Apart from the problems with reduced efficacy in the wet, these things support tiny forces compared to the friction that a car tire gives you.
I suspect the contacts need to be *very* close to the surface (they work like a capacitor), so you're going to lose most of the advantage of having your tire made of nice, thick, flexible rubber.
There's a technology available today for improving your car's road-holding ability: wider wheels. Most people aren't willing to bear the extra maintenance costs, or the reduced mileage.
Something to keep in mind when sending data and key via separate means, is most physical transfer mechanisms are tamper evident, not tamper proof.
If you send the password in a secure envelope by registered post (or by hand), and the recipient receives it, you know there's a pretty good chance no-one else saw it.
There is nothing, however, stopping someone from intercepting it, and keeping it (although you will find out about it)
It seems obvious, I know, but the logical conclusion is that you should always send the password *before* you send the data. That way, you can confirm that the password made it intact before letting the encrypted data out over an unsafe channel.
Short of securing the data channel (and all the key exchange problems that come with it), you don't know if someone has intercepted a copy of the encrypted data. If they then intercept the password as well, it's too late to protect the data.
The actual object is only 71,000 tonnes, not 1.1 million tonnes as claimed by TFA.
The energy of any possible collision with Earth is "1.1 million tons of TNT", which is about 4.6 petajoules. I expect the energy required to pull it into orbit would be in that order of magnitude, as you'd basically be trying to slow the thing down as it got near us.
I'm not sure how you many nukes it would take to apply that much kinetic energy to an object in space, but the biggest nukes can release in the order of 2 petajoules of heat.
I'm not sure that I'd want an object that size -- without any means of correcting its orbit -- hovering over my house though.
Interestingly, TFA incorrectly says the asteroid is 1.1 million tonnes. They seem to be confused with the energy of any potential impact, as measured in tons of TNT.
I don't know about you, but I get a little concerned when science reporters get stuff like that wrong.
It's not just in the media, either. They emailed us all the following:
Hi
Because you are a valued seller we'd like to let you know about some changes to eBay.com.au that are going to make our marketplace an even safer place for you to buy and sell.
These changes will be introduced in two stages: From 21 May you must offer PayPal on all your listings as well as currently permitted payment methods.
From 17 June you will only be able to offer PayPal on your listings and pay on pick up (i.e.paid for when picking up the item).
Pay on pick up can only be offered in conjunction with PayPal. No other payment methods will be permitted. A small number of exclusions will apply to these changes.
Get the lowdown on how these changes will affect you. "These changes may have some significant implications for how you trade on eBay.com.au, which is why we're organising a series of Q & A events to discuss them with you in person.
Come along and hear from me about why eBay is making these changes. We'll have a number of eBay and PayPal staff available to answer your questions and explain the changes in more detail. We are also conducting a series of online workshops about the changes throughout April and May, so keep your eye on the announcement board for details."
1. Unlike entering a patcth of ice, you don't know when you cross the event horizon. Nothing looks any different as you cross that line, however you are now destined to keep falling.
2. Even if you could somehow measure the distance to the event horizon, it wouldn't help you. You're assuming that if two objects are distance Z apart, and they each move closer by distance X, that they are now separated by Z - 2X. It's a damn good approximation in our lives, but it's not the case when you get gravity involved. The more gravity, the bigger the discrepancy.
No, it means that it can't be measured. You are still thinking of space as Euclidean. Whenever you bring gravity into the equation, space curves, and you can't measure it with a ruler.
That I don't fully understand (IANAQP), but this link gets me part of the way.
In short, and with suitable hand waving, absorbing a positive energy regular particle of a virtual pair without absorbing the negative energy particle would break the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
From the objects' points of view, they don't know when they cross the event horizon.
From an observer's point of view, the objects never reach the event horizon. They just appear to move slower and slower.
Black hole's really do mess up any concept of Euclidean distance. The best way of picturing it, is that it is a hole in space-time; for all intents and purposes, the space inside the event horizon simply doesn't exist.
Sorry, but no. It's called black hole evaporation, and black holes lose energy (hence mass), through this mechanism.
What you've described is a way that energy can be created from nowhere. If what you suggest were right, we'd all be doomed, as any small black hole would get bigger through Hawking radiation, and would then consume everything.
There is a problem with that: It assumes that space is euclidean, which we know is not the case when strong gravitational fields are involved.
The radius that is reported is kind of like the calipers you're talking about: We can theoretically see an arc of space being "blacked out" where the black hole is, and we just do a bit of trig to work out how "big" that looks.
For all intents and purposes though, there's no space inside that event horizon. It doesn't actually make sense to measure the distance across it, just as it doesn't make sense to divide by zero.
Is there a theoretical way to revert a singularity? In theory, they radiate themselves out of existence over time through Hawking Radiation. They constantly release energy, which reduces their mass. If they lose more mass than they swallow, then their event horizon will shrink. Eventually, there'll be no mass left, and no black hole.
Of course, cars also come with this thing called a "license plate", which can also be tracked remotely and wirelessly.
I don't know about "wirelessly" unless you are talking about people using their eyeballs. On Australian highways (In my state of New South Wales, at least), we have special cameras located on overpasses and things every couple of hundred kilometres or so. These most definitely detect where the number plates are in the image, cut them out, perform OCR, then record the ones that are on trucks. It's used to enforce the laws preventing truckers from driving too far without sleep, and constant speeding.
These cameras have been around for over 10 years, and I assure you, are highly accurate.
That's a bad analogy; Microsoft releases and documents APIs just for that purpose - just look at MSDN sometime.
No, the post I responded to said that if you require X for your application to run, then your work is a derivative of X. That's obviously not true. A derivative work is when you take their work and change it. It's got nothing to do with MS releasing their APIs. Regardless, there's nothing stopping you from calling the APIs that aren't documented in MSDN (like SysInternals stuff did).
The equivalent to what you said would be Blizzard suing someone over writing a LUA script, which they aren't - somebody hijacked their entire program.
The "suing Apple and Microsoft because their operating systems copy the game to RAM" is a non sequitur. You bought the license to do that - run a copy in RAM. You did not buy a license to run two copies so you can cheat the game - on top of violate the EULA.
Are their really two copies running? The article doesn't seem to suggest that. Regardless, that's a licensing issue, not a copyright issue. I run multiple copies of lots of applications in different memory spaces - if I open calc.exe in vim, I may well be in breach of Microsoft's license, but the Vim project is certainly not responsible for any infringement. If vim included a copy of code from calc.exe, then that would be a different story entirely.
To execute binaries, they need to be copied to RAM. If you don't want your code executed, then don't release it. If you want it only executed in a certain way, then say so in your licence (separate to copyright). If you don't want people calling your private interfaces, then don't publish them in DLLs.
Granted, it would be easier to go after the individual players - but better to attack the problem at its source. I have zero sympathy for people who spend money to cheat at a game, nor do I have sympathy for the $millionaire who makes it all possible.
I have no sympathy for the cheats or the cheat facilitators either, but you can't make up new rules to stop them.
Don't be silly. If I write an application that requires Windows, I'm not making a derivative work, and Microsoft can't sue me for requiring windows.
The copyright claim comes from the fact that WoW is run by the bot software, so "copies" the WoW binaries to RAM. That's obviously not going to hold water: what are they going to do next? Sue Apple and Microsoft because their operating systems copy the game to RAM to run it?
The reason that Australia is not in the running is that this datacenter will mostly serve continental Asia, so it makes sense to put it in continental Asia.
Yep - and the connection between Australia and continental Asia is pathetic. Given a list of mirrors that exclude Australia, Australians will almost always go for the US mirror over any Asian mirror - and rightly so.
And it makes sense when you think about it. Even though there's a huge amount of trade between Australia and Asia, the cultural barriers tend to reduce the flow of information. English speaking Australians might go to Asian sites to grab the latest drivers for our hardware, but that's about it. The vast majority of our non-AU information consumption comes from the US and to a lesser extent, the UK.
The article most certainly hasn't glossed over it. They discuss the cost per kWh for PV cells right near the start (when they're talking about the efficiency). The cost of PV is quite easy to calculate. Divide the cost of a cell by the energy it will produce in it's lifetime, and factor in the ongoing maintenance costs.
For FF, most of the kWh cost is from the fuel - the capital cost can be amortised across a very long time. For PV, it's almost entirely capital, which doesn't amortise as well. After 25 years, you replace the cells, and start the cost cycle again.
A large amount of [nuclear material] in, you guessed it, countries we don't get on so well with.
Uhh - are you for real?
Yeah, it's a shame the US doesn't get along so well with the country that holds about 40% of the world's uranium ore deposits. It's a good thing they get along so well with those who control the world's fossil fuels.
Slashdot Mirror
Apart from the problems with reduced efficacy in the wet, these things support tiny forces compared to the friction that a car tire gives you.
I suspect the contacts need to be *very* close to the surface (they work like a capacitor), so you're going to lose most of the advantage of having your tire made of nice, thick, flexible rubber.
There's a technology available today for improving your car's road-holding ability: wider wheels. Most people aren't willing to bear the extra maintenance costs, or the reduced mileage.
Something to keep in mind when sending data and key via separate means, is most physical transfer mechanisms are tamper evident, not tamper proof.
If you send the password in a secure envelope by registered post (or by hand), and the recipient receives it, you know there's a pretty good chance no-one else saw it.
There is nothing, however, stopping someone from intercepting it, and keeping it (although you will find out about it)
It seems obvious, I know, but the logical conclusion is that you should always send the password *before* you send the data. That way, you can confirm that the password made it intact before letting the encrypted data out over an unsafe channel.
Short of securing the data channel (and all the key exchange problems that come with it), you don't know if someone has intercepted a copy of the encrypted data. If they then intercept the password as well, it's too late to protect the data.
I think your argument would be more convincing if you had any idea what a verb was :-|.
The actual object is only 71,000 tonnes, not 1.1 million tonnes as claimed by TFA.
The energy of any possible collision with Earth is "1.1 million tons of TNT", which is about 4.6 petajoules. I expect the energy required to pull it into orbit would be in that order of magnitude, as you'd basically be trying to slow the thing down as it got near us.
I'm not sure how you many nukes it would take to apply that much kinetic energy to an object in space, but the biggest nukes can release in the order of 2 petajoules of heat.
I'm not sure that I'd want an object that size -- without any means of correcting its orbit -- hovering over my house though.
Interestingly, TFA incorrectly says the asteroid is 1.1 million tonnes. They seem to be confused with the energy of any potential impact, as measured in tons of TNT.
I don't know about you, but I get a little concerned when science reporters get stuff like that wrong.
There's two different points here:
1. Unlike entering a patcth of ice, you don't know when you cross the event horizon. Nothing looks any different as you cross that line, however you are now destined to keep falling.
2. Even if you could somehow measure the distance to the event horizon, it wouldn't help you. You're assuming that if two objects are distance Z apart, and they each move closer by distance X, that they are now separated by Z - 2X. It's a damn good approximation in our lives, but it's not the case when you get gravity involved. The more gravity, the bigger the discrepancy.
No, it means that it can't be measured. You are still thinking of space as Euclidean. Whenever you bring gravity into the equation, space curves, and you can't measure it with a ruler.
That I don't fully understand (IANAQP), but this link gets me part of the way.
In short, and with suitable hand waving, absorbing a positive energy regular particle of a virtual pair without absorbing the negative energy particle would break the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
From the objects' points of view, they don't know when they cross the event horizon.
From an observer's point of view, the objects never reach the event horizon. They just appear to move slower and slower.
Black hole's really do mess up any concept of Euclidean distance. The best way of picturing it, is that it is a hole in space-time; for all intents and purposes, the space inside the event horizon simply doesn't exist.
Sorry, but no. It's called black hole evaporation, and black holes lose energy (hence mass), through this mechanism.
What you've described is a way that energy can be created from nowhere. If what you suggest were right, we'd all be doomed, as any small black hole would get bigger through Hawking radiation, and would then consume everything.
There is a problem with that: It assumes that space is euclidean, which we know is not the case when strong gravitational fields are involved.
The radius that is reported is kind of like the calipers you're talking about: We can theoretically see an arc of space being "blacked out" where the black hole is, and we just do a bit of trig to work out how "big" that looks.
For all intents and purposes though, there's no space inside that event horizon. It doesn't actually make sense to measure the distance across it, just as it doesn't make sense to divide by zero.
What's even more interesting, is what they think happens if systems like these collide. The results of the simulation can be found here.
Err - isn't it a tyre unique ID? If I get new tyres, surely I won't need to have them specially coded to my car :-/.
... and I can stuff beans up my nose if I want. But I don't.
I don't know about "wirelessly" unless you are talking about people using their eyeballs. On Australian highways (In my state of New South Wales, at least), we have special cameras located on overpasses and things every couple of hundred kilometres or so. These most definitely detect where the number plates are in the image, cut them out, perform OCR, then record the ones that are on trucks. It's used to enforce the laws preventing truckers from driving too far without sleep, and constant speeding.
These cameras have been around for over 10 years, and I assure you, are highly accurate.
That's a bad analogy; Microsoft releases and documents APIs just for that purpose - just look at MSDN sometime.
No, the post I responded to said that if you require X for your application to run, then your work is a derivative of X. That's obviously not true. A derivative work is when you take their work and change it. It's got nothing to do with MS releasing their APIs. Regardless, there's nothing stopping you from calling the APIs that aren't documented in MSDN (like SysInternals stuff did).The equivalent to what you said would be Blizzard suing someone over writing a LUA script, which they aren't - somebody hijacked their entire program.
The "suing Apple and Microsoft because their operating systems copy the game to RAM" is a non sequitur. You bought the license to do that - run a copy in RAM. You did not buy a license to run two copies so you can cheat the game - on top of violate the EULA.
Are their really two copies running? The article doesn't seem to suggest that. Regardless, that's a licensing issue, not a copyright issue. I run multiple copies of lots of applications in different memory spaces - if I open calc.exe in vim, I may well be in breach of Microsoft's license, but the Vim project is certainly not responsible for any infringement. If vim included a copy of code from calc.exe, then that would be a different story entirely.To execute binaries, they need to be copied to RAM. If you don't want your code executed, then don't release it. If you want it only executed in a certain way, then say so in your licence (separate to copyright). If you don't want people calling your private interfaces, then don't publish them in DLLs.
Granted, it would be easier to go after the individual players - but better to attack the problem at its source. I have zero sympathy for people who spend money to cheat at a game, nor do I have sympathy for the $millionaire who makes it all possible.
I have no sympathy for the cheats or the cheat facilitators either, but you can't make up new rules to stop them.Don't be silly. If I write an application that requires Windows, I'm not making a derivative work, and Microsoft can't sue me for requiring windows.
The copyright claim comes from the fact that WoW is run by the bot software, so "copies" the WoW binaries to RAM. That's obviously not going to hold water: what are they going to do next? Sue Apple and Microsoft because their operating systems copy the game to RAM to run it?
Yep - and the connection between Australia and continental Asia is pathetic. Given a list of mirrors that exclude Australia, Australians will almost always go for the US mirror over any Asian mirror - and rightly so.
And it makes sense when you think about it. Even though there's a huge amount of trade between Australia and Asia, the cultural barriers tend to reduce the flow of information. English speaking Australians might go to Asian sites to grab the latest drivers for our hardware, but that's about it. The vast majority of our non-AU information consumption comes from the US and to a lesser extent, the UK.
The article most certainly hasn't glossed over it. They discuss the cost per kWh for PV cells right near the start (when they're talking about the efficiency). The cost of PV is quite easy to calculate. Divide the cost of a cell by the energy it will produce in it's lifetime, and factor in the ongoing maintenance costs.
For FF, most of the kWh cost is from the fuel - the capital cost can be amortised across a very long time. For PV, it's almost entirely capital, which doesn't amortise as well. After 25 years, you replace the cells, and start the cost cycle again.
Uhh - are you for real?
Yeah, it's a shame the US doesn't get along so well with the country that holds about 40% of the world's uranium ore deposits. It's a good thing they get along so well with those who control the world's fossil fuels.
Haven't you seen any sci fi movies? To be intelligent enough to travel across space, they must be willing to shower us with gifts of love and candy*.
(*) "Love and candy" in alien worlds usually takes the form of nukes and anti-matter bombs, but that's beside the point.
Learn to use a fucking library, moron.
There was a pretty interesting article in New Scientist in June that discussed the potential for "other" forms of life, and considered the environment that commonly proposed life bases would require: http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19426071.200-life--but-not-as-we-know-it.html (subscription required)
Non-carbon-based life has some pretty difficult-to-overcome hurdles.