Compression in an audio sense means reducing the dynamic range of a signal - i.e. making everything a similar volume. Compression in a file sense means applying an algorithm to make a data set use up less space.
Modern audio CDs are often compressed in an audio sense, (meaning they have limited dynamic range) but are not compressed in a file sense, i.e. 1 minute of music still takes the same number of bits it has always taken. This is very important, 1 minute of content on an audio CD always takes the same number of bits - it is not compressed in a file sense. You may take an audio CD and apply file compression to it (e.g. MP3) but that does not mean that the CD is compressed.
Now were you to have a song which you had an audio compressed version of and then ran the uncompressed and the compressed through an algorithm such as MP3, then I'm willing to agree that the audio compressed file would compress/encode to a smaller file size than the none compressed version.
But that does not mean that compression in the 2 uses being used here are the same. In the same way you would not confuse "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse" with "I helped my uncle jack off a horse", please be aware that the same word can have totally different meaning in different contexts.
To directly reference your post using 3 bits of 16 is not compressing in the encode sense because the 16 bits are all still there taking up disc space, and on the CD format forever have to be there. e.g. if I set every MSB in an ascii file to 0, the file size stays the same even if I have removed all distinction between upper and lower case and therefore reduced the information content. This is the difference between information and data.
And this is not just an audiophile issue, listen to an album such as californication and hopefully you'll hear the artefacts clearly as the drums are clipped and there is very little dynamic range across the album. If not, then I'd suggest even a £30 set of headphones will fix that problem.
The most recent one was a sun computer I was using in 2005 - I believe it was a recent (at the time) install too. The whole problem was one of backwards compatibility - they had to maintain backwards compatibility with the existing password system which could probably trace its roots back to the 70s. It may even be the case that this is still true - but have no idea how to prove it since all my current servers are linux based:-)
I pay attention to it simply because it is the system dictated by work and it won't allow you to use the password if it thinks it is a bad one - the above example is a genuine one that I wanted to use a longer more secure password and couldn't because it forbid me and rejected it.
The main reason to not use sentence length passwords is _stupid_ yet common password strength checkers do a dictionary check.
e.g. sd%$yhIQ is apparently a better password than sd%$yhIQSilly_Stuff_ouT_of_the_wAy. Anyone who thinks this is the case - like just about every password strength checker I have ever come across - should be shot.
Which to me is nuts! Also older unixs ignore anything longer than an 8 character password, you are free to have a longer one, thay'll just let you in regardless of what you type for character 9+. It's been about 3 years since I cam across one of these, but I'm sure lots of company password schemes are based around the lowest common denominator.
Doubt it: For a start anyone worth their salt would have set up the bios correctly and you can't do the exploit you've just cited, hell I can't even do that exploit on any of the desktop work PCs I've used(3 separate companies), never mind one of the servers... Secondly if you're about to say - swap out the hard drive then you're still wrong - it takes a fair amount of time to swap out a hard drive and I bet that would be noticed. Now maybe they are hot plug drives in the server, but good luck getting a properly set up raid card to boot from a new drive without appropriate passwords. So you're back on plugging in your laptop/wap to the network port, but again just about any secure network will be MAC address locked, so again that does you no good.
While i agree a physical compromise as they have described is a serious fault, it is one layer in what should be a multi-layer security model.
Well even a part failure is an engineering failure in a space environment - i.e. if the part failed because it wasn't manufactured to tolerance, then why was this missed; If it was manufactured as designed, why was the design wrong? The fact it is a different side to me Either way they need to understand why this failed, how to fix it, and how to make sure this doesn't happen again.
i.e. by definition, someone somewhere screwed up - what the concern needs to be is why this screwup was missed and how to make sure a similar screw-up does not happen again. (FWIW AFAIAC this doesn't mean firing people, after all if this problem costs a billion to fix, then a billion has been invested in that person's education, you can't afford to fire him:-)
I can't imagine the shavings coming back being a problem; the atmospheric friction already decelerates the space station so this should have a much larger effect on any shavings.
The theory has not been proven. No theory can ever be proven. It could be disproved tomorrow if we observed some phenomenon that was at odds with the theory.
Relativity has however made lots of predictions which have withstood experimental testing and therefore has allowed us to better understand the world around us. It has certainly not been proven, it's predictions have been shown to hold out under most experimental conditions (although it does have a few flaws - e.g. http://members.aol.com/carmam1534/Hollings.html seems to have a few comments).
The problem as i understand it with string theory is that it doesn't make that many predictions that we can currently test. So it is a hard theory to disprove. Also because it tells us about phenomenon that we cannot observe it doesn't help us understand the universe that much better. By a strict definition then it is not a good theory because we can't test it, nore does it make useful predictions, however as I understand it is still a developing field so this is not too much of a concern. I do wonder though why so many people are interested in it...
"What are you all talking about? Won't this be the first time the US gets to the moon?"
Maybe you're going for funny here, but like many/. geeks I'm fed up of this stupidity
You don't think NASA landed on the moon? Please state which of these events did not occur: * The Saturn V was built by thousands of workers * The Saturn V was erected and watched by millions * The astronauts entered the Saturn V * Saturn V took off * Saturn V's trajectory was tracked both by other governments (who may or may not have cried foul if it was being faked) and by many amateur Astronomers - who would have cried foul. * Apollo's further progress could and was tracked by a beacon it emitted * Part of Apollo (possibly containing the astronauts) landed on the moon * Objects (such as mirrors) were left on the moon * Materials were brought back from the moon * Everyone returns home in time for tea and crumpets.
That's the general gist, what about some of the other issues. Please state which of the following you don't believe is true:
* Smaller rockets made it into orbit * Larger rockets project things out of orbit * Rockets (Gemini) have taken people into orbit * Larger rockets still (Saturn V) have taken people into lunar orbit * Robotic probes have been landed on the moon * Robotic probes have landed on other planets (Venus / Mars) * Saturn V is sufficiently larger than Gemini, that if Gemini could put people in orbit, Saturn V could take then to the moon. * The shuttle currently launches and makes it to LEO
TBH I agree I'm left to elements of this being elements of faith. I wasn't alive at the time, so when thousands of people say they saw it take off, I'm inclined to believe them. Or was the takeoff faked too, because a machine of that size and power could not be built?
Frankly I'm left with the situation that on a hairline margin NASA did one thing that no-one else could. Just because no-one else could do it, does not mean that they didn't. I believe that if you didn't have proof of artificial satellites (GPS system etc) you'd say the images comming back from Hubble are a hoax too. Without your satellite TV system I'm sure there'd be many people saying that the whole communications satellite is a fake too!
So yes there is belief required, what I want to know is where your belief breaks down and why. FWIW by the definition I'm choosing, it's a matter of faith that i was alive yesterday and not in fact created 10 minutes ago by a hyper intelligent shade of the colour blue!
What is different this time is it is done how things should be. Let me give some examples: * the capsules this time will be a much more friendly environment - just like the shuttle your average school teacher will be able to ride in it. This is very different from the apollo capsules which ran with weird atmosphere capabilities that limited the time you could spend there and were hellish places to work * The capabilities will be much greater - they're not stuck to equitorial landings this time, they can go to the poles too. * The lander will have an airlock - no more depressurising the entire capsule for every moonwalk - sounds a small thing but it is a big improvement in terms of safety and workability. * It's desiged using modern NASA safty requirements - that's a big shift.
Look at it this way, suppose it took 2 years to create the first unix (from spec to first product to customer). Could you in 2 months produce a full unix system to current requirements (starting from a blank-ish sheet with just the specification - no code reuse). I doubt it, yet this is what you are asking nasa to do when you bemoan the fact it is taking a similar length of time to update their design.
Look in this day and age it often takes several years to specify, design and produce a new IC, and that's re-using IP - These guys have a whole system to build pratically from scratch and it is safty critical too! This stuff doesn't happen overnight - well not in any engineering project I'd entrust my life to anyway.
As an example of how expensive and timeconsuming aerospace engineering is take the 787 program $10-12 Billion, and approx 5 years. This is for a slight upgrade to a well established design/aeroframe(some new materials redesign of avionics). I don't think you realise just how hard rocket science is.
Nope it's more than that, the RIAA has literally got it's cake and is eating it. The case states (apparently) that not only can they collect revenue from ringtones without paying the artists, but that the ringtones would still be protected by copyright.
From TFA: "what the RIAA actually won in the case... was instead the right to collect money for ringtones without distributing those fees to the artists they represent. There was no establishing that ringtones are not protected intellectual property, so the RIAA will continue collecting royalty fees, because distributing songs or portions of songs requires mechanical rights. Playing a ringtone might also--in the mind of the RIAA and the letter of the law--require performing rights."
All this seems to say is that the RIAA can prevent you from creating ringtones and can create them without paying the artists. Every claim they ever made about being there to protect the rights and the income of the artist has just been blown out of the window.
From TFA "Apple makes very little from sales of music in iTunes; the vast majority of revenues are funneled back to the record companies, which then devise how to avoid paying their talent and keep as much as they can."
Looks like the author of the article agrees with you. Even if the article does seem as biased as a slashdot poster...
"It's basically a law that makes you guilty of "breaking and entering" into your own home. It's worse than redundant." Bad analogy!
If I owned the contents of the DVD under copyright law, then I could do anything I wanted with what I owned, e.g. I could make copies of it - but copyright law prevents me from doing this. I don't own the contents of the DVD in the same manner as I own a house, therefore bad analogy.
The DMCA has no real parallel, it is an act making it illegal to perform activities that may in some circumstances be against the law. It's almost (but not quite) like: * banning people from owning replica guns * Banning the possession of lock picks * The ASBO nonsense we have in England * Making it illegal to possess genitalia because they could form part of an act of rape * Placing restrictions on the use of encryption * Restricting all vehicles to a certain performance
But all of those suck as analogies as all except 1 are a reality/currently being put through as legislation... Humm I think I just killed my own argument!
"From my very limited understanding of TCP/IP, routing, and the internet itself, i have gathered that the internet was designed from a sort of "worst case scenario" point of view. it is meant to tolerate and work around slow, unreliable, and possibly hostile links first, and to deliver bits quickly second. what would it be like if we designed the internet today, but with a more "optimistic" approach? i don't know if it would change anything, or if it's even possible, but it would cool to find out."
An easy example of how the current internet is none optimal (as was explained to my by an ex-workmate) is found when you look into windowing used to control bandwidth used. From how he explained to me the current algorithm was designed in the early days of asics and goes: 1) Send first Packet 2) wait for Ack packet 3) make an estimate of available bandwidth 4) send next packet 5) based upon estimate wait appropriate time to send next packet 6) constantly adjust bandwidth usage up/down until the congestion flags found in the ack packets, or file transfer complete.
While this worked great in the days of 3K6 modems, ftp/kermit and a few dozen open connections once for the modern webserver serving goodness knows how many files per second most of the being tiny it is a silly algorithm. A superior one might be: 1) From past experience have a rough idea how fast you can send outgoing files/how much buffering the switch you are connected to has. 2) send file as fast as you possibly can until said buffer is expected to be full/you start getting ACKs back with the congestion bit set. This information could even be shared over multiple connections 3) Profit (as there is less state to maintain and because files immediately start transferring at the fastest possible rate)
Now I know they were doing research into is this would be a good idea, certainly modern routers have much more memory than was assumed in the early days of TCP/IP so seemed to benefit from this algorithm; I assume the japanese one will look at similar things/alternate algorithms. Another easy example is some/many routing algorithms assume low ping time = fast link = high bandwidth link - which is just total rubbish! There seem to be many ways the international Network could be improved (see IPV6 for another obvious example) if the replacement could gain any headway is another question...
Also we all need to be careful about talking about "replacing the internet" since the internet is built of: * Physical links * routers * data link protocols * Session level protocols * Applications * Content * user expectations
while some of these are independent of TCP/IP, many aren't and tunnelling over IP as some have suggested would not help address some of the issues that might be available for improvement (e.g. QOS issues)
Why would FTL have implications for conservation of energy?
As a serious question, I still don't understand why light speed is the limit - my understanding of relativity goes that it starts with the assumption that light is the fastest thing and then moves from there. This is them backed up by all the observations we have, so it is so far an excellent theory. So the thought experiment I like is, suppose there was an intelligent fish that was blind and used sound to communicate. This fish was intelligent enough to develop a theory of relativity based upon sound. All the experiments and observations he could perform would support his assumption that sound was the fastest thing possible. So why would the fish discovering electricity violate the conservation of energy? Why cannot there be signals in nature that do travel faster than light, they just don't occur in any phenomenon that we currently observe.
Now if we can't observe them or any repercussion of them then that's as good as not existing (for the moment). My understanding goes that if entanglement shows some FTL behaviour then that doesn't invalidate relativity, it just shows that relativity isn't a complete description of the entire universe. But we knew that already.
"In theory, the place where you are growing corn or sugar cane was already occupied by CO2-absorbing plants, either natural ones or food-destined ones. If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground."
I would argue that that depends on what you do with the farm, if it is sustainable farm, then I believe you would still be overall neutral.
The error to me comes from people see forests as oxygen sources, which I believe is false, for example I believe that the rainforests are in fact a carbon neutral piece of land.
Lets take a simplified system and consider where the oxygen I breathe comes from and how farming would work. Let's simplify things assume i only eat apples. I buy all my apples from farmer Bob down the road. When an apple is growing the tree is taking water and carbon dioxide (and sunlight) to make sugar, starches and cellulose. this forms the basis of the apple. When I eat the apple my body takes the sugar and starches and reacts this with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and water. All the oxygen I am breathing therefore comes from the crops that have been planted to produce the food I eat.
Now if I am an idiot and cut down some forest and burn it for fuel, and then let what was the forest turn to scrub/desert then the amount of CO2 in the air has increased. Likewise if I drive my car to get to farmer Bob's then the dead Dino that I burn is added to the CO2 in the air. However If I cut down a part of forest to heat my house, and let it grow back as fast as I cut it down, then I am neither adding nor reducing the amount of CO2 in the air (excluding the area that has been cut down and is in the process of re-growing).
If I cut down a forest, burn it, then plant a farm however then I have done a one shot release of Co2 into the air (assuming the farm has a smaller mass than the forest which is likely). However from this point on the farm as a unit (assuming no powered vehicles) by definition becomes a source of oxygen because the plants that it grows are converting carbon dioxide and water into food & oxygen. Alternatively it is a farm that produces fuel and oxygen; either way as long as more energy/food/fuel comes out of the farm than goes in in imported products/fuels then the farm becomes an oxygen source which the forest wasn't.
I don't understand where this concept that forests are oxygen sources comes from. If that were true, then you could not have a stable forest because its mass would be either increasing or decreasing. Now I'm not saying we should cut down forest just to have more farms because supply has to match demand for this to work, and I'd MUCH rather have a forest than a desert, in fact provided everyone is fed and we've got fuelled transport, I'd rather have forest than a farm, but i think one of us here either misunderstands the other, or misunderstands how the biological cycles work here.
Now if it is profitable to do this under current agricultural economic conditions is a question/discussion I don't know much about. However I know from my history classes they used to do this in medieval England with much success. I'm lead to believe even "The greatest story ever mistook for fact" (The Bible) has something to say about this subject too. (Yes I do appreciate the irony of citing that reference here).
So don't mistake 'economic in the current environment' for 'sustainable'.
Not sure about human waste, but 'round my parents house animal waste is routinely flung onto the fields (shit spreaders) from what is collected in the cow sheds without any pre-processing. I'm sure some human waste could be mixed directly into this without any processing - not sure this would scale on one single farm, but if every farm did a little bit it would soon add up.
You don;t have to save the whoile world at once, just everybody do a little better
No arguments there, but as with all things it's a matter of degrees. At one end you let your populace have ICBMs, at the other anything more that a pointy stick is restricted.
The balance seems to fall into 1 of 2 camps (in western society anyway): 1) restrict (rather than ban) anything whose _only_ use is as a weapon. 2) Restrict as above, but allow weapons whose use can be described as predominantly self defensive (e.g. a pistol is probably just as good to scare off a casual mugger - he's just as dead as if you had a machine gun - assuming you can aim).
Getting back to the intent of the law, i understood the second amendment was intended to: 1) Allow a standing malita 2) allow the population to overthrow the government
i don;t see how either of these apply in modern America, because the army/police are too well armed nthese days and allowing the population even more deadly weapons could well lead to a further arms race.
BTW FWIW I've never used anything more than a bb gun, so that possibly explains why I don't get this whole guns as a hobby thing...
That is an urban legend. Pencils are bad because the graphite flakes in free-fall play merry hell with the electronics. The so called space pen article at wikipedia has more info http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_pen
That the urine from it is recycled into potable water?
Also i wonder why it wasn't discussed in the article why the toilet designed for the Space shuttle couldn't be used. I'd hazard a guess that it is an integration issue, the Russian one is designed for integration into a space stations systems, whereas the shuttle one is designed to standalone. Kind of like you have a different toilet in your house vs the one in a camper van.
Ok so I;m a large company and my competitor submits a patent for (the sake of example) a working fusion reactor.
I clearly want to prove that this is an obvious idea so I try and submit prior art for any previous working fusion reactors. Failing to find any, I then try and invalidate the patent in terms of how it is not physically possible. Lets assume i also fail in that.
No matter how much fuss I generate, if i can't find prior art, or demonstrate how it is obvious, or prove it is impossible, then they will get the patent.
So yes the poor patent office clerk will have a ton of spam to wade through, but valid patents will still make it through - I don;t see a problem with this.
*Sigh* The book and the TV show both have him pulling scrabble tiles out of the bag/pouch and exclaiming "6 * 9, 42?", "I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe"
That's the joke - it doesn't make sense - unless you're a maths geek and you do the calculation in base 13. i.e. 6 * 9 = 42 (base 13) = 54 (base 10)
Slashdot Mirror
Concerned I might be feeding the troll here...
Compression in an audio sense means reducing the dynamic range of a signal - i.e. making everything a similar volume.
Compression in a file sense means applying an algorithm to make a data set use up less space.
Modern audio CDs are often compressed in an audio sense, (meaning they have limited dynamic range) but are not compressed in a file sense, i.e. 1 minute of music still takes the same number of bits it has always taken. This is very important, 1 minute of content on an audio CD always takes the same number of bits - it is not compressed in a file sense. You may take an audio CD and apply file compression to it (e.g. MP3) but that does not mean that the CD is compressed.
Now were you to have a song which you had an audio compressed version of and then ran the uncompressed and the compressed through an algorithm such as MP3, then I'm willing to agree that the audio compressed file would compress/encode to a smaller file size than the none compressed version.
But that does not mean that compression in the 2 uses being used here are the same.
In the same way you would not confuse "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse" with "I helped my uncle jack off a horse", please be aware that the same word can have totally different meaning in different contexts.
To directly reference your post using 3 bits of 16 is not compressing in the encode sense because the 16 bits are all still there taking up disc space, and on the CD format forever have to be there. e.g. if I set every MSB in an ascii file to 0, the file size stays the same even if I have removed all distinction between upper and lower case and therefore reduced the information content. This is the difference between information and data.
And this is not just an audiophile issue, listen to an album such as californication and hopefully you'll hear the artefacts clearly as the drums are clipped and there is very little dynamic range across the album. If not, then I'd suggest even a £30 set of headphones will fix that problem.
The most recent one was a sun computer I was using in 2005 - I believe it was a recent (at the time) install too. The whole problem was one of backwards compatibility - they had to maintain backwards compatibility with the existing password system which could probably trace its roots back to the 70s. It may even be the case that this is still true - but have no idea how to prove it since all my current servers are linux based :-)
I pay attention to it simply because it is the system dictated by work and it won't allow you to use the password if it thinks it is a bad one - the above example is a genuine one that I wanted to use a longer more secure password and couldn't because it forbid me and rejected it.
The main reason to not use sentence length passwords is _stupid_ yet common password strength checkers do a dictionary check.
e.g. sd%$yhIQ is apparently a better password than sd%$yhIQSilly_Stuff_ouT_of_the_wAy. Anyone who thinks this is the case - like just about every password strength checker I have ever come across - should be shot.
Which to me is nuts!
Also older unixs ignore anything longer than an 8 character password, you are free to have a longer one, thay'll just let you in regardless of what you type for character 9+. It's been about 3 years since I cam across one of these, but I'm sure lots of company password schemes are based around the lowest common denominator.
Doubt it:
For a start anyone worth their salt would have set up the bios correctly and you can't do the exploit you've just cited, hell I can't even do that exploit on any of the desktop work PCs I've used(3 separate companies), never mind one of the servers...
Secondly if you're about to say - swap out the hard drive then you're still wrong - it takes a fair amount of time to swap out a hard drive and I bet that would be noticed. Now maybe they are hot plug drives in the server, but good luck getting a properly set up raid card to boot from a new drive without appropriate passwords.
So you're back on plugging in your laptop/wap to the network port, but again just about any secure network will be MAC address locked, so again that does you no good.
While i agree a physical compromise as they have described is a serious fault, it is one layer in what should be a multi-layer security model.
oops meant to delete "The fact it is a different side to me"
Sorry
Well even a part failure is an engineering failure in a space environment - i.e. if the part failed because it wasn't manufactured to tolerance, then why was this missed; If it was manufactured as designed, why was the design wrong? The fact it is a different side to me
:-)
Either way they need to understand why this failed, how to fix it, and how to make sure this doesn't happen again.
i.e. by definition, someone somewhere screwed up - what the concern needs to be is why this screwup was missed and how to make sure a similar screw-up does not happen again. (FWIW AFAIAC this doesn't mean firing people, after all if this problem costs a billion to fix, then a billion has been invested in that person's education, you can't afford to fire him
I can't imagine the shavings coming back being a problem; the atmospheric friction already decelerates the space station so this should have a much larger effect on any shavings.
The theory has not been proven. No theory can ever be proven. It could be disproved tomorrow if we observed some phenomenon that was at odds with the theory.
Relativity has however made lots of predictions which have withstood experimental testing and therefore has allowed us to better understand the world around us. It has certainly not been proven, it's predictions have been shown to hold out under most experimental conditions (although it does have a few flaws - e.g. http://members.aol.com/carmam1534/Hollings.html seems to have a few comments).
The problem as i understand it with string theory is that it doesn't make that many predictions that we can currently test. So it is a hard theory to disprove. Also because it tells us about phenomenon that we cannot observe it doesn't help us understand the universe that much better.
By a strict definition then it is not a good theory because we can't test it, nore does it make useful predictions, however as I understand it is still a developing field so this is not too much of a concern. I do wonder though why so many people are interested in it...
"What are you all talking about? Won't this be the first time the US gets to the moon?"
/. geeks I'm fed up of this stupidity
Maybe you're going for funny here, but like many
You don't think NASA landed on the moon? Please state which of these events did not occur:
* The Saturn V was built by thousands of workers
* The Saturn V was erected and watched by millions
* The astronauts entered the Saturn V
* Saturn V took off
* Saturn V's trajectory was tracked both by other governments (who may or may not have cried foul if it was being faked) and by many amateur Astronomers - who would have cried foul.
* Apollo's further progress could and was tracked by a beacon it emitted
* Part of Apollo (possibly containing the astronauts) landed on the moon
* Objects (such as mirrors) were left on the moon
* Materials were brought back from the moon
* Everyone returns home in time for tea and crumpets.
That's the general gist, what about some of the other issues. Please state which of the following you don't believe is true:
* Smaller rockets made it into orbit
* Larger rockets project things out of orbit
* Rockets (Gemini) have taken people into orbit
* Larger rockets still (Saturn V) have taken people into lunar orbit
* Robotic probes have been landed on the moon
* Robotic probes have landed on other planets (Venus / Mars)
* Saturn V is sufficiently larger than Gemini, that if Gemini could put people in orbit, Saturn V could take then to the moon.
* The shuttle currently launches and makes it to LEO
TBH I agree I'm left to elements of this being elements of faith. I wasn't alive at the time, so when thousands of people say they saw it take off, I'm inclined to believe them.
Or was the takeoff faked too, because a machine of that size and power could not be built?
Frankly I'm left with the situation that on a hairline margin NASA did one thing that no-one else could. Just because no-one else could do it, does not mean that they didn't.
I believe that if you didn't have proof of artificial satellites (GPS system etc) you'd say the images comming back from Hubble are a hoax too. Without your satellite TV system I'm sure there'd be many people saying that the whole communications satellite is a fake too!
So yes there is belief required, what I want to know is where your belief breaks down and why.
FWIW by the definition I'm choosing, it's a matter of faith that i was alive yesterday and not in fact created 10 minutes ago by a hyper intelligent shade of the colour blue!
*sigh*
What is different this time is it is done how things should be.
Let me give some examples:
* the capsules this time will be a much more friendly environment - just like the shuttle your average school teacher will be able to ride in it. This is very different from the apollo capsules which ran with weird atmosphere capabilities that limited the time you could spend there and were hellish places to work
* The capabilities will be much greater - they're not stuck to equitorial landings this time, they can go to the poles too.
* The lander will have an airlock - no more depressurising the entire capsule for every moonwalk - sounds a small thing but it is a big improvement in terms of safety and workability.
* It's desiged using modern NASA safty requirements - that's a big shift.
Look at it this way, suppose it took 2 years to create the first unix (from spec to first product to customer). Could you in 2 months produce a full unix system to current requirements (starting from a blank-ish sheet with just the specification - no code reuse). I doubt it, yet this is what you are asking nasa to do when you bemoan the fact it is taking a similar length of time to update their design.
Look in this day and age it often takes several years to specify, design and produce a new IC, and that's re-using IP - These guys have a whole system to build pratically from scratch and it is safty critical too!
This stuff doesn't happen overnight - well not in any engineering project I'd entrust my life to anyway.
As an example of how expensive and timeconsuming aerospace engineering is take the 787 program $10-12 Billion, and approx 5 years. This is for a slight upgrade to a well established design/aeroframe(some new materials redesign of avionics).
I don't think you realise just how hard rocket science is.
Nope it's more than that, the RIAA has literally got it's cake and is eating it. The case states (apparently) that not only can they collect revenue from ringtones without paying the artists, but that the ringtones would still be protected by copyright.
... was instead the right to collect money for ringtones without distributing those fees to the artists they represent. There was no establishing that ringtones are not protected intellectual property, so the RIAA will continue collecting royalty fees, because distributing songs or portions of songs requires mechanical rights. Playing a ringtone might also--in the mind of the RIAA and the letter of the law--require performing rights."
From TFA:
"what the RIAA actually won in the case
All this seems to say is that the RIAA can prevent you from creating ringtones and can create them without paying the artists.
Every claim they ever made about being there to protect the rights and the income of the artist has just been blown out of the window.
From TFA
"Apple makes very little from sales of music in iTunes; the vast majority of revenues are funneled back to the record companies, which then devise how to avoid paying their talent and keep as much as they can."
Looks like the author of the article agrees with you. Even if the article does seem as biased as a slashdot poster...
Fine then, I patent 2 songs, I call them 1 & 0! All further digital media are now derivative works!
If only Foxtrot wasn't prior art...
"It's basically a law that makes you guilty of "breaking and entering" into your own home. It's worse than redundant."
Bad analogy!
If I owned the contents of the DVD under copyright law, then I could do anything I wanted with what I owned, e.g. I could make copies of it - but copyright law prevents me from doing this. I don't own the contents of the DVD in the same manner as I own a house, therefore bad analogy.
The DMCA has no real parallel, it is an act making it illegal to perform activities that may in some circumstances be against the law.
It's almost (but not quite) like:
* banning people from owning replica guns
* Banning the possession of lock picks
* The ASBO nonsense we have in England
* Making it illegal to possess genitalia because they could form part of an act of rape
* Placing restrictions on the use of encryption
* Restricting all vehicles to a certain performance
But all of those suck as analogies as all except 1 are a reality/currently being put through as legislation...
Humm I think I just killed my own argument!
"From my very limited understanding of TCP/IP, routing, and the internet itself, i have gathered that the internet was designed from a sort of "worst case scenario" point of view. it is meant to tolerate and work around slow, unreliable, and possibly hostile links first, and to deliver bits quickly second. what would it be like if we designed the internet today, but with a more "optimistic" approach? i don't know if it would change anything, or if it's even possible, but it would cool to find out."
An easy example of how the current internet is none optimal (as was explained to my by an ex-workmate) is found when you look into windowing used to control bandwidth used. From how he explained to me the current algorithm was designed in the early days of asics and goes:
1) Send first Packet
2) wait for Ack packet
3) make an estimate of available bandwidth
4) send next packet
5) based upon estimate wait appropriate time to send next packet
6) constantly adjust bandwidth usage up/down until the congestion flags found in the ack packets, or file transfer complete.
While this worked great in the days of 3K6 modems, ftp/kermit and a few dozen open connections once for the modern webserver serving goodness knows how many files per second most of the being tiny it is a silly algorithm. A superior one might be:
1) From past experience have a rough idea how fast you can send outgoing files/how much buffering the switch you are connected to has.
2) send file as fast as you possibly can until said buffer is expected to be full/you start getting ACKs back with the congestion bit set. This information could even be shared over multiple connections
3) Profit (as there is less state to maintain and because files immediately start transferring at the fastest possible rate)
Now I know they were doing research into is this would be a good idea, certainly modern routers have much more memory than was assumed in the early days of TCP/IP so seemed to benefit from this algorithm; I assume the japanese one will look at similar things/alternate algorithms.
Another easy example is some/many routing algorithms assume low ping time = fast link = high bandwidth link - which is just total rubbish! There seem to be many ways the international Network could be improved (see IPV6 for another obvious example) if the replacement could gain any headway is another question...
Also we all need to be careful about talking about "replacing the internet" since the internet is built of:
* Physical links
* routers
* data link protocols
* Session level protocols
* Applications
* Content
* user expectations
while some of these are independent of TCP/IP, many aren't and tunnelling over IP as some have suggested would not help address some of the issues that might be available for improvement (e.g. QOS issues)
Do you know which short story that was, I'm sure there's lots of geeks on here who'd love to read it!
Why would FTL have implications for conservation of energy?
As a serious question, I still don't understand why light speed is the limit - my understanding of relativity goes that it starts with the assumption that light is the fastest thing and then moves from there. This is them backed up by all the observations we have, so it is so far an excellent theory.
So the thought experiment I like is, suppose there was an intelligent fish that was blind and used sound to communicate. This fish was intelligent enough to develop a theory of relativity based upon sound. All the experiments and observations he could perform would support his assumption that sound was the fastest thing possible.
So why would the fish discovering electricity violate the conservation of energy?
Why cannot there be signals in nature that do travel faster than light, they just don't occur in any phenomenon that we currently observe.
Now if we can't observe them or any repercussion of them then that's as good as not existing (for the moment). My understanding goes that if entanglement shows some FTL behaviour then that doesn't invalidate relativity, it just shows that relativity isn't a complete description of the entire universe. But we knew that already.
"In theory, the place where you are growing corn or sugar cane was already occupied by CO2-absorbing plants, either natural ones or food-destined ones. If we remove natural forest to plant sugar cane / corn, it's even worse: we're destroying stuff just to get fuel, instead of just taking it from the underground."
I would argue that that depends on what you do with the farm, if it is sustainable farm, then I believe you would still be overall neutral.
The error to me comes from people see forests as oxygen sources, which I believe is false, for example I believe that the rainforests are in fact a carbon neutral piece of land.
Lets take a simplified system and consider where the oxygen I breathe comes from and how farming would work. Let's simplify things assume i only eat apples. I buy all my apples from farmer Bob down the road.
When an apple is growing the tree is taking water and carbon dioxide (and sunlight) to make sugar, starches and cellulose. this forms the basis of the apple. When I eat the apple my body takes the sugar and starches and reacts this with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and water.
All the oxygen I am breathing therefore comes from the crops that have been planted to produce the food I eat.
Now if I am an idiot and cut down some forest and burn it for fuel, and then let what was the forest turn to scrub/desert then the amount of CO2 in the air has increased. Likewise if I drive my car to get to farmer Bob's then the dead Dino that I burn is added to the CO2 in the air.
However If I cut down a part of forest to heat my house, and let it grow back as fast as I cut it down, then I am neither adding nor reducing the amount of CO2 in the air (excluding the area that has been cut down and is in the process of re-growing).
If I cut down a forest, burn it, then plant a farm however then I have done a one shot release of Co2 into the air (assuming the farm has a smaller mass than the forest which is likely). However from this point on the farm as a unit (assuming no powered vehicles) by definition becomes a source of oxygen because the plants that it grows are converting carbon dioxide and water into food & oxygen. Alternatively it is a farm that produces fuel and oxygen; either way as long as more energy/food/fuel comes out of the farm than goes in in imported products/fuels then the farm becomes an oxygen source which the forest wasn't.
I don't understand where this concept that forests are oxygen sources comes from. If that were true, then you could not have a stable forest because its mass would be either increasing or decreasing. Now I'm not saying we should cut down forest just to have more farms because supply has to match demand for this to work, and I'd MUCH rather have a forest than a desert, in fact provided everyone is fed and we've got fuelled transport, I'd rather have forest than a farm, but i think one of us here either misunderstands the other, or misunderstands how the biological cycles work here.
Crop rotation!
Now if it is profitable to do this under current agricultural economic conditions is a question/discussion I don't know much about. However I know from my history classes they used to do this in medieval England with much success. I'm lead to believe even "The greatest story ever mistook for fact" (The Bible) has something to say about this subject too. (Yes I do appreciate the irony of citing that reference here).
So don't mistake 'economic in the current environment' for 'sustainable'.
Not sure about human waste, but 'round my parents house animal waste is routinely flung onto the fields (shit spreaders) from what is collected in the cow sheds without any pre-processing. I'm sure some human waste could be mixed directly into this without any processing - not sure this would scale on one single farm, but if every farm did a little bit it would soon add up.
You don;t have to save the whoile world at once, just everybody do a little better
No arguments there, but as with all things it's a matter of degrees.
At one end you let your populace have ICBMs, at the other anything more that a pointy stick is restricted.
The balance seems to fall into 1 of 2 camps (in western society anyway):
1) restrict (rather than ban) anything whose _only_ use is as a weapon.
2) Restrict as above, but allow weapons whose use can be described as predominantly self defensive (e.g. a pistol is probably just as good to scare off a casual mugger - he's just as dead as if you had a machine gun - assuming you can aim).
Getting back to the intent of the law, i understood the second amendment was intended to:
1) Allow a standing malita
2) allow the population to overthrow the government
i don;t see how either of these apply in modern America, because the army/police are too well armed nthese days and allowing the population even more deadly weapons could well lead to a further arms race.
BTW FWIW I've never used anything more than a bb gun, so that possibly explains why I don't get this whole guns as a hobby thing...
That is an urban legend.
Pencils are bad because the graphite flakes in free-fall play merry hell with the electronics.
The so called space pen article at wikipedia has more info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_pen
That the urine from it is recycled into potable water?
Also i wonder why it wasn't discussed in the article why the toilet designed for the Space shuttle couldn't be used. I'd hazard a guess that it is an integration issue, the Russian one is designed for integration into a space stations systems, whereas the shuttle one is designed to standalone.
Kind of like you have a different toilet in your house vs the one in a camper van.
Can someone be more informative?
Ok so I;m a large company and my competitor submits a patent for (the sake of example) a working fusion reactor.
I clearly want to prove that this is an obvious idea so I try and submit prior art for any previous working fusion reactors. Failing to find any, I then try and invalidate the patent in terms of how it is not physically possible. Lets assume i also fail in that.
No matter how much fuss I generate, if i can't find prior art, or demonstrate how it is obvious, or prove it is impossible, then they will get the patent.
So yes the poor patent office clerk will have a ton of spam to wade through, but valid patents will still make it through - I don;t see a problem with this.
*Sigh*
The book and the TV show both have him pulling scrabble tiles out of the bag/pouch and exclaiming
"6 * 9, 42?",
"I always said there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe"
That's the joke - it doesn't make sense - unless you're a maths geek and you do the calculation in base 13. i.e. 6 * 9 = 42 (base 13) = 54 (base 10)