You're thinking of the Atlas, Deltas and other boosters. Those structures require pressurization to keep integrity, but the shuttle external tank doesn't. It doesn't even have a helium re-pressurization system like other boosters.
Plus, if it's in orbit and pressurized to an atmosphere, that would more then take care of the pressurization problem right there. If there was one.
The External Tank is made of spacecraft craft aluminum and lithium, and certified for pressures much higher than an earth normal atmosphere (because of the nature of the cryogenic fuel it carries).
The walls are thicker then the walls on Skylab, and stronger too, and Skylab kicked ass as a space station (until it personally kicked the ass of some shepherders when it came down over Australia).
Also, there are 10-15 tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen leftover after MECO, and that stuff could be drained and used for life support and propellent, and to make water.
It's a damn shame the ISS isn't based around using the space shuttle's external tanks instead. Each shuttle launch boosts the external tank 95% of the way to orbit. All they would need to do is hold onto the tank through the OMS 1 burn (with a minimal cargo impact), and it would be in orbit. Once it was in orbit, it could be outfitted as a space station.
To make it easier, it could have the wiring ducts and hatchways installed before launch and launch wet, like Skylab was originally supposed to do.
The only American space station so far, Skylab, was also built in a fuel tank, a S-IV stage, so it's not a new precedent. A station built out of shuttle external tanks would have more internal volume in one launch then the ISS will after 30-40 shuttle launches.
For more information on this, check out the following website: http://www.orbit6.com/et/
"Eliminates costly programming errors" What's this, has Microsoft legislated good programming? Like the old saying goes, 'When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in simple english, it will be discovered that programmers can not speak english'.
"Embraces emerging Web programming standards" Originally 'Creates^H^H^H^H^H^H^HInnovates^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HE mbraces emerging web programming standards'
"Extensive interoperability" Everything is a COM object, so EVERYTHING can now be used by malicious ActiveX critters to cause new and improved and more effective destruction!
> I'm not going to get into the whole gun debate thing.
Ok, thanks for sharing.
> It really doesn't take rights away from the general adult population, > it enables the law enforcement community to come down much harder on > the bad guys.
This is the same logic used to justify 'Zero Tolerance' laws, and those have turned into huge examples of mis-use of law. The more powers you give law enforcement, the more they will be abused. It's not paranoid rambling, it's a truth of life.
A decade ago, various law enforcement agencies were given almost cart blanche abillity to tap phone lines of suspected drug dealers. They were also given incredibly powers to confiscate money and possessions from people merely SUSPECTED of drug dealing, but they never had to prove a thing.
The end result, thousands of innocents have their phones tapped, the whole judge-approval for taps has become a joke, and thousands of people have possessions and money confiscated at gunpoint by police officers and never get any of it back, even when there is no evidence of drug dealing at all.
When these draconian measures were implemented, the people objecting were branded paranoid and condescendingly told by people like you that 'the only people that will be affected by these laws are law breakers. They will just let the police come down harder on lawbreakers, not you and I. And why object to phone taps? If you're not doing anything illegal, what do you have to hide?'
Sound familiar?
The US, despite our vaunted claims to freedom, is being systematically dissected and legislated into a religious police state. The same thing happened in Iran 20-30 years ago, and it's happening here too. COPA is just part of the process, and you're blind if you don't see it.
Based on your text, you seem to think the Constitution is a list of suggestions, not the foundation of our country.
Good parenting is not something that can be legislated into existance, and laws already exist that come down _hard_ on the real predators out there. This act merely takes more rights away from adults and does little to protect children. It's like outlawing guns, the only people who won't own guns are people who follow laws. Of course, the criminals will hold onto their guns, and the end result will be that the criminals have been empowered. These types of poorly thought out laws are foolish, and only fools are deceived by them.
Creating more laws isn't the answer, better education of both parents and children is.
I agree totally. Plus, you can store a lot more energy in a flywheel of comparable size to a zapacitor, and the lifetime under this type of strain appears to be much longer.
I think this device and the needed control infrastructure could be built for less than $100 million and launched for about the same.
> OMV is not tether-based, btw. (I work with the guys that designed it, and they are always > pulling out the little models and such. *Grin*) In any case, all you need is surface area, so if > you wanted to do something fancy, consider just hooking on a big inflatable sail dohicky - cheap, low mass, and effective. > >If you have the power to spare for a tether, I'd wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just use >electric propulsion; for a few hundred watts and a few tens of kilograms (and a year or two) you >can deorbit most anything.
The rest of your post was insightful, but these are critical errors you've just made.
A OMV stands for a 'Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle'. It is not a reference to TRWs OMV design for the Shuttle C program, or any other specific vehicle. It is a description of a vehicle that maneuvers things in orbit. That's all.
Second, the entire purpose of this design is to avoid using propellent entirely. A tether based system can stay up as long as needed and keep working for years, de-orbiting hundreds of satellites and shrouds before wearing out. If you used an ion drive, you would quickly expend your propellent after de-orbiting maybe one or two payloads. It's foolish, and hardly economical. That's the wonder of tethers: As long as you have power, you have movement.
Tethers are potentially the most important development in space travel since the fuel cell. No joke. No other propulsion system exists that can provide the thrust in LEO of a tether, nor does and device lend itself anywhere near as good to ease of deployment. A solar sail is a fanciful idea for this purpose and would be quickly destroyed by debris before it put out enough thrust to move a single kilogram out of orbit, and it would be unbelievably difficult to build and deploy for this purpose.
Tethers have limited utility for roping asteroids. Unless you haven't noticed, there aren't any asteroids orbiting in low earth orbit, the place where electromagnetic tethers are effective.
The idea is to store the payload shrouds and dead satellites in a place where LEO industry can use them later. Perhaps the use they'll pick will be constructing devices to mine asteroids, but they need to get there first.
Are you absolutely without clue to the nature of energy management? Each pound of metal hauled into orbit costs between $5,000 and $20,000 each. The reason to use an orbital junkyard is to have access to metal without needing to pay to bring it all up.
A $.01 cup of water in Oregon is worth a lot more in the middle of the Sahara, pal.
Asteroids and the moon are the next step, of course, but you need to get to them before you can exploit them.
...unless you're suggesting all the commercial astro/cosmonauts just ride out to the asteroids on smelters with nothing but their spacesuits on. This isn't a ride to the local Dairy Queen where you can hang off the side of a truck.
Absolutely. With tethers, speed isn't the name of the game, at least not yet.
Either way, the only energy that needs to be expended is in getting to the object. A good sized tether ought to be able to move the OMV itself around with impunity. Once you attach to the object, size isn't an issue, you just start expending power and let the conductive tether gobble up electricity in exchange for kinetic energy. Use a portion of the power to spin up some flywheels to fierce RPMs, then use that concentrated power to boost your OMV out of the death orbit it put the junk into. Find another satellite, rinse, and repeat.
Something cool about tether technology is that junking the stuff isn't the only option. Create a legal 'Junkyard' area in space that's at high altitude. Instead of de-orbiting satellites/discarded shrouds/interstages/etc, boost them all up to a parking orbit of sorts in the legislated 'Junk Yard'. There are orbits just one or two hundred miles higher that have lifetimes measured in decades because of lowered atmospheric density.
The junk yard concept is for the optimist that imagines a future where humanity will gratefully harvest the junkyard for raw materials in the future. The de-orbit option is for those seeking the easiest and relatively hassle-free option of fire and forget.
The answer to removing large pieces of junk from orbit is to send up a couple of tether-based OMVs to do it automatically.
Space tethers are basically conductive cables, maybe a mile long or more, that are suspended out of an orbiting vehicle. Because of gravitational gradients, the cable will align itself to be pointing down towards the ground. As the cables pass through the Earth's magnetic field, they convert velocity for energy, producing lots of electricity. It's like an electric motor.
Normally.
If, on the other hand, you run power through the cable, you trade electricity for velocity. Again, like an electric motor.
The end result is that you have a method of altering your orbit that doesn't require expending propellents. This technology will be installed on the Mir space station late this year or next, ending the reliance on Progress boosters.
Anyhow, the reason I'm bringing this up is that this is the key to removing big debris.
You launch an orbital maneuvering vehicle that uses this technology. It would rendezvous with the piece of debris and turn on the orbital brake (eg, use the tether to start generating electricity) until the object was on a re-entry vector, then it would detach and use the tether to raise itself to the orbit of the next piece of large debris.
The process could be mostly automated and wouldn't require expending propellent. Gyros would provide attitude control (and maybe energy storage for nighttime passes).
Of course, this only takes care of the stuff that's big enough to be tracked.
On the positive side, the smaller an item is, the quicker it de-orbits due to atmospheric friction. For example, a cloud of dust (or sand) would de-orbit from LEO within a couple days. It's all about altitude.
First, you might want to take him out of that box in the basement and get rid of the leather hood. I imagine the skin conditions attached to prolonged box-storage are pretty deplorable...
> I think it's probably the best animated movie I've seen since Mulan
You're not exactly aiming at the stars here with that comparison.
I think that Titan A.E's baddest flaw was that it wasn't exciting. Everything that happened was predictable, and I mean everything. It was like watching a clip-show of all the other movies in this genre I've ever seen.
Worst of all, the movie didn't take any chances. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good either.
The best thing that can be said for it is that it's better than 'All Dogs Go to Heaven', but only because there's more death. Sure, I liked it when Charlie Barkin bought a couple keys of Heroin to sell to the Itchy and the rest of the stray dogs, but it too wasn't that exciting, just like Titan AE.
The damning thing about Titan AE is that it's forgettable.
On a product I worked on until recently, encryption selection was done using the following formula:
(sensitivity of data)+(ease of implementation) = (arbitrary decision about how we felt about securing stuff)
An example, we would use a form of blowfish encryption for a configuration file that's super easy to decrypt. Because of the nature of the product, the content would be sniffable when being sent upstream anyhow, so we made the encryption just strong enough to resist a notepad surfer.
On another product, however, we were sending up private data. Now, it was usual registration data during install, but we had real privacy concerns, so we looked at our options and chose SSL because it was easy on our part to implement, but unlikely to be easilly sniffed/decrypted.
Conclusion of ramble: Whatever's easiest to implement with some allowance for the dsecurity of the data.
Security through obfuscation is coming to a close, so this method won't work much longer.
The total mass of all cargo placed into space is less than maybe 2 or 3 million lbs. And that includes the fuel in the upper stages that for the most part ends up back on earth again. The lower stages of course don't count because they never leave the planet.
Sound like a lot? It aint. Each day, over one hundred tons of mass (in the form of meteors, solar ejecta, etc) arrive on Earth, adding to its weight.
Eg, Earth gets stocked with the equivalent mass of 50 years of space travel in a week. And this continues each day.
Asteroid Mining can save our planet by putting cheaper access to the resources we need in hand, allowing us to get materials without ploughing up the land and destroying wilderness. If anything, resource friendly environmentalists should be 100% behind space exploration, because it's the most reallistic way to save the planet.
LCD is gonna be cool. My dream is for a hardware standard puts 12" LCD displays in the stores for cheap, like $100 or less. Each of these LCD displays could function as an independant monitor, but the coolness would be that you could take the plastic edges off and expose the LCD going all the way to the edge, and there would be an androgynous connector running down each side that could plug into another identical LCD. Take four of these and plug them together in a square, and you have a 24"x24" monitor. You could go out and buy a couple panels every paycheck until eventually you were satisfied with the size or had a monitor-wall to run Quake on.
This would work for TVs as well, and could really make it easier to get big TVs without needing to spend so much money at once.
I read about these in March. Here's some info from then that might have changed in the interim:
$1,538 for a QikDrive1 with up to 1GB storage. $9,840 for a QikDrive8 with up to 8GB storage.
The QikDrive is on a PCI card, but has its own internal power supply for data security. Presumably to keep the drives from being wiped by a system power failure.
They support between 15,000 and 20,000 I/O transactions per second (versus 200-300 for Winchester-style drives)
Part of the current inventory of things being loaded on the embryonic ISS is an IMAX camera. I wonder if Disney will license any of the IMAX footage for use in conjunction with any productions arising from this?
Interesting info about Atheos
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 4
The Atheos kernel is written from scratch and supports SMP, loadable device drivers and file systems, and provides threads and processes with the means to communicate amonst themselves with ease. From a cached Atheos site: "Threads can communicate through message ports, shared memory, posix signals, sempaphores, ppes, pty's, TCP/IP, and more".
The GUI isn't repackaged X. It's a native GUI that is more integrated with the OS that has a multithreaded GUI system that is more high-level. More things in the GUI are defined by the OS than the apps, leading to more consistency (ala Mac & Windows).
Here's a link to a couple Atheos related software pages: http://www.latech.edu/~jta001/AtheOS/ http://www.coolcateditor.dk/Download.asp
It's easy. The correctly rendered page with have the background colors showing through the background of the test PNG. If the background of the test PNG is gray or black or otherwise NOT a variant of the color displayed as the background of the cell the PNG is in, it's rendering incorrectly.
I could see it now, cruising around newsgroups and SMTP servers looking for spam with my Boba Fett outfit on. People could contact bounty hunters and offer added incentives for giving the personal data of the spammer to them first before passing it along to the government.
Spammed person: (getting ready to freeze the offending account and dispose of the spammer)
Me: He's no good to me dead.
Spammed person: (pausing) Don't worry, you will be properly compensated.
Spammer: (screaming as the torture began) Aaaaaaaarrrggh! They didn't opt out, they didn't opt-AAAAAAAAAAAAHH! NO! Not my e-mail finger-GNNNAARGH!
This is fascinating, it's almost as if NSI was deliberately trying to alienate its customers. What extraordinary steps will they take next to scare us away? Perhaps they'll start knocking down doors in the middle of the night to shake us down for 'domain protection money' or switch domains around once in a while for fun.
NSI is like a bunch of thugs. As long as they were the only game in town, they did brisk business and just performed their function as licensed. Now that there's competition, they're throwing their weight around like a nervous drug pusher who's worried about someone else moving in on his block.
I wish there was something we could do to avoid the NSI built infrastructure, but even their competitors need to work with NSI to get domains registered and acknowledged.
Where's our famed net-anarchy when we need it?
The Slashdot article on WashPost is dumb
on
Hump Day Quickies
·
· Score: 1
Here's an excerpt: The boys do have some adult supervision: Robin Miller, managing editor of all Andover sites, makes sure that Slashdot's articles are grammatical and libel-free, and not spelled with the numeric-letter mixture ("D00D!!! LET'S RIP SOME WAREZZZ!") that characterizes much geek typing.
This is idiotic! The numeric-letter mix that this article refers to is exclusively the use of nitwit Hacker-wannabes.
Also, what's the deal with Slashdot having 'adult supervision'. Que? Malda and Bates are both 23, not pre-teens. 23 is middle-aged if not nearing retirement in the Internet-Economy.
This article is obviously written by an artifact of the old media. It's kinda funny, if you think about it, a relic from the old media writing a semi-accurate article about the new media... A question, is the condescending tone part of an unconcious defense mechanism?
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking of the Atlas, Deltas and other boosters. Those structures require pressurization to keep integrity, but the shuttle external tank doesn't. It doesn't even have a helium re-pressurization system like other boosters.
Plus, if it's in orbit and pressurized to an atmosphere, that would more then take care of the pressurization problem right there. If there was one.
Interestingly, the Zvezda module was originally built for Mir-2, the intended followup to Mir. So in effect, that's exactly what they did.
The External Tank is made of spacecraft craft aluminum and lithium, and certified for pressures much higher than an earth normal atmosphere (because of the nature of the cryogenic fuel it carries).
The walls are thicker then the walls on Skylab, and stronger too, and Skylab kicked ass as a space station (until it personally kicked the ass of some shepherders when it came down over Australia).
Also, there are 10-15 tons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen leftover after MECO, and that stuff could be drained and used for life support and propellent, and to make water.
It's a damn shame the ISS isn't based around using the space shuttle's external tanks instead. Each shuttle launch boosts the external tank 95% of the way to orbit. All they would need to do is hold onto the tank through the OMS 1 burn (with a minimal cargo impact), and it would be in orbit. Once it was in orbit, it could be outfitted as a space station.
To make it easier, it could have the wiring ducts and hatchways installed before launch and launch wet, like Skylab was originally supposed to do.
The only American space station so far, Skylab, was also built in a fuel tank, a S-IV stage, so it's not a new precedent. A station built out of shuttle external tanks would have more internal volume in one launch then the ISS will after 30-40 shuttle launches.
For more information on this, check out the following website:
http://www.orbit6.com/et/
"Eliminates costly programming errors"
What's this, has Microsoft legislated good programming? Like the old saying goes, 'When a programming language is created that allows programmers to program in simple english, it will be discovered that programmers can not speak english'.
"Embraces emerging Web programming standards"E mbraces emerging web programming standards'
Originally 'Creates^H^H^H^H^H^H^HInnovates^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
"Extensive interoperability"
Everything is a COM object, so EVERYTHING can now be used by malicious ActiveX critters to cause new and improved and more effective destruction!
Read it for what it is, a Microsoft.NET vehicle.
> I'm not going to get into the whole gun debate thing.
Ok, thanks for sharing.
> It really doesn't take rights away from the general adult population,
> it enables the law enforcement community to come down much harder on
> the bad guys.
This is the same logic used to justify 'Zero Tolerance' laws, and those have turned into huge examples of mis-use of law. The more powers you give law enforcement, the more they will be abused. It's not paranoid rambling, it's a truth of life.
A decade ago, various law enforcement agencies were given almost cart blanche abillity to tap phone lines of suspected drug dealers. They were also given incredibly powers to confiscate money and possessions from people merely SUSPECTED of drug dealing, but they never had to prove a thing.
The end result, thousands of innocents have their phones tapped, the whole judge-approval for taps has become a joke, and thousands of people have possessions and money confiscated at gunpoint by police officers and never get any of it back, even when there is no evidence of drug dealing at all.
When these draconian measures were implemented, the people objecting were branded paranoid and condescendingly told by people like you that 'the only people that will be affected by these laws are law breakers. They will just let the police come down harder on lawbreakers, not you and I. And why object to phone taps? If you're not doing anything illegal, what do you have to hide?'
Sound familiar?
The US, despite our vaunted claims to freedom, is being systematically dissected and legislated into a religious police state. The same thing happened in Iran 20-30 years ago, and it's happening here too. COPA is just part of the process, and you're blind if you don't see it.
Based on your text, you seem to think the Constitution is a list of suggestions, not the foundation of our country.
Good parenting is not something that can be legislated into existance, and laws already exist that come down _hard_ on the real predators out there. This act merely takes more rights away from adults and does little to protect children. It's like outlawing guns, the only people who won't own guns are people who follow laws. Of course, the criminals will hold onto their guns, and the end result will be that the criminals have been empowered. These types of poorly thought out laws are foolish, and only fools are deceived by them.
Creating more laws isn't the answer, better education of both parents and children is.
I agree totally. Plus, you can store a lot more energy in a flywheel of comparable size to a zapacitor, and the lifetime under this type of strain appears to be much longer.
I think this device and the needed control infrastructure could be built for less than $100 million and launched for about the same.
> OMV is not tether-based, btw. (I work with the guys that designed it, and they are always
> pulling out the little models and such. *Grin*) In any case, all you need is surface area, so if
> you wanted to do something fancy, consider just hooking on a big inflatable sail dohicky - cheap, low mass, and effective.
>
>If you have the power to spare for a tether, I'd wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just use
>electric propulsion; for a few hundred watts and a few tens of kilograms (and a year or two) you
>can deorbit most anything.
The rest of your post was insightful, but these are critical errors you've just made.
A OMV stands for a 'Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle'. It is not a reference to TRWs OMV design for the Shuttle C program, or any other specific vehicle. It is a description of a vehicle that maneuvers things in orbit. That's all.
Second, the entire purpose of this design is to avoid using propellent entirely. A tether based system can stay up as long as needed and keep working for years, de-orbiting hundreds of satellites and shrouds before wearing out. If you used an ion drive, you would quickly expend your propellent after de-orbiting maybe one or two payloads. It's foolish, and hardly economical. That's the wonder of tethers: As long as you have power, you have movement.
Tethers are potentially the most important development in space travel since the fuel cell. No joke. No other propulsion system exists that can provide the thrust in LEO of a tether, nor does and device lend itself anywhere near as good to ease of deployment. A solar sail is a fanciful idea for this purpose and would be quickly destroyed by debris before it put out enough thrust to move a single kilogram out of orbit, and it would be unbelievably difficult to build and deploy for this purpose.
Tethers have limited utility for roping asteroids. Unless you haven't noticed, there aren't any asteroids orbiting in low earth orbit, the place where electromagnetic tethers are effective.
The idea is to store the payload shrouds and dead satellites in a place where LEO industry can use them later. Perhaps the use they'll pick will be constructing devices to mine asteroids, but they need to get there first.
Are you absolutely without clue to the nature of energy management? Each pound of metal hauled into orbit costs between $5,000 and $20,000 each. The reason to use an orbital junkyard is to have access to metal without needing to pay to bring it all up.
A $.01 cup of water in Oregon is worth a lot more in the middle of the Sahara, pal.
Asteroids and the moon are the next step, of course, but you need to get to them before you can exploit them.
...unless you're suggesting all the commercial astro/cosmonauts just ride out to the asteroids on smelters with nothing but their spacesuits on. This isn't a ride to the local Dairy Queen where you can hang off the side of a truck.
Absolutely. With tethers, speed isn't the name of the game, at least not yet.
Either way, the only energy that needs to be expended is in getting to the object. A good sized tether ought to be able to move the OMV itself around with impunity. Once you attach to the object, size isn't an issue, you just start expending power and let the conductive tether gobble up electricity in exchange for kinetic energy. Use a portion of the power to spin up some flywheels to fierce RPMs, then use that concentrated power to boost your OMV out of the death orbit it put the junk into. Find another satellite, rinse, and repeat.
Something cool about tether technology is that junking the stuff isn't the only option. Create a legal 'Junkyard' area in space that's at high altitude. Instead of de-orbiting satellites/discarded shrouds/interstages/etc, boost them all up to a parking orbit of sorts in the legislated 'Junk Yard'. There are orbits just one or two hundred miles higher that have lifetimes measured in decades because of lowered atmospheric density.
The junk yard concept is for the optimist that imagines a future where humanity will gratefully harvest the junkyard for raw materials in the future. The de-orbit option is for those seeking the easiest and relatively hassle-free option of fire and forget.
The answer to removing large pieces of junk from orbit is to send up a couple of tether-based OMVs to do it automatically.
Space tethers are basically conductive cables, maybe a mile long or more, that are suspended out of an orbiting vehicle. Because of gravitational gradients, the cable will align itself to be pointing down towards the ground. As the cables pass through the Earth's magnetic field, they convert velocity for energy, producing lots of electricity. It's like an electric motor.
Normally.
If, on the other hand, you run power through the cable, you trade electricity for velocity. Again, like an electric motor.
The end result is that you have a method of altering your orbit that doesn't require expending propellents. This technology will be installed on the Mir space station late this year or next, ending the reliance on Progress boosters.
Anyhow, the reason I'm bringing this up is that this is the key to removing big debris.
You launch an orbital maneuvering vehicle that uses this technology. It would rendezvous with the piece of debris and turn on the orbital brake (eg, use the tether to start generating electricity) until the object was on a re-entry vector, then it would detach and use the tether to raise itself to the orbit of the next piece of large debris.
The process could be mostly automated and wouldn't require expending propellent. Gyros would provide attitude control (and maybe energy storage for nighttime passes).
Of course, this only takes care of the stuff that's big enough to be tracked.
On the positive side, the smaller an item is, the quicker it de-orbits due to atmospheric friction. For example, a cloud of dust (or sand) would de-orbit from LEO within a couple days. It's all about altitude.
First, you might want to take him out of that box in the basement and get rid of the leather hood. I imagine the skin conditions attached to prolonged box-storage are pretty deplorable...
> I think it's probably the best animated movie I've seen since Mulan
You're not exactly aiming at the stars here with that comparison.
I think that Titan A.E's baddest flaw was that it wasn't exciting. Everything that happened was predictable, and I mean everything. It was like watching a clip-show of all the other movies in this genre I've ever seen.
Worst of all, the movie didn't take any chances. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't really good either.
The best thing that can be said for it is that it's better than 'All Dogs Go to Heaven', but only because there's more death. Sure, I liked it when Charlie Barkin bought a couple keys of Heroin to sell to the Itchy and the rest of the stray dogs, but it too wasn't that exciting, just like Titan AE.
The damning thing about Titan AE is that it's forgettable.
On a product I worked on until recently, encryption selection was done using the following formula:
(sensitivity of data)+(ease of implementation) = (arbitrary decision about how we felt about securing stuff)
An example, we would use a form of blowfish encryption for a configuration file that's super easy to decrypt. Because of the nature of the product, the content would be sniffable when being sent upstream anyhow, so we made the encryption just strong enough to resist a notepad surfer.
On another product, however, we were sending up private data. Now, it was usual registration data during install, but we had real privacy concerns, so we looked at our options and chose SSL because it was easy on our part to implement, but unlikely to be easilly sniffed/decrypted.
Conclusion of ramble: Whatever's easiest to implement with some allowance for the dsecurity of the data.
Security through obfuscation is coming to a close, so this method won't work much longer.
This is wrong for so many reasons.
The total mass of all cargo placed into space is less than maybe 2 or 3 million lbs. And that includes the fuel in the upper stages that for the most part ends up back on earth again. The lower stages of course don't count because they never leave the planet.
Sound like a lot? It aint. Each day, over one hundred tons of mass (in the form of meteors, solar ejecta, etc) arrive on Earth, adding to its weight.
Eg, Earth gets stocked with the equivalent mass of 50 years of space travel in a week. And this continues each day.
Asteroid Mining can save our planet by putting cheaper access to the resources we need in hand, allowing us to get materials without ploughing up the land and destroying wilderness. If anything, resource friendly environmentalists should be 100% behind space exploration, because it's the most reallistic way to save the planet.
$11,000? Yikes!
LCD is gonna be cool. My dream is for a hardware standard puts 12" LCD displays in the stores for cheap, like $100 or less. Each of these LCD displays could function as an independant monitor, but the coolness would be that you could take the plastic edges off and expose the LCD going all the way to the edge, and there would be an androgynous connector running down each side that could plug into another identical LCD. Take four of these and plug them together in a square, and you have a 24"x24" monitor. You could go out and buy a couple panels every paycheck until eventually you were satisfied with the size or had a monitor-wall to run Quake on.
This would work for TVs as well, and could really make it easier to get big TVs without needing to spend so much money at once.
Just an idea...
I read about these in March. Here's some info from then that might have changed in the interim:
$1,538 for a QikDrive1 with up to 1GB storage.
$9,840 for a QikDrive8 with up to 8GB storage.
The QikDrive is on a PCI card, but has its own internal power supply for data security. Presumably to keep the drives from being wiped by a system power failure.
They support between 15,000 and 20,000 I/O transactions per second (versus 200-300 for Winchester-style drives)
Of course, my favorite space commercialization scheme remains the following picture:
http://www.hallert.net/images/S huttleBudgetCuts.jpg
The Atheos kernel is written from scratch and supports SMP, loadable device drivers and file systems, and provides threads and processes with the means to communicate amonst themselves with ease. From a cached Atheos site: "Threads can communicate through message ports, shared memory, posix signals, sempaphores, ppes, pty's, TCP/IP, and more".
The GUI isn't repackaged X. It's a native GUI that is more integrated with the OS that has a multithreaded GUI system that is more high-level. More things in the GUI are defined by the OS than the apps, leading to more consistency (ala Mac & Windows).
Here's a link to a couple Atheos related software pages:
http://www.latech.edu/~jta001/AtheOS/
http://www.coolcateditor.dk/Download.asp
It's easy. The correctly rendered page with have the background colors showing through the background of the test PNG. If the background of the test PNG is gray or black or otherwise NOT a variant of the color displayed as the background of the cell the PNG is in, it's rendering incorrectly.
I could see it now, cruising around newsgroups and SMTP servers looking for spam with my Boba Fett outfit on. People could contact bounty hunters and offer added incentives for giving the personal data of the spammer to them first before passing it along to the government.
Spammed person: (getting ready to freeze the offending account and dispose of the spammer)
Me: He's no good to me dead.
Spammed person: (pausing) Don't worry, you will be properly compensated.
Spammer: (screaming as the torture began) Aaaaaaaarrrggh! They didn't opt out, they didn't opt-AAAAAAAAAAAAHH! NO! Not my e-mail finger-GNNNAARGH!
I like it.
This is fascinating, it's almost as if NSI was deliberately trying to alienate its customers. What extraordinary steps will they take next to scare us away? Perhaps they'll start knocking down doors in the middle of the night to shake us down for 'domain protection money' or switch domains around once in a while for fun.
NSI is like a bunch of thugs. As long as they were the only game in town, they did brisk business and just performed their function as licensed. Now that there's competition, they're throwing their weight around like a nervous drug pusher who's worried about someone else moving in on his block.
I wish there was something we could do to avoid the NSI built infrastructure, but even their competitors need to work with NSI to get domains registered and acknowledged.
Where's our famed net-anarchy when we need it?
The boys do have some adult supervision: Robin Miller, managing editor of all Andover sites, makes sure that Slashdot's articles are grammatical and libel-free, and not spelled with the numeric-letter mixture ("D00D!!! LET'S RIP SOME WAREZZZ!") that characterizes much geek typing.
This is idiotic! The numeric-letter mix that this article refers to is exclusively the use of nitwit Hacker-wannabes.
Also, what's the deal with Slashdot having 'adult supervision'. Que? Malda and Bates are both 23, not pre-teens. 23 is middle-aged if not nearing retirement in the Internet-Economy.
This article is obviously written by an artifact of the old media. It's kinda funny, if you think about it, a relic from the old media writing a semi-accurate article about the new media... A question, is the condescending tone part of an unconcious defense mechanism?