The problem is, you don't know what the conditions on Mars are, or what could possibly cause you trouble. You engineer and test for worst case, but you also overengineer for what you don't know. It'd suck to get there and find out that, for example, there's a mineral dust that gets into the motors and expands in the daytime, cracking the motors on the first day. So you build everything more sturdy than you THINK they need to be.
Besides, the money to engineer it to last twice as long has got to be dwarfed by launch and operations costs.
One of the team leads called Cartalk a few weeks ago. They asked about building something to clean off dust, and he said they get asked that ALL THE TIME. They looked at a variety of solutions, from windshield-wipers to peel-off stuff to blowing compressed air across it.
In the end, all of the solutions weighed more than just making the photocells 50% bigger to allow for dust build-up, so they did that. They were very tight on launch space and weight.
I went to DC as a high school student in 1978. We got a tour of the department of labor, and they had one of these. It followed a tape in the floor, hailed elevators with an RC signal, and used sonar to avoid running into people and stray junk. It sounds EXACTLY like these units, and pretty much looks the same too. I have a photo but can't find it right now.
So it's getting into very limited commercial use now, some 26 years later.
He let something slip right there. My guess is that they're using a much longer encryption key, and that the key is not stored on the disc, but in the player. So to crack as easily as CSS was cracked you'd have to disassemble the player as well, and even that might not help unless you can read the code out from the inside of the chip, which may or may not be possible.
While nothing's "uncrackable", a disc encrypted with a 256-bit key that you don't have would take a while. And even if you did crack it, the odds are that the contents is watermarked, and they'd know who the release came through, and prosecute him. Then you'd have to get another source for the next disc.
Bottom line would be, you'd not get any more discs, if everyone who supplied a review copy to pirates got busted immediately. And that's assuming they CAN be hacked.
No, because the VIN isn't just a serial number. It incorporates the year, manufacturer, and a lot of other info. A given VIN is only usable on another car of the same make, model, year, body style, and place of manufacture.
You could recycle numbers within one year; if a 2005 car got killed in the first year of its life, they could make another 2005 car with the same VIN, but that's probably not going to help much...
It probably will. If it's like the wireless network MP3 players I've seen, it'll use the software on the server to transcode on-the-fly to a format the player recognizes. This is how Ogg is supported on SlimDevices' players, for instance. If there's a codec for it on the PC, it'll play on the player.
I looked around, and SMC and D-Link also make similar products. However, ALL of them currently require Windows.
I am not a gamer, so I don't really care about the latest stuff out there. It's been years since I've read much of a PC related magazine, and when I've glanced at them, they've been very brain-dead.
For programming magazines, I get Perl Journal. I used to get Linux Journal, but since what I do is not very leading-edge, I wasn't getting anything out of it. I read a couple others as needed but out of the library.
I read Sky & Telescope, Astronomy (since they changed their focus, they weren't very good before), Nuts & Volts, and National Geographic. Once in a while I'll pick up a specialty magazine (like Bicycling or something) off the rack for a fix, but I don't need 12 issues a year.
I used to get more magazines, but the web has replaced many of them. Likewise, I don't buy paper books anymore, only ebooks, and since I don't do DRM, only Baen publishing is getting any of my money for books.
This implies that they are not backing up the database. If they are, then just hand over a backup. How can handing a tape to someone cause the backed up system to crash?
Or maybe it's not the software that is the "system" that they are saying will "crash." Maybe it's their system of keeping secrets that will crash. (paranoid enough for ya?)
If we want to eliminate media that causes people to have unrealistic expectations, we're going to have to live in caves. It seems that's all that media does anymore. Certainly you'd have to eliminate all advertising, and also just about all non-news magazines. Fashion, glamour, and possibly many hobby publications would have to go.
Seriously, why do people give these things? **NOBODY** wouldn't rather have cash. I suppose people think that it proves that they put some kind of thought into it, but they're wrong. "Oh, he's a techie person, give him a CompUSA gift card." Gee, thanks. If I had cash instead I could get the tech stuff I *want* instead of what CompUSA happens to have. Or maybe my car is broken this week, but it's hard to get the mechanic to take a $100 CompUSA card in payment.
Has there been any proposal to take advantage of the electrical difference along the elevator? I'd think there'd be enough juice to run the thing for free if we could tap it.
Yes, and apparently we need to use physical metaphor to get the point across to people like this. Symbolically they're the same thing. Stealing my time is the same as stealing my money or my stuff. Using my computer to spread spam is the same as using my car to shove a ad sign in people's faces around town.
True. I ride farther than 20 miles to work and back on my bike every day. Anybody that cares about the environment enough to put up with the eccentricities of an electric vehicle should really consider bicycle commuting. You can get a hell of a nice "mule" type bike (hybrid or other heavy bike) and trailer for far less than this, and have way less environmental impact as well.
To head off the comments, cycling in the rain is NOT a problem. It's some kind of modern fallacy that apparently people melt in water unless it's the special kind of water that comes out of the shower. I've tried it and it's not true. $50 in a rain cape and booties, and you're good. It's actually kind of fun to ride in the rain. And no, you don't get cold; you're pumping out so much heat, the main problem is to get vented well enough to not bake.
I'd have to agree. A friend caused significant damage to his Sparrow by hitting the brakes just a little too hard on a downhill in his driveway. Tipped it, damaged the drive. Out of commission for a while and a few thousand dollars.
I do something similar. The difference is that when I complete something, I move it to the top under "completed tasks" - then once a week (or whenever) I can email a copy to my boss, showing what I finished, what I'm working on, and what I'm thinking about. I save a copy off under a filename with the date in it, and erase the "done" stuff from the top of the todo.txt
I find it very hard to believe that anyone could get through the education necessary to be a doctor and not know what a CC is, especially since all large units of fluids are in litre containers. When I give blood, I give a half litre, saline comes in litre bags, everything in medicine is measured in metric units. You'd have to be pretty thick to not realize the connection.
Um, yes, actually it can be. For the vast majority of people who are running IE and always will be, some of this stuff is extremely scummy. You can get infected just by visiting a black hat site, or just by receiving an email and having it show up in the preview pane.
Some of the stuff is very, very difficult to get rid of too. I know a very sharp sysadmin who's been trying to clean a machine for about 2 weeks now. The stuff is sneaky, and cleaning this crap up is a specialized skill set.
Have some magnetic signs made up advertizing the local adult bookstore. Next time the judge stops at a stopsign, run up and slap the sign on the side. For bonus points, figure out somewhere that he won't notice it for a while; perhaps on the rear passenger door, he might not see it.
To simulate the trouble it can be to remove the crap from your system, slather some superglue on the backside before doing this, so that it'll be expensive and time consuming to remove and will cause damage that will also be expensive to fix.
I see NO difference between this and some of the more obnoxious spyware lately; they're both hijacking my property without my knowledge or consent in order to promote their own business interests.
Thanks, I was about to say that. If the US had any sense, there'd be only one country left in the world using a ridiculous system of measurements.
I don't know how many hogsheads in a liter either, buy why should I care?
The problem the US has now is a nearly insurmountable critical mass. I try to use metric, but even so it's difficult to do. I had a hell of a time finding metric tape measures in the US, and all lumber comes in 4x8 foot sheets, or in even feet, or something that works out to even foot measures during construction.
Using km, kg, and liters would be tough but not insurmountable; but when you get to building stuff, there's just too much inertial for the old SAE system.
Hell, it's probably at least several. The LCD panel probably has one by itself. There's almost certainly a microcontroller to integrate all the button presses and shoot them down a serial line. There may be another to get data from the main onboard system and shoot it into the LCD.
I only need 20 minutes to rip it. It seems like more than anything else, this technology is on its knees, BEGGING you to make a copy.
Point 2: I frequently open up a disc to check it out, read the book, look at the artwork, etc, and sometimes don't get around to actually watching the thing for weeks.
Of course, they will probably use this for totally cut-rate, disc-in-a-jewel-box, no booklet, no commentary, no extras crap versions. Knowing their market, they'll probably all be 4:3 pan & scan shit, too. Remember DivX (the original, BAD one)?
Who needs insurance? Anything that's hit by a meteorite gets very valuable. A friend bought a meteorite from the homeowner that found it in her yard. They found that it had bounced off the roof, causing some damage. He paid for the roof repair, and got the damaged section of the roof; having it with the meteorite probably adds $10,000 to the value of the meteorite. Similarly, a $1000 beater car that got hit by a meteorite in NY sold for something like $30,000. Another piece of the Chicago meteorite went through someone's roof and smashed their printer (they were AT THE WORKSTATION at the time). The meteorite and smashed printer sold for several tens of thousands.
As long as nobody gets hurt, a meteorite hit is a bonanza.
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The problem is, you don't know what the conditions on Mars are, or what could possibly cause you trouble. You engineer and test for worst case, but you also overengineer for what you don't know. It'd suck to get there and find out that, for example, there's a mineral dust that gets into the motors and expands in the daytime, cracking the motors on the first day. So you build everything more sturdy than you THINK they need to be.
Besides, the money to engineer it to last twice as long has got to be dwarfed by launch and operations costs.
One of the team leads called Cartalk a few weeks ago. They asked about building something to clean off dust, and he said they get asked that ALL THE TIME. They looked at a variety of solutions, from windshield-wipers to peel-off stuff to blowing compressed air across it.
In the end, all of the solutions weighed more than just making the photocells 50% bigger to allow for dust build-up, so they did that. They were very tight on launch space and weight.
I went to DC as a high school student in 1978. We got a tour of the department of labor, and they had one of these. It followed a tape in the floor, hailed elevators with an RC signal, and used sonar to avoid running into people and stray junk. It sounds EXACTLY like these units, and pretty much looks the same too. I have a photo but can't find it right now.
So it's getting into very limited commercial use now, some 26 years later.
the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.
He let something slip right there. My guess is that they're using a much longer encryption key, and that the key is not stored on the disc, but in the player. So to crack as easily as CSS was cracked you'd have to disassemble the player as well, and even that might not help unless you can read the code out from the inside of the chip, which may or may not be possible.
While nothing's "uncrackable", a disc encrypted with a 256-bit key that you don't have would take a while. And even if you did crack it, the odds are that the contents is watermarked, and they'd know who the release came through, and prosecute him. Then you'd have to get another source for the next disc.
Bottom line would be, you'd not get any more discs, if everyone who supplied a review copy to pirates got busted immediately. And that's assuming they CAN be hacked.
No, because the VIN isn't just a serial number. It incorporates the year, manufacturer, and a lot of other info. A given VIN is only usable on another car of the same make, model, year, body style, and place of manufacture.
You could recycle numbers within one year; if a 2005 car got killed in the first year of its life, they could make another 2005 car with the same VIN, but that's probably not going to help much...
It probably will. If it's like the wireless network MP3 players I've seen, it'll use the software on the server to transcode on-the-fly to a format the player recognizes. This is how Ogg is supported on SlimDevices' players, for instance. If there's a codec for it on the PC, it'll play on the player.
I looked around, and SMC and D-Link also make similar products. However, ALL of them currently require Windows.
I am not a gamer, so I don't really care about the latest stuff out there. It's been years since I've read much of a PC related magazine, and when I've glanced at them, they've been very brain-dead.
For programming magazines, I get Perl Journal. I used to get Linux Journal, but since what I do is not very leading-edge, I wasn't getting anything out of it. I read a couple others as needed but out of the library.
I read Sky & Telescope, Astronomy (since they changed their focus, they weren't very good before), Nuts & Volts, and National Geographic. Once in a while I'll pick up a specialty magazine (like Bicycling or something) off the rack for a fix, but I don't need 12 issues a year.
I used to get more magazines, but the web has replaced many of them. Likewise, I don't buy paper books anymore, only ebooks, and since I don't do DRM, only Baen publishing is getting any of my money for books.
This implies that they are not backing up the database. If they are, then just hand over a backup. How can handing a tape to someone cause the backed up system to crash?
Or maybe it's not the software that is the "system" that they are saying will "crash." Maybe it's their system of keeping secrets that will crash. (paranoid enough for ya?)
If we want to eliminate media that causes people to have unrealistic expectations, we're going to have to live in caves. It seems that's all that media does anymore. Certainly you'd have to eliminate all advertising, and also just about all non-news magazines. Fashion, glamour, and possibly many hobby publications would have to go.
Yes, that's getting VERY nearly as good as cash. But still not quite, and it's not what's being discussed.
For me, no hunk of plastic beats opening the envelope xmas morning and finding a few nice crisp benjamins.
...all the thought of cash, just not as good.
Seriously, why do people give these things? **NOBODY** wouldn't rather have cash. I suppose people think that it proves that they put some kind of thought into it, but they're wrong. "Oh, he's a techie person, give him a CompUSA gift card." Gee, thanks. If I had cash instead I could get the tech stuff I *want* instead of what CompUSA happens to have. Or maybe my car is broken this week, but it's hard to get the mechanic to take a $100 CompUSA card in payment.
Has there been any proposal to take advantage of the electrical difference along the elevator? I'd think there'd be enough juice to run the thing for free if we could tap it.
Yes, and apparently we need to use physical metaphor to get the point across to people like this. Symbolically they're the same thing. Stealing my time is the same as stealing my money or my stuff. Using my computer to spread spam is the same as using my car to shove a ad sign in people's faces around town.
True. I ride farther than 20 miles to work and back on my bike every day. Anybody that cares about the environment enough to put up with the eccentricities of an electric vehicle should really consider bicycle commuting. You can get a hell of a nice "mule" type bike (hybrid or other heavy bike) and trailer for far less than this, and have way less environmental impact as well.
To head off the comments, cycling in the rain is NOT a problem. It's some kind of modern fallacy that apparently people melt in water unless it's the special kind of water that comes out of the shower. I've tried it and it's not true. $50 in a rain cape and booties, and you're good. It's actually kind of fun to ride in the rain. And no, you don't get cold; you're pumping out so much heat, the main problem is to get vented well enough to not bake.
I'd have to agree. A friend caused significant damage to his Sparrow by hitting the brakes just a little too hard on a downhill in his driveway. Tipped it, damaged the drive. Out of commission for a while and a few thousand dollars.
I do something similar. The difference is that when I complete something, I move it to the top under "completed tasks" - then once a week (or whenever) I can email a copy to my boss, showing what I finished, what I'm working on, and what I'm thinking about. I save a copy off under a filename with the date in it, and erase the "done" stuff from the top of the todo.txt
I find it very hard to believe that anyone could get through the education necessary to be a doctor and not know what a CC is, especially since all large units of fluids are in litre containers. When I give blood, I give a half litre, saline comes in litre bags, everything in medicine is measured in metric units. You'd have to be pretty thick to not realize the connection.
Just stop downloading software. It's not hard.
Um, yes, actually it can be. For the vast majority of people who are running IE and always will be, some of this stuff is extremely scummy. You can get infected just by visiting a black hat site, or just by receiving an email and having it show up in the preview pane.
Some of the stuff is very, very difficult to get rid of too. I know a very sharp sysadmin who's been trying to clean a machine for about 2 weeks now. The stuff is sneaky, and cleaning this crap up is a specialized skill set.
Have some magnetic signs made up advertizing the local adult bookstore. Next time the judge stops at a stopsign, run up and slap the sign on the side. For bonus points, figure out somewhere that he won't notice it for a while; perhaps on the rear passenger door, he might not see it.
To simulate the trouble it can be to remove the crap from your system, slather some superglue on the backside before doing this, so that it'll be expensive and time consuming to remove and will cause damage that will also be expensive to fix.
I see NO difference between this and some of the more obnoxious spyware lately; they're both hijacking my property without my knowledge or consent in order to promote their own business interests.
Thanks, I was about to say that. If the US had any sense, there'd be only one country left in the world using a ridiculous system of measurements.
I don't know how many hogsheads in a liter either, buy why should I care?
The problem the US has now is a nearly insurmountable critical mass. I try to use metric, but even so it's difficult to do. I had a hell of a time finding metric tape measures in the US, and all lumber comes in 4x8 foot sheets, or in even feet, or something that works out to even foot measures during construction.
Using km, kg, and liters would be tough but not insurmountable; but when you get to building stuff, there's just too much inertial for the old SAE system.
Well, they can start with Orrin Hatch's house.
Hell, it's probably at least several. The LCD panel probably has one by itself. There's almost certainly a microcontroller to integrate all the button presses and shoot them down a serial line. There may be another to get data from the main onboard system and shoot it into the LCD.
new crowd control weapons that electrocute/stun the targets.
It's not non-lethal if it electrocutes the target. "electrocute" means to kill by means of electric shock.
Looks like it was just the submitter that used the wrong word, though.
I only need 20 minutes to rip it. It seems like more than anything else, this technology is on its knees, BEGGING you to make a copy.
Point 2: I frequently open up a disc to check it out, read the book, look at the artwork, etc, and sometimes don't get around to actually watching the thing for weeks.
Of course, they will probably use this for totally cut-rate, disc-in-a-jewel-box, no booklet, no commentary, no extras crap versions. Knowing their market, they'll probably all be 4:3 pan & scan shit, too. Remember DivX (the original, BAD one)?
Who needs insurance?
Anything that's hit by a meteorite gets very valuable. A friend bought a meteorite from the homeowner that found it in her yard. They found that it had bounced off the roof, causing some damage. He paid for the roof repair, and got the damaged section of the roof; having it with the meteorite probably adds $10,000 to the value of the meteorite.
Similarly, a $1000 beater car that got hit by a meteorite in NY sold for something like $30,000. Another piece of the Chicago meteorite went through someone's roof and smashed their printer (they were AT THE WORKSTATION at the time). The meteorite and smashed printer sold for several tens of thousands.
As long as nobody gets hurt, a meteorite hit is a bonanza.