wrt - Slashdot User

Submission + - NASA Gets Two Military Spy Telescopes for Astronomy (washingtonpost.com) 1

Submitted by

SomePgmr

on Monday June 04, 2012 @01:22PM

SomePgmr writes: "The U.S. government’s secret space program has decided to give NASA two telescopes as big as, and even more powerful than, the Hubble Space Telescope. Designed for surveillance, the telescopes from the National Reconnaissance Office were no longer needed for spy missions and can now be used to study the heavens."

Comment Re:Decentralization (Score 0) 314

by wrt on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @07:06PM (#40149811) Attached to: What Would a Post-Email World Look Like?

My friends call me a luddite, as I choose email over more centralized "social" ecosystems. Maybe they are right...but I would like to argue my reasons.

With email I am in greater control of the signal to noise ratio of my inbox through fine-grained filtering. I can make decisions over the privacy of my conversations by enforcing encryption and authentication. I can choose whether or not I am a marketing product. This freedom is made possible by open protocols implemented by a large set of clients and providers from which I can choose the most suitable.

I sincerely hope that SMTP will not go the way of NNTP.

Is Anyone Buying T-Mobile's Googlephone? 454

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 23, 2008 @03:37PM from the maybe-one-day dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Laura Holson writes in the NY Times that she 'wandered down to the T-Mobile store at Ninth Ave. and 43rd St. in New York City to see what kind of crowds — if any — were lining up to buy the new T-Mobile G1 which went on sale Wednesday' and saw no lines out the door, no crowding at the counter, and a complete lack of crowds. The iPhone appears to still be the gold standard and Etan Horowitz writes that the G1 'doesn't do a great job showcasing its potential. It isn't as intuitive as the iPhone, and it may take average users a while to figure out basic and advanced shortcuts and features' and 'may appeal more to techies who value open-source products and don't mind a somewhat steep learning curve.' Part of the reason for slow interest may also be that T-Mobile's 3G high-speed data network won't be up and running in many cities until the end of the year."

Comment Re:It's tough (Score 0) 137

by wrt on Tuesday September 23, 2008 @01:03PM (#25123073) Attached to: The Mobile Internet You'll Be Using In 10 Years

AEHF and its predecessor MILSTAR are both geosynchronous.

Most of the military terminals have complex (expensive) antenna control systems to help with pointing, based on known ephemeris and position data. Even so, it is possible to acquire on a sidelobe.

I would agree that this technology has a ways to come before a terminal is accessible to the consumer. Not to mention that AEHF/MILSTAR are both protected SATCOM systems, and thus have a lot of security features that are traded against bandwidth.

Slashdot Top Deals