Would a space elevator be more feasible on Mars with the reduced gravity and atmosphere?
Yes, unfortunately Mars also has two moons with orbits that intersect the equatorial plane. Thus this means you would either have to keep the space elevator mobile ( maybe along some track on the surface ) or you would have to shift the orbit of a 22km diameter rock. Taking care of the moon the old fashion American way unfortunately won't work as the amount of scrap that would be flying around in the orbit would become very dangerous to any space activity in the vicinity.
A space elevator would actually not be such a bad idea. You can deploy it from orbit, and since Mars has a lower mass than earth it would significantly reduce the requirements of the cable. Getting the damned thing there might be a bit difficult thou.
The main problem with landing is that you pick up quite a bit of speed from falling towards the planet. On Earth we take advantage of the air resistance in a relatively thick atmosphere to slow down the space shuttle as it returns. Mars has a MUCH thinner atmosphere so for large objects this won't work. You either end up going in at such a flat angle that you just bounce straight off the atmsophere like a skipping stone, or you go in too steep so that you are unable to lose enough speed before hitting the surface. It is possible to land on objects with no atmosphere ( like the moon ) using retro-rockets to slow down your descent, but because mars has a much stronger gravity this becomes impractical.
It doesn't make any sense to make a network card emit microwaves at intensities similar to microwaves because not only would you get a huge power consumption, it is also massive overkill unless you plan to search the sky for stelth bombers. The FCC ( or local equivalent ) would probably have a few things to say about it as well. The scaremongering about radiation from comunications equipment is simple unbeleivable. You are more likely to get hurt from tripping in a cat5e cable.
Actually, making random numbers good enough for encryption isn't all that difficult. For most applications you only need to generate a few thousand bits that are difficult for a third party to predict. The real problem with random numbers comes when you want a gigabyte [per second] of good random numbers for a scientific simulation, and the margin of error of your experiment needs to be a couple of orders of magnitudes bellow the output.
Heck, if you really wanted to you could generate a relatively strong private key using pen and paper and a set of scrabble tiles. You probably don't want to do that for a computer simulation running at a few ghz thou.
Personally I would be LESS worried about these cameras being used to prevent ordinary crimes. They can't hold you idenfinately for speeding, and they can't apply any of the other "terrorist" laws if a camera footage could possibly offer circumstantial evidence that you were shoplifting. With the "national security" stuff it is different. They can hold you for a significant amount of time without a conviction, you have few means to appeal your case or have it properly reviewed, and of course, they can keep the details secret. So yes, I would rather the police had these powers when it came to things like shop-lifting, drunk drivers ( that kill more people than terrorists) or tracking stolen cars. That these provisions will not be allowed for "ordinary crimes" is reason to be worried, not relieved. The catch is that an "ordinary crime" follow "ordinary laws" and cases are dealt with in an "ordinary court" where you have "ordinary rights". Guess what, when it comes to crime prevention I'd rather the police do it the "ordinary" way than the "national sexurity" way.
GPL 3 creates what in essence is a walled garden. If you GPL 3 your code, you're putting it into that garden.
That is exactly the point. If you don't like it you can always use a license like the X11 license and permit anyone to do whatever they want with your code. The GPL is all about protecting the rights of the user by limiting the restrictions a developer may impose. This includes copyright, DRM, patents etc... The restrictions apply only if you choose to accept the license, which you only have to do if you want to modify or redistribute the program. In fact, the license explicitly gives you the permission to use the program without recognising the license.
9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.
You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so.
The bottom line is that if you want other developers to be able to prevent users from doing this or that with the program, the GPL is not for you. The GPL is NOT about giving developers the greatest freedom possible ( that would be public domain or BSD-style licensing ) the GPL is about defending the USER. In particular it is about defending his/her right to run, study, modify and redistribute the program. Patents and DRM-style lockdowns are attacks against these rights, which is why they are dissalowed.
Technologically there is nothing to stop us from using renewables to make liquid hydrogen and fuel jet planes with that ( yes, a jet engine will run fine on liquid hydrogen, it has been done ). The problem is that such a scheme is very costly ( about 4 times the cost of fossil fuels ). Given that you will hav eto extract the stuff out of these algae, refine it, and of course the trouble of growing themin the first place, I must wonder if it can ever become eonomically practical. I guess eventually something must replace Oil, but these things are quite a bit away still.
a)He agrees MS Office was more expensive b)He admits he has not actually worked out, or even made an estimate, as to how much OSS was costing them. Thus not being able to know if the switch back saved even a penny. c)He previously held senior positions at Microsoft.
So basically you have a management that decides to switch to a more expensive solution without knowing it will save them even a penny, and the person in question also happens to have direct ties to the company which provides the more expensive solution...
You know in some places this kind of thing can get you jail time...
Hydrogen alone won't solve it but in combination with an expansion of Nuclear Power, Renewable energy sources and Carbon Capture & Storage it very well could. Mind you, personally I think it is more suitable for aviation where batteries are unpractical. When it comes to cars and trains the future is electric.
The conversion is actually fairly simple, and it certainly wouldn't be a huge issue to stick a small chip in the display converting from RGB to whatever this display wants. Heck, modern displays screw around with the colour balance already. Most of them let you change the colour "temperature" as an example.
Seriously, people are absolutely insane about refresh rates where it really doesn't matter. For CRTs a high refresh rate is important because you get flickering without it, but if your light output remains fixed between frames ( as would appear to be the case with these displays ) it really doesn't matter once you are above a fairly small threshold ( video tapes use about 24fps iirc )
In comparison, in a cinema your projector may emit some 72 pulses of light each second, but it doesn't change the image between every pulse. Thus the actual framerate is only some 24fps. The reason you output a higher freuency of light pulses is simply because the shutter would otherwise cause flickering at 24fps which would be noticeable by most people. With displays that don't use a shutter ( i.e LCDs ) this is not an issue so they only need a sufficient refresh rate to provide a convincing animation.
Now, for gaming the whole argument is even more silly because the average reaction time to detect a flash of light is about 200ms. Sure, wth training you can probaly cut that in half or something, but you won't even get remotely close to 8ms, and regardless your network ping will be considerably above that.
In essence, yur TFT doesn't need a response time bellow 6ms, and it certainly doesn't need a framerate above 100hz unless you are a chemical engineer and effectively split the refresh rate in two using 3D glasses.
It is like those Hi-Fi fanatics who will use cabling capable of transmitting in the Ghz range to hook up their amplifier.
so, a hundred billion times a hundred million, that gives 10^11 * 10^8 = 10^19. Pffffft, it is less than the RIAA's revenue loss from P2P file sharing alone... When you add in the MPAA and all the porn floating out there 10^19 is not at all a large number.
TFA seems interesting enough, but someone tell me one thing. What is this second life thing ? Is it an upgrade from the first one? Doesn't quite seem worth it to get the expansion before I figure out the original to put it that way...;-)
Anyway, I find it unlikely that a neurotoxin would kill before you can feel it seeing that the cause of death is usually failure of the respiratory system or cardiac arrest. So basically, depending on the dose it might hurt about as much as being chocked to death or having a fatal heart attack. For obvious reasons it is hard to determine how much a fatal heart attack would hurt...
We know for sure that SONY cannot win a format war because then the universe would implode. We also know that Toshiba is not winning this format war. The logical conclusion is that the whole HD-DVD concept is about to fail miserably in favour of increased internet bandwidth and magnetic storage. Heck, the standard offers over where I am is already in excess of 5 mbit. By the time either HD DVD format has a chance to overtake DVD ( guessing 5-10 years at least ) it will be more than enough to doom the entire HD-DVD concept. Unless the MPAA can cripple broadband deployment in key markets ( read US ) sufficiently of course.
The IP protocol is public and anybody can implement it given the technical expertise. Microsoft DRM , however, is restricted to Microsoft, not due to any technical limitation, but due to copyright law. It is more similar to the BBC releasing their shows on the internet but saying you can only download it using Pipex broadband, not NTL or BT. Similarly, for DVDs it is more similar to releasing it on DVDs, but then saying you can only use a SONY player, not a Phillips or Toshiba one.
Then we have the issue weather it is right of them to use DRM to begin with. The stated justification has been in order not to interfere with international broadcast rights. Now I wonder how difficult it would be for the BBC to limit their downloads to IPs that are located in the UK. My guess is that it would be a whole lot easier ( and more effective ) than trying to implement a software based DRM scheme that won't be cracked within a year. Furthermore, the terrestrial digital broadcast currently has no DRM on it, so it is hardly a case of preventing copyright infringement. Besides, the content has already been paid for by the license fees, so it makes no sense restricting what people can do with it within the UK.
Basically, if they are concerned about UK citizens passing on the media to non-UK citizens then a simply denying access to IPs outside the UK will do the same job as limiting the digital broadcast to the UK. Hey, here's an idea. require people to input the number of their latest license bill in order to download the content. That stops downloads from outside the UK while at the same time enforcing the license fee, and it will be a whole lot more successful than Microsoft DRM.
Bottom line is, this has nothing to do with technological limits or prevention of copyright infringement. It is a basic lock-in to Microsoft software, and is quite arguably illegal under both UK and EU legislation. If the BBC doesn't change their policy themselves, this WILL end as another anti trust case in the EU courts.
I think what many forget here is that while this may shut down people running internet radio from US servers and domain names, it is only a question of time for a foreign supply to take advantage of any vacuum that may result if the us pulls the plug. So rather than shutting down internet radio, this whole circus will move it abroad. The RIAA won't win, artists won't win, customers won't win and America won't win. Foreign ISPs will however win and the US will become a little less competitive on the global market. In short, the more the RIAA tightens their grip, the more will slip through to abroad where laws are different. In the long run this might just be what causes the RIAA's downfall. By crippling the American music industry they pave the way for competitors to take their place.
Soviet -> Microsoft Chernobyl's RBMK reactor -> Windows ME
IAEA -> Open Source Movement European Pressurised Water Reactor -> OpenBSD, default install
Yes, hardware can fail, but depending on how you build it the probability of failure, and just how damaging a failure will be, will differ greatly. So just like any sane software developer will not build a system where a bug in your animated cursor rendering is likely to allow execution of arbitrary code, a modern western reactor is not built in a manner that lets a bug in a LISP program cause a complete meltdown. Much has changed since TMI. Modern designs have redundant safety systems for virtually every critical part of the reactor. As an example, Canadian reactors have multiple redundant sets of control rods. Some are manual, some are automated , and the automated ones are split between two separated systems. Triggering any one of them will cause complete shut-down of the reactor, and should all control rod systems fail it is possible to inject neutron-absorbing substances into the heavy water moderator, triggering a shut-down that way. Now, I'm not going to state anything for certain, but if you can come up with a bug in a LISP or Java program that would defeat such a system, then quite frankly I have to wonder what you are doing speaking to us mortals ; - )
Imagine if your init scripts contain the following:
aptitude install kubuntu-desktop
This is essentially what "software as a service" does. Oh, but what about data shared over the network with a bunch of people collaborating on the project ? Simple. Just add another line...
svn up
Really, that's pretty much all there is to it. Oh, but what if I want to run code on the remote server? Well...
ssh username@host
Hey, you could even add in an NX client if you want it really fancy. Software as a service is nothing new.
Slashdot Mirror
A space elevator would actually not be such a bad idea. You can deploy it from orbit, and since Mars has a lower mass than earth it would significantly reduce the requirements of the cable. Getting the damned thing there might be a bit difficult thou.
The main problem with landing is that you pick up quite a bit of speed from falling towards the planet. On Earth we take advantage of the air resistance in a relatively thick atmosphere to slow down the space shuttle as it returns. Mars has a MUCH thinner atmosphere so for large objects this won't work. You either end up going in at such a flat angle that you just bounce straight off the atmsophere like a skipping stone, or you go in too steep so that you are unable to lose enough speed before hitting the surface. It is possible to land on objects with no atmosphere ( like the moon ) using retro-rockets to slow down your descent, but because mars has a much stronger gravity this becomes impractical.
It doesn't make any sense to make a network card emit microwaves at intensities similar to microwaves because not only would you get a huge power consumption, it is also massive overkill unless you plan to search the sky for stelth bombers. The FCC ( or local equivalent ) would probably have a few things to say about it as well. The scaremongering about radiation from comunications equipment is simple unbeleivable. You are more likely to get hurt from tripping in a cat5e cable.
Actually, making random numbers good enough for encryption isn't all that difficult. For most applications you only need to generate a few thousand bits that are difficult for a third party to predict. The real problem with random numbers comes when you want a gigabyte [per second] of good random numbers for a scientific simulation, and the margin of error of your experiment needs to be a couple of orders of magnitudes bellow the output.
Heck, if you really wanted to you could generate a relatively strong private key using pen and paper and a set of scrabble tiles. You probably don't want to do that for a computer simulation running at a few ghz thou.
Seeing that ink prices are likely to surge (again) ...
Personally I would be LESS worried about these cameras being used to prevent ordinary crimes. They can't hold you idenfinately for speeding, and they can't apply any of the other "terrorist" laws if a camera footage could possibly offer circumstantial evidence that you were shoplifting. With the "national security" stuff it is different. They can hold you for a significant amount of time without a conviction, you have few means to appeal your case or have it properly reviewed, and of course, they can keep the details secret. So yes, I would rather the police had these powers when it came to things like shop-lifting, drunk drivers ( that kill more people than terrorists) or tracking stolen cars. That these provisions will not be allowed for "ordinary crimes" is reason to be worried, not relieved. The catch is that an "ordinary crime" follow "ordinary laws" and cases are dealt with in an "ordinary court" where you have "ordinary rights". Guess what, when it comes to crime prevention I'd rather the police do it the "ordinary" way than the "national sexurity" way.
Technologically there is nothing to stop us from using renewables to make liquid hydrogen and fuel jet planes with that ( yes, a jet engine will run fine on liquid hydrogen, it has been done ). The problem is that such a scheme is very costly ( about 4 times the cost of fossil fuels ). Given that you will hav eto extract the stuff out of these algae, refine it, and of course the trouble of growing themin the first place, I must wonder if it can ever become eonomically practical. I guess eventually something must replace Oil, but these things are quite a bit away still.
a)He agrees MS Office was more expensive
b)He admits he has not actually worked out, or even made an estimate, as to how much OSS was costing them. Thus not being able to know if the switch back saved even a penny.
c)He previously held senior positions at Microsoft.
So basically you have a management that decides to switch to a more expensive solution without knowing it will save them even a penny, and the person in question also happens to have direct ties to the company which provides the more expensive solution...
You know in some places this kind of thing can get you jail time...
Hydrogen alone won't solve it but in combination with an expansion of Nuclear Power, Renewable energy sources and Carbon Capture & Storage it very well could. Mind you, personally I think it is more suitable for aviation where batteries are unpractical. When it comes to cars and trains the future is electric.
The conversion is actually fairly simple, and it certainly wouldn't be a huge issue to stick a small chip in the display converting from RGB to whatever this display wants. Heck, modern displays screw around with the colour balance already. Most of them let you change the colour "temperature" as an example.
8ms correspods to roughly 125 images per second.
Seriously, people are absolutely insane about refresh rates where it really doesn't matter. For CRTs a high refresh rate is important because you get flickering without it, but if your light output remains fixed between frames ( as would appear to be the case with these displays ) it really doesn't matter once you are above a fairly small threshold ( video tapes use about 24fps iirc )
In comparison, in a cinema your projector may emit some 72 pulses of light each second, but it doesn't change the image between every pulse. Thus the actual framerate is only some 24fps. The reason you output a higher freuency of light pulses is simply because the shutter would otherwise cause flickering at 24fps which would be noticeable by most people. With displays that don't use a shutter ( i.e LCDs ) this is not an issue so they only need a sufficient refresh rate to provide a convincing animation.
Now, for gaming the whole argument is even more silly because the average reaction time to detect a flash of light is about 200ms. Sure, wth training you can probaly cut that in half or something, but you won't even get remotely close to 8ms, and regardless your network ping will be considerably above that.
In essence, yur TFT doesn't need a response time bellow 6ms, and it certainly doesn't need a framerate above 100hz unless you are a chemical engineer and effectively split the refresh rate in two using 3D glasses.
It is like those Hi-Fi fanatics who will use cabling capable of transmitting in the Ghz range to hook up their amplifier.
so, a hundred billion times a hundred million, that gives 10^11 * 10^8 = 10^19. Pffffft, it is less than the RIAA's revenue loss from P2P file sharing alone... When you add in the MPAA and all the porn floating out there 10^19 is not at all a large number.
TFA seems interesting enough, but someone tell me one thing. What is this second life thing ? Is it an upgrade from the first one? Doesn't quite seem worth it to get the expansion before I figure out the original to put it that way... ;-)
According to Wikipedia the effect varies a lot depending on the particular species and need not be fatal._ humans
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_snail#Danger_to
Anyway, I find it unlikely that a neurotoxin would kill before you can feel it seeing that the cause of death is usually failure of the respiratory system or cardiac arrest. So basically, depending on the dose it might hurt about as much as being chocked to death or having a fatal heart attack. For obvious reasons it is hard to determine how much a fatal heart attack would hurt...
Oh, and there is no antidote.
We know for sure that SONY cannot win a format war because then the universe would implode. We also know that Toshiba is not winning this format war. The logical conclusion is that the whole HD-DVD concept is about to fail miserably in favour of increased internet bandwidth and magnetic storage. Heck, the standard offers over where I am is already in excess of 5 mbit. By the time either HD DVD format has a chance to overtake DVD ( guessing 5-10 years at least ) it will be more than enough to doom the entire HD-DVD concept. Unless the MPAA can cripple broadband deployment in key markets ( read US ) sufficiently of course.
The IP protocol is public and anybody can implement it given the technical expertise. Microsoft DRM , however, is restricted to Microsoft, not due to any technical limitation, but due to copyright law. It is more similar to the BBC releasing their shows on the internet but saying you can only download it using Pipex broadband, not NTL or BT. Similarly, for DVDs it is more similar to releasing it on DVDs, but then saying you can only use a SONY player, not a Phillips or Toshiba one.
Then we have the issue weather it is right of them to use DRM to begin with. The stated justification has been in order not to interfere with international broadcast rights. Now I wonder how difficult it would be for the BBC to limit their downloads to IPs that are located in the UK. My guess is that it would be a whole lot easier ( and more effective ) than trying to implement a software based DRM scheme that won't be cracked within a year. Furthermore, the terrestrial digital broadcast currently has no DRM on it, so it is hardly a case of preventing copyright infringement. Besides, the content has already been paid for by the license fees, so it makes no sense restricting what people can do with it within the UK.
Basically, if they are concerned about UK citizens passing on the media to non-UK citizens then a simply denying access to IPs outside the UK will do the same job as limiting the digital broadcast to the UK. Hey, here's an idea. require people to input the number of their latest license bill in order to download the content. That stops downloads from outside the UK while at the same time enforcing the license fee, and it will be a whole lot more successful than Microsoft DRM.
Bottom line is, this has nothing to do with technological limits or prevention of copyright infringement. It is a basic lock-in to Microsoft software, and is quite arguably illegal under both UK and EU legislation. If the BBC doesn't change their policy themselves, this WILL end as another anti trust case in the EU courts.
I think what many forget here is that while this may shut down people running internet radio from US servers and domain names, it is only a question of time for a foreign supply to take advantage of any vacuum that may result if the us pulls the plug. So rather than shutting down internet radio, this whole circus will move it abroad. The RIAA won't win, artists won't win, customers won't win and America won't win. Foreign ISPs will however win and the US will become a little less competitive on the global market. In short, the more the RIAA tightens their grip, the more will slip through to abroad where laws are different. In the long run this might just be what causes the RIAA's downfall. By crippling the American music industry they pave the way for competitors to take their place.
Right, trying to explain this to the CS crowd...
Soviet -> Microsoft
Chernobyl's RBMK reactor -> Windows ME
IAEA -> Open Source Movement
European Pressurised Water Reactor -> OpenBSD, default install
Yes, hardware can fail, but depending on how you build it the probability of failure, and just how damaging a failure will be, will differ greatly. So just like any sane software developer will not build a system where a bug in your animated cursor rendering is likely to allow execution of arbitrary code, a modern western reactor is not built in a manner that lets a bug in a LISP program cause a complete meltdown. Much has changed since TMI. Modern designs have redundant safety systems for virtually every critical part of the reactor. As an example, Canadian reactors have multiple redundant sets of control rods. Some are manual, some are automated , and the automated ones are split between two separated systems. Triggering any one of them will cause complete shut-down of the reactor, and should all control rod systems fail it is possible to inject neutron-absorbing substances into the heavy water moderator, triggering a shut-down that way. Now, I'm not going to state anything for certain, but if you can come up with a bug in a LISP or Java program that would defeat such a system, then quite frankly I have to wonder what you are doing speaking to us mortals ; - )
That is the sound of another champagne bottle being opened over at Nintendo ...
Seriously. It starts looking as if Sony WANTS to lose Europe.
Imagine if your init scripts contain the following:
aptitude install kubuntu-desktop
This is essentially what "software as a service" does. Oh, but what about data shared over the network with a bunch of people collaborating on the project ? Simple. Just add another line...
svn up
Really, that's pretty much all there is to it. Oh, but what if I want to run code on the remote server? Well...
ssh username@host
Hey, you could even add in an NX client if you want it really fancy. Software as a service is nothing new.
The speed of light limits your ping, not your bandwidth. There is nothing to stop you sending data over multiple fibres or several frequencies.