Anyone else remember seeing pics of big liquid fueled rockets ah "malfunctioning" on the pad? It is a rather energetic event. Personally, I'd rather have an ejection handle that would fire the explosive bolts holding the capsule to the vehicle, fire the escape rockets (solid fuel and stone-stock reliable), with a simple parachute system. This would keep the personnel safely within the capsule (not out and exposed to all that flame and debris), and no-doubt be much faster than manually exiting the capsule and letting gravity take you for a ride right down past tons of liquid fuel and oxidizer...
I mean, 'cmon... We've been doing ejection seat type systems for what, 40 to 50 years now? These kinds of systems are very, very reliable. Other spacecraft have used similar systems. The F-111 had/has such a system if I remember correctly. The (lack of) speed for manual egress of the capsule and then letting slow gravity draw them right down past the volatile fuels/oxidizers... Not a good plan IMHO. Much better to pull them up and away immediately within a controlled and protected environment.
It would seem to me that is a virus-writer's wet dream... All they need do now is trick Defender into identifying some other parts of your system as spyware... And the snake eats itself... Or some such...
I'm thinking an average breakdown something like this:
1 core for the OS
1 core for the spyware
1 core to play your music player
1 core for whatever application you're actually working with
Of course, some computer geek types (eg./. types) might have a different breakdown:
1 core for the OS
0 cores for spyware, my {insert favorite distro} is invulnerable
1 core for Firefox/Thunderbird 'cause I gotta stay connected
1 core downloading the latest RPMs
1 core compiling some new toy...;-)
Yes, I am well aware M-C is a fiction writer, having been a fan of his for years.
As I said in my post though... Read the book, track down the references given there. Expand your research a little and you'll find that there is significant conflict in research results regarding global warming. Not just are we causing global warming but the bigger question of is global warming even happening. Further, some researchers are not sure we even have the means to detect and determine if we are a contributing factor in the changing climate. You have to realize, the climate has been changing constantly since our kind was running around in fur skins with clubs.
For example, there is no such thing as "raw" temperature data. All data has adjustments and biases added due to changes in methodology, technology, changing land use at the reporting site, etc. All well and good but... There is no way to really know if these adjustments are too much, too little, about right, or even off plus or minus varying over time. Given that the adjustments are larger than the observed changes (trends) this becomes a critical question. Change your land-use factor and you can "prove" global warming, or a coming ice age.
Throw in that many of the dire (nearly sensational) predictions of global warming are based on computer models (note, not reality and not actual field work - I do computer modeling for a living, I well understand the difference)... Then realize some of these models have been off by 300% in "predicting" past trends... By the time you absorb all that it is very, very hard to buy into the idea of global warming, let alone that we are causing it or could do anything about it. For example, even if mankind stopped CO2 emissions into the air - completely, stopped 100% it would only impact something less than 1.5% of the CO2 put into the air by nature. Given that reality check, it is hard to get too excited about pushing around man made CO2 emissions by a few percentage points when it would be an extremely small impact in nature.
Al Gore is a known fiction writer too... Oops, I mean politician. (same thing really IMHO) I don't buy into unsubstantiated political spin. Show me the incontrovertible science behind it. Problem is, right now that does not exist for this issue.
To sum up... Don't believe everything you read, nor everything the media throws at you. There is big money behind all sides of the issue. Everyone has an agenda, and everyone is spinning the message to suit their goals.
If you read "State of Fear" by M-C... and actually look up some of the references in there... You come away wondering:
a) Is "global warming" really happening?
b) If "global warming" is really happening, is it due to anything mankind is doing?
c) Even if you buy-into a and b... Is there anything that realistically can be done?
d) If "global warming" is happening, and it is part of a natural cycle... It is almost certainly folly to believe we can do anything to influence it.
I read SOF and was completely shocked at how little is really known about this thing called "global warming" that so many people seem to believe in, yet there is so much conflicting information about it...
What is really amusing is that in the 1970s and early 80s there was talk and fear of a coming ice age or mini-ice age... Then the "scientific community" did a complete about face...
If you don't believe me, read SOF and then check the references. It is not only informative, it is entertaining. Although the parts where they were stranded in a snow-cat in Antarctica were a bit drawn out for me...
Another game/program to definitely NOT purchase or ever play. I wouldn't install it even if it were free. Heck, not even if they paid me 10X the price of the game...
My vote is this is a huge PR blunder on EAs part. There is absolutely no way I will ever support that kind of behavior from a company. No spyware, rootkits, etc. period! This is my machine, not your market research project.
One of the first lesson anyone planning "operations" learns is: leave nothing to chance. (chance has a way of sneaking up on you all on its own anyway) So if you were a terrorist planner... Would you just keep your team waiting around, waiting for someone to stumble across them, or put two and two together? Would you operate on someone elses timetable, or one left to chance? No, if you were planning something, you wouldn't wait until some conditions (eg. fire/emergency vehicles responding in some area you want/need) just happened to occur. No, you would plan and execute the necessary diversion. You wouldn't wait for some (possibly flakey) public website to confirm your action - you'd have your operatives in positive communications with you.
This smells like one of those "feel good" alleged security measures that in reality has zero net effect.
I'm no GPS expert but I would expect the jamming to take one of two forms.
First, you could simply jam the signal. GPS works off of radio signals. Blanket those freqencies with enough high-power noise and the reciever cannot pick out the real signal. You have the advantage of being closer than the sattelites. You have the disadvantage of having to put out a fair amount of power over (I believe) several distinct frequencies. Get it wrong, and a good noise filter will suppress your signal and the bombs work anyway. The other downside is that a weapon configured to "home on jam" will follow your high powered radio signal right to your antenna...:-(
Second, and more technically difficult, you could try to introduce an "offset" into the signal via rebroadcast of the GPS signal and/or overriding it. This may or may not work at all with the high-resolution military GPS. Even if it does, monitoring of your signal for a while will show the offset you're introducing. Program the bomb to fly to your position minus the offset, and you've just guided the bomb right to you...
My guess would be a one-two punch. A HARM missile to take out the antenna, followed up by a (now clear) GPS guided bomb to take out the facility/vehicles.
Also, I wonder if they considered any correlation between people purchasing a computer and then just spending their time and money on other things? You know, computer software, upgrades, surfing the net, playing games. Maybe music just isn't as important to these people anymore and drops further down their time/money budget?
I too have made the switch on two computers at my house, without looking back (Suse 10.0). I still have to maintain several XP boxes for the wife and kids. But I have the kids experimenting with Knoppix live CDs. Also, they are all using open-source applications. The nominal load is: Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice.
I'm just about ready to slip in Linux under their application set. Two things I have to work out first: 1) I have to teach myself a little bit more about printer sharing over the home network. 2) Wife and kids are into iPods so I have to figure out if iTunes will run inside Wine or some such.
I have a 5 year old IBM Thinkpad, P-III at 800Mhz and 192MB memory. Right now it is mostly unused and loaded with Win98. The Knoppix live CD boots just fine on it. I'm thinking of dumping Win98 and going Suse or Knoppix on it. So I guess that would put me solidly into that bucket of people dumping 98 for Linux.;-)
I'd be happy if they could just help me work out my IPv6 woes between Suse 10.0 and my ISP...
I too wonder what market they may be going after here...
Also, I wonder if this will be the usual "jack up Linux and slip a real-time kernel in underneath" approach. Then Linux actually runs as a low(er) priority task on the R-T kernel...
Interesting analysis. Brings up one question though... Being a Mechanical Engineering and Comp-Sci type I honestly don't know, so I'll ask... In your 1.000 m^3 of salt water, how much of the *volume* is due to water, and how much is due to salt? I understand the salt is dissolved into the water, but do the salt molecules fit perfectly between the water molecules? That is, if I take 1.000 m^3 of fresh water and throw in 20.1 kg of sea-salt, do I still have 1.000 m^3 of (now salty) water?
The reason I ask is that in your analysis, at the end, your 915 kg of fresh water would not be fresh for very long. It would absorb salt from the surrounding water. This pulling salt from that water might (?) pull down the volume it occupies. Granted, at the same time it would be adding salt to the fresh water volume. The real question is, is there a volume change by adding/removing salt, and is the relationship linear? If it is not linear, you might get more of a volume reduction from the (relatively) high salinity water than you would get from adding the initial salt to the fresh.
I guess what you'd really have to look at is the total volume of the oceans, volumes of salt and water, mass of salt and water. Then look at how much volume you'd gain for the oceans by pulling out the ice, and how much volume you'd have at the end, with the net slightly lower salinity after difusing all that fresh water back in.
Why don't they sue them for drunk drivers too? Why not get a cut from the manufacturers for every parking ticket, speeding ticket, etc. too? They (the big bad manufacturers) are obviously an enabler here!:/
Absolutely no reason other countries cannot have nukes. All they have to do is accept the consequences of their choice.
The US chose to develop nuclear weapons, then accepted the risk of 50+ years of MAD. If the Iranians want to develop nuclear technology, even nuclear weapons, fine. Good luck, be careful not to have any accidents and further pollute our planet.
Just one thing though. If we have to accept them as a nuclear power, they have to accept our disapproval of their choice. Fair is fair. Why should they be allowed to make decisions in a consequence-free environment?
As for the US continuing to build nuclear weapons... What has been proposed is a replacement program. Not an increase in warhead count. The idea is to update the arsenel for increased reliability and safety. Kinda hard to argue against that. In a land where everyone is forced to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets "for their own good" it's hard to argue against replacing 20 and 30 year old technology where nuclear weapons are concerned.
Can the little USB thumb drives be physically write-protected? It would seem to me that mounting them on a potentially virus-infected Windows machine. (ie. any Windows machine) is just asking for trouble. I have a couple of CD-Rs burned (and finalized) with utilities. Maybe I'm paranoid, but if they go into a potentially infected machine, and it turns out to be infected with something nasty, it's a one-way trip. CD-Rs are cheap, my time and data are not.
Even easier, just bring any one of several recent laptops that have had battery problems. (Dell, Apple, and IBM if I remember correctly) Lithium based batteries can be "quite energetic" when they go. Google "cr123 battery explosion"...
They ought to put that in the background - sort of like a taxicab meter. Use some sort of basic formula, congressional salary of those present x time etc...
In a former job we were all billed at a fixed hourly rate. There was a computer in the corner of the conference room, so I wrote a little program... Whenever a meeting started, I'd run it and input the number of people there. It showed a running cost of the meeting. That is, of course, until I ran afoul of one management type that didn't see the humor in it. (That could be due to the fact that he wasted more time and $ than anyone else in meetings.) Then it was "suggested" to me that I not run that again...
We here at Moon-Soft (tm) have warped the very shape of reality...er...this semi-spherical body. We can now provide longer vistas. Of course to fully take advantage of the improved horizons you'll need to upgrade your ship's thrust capacity, your visor's light filters... In fact, let me refer you to our friends over at Intele-spatial rockets. I'm sure they can outfit you with all the hardware you need to fully appreciate our development.
What's that? You prefer to keep your existing modest ship? Go where? Open-Orbit's space station? You say it is closer at hand, more affordable, and they even let you work on it if you'd like? What a preposterous idea! I'm sure they can't possibly offer you the same experience we have. Why, nearly everyone is going to the moon these days... Who'd want to stay in a closer, faster orbit?
At least, not that way. I don't intend to start a religious war over distros but... I've tried Ubuntu and was not that impressed. I don't care for Gnome, and yes I know you can get Kbuntu with KDE instead. It also had problems running on my older test machine - couldn't get the video right and a couple of other minor issues. (Note, I was able to configure Knoppix properly on the same machine and Suse worked right off the CD.)
RH, in my humble opinion, in going after corporate installs, is doing us all a favor. It is helping to "legitimize" Linux as more than just a hacker/hobbiest toy. It is hard to fault them for picking a market segment and going after it, supporting it. I think that is better than trying to "focus across the board" which really is no focus at all.
I agree that RH will probably suffer on the desktop merely because some of the other distros are more oriented towards easier user installs, administration, and desktop use. But from my experience, it won't be Ubuntu they'll lose share to. I believe it'll be something like Knoppix (which worked better for me) or Suse, which is corporate backed and very slick on the desktop. I actually run Suse, Knoppix, and RH at home on various machines. Although, maybe I am an example of what the author is talking about. I do intend to put Suse on the machine currently running RH FC2... Then I'll just be a two distro house...
It is already a problem. Depending on who you talk to, there are something like 10000 objects in orbit already. (I guess it depends on what size thing you're worried about)
I guess finding "launch windows" is less and less about orbital mechanics and more like merging onto a freeway at rush hour.
What's the range? From what I've read of standard RFID type systems, anywhere from a few inches to a few feet. Some "high power" systems for say, reading tags on the cargo of a truck going through a toll booth are a few yards... Now, of course higher power transmitters and sensitive directional antennas can significantly increase that range...
What's the data load? As far as I know (here again, from what I've read of other RFID systems) it is a single large integer. Something like 128 bits. Therefore, it would not contain your bio data, bank accounds, SSN, etc. It would merely be an index into a database. So all a stray reader would get is a number. Without access to say the US Embassy DB, they wouldn't have anything other than you had an RFID tag on you. Heck, some of the products, clothing, etc. you have on may already have RFID tags. So just having a tag doesn't necessarily mark you as an American anyway.
Yes, they are passive systems. Like old crystal radios, they are powered by the elecromagnetic energy in the signal sent from an outside system. So you don't broadcast, you merely respond if someone else does. IMHO, broadcasting, looking for RFID tags is a much riskier business. It basically says "Hey, I'm scanning for tags..." And that can be detected completely passively... (Here we go again with Spy vs. Spy...)
RFID tags can be jammed. You can (depending on legalities in your area???) carry a specific RFID tag with you that effectively jams the system and makes any other RFID tags on your person unreadable. When a reader querries for tags, if say two respond then the reader has to go into arbitration. It basically re-broadcasts the query with "only if your number starts with 1" (think 128 bit binary here). If it still gets a collision on the response, it'll try "only if your number starts with 11" and so on, until it finds a differentiating point (bit). Then it will query each tag separately with subsequent signals. The jammer tags are set to always respond, period. So they in effect mask every possible number from any other tag. So if it were me, I'd carry a jammer tag in a small envelop tucked in my passport. (same location as passport tag) effectively blocking it from snooping. Then I'd merely hand over the passport, sans envelop, when dealing with a legitimate inquiry.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I'm no RFID expert, and it has been months since I read anything on it. Neat technology though...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, particularly since Iran may be Muslim, but it is not Arab.
I mean, 'cmon... We've been doing ejection seat type systems for what, 40 to 50 years now? These kinds of systems are very, very reliable. Other spacecraft have used similar systems. The F-111 had/has such a system if I remember correctly. The (lack of) speed for manual egress of the capsule and then letting slow gravity draw them right down past the volatile fuels/oxidizers... Not a good plan IMHO. Much better to pull them up and away immediately within a controlled and protected environment.
It would seem to me that is a virus-writer's wet dream... All they need do now is trick Defender into identifying some other parts of your system as spyware... And the snake eats itself... Or some such...
1 core for the OS
1 core for the spyware
1 core to play your music player
1 core for whatever application you're actually working with
Of course, some computer geek types (eg. /. types) might have a different breakdown:
1 core for the OS ;-)
0 cores for spyware, my {insert favorite distro} is invulnerable
1 core for Firefox/Thunderbird 'cause I gotta stay connected
1 core downloading the latest RPMs
1 core compiling some new toy...
Yes, I am well aware M-C is a fiction writer, having been a fan of his for years.
As I said in my post though... Read the book, track down the references given there. Expand your research a little and you'll find that there is significant conflict in research results regarding global warming. Not just are we causing global warming but the bigger question of is global warming even happening. Further, some researchers are not sure we even have the means to detect and determine if we are a contributing factor in the changing climate. You have to realize, the climate has been changing constantly since our kind was running around in fur skins with clubs.
For example, there is no such thing as "raw" temperature data. All data has adjustments and biases added due to changes in methodology, technology, changing land use at the reporting site, etc. All well and good but... There is no way to really know if these adjustments are too much, too little, about right, or even off plus or minus varying over time. Given that the adjustments are larger than the observed changes (trends) this becomes a critical question. Change your land-use factor and you can "prove" global warming, or a coming ice age.
Throw in that many of the dire (nearly sensational) predictions of global warming are based on computer models (note, not reality and not actual field work - I do computer modeling for a living, I well understand the difference)... Then realize some of these models have been off by 300% in "predicting" past trends... By the time you absorb all that it is very, very hard to buy into the idea of global warming, let alone that we are causing it or could do anything about it. For example, even if mankind stopped CO2 emissions into the air - completely, stopped 100% it would only impact something less than 1.5% of the CO2 put into the air by nature. Given that reality check, it is hard to get too excited about pushing around man made CO2 emissions by a few percentage points when it would be an extremely small impact in nature.
Al Gore is a known fiction writer too... Oops, I mean politician. (same thing really IMHO) I don't buy into unsubstantiated political spin. Show me the incontrovertible science behind it. Problem is, right now that does not exist for this issue.
To sum up... Don't believe everything you read, nor everything the media throws at you. There is big money behind all sides of the issue. Everyone has an agenda, and everyone is spinning the message to suit their goals.
If you read "State of Fear" by M-C... and actually look up some of the references in there... You come away wondering:
a) Is "global warming" really happening?
b) If "global warming" is really happening, is it due to anything mankind is doing?
c) Even if you buy-into a and b... Is there anything that realistically can be done?
d) If "global warming" is happening, and it is part of a natural cycle... It is almost certainly folly to believe we can do anything to influence it.
I read SOF and was completely shocked at how little is really known about this thing called "global warming" that so many people seem to believe in, yet there is so much conflicting information about it...
What is really amusing is that in the 1970s and early 80s there was talk and fear of a coming ice age or mini-ice age... Then the "scientific community" did a complete about face...
If you don't believe me, read SOF and then check the references. It is not only informative, it is entertaining. Although the parts where they were stranded in a snow-cat in Antarctica were a bit drawn out for me...
Another game/program to definitely NOT purchase or ever play. I wouldn't install it even if it were free. Heck, not even if they paid me 10X the price of the game...
My vote is this is a huge PR blunder on EAs part. There is absolutely no way I will ever support that kind of behavior from a company. No spyware, rootkits, etc. period! This is my machine, not your market research project.
One of the first lesson anyone planning "operations" learns is: leave nothing to chance. (chance has a way of sneaking up on you all on its own anyway) So if you were a terrorist planner... Would you just keep your team waiting around, waiting for someone to stumble across them, or put two and two together? Would you operate on someone elses timetable, or one left to chance? No, if you were planning something, you wouldn't wait until some conditions (eg. fire/emergency vehicles responding in some area you want/need) just happened to occur. No, you would plan and execute the necessary diversion. You wouldn't wait for some (possibly flakey) public website to confirm your action - you'd have your operatives in positive communications with you.
This smells like one of those "feel good" alleged security measures that in reality has zero net effect.
Isn't Windows just a training OS used to prepare people for a real OS? (ie. Linux!) ;-)
So sure, it still has some use. Without windows, those of us that know and love Linux wouldn't know how good we have it.
Besides, without windows...
Unfortunately what they failed to mention in the article was that 12.7 Tbps of that was spam and viruses...
I'm no GPS expert but I would expect the jamming to take one of two forms.
First, you could simply jam the signal. GPS works off of radio signals. Blanket those freqencies with enough high-power noise and the reciever cannot pick out the real signal. You have the advantage of being closer than the sattelites. You have the disadvantage of having to put out a fair amount of power over (I believe) several distinct frequencies. Get it wrong, and a good noise filter will suppress your signal and the bombs work anyway. The other downside is that a weapon configured to "home on jam" will follow your high powered radio signal right to your antenna... :-(
Second, and more technically difficult, you could try to introduce an "offset" into the signal via rebroadcast of the GPS signal and/or overriding it. This may or may not work at all with the high-resolution military GPS. Even if it does, monitoring of your signal for a while will show the offset you're introducing. Program the bomb to fly to your position minus the offset, and you've just guided the bomb right to you...
My guess would be a one-two punch. A HARM missile to take out the antenna, followed up by a (now clear) GPS guided bomb to take out the facility/vehicles.
Also, I wonder if they considered any correlation between people purchasing a computer and then just spending their time and money on other things? You know, computer software, upgrades, surfing the net, playing games. Maybe music just isn't as important to these people anymore and drops further down their time/money budget?
Amen brother! ;-)
I too have made the switch on two computers at my house, without looking back (Suse 10.0). I still have to maintain several XP boxes for the wife and kids. But I have the kids experimenting with Knoppix live CDs. Also, they are all using open-source applications. The nominal load is: Thunderbird, Firefox, OpenOffice.
I'm just about ready to slip in Linux under their application set. Two things I have to work out first: 1) I have to teach myself a little bit more about printer sharing over the home network. 2) Wife and kids are into iPods so I have to figure out if iTunes will run inside Wine or some such.
I have a 5 year old IBM Thinkpad, P-III at 800Mhz and 192MB memory. Right now it is mostly unused and loaded with Win98. The Knoppix live CD boots just fine on it. I'm thinking of dumping Win98 and going Suse or Knoppix on it. So I guess that would put me solidly into that bucket of people dumping 98 for Linux. ;-)
I'd be happy if they could just help me work out my IPv6 woes between Suse 10.0 and my ISP...
I too wonder what market they may be going after here...
Also, I wonder if this will be the usual "jack up Linux and slip a real-time kernel in underneath" approach. Then Linux actually runs as a low(er) priority task on the R-T kernel...
Interesting analysis. Brings up one question though... Being a Mechanical Engineering and Comp-Sci type I honestly don't know, so I'll ask... In your 1.000 m^3 of salt water, how much of the *volume* is due to water, and how much is due to salt? I understand the salt is dissolved into the water, but do the salt molecules fit perfectly between the water molecules? That is, if I take 1.000 m^3 of fresh water and throw in 20.1 kg of sea-salt, do I still have 1.000 m^3 of (now salty) water?
The reason I ask is that in your analysis, at the end, your 915 kg of fresh water would not be fresh for very long. It would absorb salt from the surrounding water. This pulling salt from that water might (?) pull down the volume it occupies. Granted, at the same time it would be adding salt to the fresh water volume. The real question is, is there a volume change by adding/removing salt, and is the relationship linear? If it is not linear, you might get more of a volume reduction from the (relatively) high salinity water than you would get from adding the initial salt to the fresh.
I guess what you'd really have to look at is the total volume of the oceans, volumes of salt and water, mass of salt and water. Then look at how much volume you'd gain for the oceans by pulling out the ice, and how much volume you'd have at the end, with the net slightly lower salinity after difusing all that fresh water back in.
Why don't they sue them for drunk drivers too? Why not get a cut from the manufacturers for every parking ticket, speeding ticket, etc. too? They (the big bad manufacturers) are obviously an enabler here! :/
The US chose to develop nuclear weapons, then accepted the risk of 50+ years of MAD. If the Iranians want to develop nuclear technology, even nuclear weapons, fine. Good luck, be careful not to have any accidents and further pollute our planet.
Just one thing though. If we have to accept them as a nuclear power, they have to accept our disapproval of their choice. Fair is fair. Why should they be allowed to make decisions in a consequence-free environment?
As for the US continuing to build nuclear weapons... What has been proposed is a replacement program. Not an increase in warhead count. The idea is to update the arsenel for increased reliability and safety. Kinda hard to argue against that. In a land where everyone is forced to wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets "for their own good" it's hard to argue against replacing 20 and 30 year old technology where nuclear weapons are concerned.
Can the little USB thumb drives be physically write-protected? It would seem to me that mounting them on a potentially virus-infected Windows machine. (ie. any Windows machine) is just asking for trouble. I have a couple of CD-Rs burned (and finalized) with utilities. Maybe I'm paranoid, but if they go into a potentially infected machine, and it turns out to be infected with something nasty, it's a one-way trip. CD-Rs are cheap, my time and data are not.
Thanks for the laugh! And BTW, you should seek therapy...
Even easier, just bring any one of several recent laptops that have had battery problems. (Dell, Apple, and IBM if I remember correctly) Lithium based batteries can be "quite energetic" when they go. Google "cr123 battery explosion" ...
They ought to put that in the background - sort of like a taxicab meter. Use some sort of basic formula, congressional salary of those present x time etc...
In a former job we were all billed at a fixed hourly rate. There was a computer in the corner of the conference room, so I wrote a little program... Whenever a meeting started, I'd run it and input the number of people there. It showed a running cost of the meeting. That is, of course, until I ran afoul of one management type that didn't see the humor in it. (That could be due to the fact that he wasted more time and $ than anyone else in meetings.) Then it was "suggested" to me that I not run that again...
We here at Moon-Soft (tm) have warped the very shape of reality...er...this semi-spherical body. We can now provide longer vistas. Of course to fully take advantage of the improved horizons you'll need to upgrade your ship's thrust capacity, your visor's light filters... In fact, let me refer you to our friends over at Intele-spatial rockets. I'm sure they can outfit you with all the hardware you need to fully appreciate our development.
What's that? You prefer to keep your existing modest ship? Go where? Open-Orbit's space station? You say it is closer at hand, more affordable, and they even let you work on it if you'd like? What a preposterous idea! I'm sure they can't possibly offer you the same experience we have. Why, nearly everyone is going to the moon these days... Who'd want to stay in a closer, faster orbit?
At least, not that way. I don't intend to start a religious war over distros but... I've tried Ubuntu and was not that impressed. I don't care for Gnome, and yes I know you can get Kbuntu with KDE instead. It also had problems running on my older test machine - couldn't get the video right and a couple of other minor issues. (Note, I was able to configure Knoppix properly on the same machine and Suse worked right off the CD.)
RH, in my humble opinion, in going after corporate installs, is doing us all a favor. It is helping to "legitimize" Linux as more than just a hacker/hobbiest toy. It is hard to fault them for picking a market segment and going after it, supporting it. I think that is better than trying to "focus across the board" which really is no focus at all.
I agree that RH will probably suffer on the desktop merely because some of the other distros are more oriented towards easier user installs, administration, and desktop use. But from my experience, it won't be Ubuntu they'll lose share to. I believe it'll be something like Knoppix (which worked better for me) or Suse, which is corporate backed and very slick on the desktop. I actually run Suse, Knoppix, and RH at home on various machines. Although, maybe I am an example of what the author is talking about. I do intend to put Suse on the machine currently running RH FC2... Then I'll just be a two distro house...
It is already a problem. Depending on who you talk to, there are something like 10000 objects in orbit already. (I guess it depends on what size thing you're worried about)
I guess finding "launch windows" is less and less about orbital mechanics and more like merging onto a freeway at rush hour.
What's the range? From what I've read of standard RFID type systems, anywhere from a few inches to a few feet. Some "high power" systems for say, reading tags on the cargo of a truck going through a toll booth are a few yards... Now, of course higher power transmitters and sensitive directional antennas can significantly increase that range...
What's the data load? As far as I know (here again, from what I've read of other RFID systems) it is a single large integer. Something like 128 bits. Therefore, it would not contain your bio data, bank accounds, SSN, etc. It would merely be an index into a database. So all a stray reader would get is a number. Without access to say the US Embassy DB, they wouldn't have anything other than you had an RFID tag on you. Heck, some of the products, clothing, etc. you have on may already have RFID tags. So just having a tag doesn't necessarily mark you as an American anyway.
Yes, they are passive systems. Like old crystal radios, they are powered by the elecromagnetic energy in the signal sent from an outside system. So you don't broadcast, you merely respond if someone else does. IMHO, broadcasting, looking for RFID tags is a much riskier business. It basically says "Hey, I'm scanning for tags..." And that can be detected completely passively... (Here we go again with Spy vs. Spy...)
RFID tags can be jammed. You can (depending on legalities in your area???) carry a specific RFID tag with you that effectively jams the system and makes any other RFID tags on your person unreadable. When a reader querries for tags, if say two respond then the reader has to go into arbitration. It basically re-broadcasts the query with "only if your number starts with 1" (think 128 bit binary here). If it still gets a collision on the response, it'll try "only if your number starts with 11" and so on, until it finds a differentiating point (bit). Then it will query each tag separately with subsequent signals. The jammer tags are set to always respond, period. So they in effect mask every possible number from any other tag. So if it were me, I'd carry a jammer tag in a small envelop tucked in my passport. (same location as passport tag) effectively blocking it from snooping. Then I'd merely hand over the passport, sans envelop, when dealing with a legitimate inquiry.
Take all this with a grain of salt. I'm no RFID expert, and it has been months since I read anything on it. Neat technology though...