Conversely, optical comms could probably be received on any telescope on the planet. We already have a wide variety of equipment setup for receiving very faint optical signals. Just a matter of hooking that into a modulator (he says, casually describing several Ph D projects and millions of dollars).
It's a bubble because absolutely no one, anywhere in the world, has any reason to tether themselves to the Bitcoin currency. You don't pay taxes in it. No one has to pay taxes in it.
There's no anchor to the currency. The only thing anyone has to do with Bitcoin is cash out to their local currency to pay taxes.
This is hardly "backdoor". There's a central body, the police can obtain a warrant and then request information from it.
The article asserts that they will be able to get information without warrants, though no mechanism for this has been suggested. Are you saying that the article is incorrect?
You're right not a warrant, but also not direct access - there's an intermediary. So the pressing issue is probably to have the law changed to still require a warrant, but provide quicker turn-around when one is granted.
This is hardly "backdoor". There's a central body, the police can obtain a warrant and then request information from it.
Doctor-patient confidentiality is a practice with regards to disclosure by doctors. In a practical sense your information is disclosed widely with the government and your insurance company - i.e. Medicare would know for what items I went to the optometrist recently, as would any private insurer I had, because they need to pay for the various line-item billings.
It's not a meaningful change from standard practice - medical practitioners can already be compelled by the same warrant's to share patient files.
Cutting things up isn't useful. In space you need to impart delta-V - lasers have been proposed as a way to trigger outgasing on orbital debris from the ground. Add enough upwards delta-V away from the earth and you could shift the orbit enough for a deep-dive into the atmosphere (space, the only place where thrusting away from the ground sends you straight into it).
The physics of electromagnetism and photonics will somehow stop an errant beam from destroying anything else as it travels onwards? Nope, of course not.
Okay so you clearly have no idea how lasers work, or the physics of electromagnetism.
For one thing, they defocus over long distances. At sufficiently high energies they lose energy because they turn the air to plasma and bleed off intensity as heat. It's been a struggle to make ranged laser weapons work, because you can't exceed a couple of kw/cm2 before the air turns to plasma and your beam blooms out of existence.
And for the example given, lasers are much less likely to cause collateral damage - they can "unfired" instantly, and they will travel at a tangent to the Earth meaning that once headed any amount above the horizon they will never fall below it. Bullets, missiles, bombs - well those always come down and they are lethal when they do.
Parallel construction is based on the idea that if a crime was committed, then it's unlikely that the bit you got by a non-admissable means was the only evidence of that crime.
"Fruit of the poisonous tree" is also specific: what it means is that you can't use an inadmissable wiretap to then carry out a normally disallowed search to get evidence of a crime.
So for example, it is not illegal for police to search through public parklands. It's public property after all, they can go there. If it was discovered someone had committed a murder and buried the body in a public park, but it was discovered by inadmissable wiretap (say, a hitman telling a client the job was completed) - then you couldn't use that intercept to get a warrant to go search their house for murder implements, or collect DNA.
But you can suggest to law enforcement to check public parks for bodies, particularly within 100m of these coordinates or so. Law enforcement is normally able to do this, and might have stumbled across this anyway, or a hiker might have or something. If they then find the body, they can work backwards from the victim, rebuild the profile, and when it comes time to asking for warrants, they can happen to ask for a warrant against the intercept guy first (amongst others they would normally have done so with).
All this evidence, collected this way, is admissable because it could have been discovered as a part of normal, admissable police/law enforcement procedure. It's public, it's out in the open and you have to explain it because it was perfectly legal to collect it.
Modern archeological evidence shows that the pyramids were almost certainly not built by slaves. While it's true the Egyptians had slaves, from the building layout and likely meal compositions, the pyramid builders were actually working a well-paid, high status job (and why not, its building the tombs of the emperor - working on things for the whitehouse is usually considered to hold prestige as well).
Fast-forward to World War II and see how well slave labor worked out for the Germans building rockets. They sank staggering amounts of resources into the enterprise, and despite it were still having frequent problems with V2s being sabotaged or not working from poorly built components. A problem Von Braun himself recognized.
Just because you can enslave people and do something doesn't mean you're being remotely efficient about it.
That article isn't especially informative either, but does get into the issue better: it's all about how and what's being tracked and included as "healthcare.gov".
The $634m figure was being bandied around right out the gate - it's probably getting slightly closer to true now, but it depends on what you want to call a boondoggle in how you sum it up. I will wager there's a lot of non-optional IT costs at the moment which people are scrambling to shove under the "healthcare.gov" banner in order to hopefully make the number bigger.
The $600+m is what you get if you simply add up every contract given to the original contractor (CGI Technology and Solutions) since 2007. You know, when Bush was in the Whitehouse. They're a reasonably large, reasonably well-used contractor for things so they do other stuff too.
Since Congress dicked around with actually providing specific funding for it's creation, the estimate is that it probably cost about $120 million, with an original budget of ~$55 million + auxiliary spending (after changes to the various bills by Congress and states) of $63 million. For a total of ~$120 m. That's probably at the high end.
Sure you can force someone to be productive under miserable conditions but you can get terrific productivity as well by treating your employees nicely.
Actually you really can't - its a policing fallacy. People count the costs of welfare, but don't count the costs of their police force.
Similarly, a part of that "force people to be productive" is paying a whole bunch of managers to stand around and bear over them.
I used this for navigating all around cities in Europe. The data set over there is very complete.
Frankly, having a smartphone which can't operate it's most useful and potentially life-saving features without a data connection just seems retarded - and I'd regard having very completely world maps on the device as a critical aspect of that.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.
Ahhh?? How come? I mean, it doesn't need to be a "boundary region" per se, the "constant" may vary gradually, within a small percentage and over large distances.
And, except for variation of several orders of magnitude that would bring the electron orbits inside the nucleus, why would "atoms fly apart"? Their orbitals would modify spatially, but I imagine the orbitals' energy could still remain the same.
Yes, light may be stretched/compressed in the same manner it happens within a lens. Wouldn't this explain a "gravitational lensing"?
Without knowing the exact nature of the change your proposing it's hard to estimate what the precise effects would be, but needless to say the fundamental constants varying in a consistent manner over a region of space would still produce dramatic effects. Modifying that changes all sorts of energy levels - parallel plate capacitors which are charged to an energy in one region of space are suddenly not in another. They'd experience forces counter-acting the energy change - and that's an ideal system. In an atomic system you'd have atoms which suddenly had to shed excess energy somehow - you'd get huge structures of these which would look unlike anything else in the universe (since it'd be a ghost force not explainable as gravity or conventional electromagnetism).
And it very much would be a subatomic re-arrangement - those constants are involved in every level of physics and chemistry. Changes would not result in "simple" results, you'd get massively emergent effects. But probably most importantly, all of this would happen to visible matter - it would be very obvious because we'd see something which didn't make sense with normal forces. Dark matter is notable because the only thing we see is unusual gravitational attraction, and nothing else.
Except professors don't teach at high schools, which is what this seems to be about.
And probably more to the point, the bigger problem is no one can agree on what a bad teacher is to be measured by beyond anecdotes. But I strongly suspect its "shouldn't have given my child a bad grade!"
It depends on their system. It's conceivable you could replace the enzyme solution if it was freely circulating, as the article notes, from from looking at the abstract it seems they still depend on a surface-attached enzyme system as well. So that's still functionally like replacing the battery anode and cathode every few weeks as well - so in practice you can't do it at all (since if anything gets into that solution it'll destroy the enzymes very quickly - say, some discarded skin cells).
This puts you back in "single use" category - which just isn't useful for a battery technology.
Stuff like this has been done before - and it always sounds good - but they're burying the lead.
Enzymes degrade. They're just made of amino acids - they're not long term structures. It's why our bodies cycle and replace them all the time, and its why every single commercial product based on enzymes is single-use only. With time - and we're talking weeks, not years - they fall apart and stop working due to hydrolysis and self-reactions and what not.
This is why there was a lot of excitement when MIT successfully produced completely solid-state glucose fuel cells. Because a solid-state technology is not enzyme based, and would degrade much, much more slowly (also has other neat properties: like you can implant it).
The big news in...well just about anything, would be if they'd built a battery with a biological component that could self-regenerate the enzymes it needed to operate. That would make me excited - since we'd finally be talking about something you could actually build a useful and long-term product out of (also creating some hilarious new failure modes - 'sorry, your battery has developed an infection - please bring it to tech support for antibiotic treatment').
Follow up: And it looks like sub-surface support is exactly what I was just complaining about - a way to update small portions of your window and tell the compositor that's what you're doing. Make your editing windows subsurfaces and only send the necessary updates.
VNC is highly dependent on how clever/fast your image scraping and compression is. The TigerVNC client connecting over a LAN to a TightVNC windows server is so much faster then some of the other clients its unbelievable. Even over the net it's much quicker then others (TemaViewer's VNC client is terrible).
The problem is very much "how quickly can you get a copy of the pixels" "how quickly can you compress them" and "how many screen sections do you need to update".
The slightly disappointing thing (or thing I've not been able to establish one-way or the other about Wayland) is that there doesn't seem to be any interface for a client application to signal the compositor that it's updating just a small portion of the screen, rather then whole thing.
VNC could easily be configured to run as a client and serve just a specific window over the net (with the benefit that you could create it as a normal desktop X window, hide it while it's being remotely served, and then bring it back to the local X session) - but the server software to do this just isn't there yet. Wayland certainly seems like it'll make it a heck of a lot easier to write *good* client software like this.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Conversely, optical comms could probably be received on any telescope on the planet. We already have a wide variety of equipment setup for receiving very faint optical signals. Just a matter of hooking that into a modulator (he says, casually describing several Ph D projects and millions of dollars).
Minorities and poor people?
Yes because clearly political ideology is exactly as unchangeable as one's race or country of origins.
Talk about bait and switch.
Seriously this isn't new. Good in-car nav systems have had dead reckoning based on wheel position + speed for ages.
It's a bubble because absolutely no one, anywhere in the world, has any reason to tether themselves to the Bitcoin currency. You don't pay taxes in it. No one has to pay taxes in it.
There's no anchor to the currency. The only thing anyone has to do with Bitcoin is cash out to their local currency to pay taxes.
This is hardly "backdoor". There's a central body, the police can obtain a warrant and then request information from it.
The article asserts that they will be able to get information without warrants, though no mechanism for this has been suggested. Are you saying that the article is incorrect?
You're right not a warrant, but also not direct access - there's an intermediary. So the pressing issue is probably to have the law changed to still require a warrant, but provide quicker turn-around when one is granted.
This is the NHS in Britain aka single-payer healthcare from the government.
This is hardly "backdoor". There's a central body, the police can obtain a warrant and then request information from it.
Doctor-patient confidentiality is a practice with regards to disclosure by doctors. In a practical sense your information is disclosed widely with the government and your insurance company - i.e. Medicare would know for what items I went to the optometrist recently, as would any private insurer I had, because they need to pay for the various line-item billings.
It's not a meaningful change from standard practice - medical practitioners can already be compelled by the same warrant's to share patient files.
Cutting things up isn't useful. In space you need to impart delta-V - lasers have been proposed as a way to trigger outgasing on orbital debris from the ground. Add enough upwards delta-V away from the earth and you could shift the orbit enough for a deep-dive into the atmosphere (space, the only place where thrusting away from the ground sends you straight into it).
The physics of electromagnetism and photonics will somehow stop an errant beam from destroying anything else as it travels onwards? Nope, of course not.
Okay so you clearly have no idea how lasers work, or the physics of electromagnetism.
For one thing, they defocus over long distances. At sufficiently high energies they lose energy because they turn the air to plasma and bleed off intensity as heat. It's been a struggle to make ranged laser weapons work, because you can't exceed a couple of kw/cm2 before the air turns to plasma and your beam blooms out of existence.
And for the example given, lasers are much less likely to cause collateral damage - they can "unfired" instantly, and they will travel at a tangent to the Earth meaning that once headed any amount above the horizon they will never fall below it. Bullets, missiles, bombs - well those always come down and they are lethal when they do.
These days? Both of them. Crazy is doubling down on stupid.
That's not how parallel construction works.
Parallel construction is based on the idea that if a crime was committed, then it's unlikely that the bit you got by a non-admissable means was the only evidence of that crime.
"Fruit of the poisonous tree" is also specific: what it means is that you can't use an inadmissable wiretap to then carry out a normally disallowed search to get evidence of a crime.
So for example, it is not illegal for police to search through public parklands. It's public property after all, they can go there. If it was discovered someone had committed a murder and buried the body in a public park, but it was discovered by inadmissable wiretap (say, a hitman telling a client the job was completed) - then you couldn't use that intercept to get a warrant to go search their house for murder implements, or collect DNA.
But you can suggest to law enforcement to check public parks for bodies, particularly within 100m of these coordinates or so. Law enforcement is normally able to do this, and might have stumbled across this anyway, or a hiker might have or something. If they then find the body, they can work backwards from the victim, rebuild the profile, and when it comes time to asking for warrants, they can happen to ask for a warrant against the intercept guy first (amongst others they would normally have done so with).
All this evidence, collected this way, is admissable because it could have been discovered as a part of normal, admissable police/law enforcement procedure. It's public, it's out in the open and you have to explain it because it was perfectly legal to collect it.
Actually you're incorrect.
Modern archeological evidence shows that the pyramids were almost certainly not built by slaves. While it's true the Egyptians had slaves, from the building layout and likely meal compositions, the pyramid builders were actually working a well-paid, high status job (and why not, its building the tombs of the emperor - working on things for the whitehouse is usually considered to hold prestige as well).
Fast-forward to World War II and see how well slave labor worked out for the Germans building rockets. They sank staggering amounts of resources into the enterprise, and despite it were still having frequent problems with V2s being sabotaged or not working from poorly built components. A problem Von Braun himself recognized.
Just because you can enslave people and do something doesn't mean you're being remotely efficient about it.
That article isn't especially informative either, but does get into the issue better: it's all about how and what's being tracked and included as "healthcare.gov".
The $634m figure was being bandied around right out the gate - it's probably getting slightly closer to true now, but it depends on what you want to call a boondoggle in how you sum it up. I will wager there's a lot of non-optional IT costs at the moment which people are scrambling to shove under the "healthcare.gov" banner in order to hopefully make the number bigger.
It didn't cost $634 million.
The $600+m is what you get if you simply add up every contract given to the original contractor (CGI Technology and Solutions) since 2007. You know, when Bush was in the Whitehouse. They're a reasonably large, reasonably well-used contractor for things so they do other stuff too.
Since Congress dicked around with actually providing specific funding for it's creation, the estimate is that it probably cost about $120 million, with an original budget of ~$55 million + auxiliary spending (after changes to the various bills by Congress and states) of $63 million. For a total of ~$120 m. That's probably at the high end.
Sure you can force someone to be productive under miserable conditions but you can get terrific productivity as well by treating your employees nicely.
Actually you really can't - its a policing fallacy. People count the costs of welfare, but don't count the costs of their police force.
Similarly, a part of that "force people to be productive" is paying a whole bunch of managers to stand around and bear over them.
I used this for navigating all around cities in Europe. The data set over there is very complete.
Frankly, having a smartphone which can't operate it's most useful and potentially life-saving features without a data connection just seems retarded - and I'd regard having very completely world maps on the device as a critical aspect of that.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.
Ahhh?? How come? I mean, it doesn't need to be a "boundary region" per se, the "constant" may vary gradually, within a small percentage and over large distances.
And, except for variation of several orders of magnitude that would bring the electron orbits inside the nucleus, why would "atoms fly apart"? Their orbitals would modify spatially, but I imagine the orbitals' energy could still remain the same.
Yes, light may be stretched/compressed in the same manner it happens within a lens. Wouldn't this explain a "gravitational lensing"?
Without knowing the exact nature of the change your proposing it's hard to estimate what the precise effects would be, but needless to say the fundamental constants varying in a consistent manner over a region of space would still produce dramatic effects. Modifying that changes all sorts of energy levels - parallel plate capacitors which are charged to an energy in one region of space are suddenly not in another. They'd experience forces counter-acting the energy change - and that's an ideal system. In an atomic system you'd have atoms which suddenly had to shed excess energy somehow - you'd get huge structures of these which would look unlike anything else in the universe (since it'd be a ghost force not explainable as gravity or conventional electromagnetism).
And it very much would be a subatomic re-arrangement - those constants are involved in every level of physics and chemistry. Changes would not result in "simple" results, you'd get massively emergent effects. But probably most importantly, all of this would happen to visible matter - it would be very obvious because we'd see something which didn't make sense with normal forces. Dark matter is notable because the only thing we see is unusual gravitational attraction, and nothing else.
Except professors don't teach at high schools, which is what this seems to be about.
And probably more to the point, the bigger problem is no one can agree on what a bad teacher is to be measured by beyond anecdotes. But I strongly suspect its "shouldn't have given my child a bad grade!"
It depends on their system. It's conceivable you could replace the enzyme solution if it was freely circulating, as the article notes, from from looking at the abstract it seems they still depend on a surface-attached enzyme system as well. So that's still functionally like replacing the battery anode and cathode every few weeks as well - so in practice you can't do it at all (since if anything gets into that solution it'll destroy the enzymes very quickly - say, some discarded skin cells).
This puts you back in "single use" category - which just isn't useful for a battery technology.
Never going to happen.
Stuff like this has been done before - and it always sounds good - but they're burying the lead.
Enzymes degrade. They're just made of amino acids - they're not long term structures. It's why our bodies cycle and replace them all the time, and its why every single commercial product based on enzymes is single-use only. With time - and we're talking weeks, not years - they fall apart and stop working due to hydrolysis and self-reactions and what not.
This is why there was a lot of excitement when MIT successfully produced completely solid-state glucose fuel cells. Because a solid-state technology is not enzyme based, and would degrade much, much more slowly (also has other neat properties: like you can implant it).
The big news in...well just about anything, would be if they'd built a battery with a biological component that could self-regenerate the enzymes it needed to operate. That would make me excited - since we'd finally be talking about something you could actually build a useful and long-term product out of (also creating some hilarious new failure modes - 'sorry, your battery has developed an infection - please bring it to tech support for antibiotic treatment').
Problem is it's meaningless if you don't know the potential developed from the chemistry.
Follow up: And it looks like sub-surface support is exactly what I was just complaining about - a way to update small portions of your window and tell the compositor that's what you're doing. Make your editing windows subsurfaces and only send the necessary updates.
VNC is highly dependent on how clever/fast your image scraping and compression is. The TigerVNC client connecting over a LAN to a TightVNC windows server is so much faster then some of the other clients its unbelievable. Even over the net it's much quicker then others (TemaViewer's VNC client is terrible).
The problem is very much "how quickly can you get a copy of the pixels" "how quickly can you compress them" and "how many screen sections do you need to update".
The slightly disappointing thing (or thing I've not been able to establish one-way or the other about Wayland) is that there doesn't seem to be any interface for a client application to signal the compositor that it's updating just a small portion of the screen, rather then whole thing.
VNC could easily be configured to run as a client and serve just a specific window over the net (with the benefit that you could create it as a normal desktop X window, hide it while it's being remotely served, and then bring it back to the local X session) - but the server software to do this just isn't there yet. Wayland certainly seems like it'll make it a heck of a lot easier to write *good* client software like this.
Have physicists taken into account that the stars nearer the center of the galaxy are in a deeper gravity well and so will experience time at a different rate than the stars out at the edge
Yes, but only recently. They have also detected similar rings of gravitational lensing in galactic voids that have no observable matter, indicating huge amounts of invisible matter in areas with no other detectable matter within tens of millions of light years of the locations.
What if the permittivity/permeability constants of that "void" areas aren't that constant as we assume they are?
That would actually be really obvious - you'd get massive discontinuities at the boundary regions where the constants started changing, since ordinary matter straying into those regions would be re-arranged at a subatomic level - atoms flying apart, new ones forming, light being stretched and compressed etc.