Basically, it means, that when the sun is shining on the solar cell, we can say that a certain amount of power, in watts, is hitting the solar cell. Say there is an available 100 Watts of total solar (light) power hitting the cell. If a solar cell is 10 percent efficient, then that means that cell would output 10 Watts of electrical power. If it's 50 percent efficient, it's outputting 50 Watts of power. So, if a solar cell were 100 percent efficient, and 100 watts of power were hitting it, it would generate 100 watts of electrical power.
Now, you can always increase the amountn of power your cells are 'exposed' to by increaasing the area/size of the solar cell, or by using multiple solar cells connected together, but both approaches increases costs. So, the reason people want more efficient solar cells is that, all else being equal, higher-efficiency == cheaper solar cells (well, cheaper per kiloWatt-hour; of course, all it not always equal - it doesn't do much good to get 2x efficiency at 2x costs).
So, the 'holy grail' of solar power is a technology that is both relatively cheap per square-meter, and a bit more efficient than current, comparitively priced, offerings.
"Nothing that's better has ever sold for less than 5% under the price of the competition."
That really depends. If something is only a little bit cheaper than the competition, then I agree with you. I also agree that would be true when they first start selling these (because there will likely be more demand than they can satisfy at first, anyhow).
"No company can afford to leave money on the table."
I *do* agree with this statement, which is why I don't necessarily agree with the prior thesis. In business, there is a concept of a price/demand curve. Think of it this way: Right now, not many people or companies are buying solar cells to put on the roofs of their houses/buildings. However, I guarantee, that there is some price, below which, every property owner in the world would buy a solar cell and put it on their property to offset the costs of buying electric power from the grid. I suppose that price point would be a function of the average unit cost of buying electricity.
Right now, solar cells are so expensive, they take something like 15 or 20 years to pay for themselves, so most property owners don't see a big incentive. Lower that price to 10 years or 8 years, or even lower, and suddenly the demand for these things will skyrocket.
Now, of course, that only is possible if someone does actually come up with an effective solar cell that they can mass produce for something like 1/2 the cost (or maybe less), than their competitors. The reason I say that is only possible is because, in order for the price/demand curve to come out favorably for the company, the increase in sales has to more than offset the loss of marginal profit.
That is to say, if I'm making X marginal profit selling Y units, then if I reduce the price such that my marginal profit becomes, for example, 1/2X, then I need to sell more than 2Y units to realize an increase in profits from decreasing price.
The thing is, the solar market hasn't even *begun* to be tapped yet. There's so much 'potential demand', but that potential demand will only become real demand if the prices on solar cells drop more. There is very much a financial incentive for someone to develop a solar cell that they can sell significantly cheaper than the current prices, because there is very low demand for solar cells (compared to what you might *potentially* be able to get, that is, considering that most of the world don't own solar cells yet), but the only reason the demand is low is because the costs are, truly, too high right now - for most people, there's not enough savings vs cost to justify the purchase.
I wonder if they could have mixed in something with the alcohol which would have made it extremely unpleasant tasting, or made people vomit or something, but wouldn't actually kill them? If that was an alternative, then I suppose that would have been a much more reasonable thing to do.
Still, I don't think it's fair to say the government poisoned people, when it was the people profitting off of stealing and re-selling industrial alchohol for human consumption, who are truly to blame.
"Poisonous alcohol still kills--16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes--but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order."
Wait, so unscrupulous businessmen making their own deadly booze to avoid taxes is the fault of 'unscrupulous businessmen', but unscrupulous businessment stealing industrial alchohol which I'm sure was labelled as such, and most likely labelled as poisonous, and then presumably putting it into other bottles (and possibly mixing it with other stuff to make it 'palatable' and/or dillute it for increased profit) somehow is NOT due to unscrupulous businessmen.
Sounds to me like the government didn't pour this stuff down people's gullets or trick them into drinking it. It sounds to me EXACTLY like 'unscrupulous businessmen' in the USA in the 1920's did something they knew would poison people, just to make a quick buck. I don't at all blame the government, as long as the original poisoned alchohol supplies were labelled as such. After that, it's not the goverment's fault if someone serves poison to other people. You wouldn't blame the government if ANY OTHER industrial chemical ended up in people's drinks because of criminals, would you?
The article author, with that statement, sure makes herself look kind of foolish, in this article. I particularly liked this quote: "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues."
They didn't poison *people*. They 'poisoned' an industrial chemical that wasn't being manufactured, sold, or labelled for human consumption. Bootleggers poisoned people.
I want to make it clear I don't blame the poisoning victims in this. I squarly blame the bootleggers that sold them the poisoned drinks.
As for prohibition, no, I don't agree with it, and I wouldn't bring back that ammendment, but the government is *supposed* to follow the Constitution, and it was legally ammended by the Congress and the States, so the goverment is bound to uphold the Constitution. Poisoning the industrial alchohol seems a *perfectly* reasonable step in that situation, so long as everyone knows it has been poisoned.
"Nevermind the fact that his job description by law says he must oppose legalization,"
Why would the People want or need the governments's opinion on what should or should not be legal? It doesn't really matter. As long as drugs are illegal, the 'drug czar' has a job to do, not an opinion. I don't want his opinion, because he is the government. The People are to drive government policy/law, not the other way around.
"The NRC can't do that because it would be spending Entergy's money, which it has no right to do, or else spending public money fixing something that belongs to Entergy"
Ok, first, I don't really know that it's necessary in this case, BUT: I have no problem with applying *special rules* to nuclear plants that we don't normally apply to most other types of businesses, if necessary. I have no problem with the government spending a nuclear operating company's money if it means protecting public safety, and I also have no problem with taxpayer money being spent (and then reclaimed in fines or in the forced sale of the power plant, if necessary and appropriate for a given situation).
I believe that we do need some nuclear power in our energy supply, and I also think that because of public safety concerns, there is absolutely a reasonable and rational argument for the government to protect the nation against any operator which would put it at risk. I *hope* that whatever Act of Congress authorized the NRC to license these companies, also gives the NRC *ANY POWERS* they need to keep the nation safe from Nuclear Accidents.
What I don't get about this whole situation is why the NRC doesn't bring someone in (either an NRC employee, or maybe a qualified consultant) to be the Acting Director of Safety? Doesn't the NRC have anybody qualified to take over operations of Nuclear Plants when necessary? If Entergy can't run the plant safely, bring in someone who can (at least temporarily, until the 'permanent disposition' of the situation can be sorted out). If Entergy really did something bad, perhaps they should be forcibly divested of their ownership of the plant (probably with some partial compensation, but perhaps not complete compensation, as a punitive measure), and the plant sold to a company who has a track record for running nuclear plants safely?
I'm sure none of the Vermont legislators wants to appear to be taking the safety of Vermont residents 'lightly', so they are rushing to this idea of permanently shutting down the power plant. I do agree that something needs to be done, but shutting down a plant which just needs some repairs (and possibly retrofitting some 'safety upgrades') seems like an irrational, knee-jerk reaction.
"so the crack will include a locally run save game server? I fail to see how this will be all that much of a barrier".
I do agree with your basic analysis, but I suspect they may have 'complicated' things a little bit by using strong crypto to 'authenticate' both the client *and* the server. So, the binary is probably configured to not connect to a server unless it gets the write challenge/response, encrypted with the correct private key on the other end (maybe I'm giving Ubi's devs too much credit, not sure).
If that's the case, that's *still* not an insurmountable barrier - you just have to figure out how to hack the exe to either skip that challenge/response when connecting to the server, or if necessary, replace the public key image in the binary with a public key of your choosing (so that the executable is now looking for the data to be encrypted with 'your' private key instead of Ubisofts's private key). Of course, the executable probably checks to see if the exe itself has been modified, so there is another level of change you have to make to disable or change the way the exe verifies itself.
I think you're right that this isn't an 'uncrackable' DRM system, but it's a least a step or two more complex, perhaps, than some other DRM systems.
One other thing which might make cracking much harder, is if they made the game such that critical game *content* was streamed over the Internet (basically, what you buy and install isn't a 'complete' game, but is missing vital bits which you have to retrieve from the server). This too could be worked around by some hacker using a legit copy to retrieve the missing bits, save it locally, then incorporate it into the 'local game server' you mentioned. But, again that makes creating the hack somewhat more complex/hard.
"But that doesn't explain anything, it just complicates."
Oh, I totally agree. I'm not saying I think this is actually the case. I was just sort of responding to the point in the article where the guy pontificates how time always goes forward, never backwards. I'm trying to make the point that even if it did, we'd never know. My point is, while there's no good reason to suppose time does ever go backwards, he seems to be missing a fundamental problem with the concept.
Perhaps time does flow back and forth. . . except that we, caught in time, would never know the difference, yes? If "time" represents the configurations of matter and energy in the universe, if time ever did flow backwards, our minds would seem to reset back to that point in time, and we would never remember having been in the future (of if it rolled back far enough, we would no longer exist, waiting yet again to be born)?
Can Science really ever say, with a certainty, that time never does go backwards? All we can say is that if time does go backwards, we would never be able to detect it. You'd need an observational point outside of time to see such ebb and flow (if it happened to exist), wouldn't you?
1: "NASA has too many PHB's. We need to flatten the management structure, and hire more scientists and engineers to get things done."
. . . 4-8 years later. . .
2: "Those scientists and engineers play around their labs and ivory towers all day with their heads in the clouds, and aren't getting anything done. We need to add some people with real world project management and business experience to provide some real *leadership* at NASA, and get things done."
I sure hope there is a way to turn off reporting what games you own or have played recently? If I want someone to know that, I'll tell them. It's none of anyone else's business what I own and play.
I have to wonder about this approach, if it falls into the category of seemingly random today, because we simply don't yet know how to predict the outcome, but maybe someone in a few years' time figures out the necessary principles to predict what the outcome will be?
Still, I suppose until such a time (if it ever arrives), this is probably a lot better than currently existing approaches.
"Common sense comes in to play here, and even in court."
Wow, what court is that? I've seen way too many U.S. court cases where common sense was chucked out the window in part or in whole, to believe that's the case in the U.S.
I believe I did say, "they might be great learning exercises for engineering students". In that context, I say they are great. No problem with that. But, is it really worthy for such a learning exercise to be in the news, like it's some major breakthrough in automotive engineering?
I'm not that impressed. I mean, while the figure mentioned seems impressive, how is this 'research' helpful? I mean, we already have *known* for a very long time that if you made a super small, lightweight vehicle with excellent aerodynamics, very low top-speed, and very low torque/accelleration, you can get much more mileage than the typical car. But, nobody wants a vehicle like that. People want vehicles very much like what they already have. . . enough mass around them to provide protections in an accident, enough space and power to haul 4 - 8 people plus cargo/luggage, and decent speed and accelleration - I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever.
I honestly think these 'toy car' concepts, while they might be great learning exercises for engineering students, aren't very impressive. I'd be much more impressed by the 80-100 MPG 4-door sedan.
What's to stop someone replacing the LCI, then, AFTER water damage has occured, in order to defraud Apple by showing that their 'third-party' water detector hasn't detected contact with water. I really don't know the specifics of the Magnuson-Moss act, and don't care to try to decipher it since I'm not a lawyer and any opinion I have on that matter would be worthless. But, seems like any common-sense approach to the situation indicates that that the whole point of having such an indicator is that it must be continuously in use from the time of sale. Any replacement by anyone other than an Apple service employee would render it moot.
"He will wake up one day in the very near future to find his bank accounts frozen."
I hope they don't get around to this until after the game has been sold and makes a few million currency, so there is actually something for the scammers to lose, and for the tax office, employees and creditors to be compensated with. Of course, there's no guarantee the game will be bought by anyone or make any money, but if they wait to sieze assets and arrest these guys, and the game doesn't make any revenue, well, the creditors and employees haven't really lost anything. You can always arrest the people behind this later - at least let them think they've gotten away with it, and get the product to market, then go in for the big score (if there is one).
"Some claim its possible to make the output of the reprocessing process impossible to use for nuclear weapons"
That's not actuallly the claims. The claims are that it's *much easier* to build your own enrichment facilities (a la Iran), and create weapons-grade plutonium using 'traditional' breeder reactors (the type that USA, Russia, China, France, etc have been using for decades), than it is to try to extract Plutonium out of the radioactive 'soup' that is produced by such designs (like the IFR). That's actually likely to NOT change, because if you are Iran or North Korea, wouldn't you rather just pay your clever scientists to design a 'traditional' breeder reactor? Why would you *bother* trying to reclaim plutonium out of IFR rods when it's so much harder/more expensive than just building a uranium enrichment facility and a weapons reactor?
That's the argument, and it makes a hellofalotta sense. In order for it to be 'worthwhile' for anyone to even bother *trying*, it would have to at least theoretically have some *advantage* over a traditional weapons developmement approach, and with the fuel rods of an IFR reactor, there would be no advantage.
If getting plutonium from an IFR reactor were your *only* option, I suppose that it might make sense, but the truth is these other governments always have the still extremely hard and expensive, but much easier and cheaper option of just developing a 'traditional' weapons program.
If they don't have the ability to develop a traditional program, then they definitely don't have the ability to solve a much harder problem.
*But*, all that said, I still do have some worry/fear over a different, but related problem: using products from such a reactor in a 'dirty-bomb'. Even if they couldn't use fuel or waste from a recycling reactor design to create a high-yield fission bomb, they might still be able to turn the radioactive soup produced by such designs into a bomb that could be detonated in the atmosphere somewhere which would put a lot of highly radioactive contaminants into the air, water, and soil. That is one possibility we can't, seemingly, altogether avoid, with nuclear power.
*But*, it seems to me that even if we don't develop technologies like the IFR, that still doesn't make any significant change in the possibility/probability that someone like Iran or North Korea could develop nuclear weapons (whether 'conventional' or of the 'dirty-bomb' varieties). So, should we NOT develop recycling reactor technologies, because of a threat which still materially exists even if we *don't* develop those technologies?
Should we just leave our nuclear waste sitting around for 100,000 years in order to gain nothing in return? We have a problem, we must deal with it. The best hope we know of for dealing with nuclear waste is to 'burn' it in a reactor. So, should we not do that?
Have you read up any on the IFR design? One of the key features is that it 'burns' basicaly all of the radioactive byproducts of fission, reducing the radioactive 'wastes' to byproducts that become 'cool' in something like 500 or 1000 years. I think we have the technology to store radioactive wastes for 500-1000 years.
Well, when you hit the gas pedal on your car, is it your car that accellerates inside of the Universe, or is it the universe accellerating around your car?
Seems a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem? I mean, I'm not proposing we start building hundreds of these things right off the bat. Let's try to get one or two commercially viable designs built, tested, and proven, over the next couple decades. Let's work on proving them safe. Then, let's start a larger 'deployment' phase of building a few dozen of them. Yes, this means it'll be decades before there's enough of them to provide even a 'dent' in our energy supply problems (and in the meantime, we should *also* be building wind, solar, etc).
But let us get *started*, so that we can start dealing with our nuclear waste problem in 2 or 3 decades' time. As another replyer noted, we NEED to do this, to deal with our 'waste problem', even if we're not doing it for the energy - but we might as well get energy from it anyhow, to sort of 'pay for' the nuclear waste disposal. Make dealing with our 'waste problem' at least a 'break-even' endeavor, and maybe, possibly, a profitable business.
"it is "as if" you were going faster than light because of the quirky way relativity works."
Except, in the meantime, time is continuing at it's relentless pace outside of your frame of reference, and when you reach your 5000 lightyear destination, 8000 years (or whatever) have actually passed. As long as you don't care that outside of your 'time bubble', time is quite literally flying by, then, sure, it means you could theoretically travel vast stellar distances 'in your lifetime'.
There's still the problem that anyone you wanted to rendezvous with has been dead for thousands of years (unless it's an alien with a very long life-span).
That sounds like you're kind of proposing using air resistance to make your car go faster. Which, of course, doesn't make much sense. It's not that the hydrogen has 7 teV of kinetic energy - it's that your SPACESHIP has that energy, and is colliding with hydrogen which is (basically) at rest. You can't extract energy from the 'at rest' hydrogen atoms, because they don't have it. What would happen is that your collision with those molecules would likely destroy your ship (massive hull heating, until you get vaporization; possibly sub-atomic reactions, not sure), and those atoms that passed through the ship would destroy your flesh.
There is a concept, called the Bussard Ramjet, which suggests using some sort of 'scoop' to gather some of the hydrogen in front of and around the ship, and using some of your kinetic energy to compress/heat the hydrogen until you cause fusion, so that you can actually extract energy from the 'at rest' H, but that is fusion energy, not kinetic energy. Once you've released the fusion energy, you could try to direct it away from the ship, thereby getting a net increase in kinetic energy. But, again, the key point there is the energy is being extracted from Hydrogen fusion.
Nuclear waste isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. That nuclear waste, is in fact, valuable fuel in some types of reactor designs. Notably, the Integral Fast Reactor-style of design (and, I believe there are some other design concepts being researched along similar lines). I've heard estimates (though I don't really know if they are true or not, but I've no current knowledge to contradict it) that the current 'reserves' of nuclear waste could power reactors for something like 500 years or 1000 years without mining any 'new' uranium.
However, I think the Obama administration is making a bit of a mistake. It's my understanding that the reactor designs they are getting built are still based upon the once-through concept, which will need 'new' uranium to be mined and enriched, and produce more 'waste'. Seems to me we should really be pushing to the 'recycling' types of reactor designs, and maybe put a moratorium on importing any more uranium into the country. We should be trying to phase out the old style, once-through reactors.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, it means, that when the sun is shining on the solar cell, we can say that a certain amount of power, in watts, is hitting the solar cell. Say there is an available 100 Watts of total solar (light) power hitting the cell. If a solar cell is 10 percent efficient, then that means that cell would output 10 Watts of electrical power. If it's 50 percent efficient, it's outputting 50 Watts of power. So, if a solar cell were 100 percent efficient, and 100 watts of power were hitting it, it would generate 100 watts of electrical power.
Now, you can always increase the amountn of power your cells are 'exposed' to by increaasing the area/size of the solar cell, or by using multiple solar cells connected together, but both approaches increases costs. So, the reason people want more efficient solar cells is that, all else being equal, higher-efficiency == cheaper solar cells (well, cheaper per kiloWatt-hour; of course, all it not always equal - it doesn't do much good to get 2x efficiency at 2x costs).
So, the 'holy grail' of solar power is a technology that is both relatively cheap per square-meter, and a bit more efficient than current, comparitively priced, offerings.
"Nothing that's better has ever sold for less than 5% under the price of the competition."
That really depends. If something is only a little bit cheaper than the competition, then I agree with you. I also agree that would be true when they first start selling these (because there will likely be more demand than they can satisfy at first, anyhow).
"No company can afford to leave money on the table."
I *do* agree with this statement, which is why I don't necessarily agree with the prior thesis. In business, there is a concept of a price/demand curve. Think of it this way: Right now, not many people or companies are buying solar cells to put on the roofs of their houses/buildings. However, I guarantee, that there is some price, below which, every property owner in the world would buy a solar cell and put it on their property to offset the costs of buying electric power from the grid. I suppose that price point would be a function of the average unit cost of buying electricity.
Right now, solar cells are so expensive, they take something like 15 or 20 years to pay for themselves, so most property owners don't see a big incentive. Lower that price to 10 years or 8 years, or even lower, and suddenly the demand for these things will skyrocket.
Now, of course, that only is possible if someone does actually come up with an effective solar cell that they can mass produce for something like 1/2 the cost (or maybe less), than their competitors. The reason I say that is only possible is because, in order for the price/demand curve to come out favorably for the company, the increase in sales has to more than offset the loss of marginal profit.
That is to say, if I'm making X marginal profit selling Y units, then if I reduce the price such that my marginal profit becomes, for example, 1/2X, then I need to sell more than 2Y units to realize an increase in profits from decreasing price.
The thing is, the solar market hasn't even *begun* to be tapped yet. There's so much 'potential demand', but that potential demand will only become real demand if the prices on solar cells drop more. There is very much a financial incentive for someone to develop a solar cell that they can sell significantly cheaper than the current prices, because there is very low demand for solar cells (compared to what you might *potentially* be able to get, that is, considering that most of the world don't own solar cells yet), but the only reason the demand is low is because the costs are, truly, too high right now - for most people, there's not enough savings vs cost to justify the purchase.
Just thinking about this more. . .
I wonder if they could have mixed in something with the alcohol which would have made it extremely unpleasant tasting, or made people vomit or something, but wouldn't actually kill them? If that was an alternative, then I suppose that would have been a much more reasonable thing to do.
Still, I don't think it's fair to say the government poisoned people, when it was the people profitting off of stealing and re-selling industrial alchohol for human consumption, who are truly to blame.
"Poisonous alcohol still kills--16 people died just this month after drinking lethal booze in Indonesia, where bootleggers make their own brews to avoid steep taxes--but that's due to unscrupulous businessmen rather than government order."
Wait, so unscrupulous businessmen making their own deadly booze to avoid taxes is the fault of 'unscrupulous businessmen', but unscrupulous businessment stealing industrial alchohol which I'm sure was labelled as such, and most likely labelled as poisonous, and then presumably putting it into other bottles (and possibly mixing it with other stuff to make it 'palatable' and/or dillute it for increased profit) somehow is NOT due to unscrupulous businessmen.
Sounds to me like the government didn't pour this stuff down people's gullets or trick them into drinking it. It sounds to me EXACTLY like 'unscrupulous businessmen' in the USA in the 1920's did something they knew would poison people, just to make a quick buck. I don't at all blame the government, as long as the original poisoned alchohol supplies were labelled as such. After that, it's not the goverment's fault if someone serves poison to other people. You wouldn't blame the government if ANY OTHER industrial chemical ended up in people's drinks because of criminals, would you?
The article author, with that statement, sure makes herself look kind of foolish, in this article. I particularly liked this quote: "I never heard that the government poisoned people during Prohibition, did you?" I kept saying to friends, family members, colleagues."
They didn't poison *people*. They 'poisoned' an industrial chemical that wasn't being manufactured, sold, or labelled for human consumption. Bootleggers poisoned people.
I want to make it clear I don't blame the poisoning victims in this. I squarly blame the bootleggers that sold them the poisoned drinks.
As for prohibition, no, I don't agree with it, and I wouldn't bring back that ammendment, but the government is *supposed* to follow the Constitution, and it was legally ammended by the Congress and the States, so the goverment is bound to uphold the Constitution. Poisoning the industrial alchohol seems a *perfectly* reasonable step in that situation, so long as everyone knows it has been poisoned.
"Nevermind the fact that his job description by law says he must oppose legalization,"
Why would the People want or need the governments's opinion on what should or should not be legal? It doesn't really matter. As long as drugs are illegal, the 'drug czar' has a job to do, not an opinion. I don't want his opinion, because he is the government. The People are to drive government policy/law, not the other way around.
"The NRC can't do that because it would be spending Entergy's money, which it has no right to do, or else spending public money fixing something that belongs to Entergy"
Ok, first, I don't really know that it's necessary in this case, BUT: I have no problem with applying *special rules* to nuclear plants that we don't normally apply to most other types of businesses, if necessary. I have no problem with the government spending a nuclear operating company's money if it means protecting public safety, and I also have no problem with taxpayer money being spent (and then reclaimed in fines or in the forced sale of the power plant, if necessary and appropriate for a given situation).
I believe that we do need some nuclear power in our energy supply, and I also think that because of public safety concerns, there is absolutely a reasonable and rational argument for the government to protect the nation against any operator which would put it at risk. I *hope* that whatever Act of Congress authorized the NRC to license these companies, also gives the NRC *ANY POWERS* they need to keep the nation safe from Nuclear Accidents.
What I don't get about this whole situation is why the NRC doesn't bring someone in (either an NRC employee, or maybe a qualified consultant) to be the Acting Director of Safety? Doesn't the NRC have anybody qualified to take over operations of Nuclear Plants when necessary? If Entergy can't run the plant safely, bring in someone who can (at least temporarily, until the 'permanent disposition' of the situation can be sorted out). If Entergy really did something bad, perhaps they should be forcibly divested of their ownership of the plant (probably with some partial compensation, but perhaps not complete compensation, as a punitive measure), and the plant sold to a company who has a track record for running nuclear plants safely?
I'm sure none of the Vermont legislators wants to appear to be taking the safety of Vermont residents 'lightly', so they are rushing to this idea of permanently shutting down the power plant. I do agree that something needs to be done, but shutting down a plant which just needs some repairs (and possibly retrofitting some 'safety upgrades') seems like an irrational, knee-jerk reaction.
"so the crack will include a locally run save game server? I fail to see how this will be all that much of a barrier".
I do agree with your basic analysis, but I suspect they may have 'complicated' things a little bit by using strong crypto to 'authenticate' both the client *and* the server. So, the binary is probably configured to not connect to a server unless it gets the write challenge/response, encrypted with the correct private key on the other end (maybe I'm giving Ubi's devs too much credit, not sure).
If that's the case, that's *still* not an insurmountable barrier - you just have to figure out how to hack the exe to either skip that challenge/response when connecting to the server, or if necessary, replace the public key image in the binary with a public key of your choosing (so that the executable is now looking for the data to be encrypted with 'your' private key instead of Ubisofts's private key). Of course, the executable probably checks to see if the exe itself has been modified, so there is another level of change you have to make to disable or change the way the exe verifies itself.
I think you're right that this isn't an 'uncrackable' DRM system, but it's a least a step or two more complex, perhaps, than some other DRM systems.
One other thing which might make cracking much harder, is if they made the game such that critical game *content* was streamed over the Internet (basically, what you buy and install isn't a 'complete' game, but is missing vital bits which you have to retrieve from the server). This too could be worked around by some hacker using a legit copy to retrieve the missing bits, save it locally, then incorporate it into the 'local game server' you mentioned. But, again that makes creating the hack somewhat more complex/hard.
"But that doesn't explain anything, it just complicates."
Oh, I totally agree. I'm not saying I think this is actually the case. I was just sort of responding to the point in the article where the guy pontificates how time always goes forward, never backwards. I'm trying to make the point that even if it did, we'd never know. My point is, while there's no good reason to suppose time does ever go backwards, he seems to be missing a fundamental problem with the concept.
Perhaps time does flow back and forth. . . except that we, caught in time, would never know the difference, yes? If "time" represents the configurations of matter and energy in the universe, if time ever did flow backwards, our minds would seem to reset back to that point in time, and we would never remember having been in the future (of if it rolled back far enough, we would no longer exist, waiting yet again to be born)?
Can Science really ever say, with a certainty, that time never does go backwards? All we can say is that if time does go backwards, we would never be able to detect it. You'd need an observational point outside of time to see such ebb and flow (if it happened to exist), wouldn't you?
I can see this becoming a cyclical argument:
1: "NASA has too many PHB's. We need to flatten the management structure, and hire more scientists and engineers to get things done."
. . . 4-8 years later. . .
2: "Those scientists and engineers play around their labs and ivory towers all day with their heads in the clouds, and aren't getting anything done. We need to add some people with real world project management and business experience to provide some real *leadership* at NASA, and get things done."
. . . 4-8 years later. . .
3: Goto 1
I sure hope there is a way to turn off reporting what games you own or have played recently? If I want someone to know that, I'll tell them. It's none of anyone else's business what I own and play.
I have to wonder about this approach, if it falls into the category of seemingly random today, because we simply don't yet know how to predict the outcome, but maybe someone in a few years' time figures out the necessary principles to predict what the outcome will be?
Still, I suppose until such a time (if it ever arrives), this is probably a lot better than currently existing approaches.
"Common sense comes in to play here, and even in court."
Wow, what court is that? I've seen way too many U.S. court cases where common sense was chucked out the window in part or in whole, to believe that's the case in the U.S.
I believe I did say, "they might be great learning exercises for engineering students". In that context, I say they are great. No problem with that. But, is it really worthy for such a learning exercise to be in the news, like it's some major breakthrough in automotive engineering?
I'm not that impressed. I mean, while the figure mentioned seems impressive, how is this 'research' helpful? I mean, we already have *known* for a very long time that if you made a super small, lightweight vehicle with excellent aerodynamics, very low top-speed, and very low torque/accelleration, you can get much more mileage than the typical car. But, nobody wants a vehicle like that. People want vehicles very much like what they already have. . . enough mass around them to provide protections in an accident, enough space and power to haul 4 - 8 people plus cargo/luggage, and decent speed and accelleration - I think most of us have had driving experiences where we really needed to accellerate *right now* in order to avoid getting run over by a truck or bus or whatever.
I honestly think these 'toy car' concepts, while they might be great learning exercises for engineering students, aren't very impressive. I'd be much more impressed by the 80-100 MPG 4-door sedan.
What's to stop someone replacing the LCI, then, AFTER water damage has occured, in order to defraud Apple by showing that their 'third-party' water detector hasn't detected contact with water. I really don't know the specifics of the Magnuson-Moss act, and don't care to try to decipher it since I'm not a lawyer and any opinion I have on that matter would be worthless. But, seems like any common-sense approach to the situation indicates that that the whole point of having such an indicator is that it must be continuously in use from the time of sale. Any replacement by anyone other than an Apple service employee would render it moot.
"He will wake up one day in the very near future to find his bank accounts frozen."
I hope they don't get around to this until after the game has been sold and makes a few million currency, so there is actually something for the scammers to lose, and for the tax office, employees and creditors to be compensated with. Of course, there's no guarantee the game will be bought by anyone or make any money, but if they wait to sieze assets and arrest these guys, and the game doesn't make any revenue, well, the creditors and employees haven't really lost anything. You can always arrest the people behind this later - at least let them think they've gotten away with it, and get the product to market, then go in for the big score (if there is one).
"Some claim its possible to make the output of the reprocessing process impossible to use for nuclear weapons"
That's not actuallly the claims. The claims are that it's *much easier* to build your own enrichment facilities (a la Iran), and create weapons-grade plutonium using 'traditional' breeder reactors (the type that USA, Russia, China, France, etc have been using for decades), than it is to try to extract Plutonium out of the radioactive 'soup' that is produced by such designs (like the IFR). That's actually likely to NOT change, because if you are Iran or North Korea, wouldn't you rather just pay your clever scientists to design a 'traditional' breeder reactor? Why would you *bother* trying to reclaim plutonium out of IFR rods when it's so much harder/more expensive than just building a uranium enrichment facility and a weapons reactor?
That's the argument, and it makes a hellofalotta sense. In order for it to be 'worthwhile' for anyone to even bother *trying*, it would have to at least theoretically have some *advantage* over a traditional weapons developmement approach, and with the fuel rods of an IFR reactor, there would be no advantage.
If getting plutonium from an IFR reactor were your *only* option, I suppose that it might make sense, but the truth is these other governments always have the still extremely hard and expensive, but much easier and cheaper option of just developing a 'traditional' weapons program.
If they don't have the ability to develop a traditional program, then they definitely don't have the ability to solve a much harder problem.
*But*, all that said, I still do have some worry/fear over a different, but related problem: using products from such a reactor in a 'dirty-bomb'. Even if they couldn't use fuel or waste from a recycling reactor design to create a high-yield fission bomb, they might still be able to turn the radioactive soup produced by such designs into a bomb that could be detonated in the atmosphere somewhere which would put a lot of highly radioactive contaminants into the air, water, and soil. That is one possibility we can't, seemingly, altogether avoid, with nuclear power.
*But*, it seems to me that even if we don't develop technologies like the IFR, that still doesn't make any significant change in the possibility/probability that someone like Iran or North Korea could develop nuclear weapons (whether 'conventional' or of the 'dirty-bomb' varieties). So, should we NOT develop recycling reactor technologies, because of a threat which still materially exists even if we *don't* develop those technologies?
Should we just leave our nuclear waste sitting around for 100,000 years in order to gain nothing in return? We have a problem, we must deal with it. The best hope we know of for dealing with nuclear waste is to 'burn' it in a reactor. So, should we not do that?
Have you read up any on the IFR design? One of the key features is that it 'burns' basicaly all of the radioactive byproducts of fission, reducing the radioactive 'wastes' to byproducts that become 'cool' in something like 500 or 1000 years. I think we have the technology to store radioactive wastes for 500-1000 years.
Well, when you hit the gas pedal on your car, is it your car that accellerates inside of the Universe, or is it the universe accellerating around your car?
Seems a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem? I mean, I'm not proposing we start building hundreds of these things right off the bat. Let's try to get one or two commercially viable designs built, tested, and proven, over the next couple decades. Let's work on proving them safe. Then, let's start a larger 'deployment' phase of building a few dozen of them. Yes, this means it'll be decades before there's enough of them to provide even a 'dent' in our energy supply problems (and in the meantime, we should *also* be building wind, solar, etc).
But let us get *started*, so that we can start dealing with our nuclear waste problem in 2 or 3 decades' time. As another replyer noted, we NEED to do this, to deal with our 'waste problem', even if we're not doing it for the energy - but we might as well get energy from it anyhow, to sort of 'pay for' the nuclear waste disposal. Make dealing with our 'waste problem' at least a 'break-even' endeavor, and maybe, possibly, a profitable business.
"it is "as if" you were going faster than light because of the quirky way relativity works."
Except, in the meantime, time is continuing at it's relentless pace outside of your frame of reference, and when you reach your 5000 lightyear destination, 8000 years (or whatever) have actually passed. As long as you don't care that outside of your 'time bubble', time is quite literally flying by, then, sure, it means you could theoretically travel vast stellar distances 'in your lifetime'.
There's still the problem that anyone you wanted to rendezvous with has been dead for thousands of years (unless it's an alien with a very long life-span).
That sounds like you're kind of proposing using air resistance to make your car go faster. Which, of course, doesn't make much sense. It's not that the hydrogen has 7 teV of kinetic energy - it's that your SPACESHIP has that energy, and is colliding with hydrogen which is (basically) at rest. You can't extract energy from the 'at rest' hydrogen atoms, because they don't have it. What would happen is that your collision with those molecules would likely destroy your ship (massive hull heating, until you get vaporization; possibly sub-atomic reactions, not sure), and those atoms that passed through the ship would destroy your flesh.
There is a concept, called the Bussard Ramjet, which suggests using some sort of 'scoop' to gather some of the hydrogen in front of and around the ship, and using some of your kinetic energy to compress/heat the hydrogen until you cause fusion, so that you can actually extract energy from the 'at rest' H, but that is fusion energy, not kinetic energy. Once you've released the fusion energy, you could try to direct it away from the ship, thereby getting a net increase in kinetic energy. But, again, the key point there is the energy is being extracted from Hydrogen fusion.
Nuclear waste isn't a problem, it's an opportunity. That nuclear waste, is in fact, valuable fuel in some types of reactor designs. Notably, the Integral Fast Reactor-style of design (and, I believe there are some other design concepts being researched along similar lines). I've heard estimates (though I don't really know if they are true or not, but I've no current knowledge to contradict it) that the current 'reserves' of nuclear waste could power reactors for something like 500 years or 1000 years without mining any 'new' uranium.
However, I think the Obama administration is making a bit of a mistake. It's my understanding that the reactor designs they are getting built are still based upon the once-through concept, which will need 'new' uranium to be mined and enriched, and produce more 'waste'. Seems to me we should really be pushing to the 'recycling' types of reactor designs, and maybe put a moratorium on importing any more uranium into the country. We should be trying to phase out the old style, once-through reactors.