So the feds have *plenty* of incentive to find this little toy before the Russkies or the Chinese get their hands on it.
This is near-impossible, technically. By the time the traffic flows through the "core routers", it's just a bunch of IP packets which the system doesn't even try to interpret at a higher level. Reconstructing the messages, running spamassassin on them, and selectively blocking them would put an insane CPU load on the routers. They would effectively be acting as mail relays, not routers.
There are also philosophical problems with such a scheme which others can explain...
Election
was a much better movie than it was a book, IMHO. The simplified ending is much more delicious, and Tammy Metzler's campaign speech has much more impact when delivered than when read.
If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favour and rent the DVD and spot the parallels with the 2000 election (though they're coincidental, the movie was made in 1999).
Apparently, stuff that goes up has a good chance of being dumped into people's backyards, and that should concern you.
Uranium just isn't that dangerous. Plutonium is nasty, sure. So are some of the isotopes formed by fission reactions. So use uranium for your nuclear reactor, encase it in enough shielding to survive a failed launch (which is quite possible,), and leave the reactor out in deep space rather than bringing it home.
As for what the US military can do with nuclear power in space, the US military has B-2 bombers with guided bombs, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers which carry enough strike power to take down the air force of any other nation, and hundreds of ICBMs at its disposal. Compared to that a nuclear reactor in space is chicken feed.
Sure, but for the cost of sending you, we could send hundreds of unmanned probes. Each of them may take days to accomplish what you can accomplish in minutes, but what does it matter? Mars isn't going anywhere.
Ah. I'd make a further point. Aside from the productivity gains, which I argue are so huge that it might well justify the cost of a manned missions, there are things that a human expedition can do that robots simply can't, no matter how many probes you send.
Furthermore, while running around Mars, you would thoroughly contaminate it.
A well-designed human mission shouldn't pose much of a contamination threat. The lander and all the gear would be sterilized before the mission left Earth, just like an unmanned mission. Of course, the crew would take along bacteria, viruses and whatnot, so that's not a complete fix.
However, it wouldn't be hard to sterilise the crew's excretions. For instance, a simple technique would be to simply heat up any waste to a few hundred degrees for a few minutes before dumping it. Heck, let's go further and heat it to 1500 degrees if you want to be absolutely sure.
In any case, Mars' surface environment is likely to do a pretty good job of killing any microbes the crew bring with them. The ones that inhabit our bodies aren't extremophiles, and even extremophiles would struggled with martian surface conditions, with the very low temperatures, bugger-all atmosphere, lack of liquid water, and unshielded UV.
Just out of curiosity, but if we send people to Mars, how in the hell are they supposed to get back?
If you send a big enough booster, you could include enough fuel for the return trip. Unfortunately, that means you need to take an awful lot of fuel, which takes a really big rocket (or series of rockets) to get out of Earth orbit, The more big launches you need to make, the more it's going to cost.
Alternatively, you could make some propellant there. Either you send a nuclear reactor to Mars to turn carbon dioxide and hydrogen (the hydrogen is either brought with you, or if we know a bit more about water availability on Mars maybe we'll be able to extract it from the soil or something) into, say, methane and oxygen bipropellant. The reactor, processing plant, and so on are much lighter than the fuel, so this should be easier. This is Mars Direct, dreamed up (with a colleague) by Robert Zubrin, the guy behind the Mars Society.
If you've got a nuclear thermal rocket, you need a heap less propellant because you can force it out the back of the rocket much faster. Therefore, you can probably just take it with you, or you might use something from Mars for the return trip.
Finally, if you've got an Orion drive (powering the ship by exploding nuclear weapons behind it), a VASIMR engine, or something similarly exotic, your propellant is so efficient at moving the ship that carrying the fuel for the return trip is dead easy. In fact, you can burn extra fuel to get there much faster than a standard trip with a chemical or nuclear thermal rocket.
Slashdot Mirror
The Voyager probes were sent out with a gold disc which contains, amongst other things, greetings from Kurt Waldheim (former Secretary-General of the UN) amongst ones in a bunch of languages, the "sounds of Earth", including Beethoven and Chuck Berry, the sound of waves against the shore, and various other things, and a bunch of images of Earth life, as well as some instructions as to how to play the disc. It was Carl Sagan's project, IIRC.
Of course, the odds of the probes ever being detected by extra-terrestrial intelligence is virtually zero, given their slow speed, tiny size, and the fact that they don't emit any signals (or more precisely won't by the time ET is in a position to spot them).
When GnuCash was ported to Alpha, IIRC, the porters ran into issues where C pointers where converted into guile and back again. It wasn't that hard to fix, though.
If you want to see cars which bear some resemblance to production race, it's either a production car category like Porsche Cup, or group N rally (the World Rally cars are very heavily modified).
My favourite racing categories are actually motocross bikes or dirt speedway racing, which in terms of spectator entertainment crap all over the open-wheel categories, NASCAR, Touring Cars, and even rallies (you don't get to see enough of the course in a rally, sadly). The other nice thing about supercross is that you can actually buy the bikes the pros use (well, not quite, but very, very close).
When you've got a decent-size property with eucalypts on it, a fair number of of large branches and entire trees end up on the ground, and chopping them up and turning them into firewood is pretty much a no-brainer. On our property, we plant far more trees than are being removed, by the way (as it was overcleared in the past).
I agree entirely that it's not a mainstream solution, but it has its place in less densely-populated areas.
CDs and DVD-video offered an immediately obvious improvement of sound quality on the equipment people either already had or could easily afford. If SACD can't do that, it's not going to take off quickly.
When it comes to using a monopoly position to screw competitors out of the market, Telstra makes Microsoft look like an amateur. About the only difference is that rather than Microsoft buying politicians, the government owns 51% of Telstra.
And like Microsoft, the only way it's ever going to improve is if somebody takes a hacksaw to Telstra. They should seperate the retail business into a seperate entity, which pays the network provider just like all the other telcos.
Labor actually suggested this on the quiet (after they got themselves into a horrible mess over telecommunications policy) but I doubt they'll ever actually implement it.
As to pork barrelling, that still occurs, but pork is aimed differently to that in the US. Our arliamentary system, particularly when you throw in proportional representation in the Senate and IRV in the lower house, are quite different to the US's presidential system, and trying to explain the different dynamics to people who've never had exposure to it is kind of complex.
In any case, if you want acceleration thrills, may I suggest a decent Japanese motorcycle, which will accelerate just as quickly (up to 100 mph or so) and will feel a lot scarier doing so...and keep the other million dollars or so in your pocket :)
Sure, acting is a skill, but that doesn't mean everyone with that skill makes a career out of it. There's lots of people out there that could do a servicable job at a project like this who aren't professional actors, and have a lot of fun doing it. I know I had fun doing a couple of student plays, and while I don't kid myself I'm the next De Niro, everyone laughed in the right places.
As a resident of Melbourne, hey couldn't be worse than Sydney cops ;)
I'm surprised Dubya isn't calling for the preemptive destruction of all NEAs because they might pose a threat somewhere beyond the range at which we can accurately predict orbits. Might be more useful than his current bee in a bonnet...
I killed all the elephants in my house today :)
However, IIRC much of the carbon dioxide on Mars is probably in the regolith rather than on the polar cap. It's just a lot harder to get to. It still might be possible to terraform Mars, but the job seems to be harder than first thought.
Why would they have to? They could hand everybody on their network 16 (or 24) bits of subnet and still have untold billions of addresses left over.
You need to get your head around that with IPv6 there will never again be a shortage of IP addresses (with the assumption that mere stupidity rather than insanity prevails in handing them out). 128 bits is rather a lot :)
I'm no expert on parallel algorithms, but as I understand it, faster processors aren't going to make it any easier to parallelize problems. In fact, it may even reduce the gains from doing so as the communication overhead becomes a greater and greater part of the cost of the computation on your parallel machine.
Catherine Zeta-Jones, to give her credit, is sensational as Velma, and Renee Zellweger is passable as Roxie. Richard Gere is awful as the smarmy lawyer. Even Protools can't fix his singing, and he can't dance (why oh why didn't they cast Hugh Jackman, who aside from being a good actor is a fine singer and dancer). The support cast were fine (particularly Queen Latifah).
The visuals, however, were pretty unimaginative. What really killed it for me, however, was the director' propensity to stick dialogue straight over the top of the songs! He's working with one of the best musical scores in decades and he feels the need to layer inane dialogue over the friggin' top?
Do yourself a favour and go see the stage version instead.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but there seems to be a misinterpretation. My *personal* opinion is that The Two Towersisn't that great (aside from Gollum, who was an extremely impressive creation), and Chicago was quite good (though hardly Oscar-worthy). However, that is irrelevant to the main thrust of my post. The results don't have a great deal to do with the merits or otherwise of the movies, and a great deal to do with what Harvey Weinstein (the boss at Miramax) and a few other studio heavies want.
So don't get too offended when Spirited Away loses to Lilo & Sitch, and The Two Towers gets beaten by Chicago.
For a OTP to be secure, it has to be random. The contents of cnn.com aren't random.
By analogy, I would think that using a GPL'd JAR file would be treated similarly.
IANAL, nor do I play one on TV. Nor has anything GPL-related been really tested in court yet, so even If I Was A Lawyer, who knows what the courts might decide to do.
Let's assume it's a crypto box for a start, and further assume it's a symmetric cypher. Now, if it turns out the algorithm and keylength is similar to what's out there in the open world, that would suggest that such a cypher is currently unbreakable. That wouldn't be assured, as it's possible that NSA might be able to break it but they are confident the rest of the world can't, but Occam's Razor would suggest that it was indeed secure against the best efforts of the world's military cryptographers.
Now, if it turns out that they are using a significantly different algorithm to the open world, the question arises, "Why?" Are they just particularly paranoid, or do they know something that renders current algorithms vulnerable to cryptanalysis? What extra tricks does the algorithm use? What do those tricks prevent?
So the feds have *plenty* of incentive to find this little toy before the Russkies or the Chinese get their hands on it.
There are also philosophical problems with such a scheme which others can explain...
If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favour and rent the DVD and spot the parallels with the 2000 election (though they're coincidental, the movie was made in 1999).
Uranium just isn't that dangerous. Plutonium is nasty, sure. So are some of the isotopes formed by fission reactions. So use uranium for your nuclear reactor, encase it in enough shielding to survive a failed launch (which is quite possible,), and leave the reactor out in deep space rather than bringing it home.
As for what the US military can do with nuclear power in space, the US military has B-2 bombers with guided bombs, cruise missiles, aircraft carriers which carry enough strike power to take down the air force of any other nation, and hundreds of ICBMs at its disposal. Compared to that a nuclear reactor in space is chicken feed.
Ah. I'd make a further point. Aside from the productivity gains, which I argue are so huge that it might well justify the cost of a manned missions, there are things that a human expedition can do that robots simply can't, no matter how many probes you send.
A well-designed human mission shouldn't pose much of a contamination threat. The lander and all the gear would be sterilized before the mission left Earth, just like an unmanned mission. Of course, the crew would take along bacteria, viruses and whatnot, so that's not a complete fix. However, it wouldn't be hard to sterilise the crew's excretions. For instance, a simple technique would be to simply heat up any waste to a few hundred degrees for a few minutes before dumping it. Heck, let's go further and heat it to 1500 degrees if you want to be absolutely sure. In any case, Mars' surface environment is likely to do a pretty good job of killing any microbes the crew bring with them. The ones that inhabit our bodies aren't extremophiles, and even extremophiles would struggled with martian surface conditions, with the very low temperatures, bugger-all atmosphere, lack of liquid water, and unshielded UV.