Citizens of the world are striking back at 24/7 state surveillance
Congratulations, I couldn't have worded this to make it sound more like we're actually living in a futuristic dystopian society in which the whole world (also known by the aliens as "the USA") is oppressed by a tyrannic regime out of control that puts cameras in your toilets.
I too love to make reality sound like an apocalyptic fantasy, but I could use keeping that shit off the summary. Cue all the "but the government already listens to all your phone calls" replies.
Alright, you guys make this whole "new internet" thing, and we're you're done we'll just all switch to it all at the same time OK? We just need to schedule a date for when to switch to that new Internet thing. We should do it during a quiet time of the year, the month of December sounds appropriate, and I reckon it should take you guys quite a few years..
How does December 21st, 2012 sound? I have nothing in my schedule for *that* day... Too apocalyptic maybe?
Actually the atmosphere is 1.6% methane, the rest is nitrogen. SF writers in the 50s believed it was mainly methane because methane had been discovered by spectrography in the 1940s, although its quantities were overestimated by an order of magnitude.
Well first of all some people actually do use 3G connection for their home computer, and then there are torrent clients for cell phones, although I never managed to actually download anything from my N95.
First of all we know Titan's atmosphere way well enough for that (look it up, we're far from completely ignorant about it unlike what you make it out to be), thanks to sending a probe there. And it wouldn't necessarily be hard, it's not because the atmosphere is different that it'd make it hard, it's just a few things about the atmosphere that may make it harder or easier, but there's nothing inherently hard about it.
Also, I think it might be easier to inflate a blimp during a parachute-slowed decent than to actually land safely. Which makes me wonder, why don't we send blimps everywhere where we can find a dense atmosphere? Can you picture a blimp in the atmosphere of Jupiter, Venus or Neptune? *drool*
Well, I won't ask you to picture a blimp in Uranus but that would be pretty cool too.
That's because you would have to accelerate the Titan-oil from 9.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Saturn) to 29.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Earth).
Except it doesn't work like that at all. You don't accelerate, otherwise you'll never go down to Earth's orbit, you decelerate to go down, and by doing so you gain speed.
Right, so that's not a lie, however if you look for rare keywords on Cuil you'll see a thousand times less results than Google. So they've indexed 120 billion pages but they will only let you search through 40 millions? Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
When I tried out cuil the first time (first slashdot post) it had lots of problems finding just about anything. But I just tried again today and got pretty much all the results I wanted. Not all of them in the top spot, but the results have improved quite a bit.
Very true! I just tried again a few searches I tried the first time and not only it finds more but their reported result count is consistent with how many they display. Maybe that's what I get for e-mailing them about those inconsistencies the previous time.
FTFA : "Because P2P file sharing applications typically engage in continuous (rather than bursty) transmissions at high data rates, a small number of users of P2P file sharing applications served by a particular cell site could severely degrade the service quality enjoyed by all customers served by that site."
Hey AT&T, it's called QoS, look it up!
And if their problem is with "continuous" transmissions, let's just make a new P2P protocol that instead uses lots of "bursty" transmissions to lots of different other P2P users. There, problem solved!
So I guess that then you'd have to stick to a fixed lander, like the one that landed in 2005 except more durable and with more instruments? By the way, why was the Huygens probe even designed to only last a few hours? Or is it all you can get without solar panels?
Well maybe the UAV part isn't worth it considered how complicated it would be rather than just a blimp, but on the other hand it doesn't seem that bad. It seems that near the surface winds are weak (around 0.5 m/s, or 1.8 km/h), so it doesn't matter so much if the UAVs get blown around like storyfoam in that case. It seems however that high altitude winds can reach up to 270 mph, which could be used by the blimp to travel large distances.
I think the main problem is really how to make a UAV/blimp fly in an atmosphere of nitrogen sometimes colder than 90 K, however I'm not qualified to assert whether or not this would even be possible. By the way I was wrong, the surface pressure isn't 5 bars but 1.46. That's what you get for relying on information you read as a child in books published in the early 1980s. Looks like the pressure reaches 1 bar at an altitude of roughly 6 km.
Cuil is pretty much living on the lie that it has over 120 billion index pages, which as it turns out after using it a bit seems indeed like complete and utter bullcrap. Without this claim (that their index is 3 times bigger than Google's, yeah right..) they're just another trier with a design some people argue is nice.
OK here's my idea of a fancy mission to Titan. Firstly, an orbiter around Titan, with a nice camera and the appropriate filters to see through the atmosphere like Cassini has, but also so radar thing to map the whole thing , even under its liquid lakes, and gather lots of informations about what must be Titan's unusual geology, and that would serve as a relay between Earth and the various machines on Titan. Then a lander, not necessarily a rover but that could be a plus, mainly designed to study the local geology and weather. Then a robot to explore the lakes, their chemistry, eventual currents, their depth.
And the fanciest part of all, a UAV-carrying blimp. It would float in Titan's thick atmosphere, low enough to be able to carry heavy weights (remember, on Titan a pressure of 1 Earth atmosphere is pretty high above the ground) and cover a lot of ground, provided there's some wind on Titan. It would obviously study the atmosphere, clouds, winds, chemicals composition, temperature etc extensively, but it would also be greatly placed to study the ground from very close. I said UAV-carrying, what would be more fancy than a blimp that would launch tiny UAVs that would fly around taking lots of pictures and measurements to then return to the blimp?
Please tell me that all these rovers on Mars were just there to train for the real thing on Titan.
No seriously, picture how awesome it would be to explore Titan with rovers. This place is probably the one place in the Solar system that has the most in common with our planet! The fact that it still has rivers and liquid lakes makes it so much more interesting than Mars, plus it has a thick atmosphere (5 times our atmosphere on the surface) we could probably send a UAV there or a blimp.
Maybe we -do- need to kill NASA's manned space flight program.
Hallelujah, well, mostly. Of course we probably want to keep people in orbit and what not, but at least $100 billion to go back to the moon is plain silly and pointless. That was just the clueless Bush administration's space pissing contest and that thing needs to get killed badly, although a launcher that can get at least as much into orbit as the Saturn V is a great thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the motivation behind that plan was to send American men to the Moon so they could flip off the far side of the Earth all at once.
Exactly, we're fighting a guerilla warfare, so what could possibly be the use of remaining the top dogs? Let's just wait until the Chinese get the upper hand on that whole "space" thing to worry about catching up with them. By all means let's make R&D policies based on short/mid-term concerns. If something isn't going to be useful to alleviate our concerns of the hour within the next few years then it's clearly a waste of time and money.
Right, because what could we possibly use in the future of a plane that can be launched to space and come back to Earth when the Shuttle is about to be retired? Oh wait..
The problem with UFO sightings is that they don't just go fast, they do what nothing we know of can do, i.e. fly at 70 knots, accelerate for a few seconds to 9 G to reach 600 knots and go up 10,000 feet, that kind of stuff... Besides, UFO sightings didn't exactly start 20 years ago.
Yes, but don't worry, very nice men in dark suits will come very soon to throw you to federal pound-pedos-in-the-ass prison, I mean.. to take you to a place where they will take good care of you.
That's funny that so many people should think that geeks don't exercise because like half of the people I know at various gyms were CS college geeks, engineers, teachers, doctors, etc.. The other half were mostly construction workers and dope dealers (but that probably had to do with the city I lived in).
Slashdot Mirror
Citizens of the world are striking back at 24/7 state surveillance
Congratulations, I couldn't have worded this to make it sound more like we're actually living in a futuristic dystopian society in which the whole world (also known by the aliens as "the USA") is oppressed by a tyrannic regime out of control that puts cameras in your toilets.
I too love to make reality sound like an apocalyptic fantasy, but I could use keeping that shit off the summary. Cue all the "but the government already listens to all your phone calls" replies.
Well you could still put them in orbit around Titan and beam the power where needed ;)
Alright, you guys make this whole "new internet" thing, and we're you're done we'll just all switch to it all at the same time OK? We just need to schedule a date for when to switch to that new Internet thing. We should do it during a quiet time of the year, the month of December sounds appropriate, and I reckon it should take you guys quite a few years..
How does December 21st, 2012 sound? I have nothing in my schedule for *that* day... Too apocalyptic maybe?
Actually the atmosphere is 1.6% methane, the rest is nitrogen. SF writers in the 50s believed it was mainly methane because methane had been discovered by spectrography in the 1940s, although its quantities were overestimated by an order of magnitude.
Well first of all some people actually do use 3G connection for their home computer, and then there are torrent clients for cell phones, although I never managed to actually download anything from my N95.
True but the amount of fuels that would be burned in order to get there to examine more fuels defeats the purpose doesn't it?
Don't they teach chemistry in American high schools? In French high schools they teach you that you need something like oxygen to burn fuel.
First of all we know Titan's atmosphere way well enough for that (look it up, we're far from completely ignorant about it unlike what you make it out to be), thanks to sending a probe there. And it wouldn't necessarily be hard, it's not because the atmosphere is different that it'd make it hard, it's just a few things about the atmosphere that may make it harder or easier, but there's nothing inherently hard about it.
Also, I think it might be easier to inflate a blimp during a parachute-slowed decent than to actually land safely. Which makes me wonder, why don't we send blimps everywhere where we can find a dense atmosphere? Can you picture a blimp in the atmosphere of Jupiter, Venus or Neptune? *drool*
Well, I won't ask you to picture a blimp in Uranus but that would be pretty cool too.
That's because you would have to accelerate the Titan-oil from 9.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Saturn) to 29.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Earth).
Except it doesn't work like that at all. You don't accelerate, otherwise you'll never go down to Earth's orbit, you decelerate to go down, and by doing so you gain speed.
The only problem would be finding oxygen to combust it with...
Send a giga-shitload of solar panels there, fore into the liquid water layer, do electrolysis, and there you go!
The first manned mission to Titan ended tragically today as one of the astronauts stepped out onto the surface and lit up a cigarette.
You'd need oxygen for that.
Maybe it's not a lie
Right, so that's not a lie, however if you look for rare keywords on Cuil you'll see a thousand times less results than Google. So they've indexed 120 billion pages but they will only let you search through 40 millions? Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
When I tried out cuil the first time (first slashdot post) it had lots of problems finding just about anything. But I just tried again today and got pretty much all the results I wanted. Not all of them in the top spot, but the results have improved quite a bit.
Very true! I just tried again a few searches I tried the first time and not only it finds more but their reported result count is consistent with how many they display. Maybe that's what I get for e-mailing them about those inconsistencies the previous time.
FTFA : "Because P2P file sharing applications typically engage in continuous (rather than bursty) transmissions at high data rates, a small number of users of P2P file sharing applications served by a particular cell site could severely degrade the service quality enjoyed by all customers served by that site."
Hey AT&T, it's called QoS, look it up!
And if their problem is with "continuous" transmissions, let's just make a new P2P protocol that instead uses lots of "bursty" transmissions to lots of different other P2P users. There, problem solved!
So I guess that then you'd have to stick to a fixed lander, like the one that landed in 2005 except more durable and with more instruments? By the way, why was the Huygens probe even designed to only last a few hours? Or is it all you can get without solar panels?
Well maybe the UAV part isn't worth it considered how complicated it would be rather than just a blimp, but on the other hand it doesn't seem that bad. It seems that near the surface winds are weak (around 0.5 m/s, or 1.8 km/h), so it doesn't matter so much if the UAVs get blown around like storyfoam in that case. It seems however that high altitude winds can reach up to 270 mph, which could be used by the blimp to travel large distances.
I think the main problem is really how to make a UAV/blimp fly in an atmosphere of nitrogen sometimes colder than 90 K, however I'm not qualified to assert whether or not this would even be possible. By the way I was wrong, the surface pressure isn't 5 bars but 1.46. That's what you get for relying on information you read as a child in books published in the early 1980s. Looks like the pressure reaches 1 bar at an altitude of roughly 6 km.
Cuil is pretty much living on the lie that it has over 120 billion index pages, which as it turns out after using it a bit seems indeed like complete and utter bullcrap. Without this claim (that their index is 3 times bigger than Google's, yeah right..) they're just another trier with a design some people argue is nice.
OK here's my idea of a fancy mission to Titan. Firstly, an orbiter around Titan, with a nice camera and the appropriate filters to see through the atmosphere like Cassini has, but also so radar thing to map the whole thing , even under its liquid lakes, and gather lots of informations about what must be Titan's unusual geology, and that would serve as a relay between Earth and the various machines on Titan. Then a lander, not necessarily a rover but that could be a plus, mainly designed to study the local geology and weather. Then a robot to explore the lakes, their chemistry, eventual currents, their depth.
And the fanciest part of all, a UAV-carrying blimp. It would float in Titan's thick atmosphere, low enough to be able to carry heavy weights (remember, on Titan a pressure of 1 Earth atmosphere is pretty high above the ground) and cover a lot of ground, provided there's some wind on Titan. It would obviously study the atmosphere, clouds, winds, chemicals composition, temperature etc extensively, but it would also be greatly placed to study the ground from very close. I said UAV-carrying, what would be more fancy than a blimp that would launch tiny UAVs that would fly around taking lots of pictures and measurements to then return to the blimp?
Please tell me that all these rovers on Mars were just there to train for the real thing on Titan.
No seriously, picture how awesome it would be to explore Titan with rovers. This place is probably the one place in the Solar system that has the most in common with our planet! The fact that it still has rivers and liquid lakes makes it so much more interesting than Mars, plus it has a thick atmosphere (5 times our atmosphere on the surface) we could probably send a UAV there or a blimp.
Maybe we -do- need to kill NASA's manned space flight program.
Hallelujah, well, mostly. Of course we probably want to keep people in orbit and what not, but at least $100 billion to go back to the moon is plain silly and pointless. That was just the clueless Bush administration's space pissing contest and that thing needs to get killed badly, although a launcher that can get at least as much into orbit as the Saturn V is a great thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the motivation behind that plan was to send American men to the Moon so they could flip off the far side of the Earth all at once.
Exactly, we're fighting a guerilla warfare, so what could possibly be the use of remaining the top dogs? Let's just wait until the Chinese get the upper hand on that whole "space" thing to worry about catching up with them. By all means let's make R&D policies based on short/mid-term concerns. If something isn't going to be useful to alleviate our concerns of the hour within the next few years then it's clearly a waste of time and money.
Right, because what could we possibly use in the future of a plane that can be launched to space and come back to Earth when the Shuttle is about to be retired? Oh wait..
The problem with UFO sightings is that they don't just go fast, they do what nothing we know of can do, i.e. fly at 70 knots, accelerate for a few seconds to 9 G to reach 600 knots and go up 10,000 feet, that kind of stuff... Besides, UFO sightings didn't exactly start 20 years ago.
Am I the only one who misread NAFTA at a glance?
Yes, but don't worry, very nice men in dark suits will come very soon to throw you to federal pound-pedos-in-the-ass prison, I mean.. to take you to a place where they will take good care of you.
Pretty cool stuff. If only Google had some sort of advanced search mode in which you could use that sort of syntax.
That's funny that so many people should think that geeks don't exercise because like half of the people I know at various gyms were CS college geeks, engineers, teachers, doctors, etc.. The other half were mostly construction workers and dope dealers (but that probably had to do with the city I lived in).