"Survival of the Human species" [...] does not mean saving lives.
It can be easily shown that survival of the species does mean saving lives. That's just by definition of the word "survival."
It can be also shown that survival of one human may lead to survival of the whole civilization. Just as an example, if the inventor of the warp drive dies young, before inventing the thing, the Borg can assimilate the Earth before another inventor shows up. The civilization is facing many challenges today. Would we better off if Steven Hawking died young? Will his work lead to construction of hyperspace drive 20 years later?
While you are correct that creature comforts usually do not contribute to survival, we do not know what does or does not make a difference in the future. We can know that only looking back. All we can do is to do the best we can at every moment in time.
That means the funding is going to come from someplace other than my taxes.
All the profits and patents will also go to whoever pays for the research. Access to the treatment will be gated by foreign governments. (Not that the US government isn't attempting that already.)
There are quite a few HA enthusiasts. But the majority of them want results, not the process. Z-Wave is a known system that delivers known, and good, results. Is this one just as good? Nobody knows, it's still being developed.
Mesh networks usually constrain the number of hops, to prevent an infinite bounce of messages within the system. In Z-Wave the maximum hop count is four, IIRC. What do you do if your building is longer, or more complex, than that? You deploy additional (slave) controllers. They are independently connected (via Ethernet, often) and synchronized. Does this system support that?
The placement of the gateway into one of the light bulbs is also debatable. Why each light bulb has to have all that functionality if it is not used in most of them? Wouldn't it be easier to have a plug in the wall, like SheevaPlug, that can talk to the mesh over whatever control interface is available?
The procedure of replacement of failed components is also relevant. OK, one of the bulbs failed. What do you do now? Are they controlled as a group, as a scene, or individually? In all these cases the controller has to know the MAC (or other) address of the new unit. In Z-Wave the address is dynamically set; in Insteon it's a 3-byte MAC address.
As I said, Z-Wave and Insteon went through years of development, deployment, and fixes before they became more or less usable. Zigbee made big mistakes early on, and because of that Zigbee devices were not interoperable. That made use of them risky. Now Z-Wave (Sigma Designs) has certification schemes, where every new device is tested in special labs that it conforms to all the aspects of the protocol and will not interfere with other devices. There is a lot of that stuff in every successful large scale system. The guys who came up with this WiFi idea probably don't appreciate how much exactly it takes to become successful in this market.
Will they succeed? I don't know. There is nothing, technically, that would prevent them from making a system that is better than existing ones. But they must be careful to not construct roadblocks. For example, existing systems support battery-powered nodes that can work on a single battery for about a year. This calls for very rare activation, and for a special "beaming" scheme to wake up such a device. Is their system capable of that? It better be, otherwise they cannot build motion sensors, and smoke alarms, and doorbells, and door/window sensors, and many other similar devices.
You can bump the switch with your elbow when your arms are full
This light bulb has to be always ON at the switch. Perhaps you can cycle it off and on, and then it will default to "on" after application of power. But that's inconvenient and counter-intuitive.
you can have the lights turn on when your phone is in range after you come home
Perhaps that will work if you are a King and live in a palace, with rooms that are far apart. Modern homes have rooms packed close to each other, and drywall does not block RF. You will end up activating lights in all adjacent rooms, regardless of the need.
automatically turn on when your garage opens and it's dark at the end of the day
My garage opener already has two light bulbs (LED) that activate for 5 minutes after the door moves. That's plenty of time to park the car, grab your things and get into the house.
you can turn them on from a button in your car
Once you get into this level of functionality you want to have an established home automation system, like Z-Wave or Insteon. They already have portable and stationary controllers, and a bunch of devices that can be controlled. Is this company on Kickstarter is trying to compete with Z-Wave? They'd become yet another proprietary solution that is a thing in itself. The huge advantage of Z-Wave is that it is a standard, and everyone can make Z-Wave devices that will work with everyone else's Z-Wave devices. For that purpose Z-Wave has published a set of classes, where the programming instructions for every class (sensor, light switch, etc.) are explained in detail. Technology-wise, Z-Wave is also a mesh, it runs in the 900 MHz ISM band, and it does not interfere with your 802.11 networks. Insteon is a mixed (power line and wireless) technology. Both are pretty inexpensive.
But I get it - smart phones are complicated and those damn kids use them too much already so no one should have more technology - especially not nerds on a tech news site.
You want more than one controller at your home. Do you want to pay for several smartphones that are just laying around the house so that visitors can use them? Do you *always* have your smartphone on you? (I don't even own one, and I have no plans to get such a thing.) What if you forget your smartphone at work, or lose it, or break it?
There also the significant downside in that all your light switches become useless because you have to leave them all on, all the time.
There is a more significant downside, but to learn about it you have to have a few of those smart switches in your house.
That downside is that they consume a lot of power, regardless of whether they are on or off. They don't have transformers; but that wouldn't be a good solution either because 1 to 2 watt transformers are horribly inefficient (I measured them personally.) A switcher would be efficient, but they cost too much, and they require medium frequency, ferrite-based transformers, and an optocoupler... it gets expensive fast.
So what are these switches using instead? They have a small capacitor, a small resistor, a rectifier bridge, and a Zener diode. That's basically all that they have. This is a horribly inefficient system; a typical dimmer switch with remote control (Z-Wave or Insteon, doesn't matter which one exactly) easily dissipates a watt of power. Multiply by 24 and 365.25, and you end up with about 9 kWh wasted just on that one switch. If you have ten of them, that'd be 90 kWh per year. Not much, but it's energy that you did not have to burn. To put it differently, each switch consumes enough energy to keep an incandescent 100W light bulb on for more than three days and three nights. If you use an LED or CFL light bulb, it takes 10% of that power, and then the switch itself burns enough power to keep that light on for a whole month.
I have these switches, and they are heating the walls of my house. This is particularly easy to notice in summer. I can afford that because all my power comes from the solar (PV) array. But it's a factor if you just want to "become green." The best way to be green is to use LED light bulbs and regular, dumb switches - and to use those switches whenever you enter and leave the area. Automation saves energy only in very specific circumstances, when you cannot expect the lights to be turned off promptly. Corridors of office buildings, at night, is one such example. At home most people neither want nor need home automation. They will not be better off with it. It's just a toy, and as most toys go it costs you more than you save.
I don't use X10, actually, except a couple of motion sensors and one receiver for them. X10 is not reliable. Most of my house runs on Insteon because it's cheaper than Z-Wave. I have a few Z-Wave devices too, and I make new ones. Z-Wave is pretty good, but it's complex in programming (the firmware that goes into the device.) The serial protocol of the controller is not a pleasure either; to begin with, it's binary...
Insteon is a proprietary design, but the protocol is open. It is necessary if you want to control something. I have the PDF on this box somewhere, and I used it to hack the thermostat code to add a function (fan on/off) that wasn't there initially.
Insteon can work with Linux. My own setup runs on Windows, just because I'm using Homeseer - and until just a month ago HS did not run on Linux at all. The hardware interface (USB or serial) plugs into a userspace service, and that one exposes a port (don't remember what type) for multiple clients to connect. HS connects to that port. You can bypass all that if you need to, or you can even build your own Insteon hardware if you have nothing else to do:-) I can't think of anything secret there.
You can write Bash scripts to run your house. You will want to have some framework, though - you get a better view from shoulders of giants. Check out MisterHouse and LinuxHA. Do not waste your time on reinventing the wheel; use existing code and build on top of it.
I use Insteon and Z-Wave at this house. They run on cheap 8-bit processors and do not require fancy clocks, or complex modulation, or multiple channels. WiFi is overdesigned for the task, is chatty, and needs configuration of some sort.
If you are interested in home automation, the last thing you want to do is to jump on a technology that is advertised to you through Slashdot. There is not much you can do with a single light bulb; however if you get a proper set of sensors, switches and stuff (Z-Wave on more expensive end, Insteon in the middle, and X10 at the dirt cheap prices) then you can build a usable system out of that, one that detects your activities and does the right thing. A single light bulb might be fun to play with... for about five minutes. To do more you need more. Insteon market has many devices that do what you need. Z-Wave manufacturers make new devices every day.
I'm not trying to justify murder, but there is a difference between killing your own people and killing someone else's people. You may not like the difference, you may not think it matters, but there is one.
The people that are being murdered probably don't care much about who exactly is doing the killing. After all, would you, standing against the wall, be thinking of the execution squad as of "your own people?" Such executions are common in civil wars, and you can bet that the warring sides do not think of each other as of long lost, beloved brothers.
But if you want to approach this legally, what difference does it make? I think it's the matter of having legal power of a souvereign over a given person. If he is under the jurisdiction of a country then that country can use its laws, however unjust, to oppress that person, all the way up to killing. Governments have that right, and the USA uses it even today, sometimes even without a trial, and sometimes it knowingly kills innocents. This means that mass deaths in USSR were... legal? Apparently so, as long as the actions of the government were in accord with the laws that the same government had adopted and published. Can a country have harsh laws that make no sense? Sure it can; how about Saudi Arabia today, or Thailand, or Afghanistan? If you don't like their laws, don't go there. If you are a citizen... you either obey, or you escape, or you fight those laws, or you die.
Now, what about a situation when conquerors come into a country and kill its population without accepting that population under their jurisdiction? (That's the situation you posed.) Then this becomes a plain vanilla war crime. Politically speaking, the USA would be better off interpreting the Indians as citizens. The government has power to order its citizens around. It does not have such power over foreigners.
If you need 90kg for your trip maybe you should consider not taking all your gold medallions and lead bricks.
As I said, trains work only for people who travel light. Now if you want to debate *why* people have to carry lots of equipment with them, I guess you never met hikers, climbers, fishers, hunters, or even bicyclists who have to drive to the location to enjoy their bikes there. Not every cargo is of Princess Vespa's selection, loaded with hair dryers on a desert planet. Some people actually know what they are doing. In my case, for example, I have a huge bag of clothing that covers all cases from -10C to +30C, in the field (layered clothing) and at the lodge, so much variable is the climate in High Sierras. I may go through several different types of weather just on my way there - rain, fog, snowstorm, ice, mud - I have seen it all there. Carrying chains too, by the way. Oh, the nearest train station is in Reno, NV - about 150 miles away.
Four hours of solid driving is pushing it for most people, at which point a half hour break and refuel is a good idea for you as much as the car.
Today 30 minutes won't be enough to recharge the car. Tesla can be recharged to 50% in 20 minutes if you are using their supercharger. Charging to 100% will take longer. Stopping for 20-30 minutes every 100-150 miles is not practical. I personally stop after 4 hours for 15 minutes to eat a sandwich. There is no need to stay around for longer - you aren't going to relax sitting in a chair at McD if you were sitting in a chair in your car for hours prior. You need to walk, but you won't want to walk for even 15 minutes, let alone an hour.
They are fine for the vast majority of journeys and the 0.01% they are unable to conveniently cover would be cheaper to just rent a petrol car for considering the savings you get the rest of the time.
A week-long rental of a car will cost you 10% of the cost of a car. Those rentals are not charities, and their services are very expensive. It is cheaper to buy a gas car and drive it everywhere than to buy an EV (in itself a more costly car) and then additionally pay for rent.
It would be easier to just build a good public transport system with normal trains so you didn't need to take a car at all.
It's easy to say if you travel light - such as carrying nothing outside of pockets of your clothes.
However if you go to a freeway and have a look at other cars, you will see that many are fully loaded. Long trips require a lot of stuff, unless you are willing to travel like a hobo.
When I go on a vacation in my car I load it with 200 lbs of clothes, food and equipment that I need while there. I load it in my garage, and I unload it at the site. No handling is required between these points. Public transit would be useless to me - how do I get this mountain of stuff to the train? You can't even load that much into a bus because it takes ten minutes to load if you are lightning fast (and if nobody steals some of your bags while you are not looking.)
Train is excellent only if you wake up one fine morning, put on your pants and your shirt, take your iPhone, and go to a place hundreds of miles away. I don't know too many people who need to do just that.
USSR, in their attempts to build socialism, reached the end of the line by 1980's. Nobody was working, but everyone was paid. The industry collapsed. Changes were not just desired, they were mandatory, because the country was about to experience another wave of hunger. Gorbachev started the reforms, but he had no clue what to do. By Putin's time things got sorted out on their own, in a naturally capitalist way. A young capitalist economy, running under minimal control of the government, can be very efficient - more efficient, in principle, than the mature - if not creaking old - capitalism of the USA, bound in seventeen layers of red tape, so that BANANA is the only available industrial option.
It's the old tale of Phoenix. Empires get born, mature, get old, and then die. Young empires take the lead until it's their turn to get old and die.
Does killing tens of millions of your own citizens in forced collectivization, forced relocations, artificial famines and camps that worked their prisoners to death count for anything?
An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.
So what is the Skynet, not an advanced civilization or not barbaric?
There could be civilizations that don't even realize that chemical compounds may interlink to support life. There could be civilizations to which we are microscopic creatures; or the other way around. We destroy bacteria in most places where we come across them, and if they attract our attention we just do it faster.
There may be civilizations that define the word "barbaric" differently. We had those here, on Earth - Aztecs, for example. Not even mentioning many examples from the 20th century.
Most of terrestrial communications on VHF and above is done with antennas that don't radiate much into space. HF and longer wavelengths reflect from ionosphere and don't leave Earth. Most unintended transmissions don't have enough power to be detected outside of the Solar system, and they don't employ noise-resistant coding.
However if you take a 60 dBi dish, shove a kilowatt or ten into the feed, and slowly modulate the signal with error correction codes, that transmission might be detectable from a larger distance - depending on how much gain the receiving antenna has.
Why is the first part of the wave a perfect and uniform triangle wave followed by a clear and steady zero-level, then it degrades into a much noisier signal?
This knowledge is lost along with the analog television. Clear and steady zero level is blanking interval, and the "noisier signal" is the analog video of the scan line.
If you rotate the disk backward you will get the image flipped, and the sequence of the frames inverted (assuming that the recording is done in a spiral, and thus has only two ends.) An observer may be able to figure out which end is up even without hints.
A lot of folks know how to clear their on-phone text/call history, after all.
Does that also clear big databases at Verizon and AT&T and Sprint? The databases that are used to bill you for air minutes, long distance and international calls, and all that? The databases that record your GPS location and the nearby towers?
Naturally, it's always possible that the driver uses someone else's phone. But then there is nothing that the LEO at the scene can do, short of searching the car. The driver can say "Sorry, officer, I do not have my phone with me" and he wouldn't be lying. What if there are several people in the car and several phones? Who did the texting? How would one prove it? What if there is no SIM card in the phone? (Not difficult to "lose" one while waiting for the police to arrive. Sorry, officer, the impact threw the phone out of the holder and the card must have fallen out. I'm sure you can find it.)
If we want this situation to improve, we'll have to start identifying the aspects of our society that leave so many people overly stressed & unhappy, and start changing them.
I don't think that popular rejection of whiners has anything to do with it. There are far more objective reasons. For example:
Political instability or unfavorable political developments (such as any of the recent scandals of the week)
Deindustrialization of the society on one hand, and higher automation of what remains on another hand, leading to mass unemployment and poverty.
Continued destruction of the currency, inevitably leading to the country defaulting on its debts and entering a major crisis
Continued destruction of public morale; increase of criminal activity.
Continued fragmentation of the society into unfriendly, if not warring, factions.
Most people cannot do much about that, except to drink and use drugs. The most wise refrain from having children. The future is not going to be pleasant. Humanity hasn't mastered psychohistory yet, but we have good enough understanding of its basics.
If you are facing the choice to either sit down in front of the TV or to go in the street and kick the living dayligths out of an innocent stranger, now you know which one is safer.
Perhaps. But it's even more useless then. Who needs textures and models that are encoded with a proprietary editor for a very specific use, with zero documentation, and can be rendered only by a very specific engine? (Like the swaying grass in Far Cry 2, for one example.) Music could be the only readily usable asset - if somehow it pains one too much to plug the S/PDIF in and record it in all its digital glory. Sometimes studios publish the music separately, in better format. Such music is "out there" for many games, and it was not recorded during the game.
I'd have thought that in 2013 nobody cares about SYN floods on open ports any more than they do about receiving just a barrage of random packets in general.
Well, SYN cookies and TCPCT have their place. But would you like to stay in your home, behind the locked door, while groups of masked men try, day and night, to pick the lock? Most people would prefer to not even allow such people onto the property.
Not if an account is permanently locked out after 20 unsuccessful tries, like it should be.
There is a little catch with that. Imagine that some miscreant connected to your SSH port (22 or whatever) and tried a bunch of logins and passwords. The account locked out. Now you need to urgently connect to the box and do something, in the middle of the night. The server is 300 miles away, and there is nobody at the site to clear the lockout. What do you do then? Jump into the car and start driving? Lockouts are usable only if there is always an admin available to clear them. Login rate controls are far more practical, being just short lockouts that reset themselves automatically. Even then if the attack continues you may not get a chance to log in before the account locks out again. That'd be a damn effective DoS, done with hardly any effort.
Heck, I'd say that by default ssh should only allow password-less logins anyway.
I do exactly that. To connect, you must have the private key, and you must know the password for the key. Neither of them is ever leaving your [trusted] system.
Slashdot Mirror
"Survival of the Human species" [...] does not mean saving lives.
It can be easily shown that survival of the species does mean saving lives. That's just by definition of the word "survival."
It can be also shown that survival of one human may lead to survival of the whole civilization. Just as an example, if the inventor of the warp drive dies young, before inventing the thing, the Borg can assimilate the Earth before another inventor shows up. The civilization is facing many challenges today. Would we better off if Steven Hawking died young? Will his work lead to construction of hyperspace drive 20 years later?
While you are correct that creature comforts usually do not contribute to survival, we do not know what does or does not make a difference in the future. We can know that only looking back. All we can do is to do the best we can at every moment in time.
I cannot think of any research that helps the survival of either Humans or Chimps.
Sorry to hear that. Perhaps an example will help:
"This here vial contains a drug that is effective in treatment of diabetes, and is harmless. True or false?"
That means the funding is going to come from someplace other than my taxes.
All the profits and patents will also go to whoever pays for the research. Access to the treatment will be gated by foreign governments. (Not that the US government isn't attempting that already.)
There are quite a few HA enthusiasts. But the majority of them want results, not the process. Z-Wave is a known system that delivers known, and good, results. Is this one just as good? Nobody knows, it's still being developed.
Mesh networks usually constrain the number of hops, to prevent an infinite bounce of messages within the system. In Z-Wave the maximum hop count is four, IIRC. What do you do if your building is longer, or more complex, than that? You deploy additional (slave) controllers. They are independently connected (via Ethernet, often) and synchronized. Does this system support that?
The placement of the gateway into one of the light bulbs is also debatable. Why each light bulb has to have all that functionality if it is not used in most of them? Wouldn't it be easier to have a plug in the wall, like SheevaPlug, that can talk to the mesh over whatever control interface is available?
The procedure of replacement of failed components is also relevant. OK, one of the bulbs failed. What do you do now? Are they controlled as a group, as a scene, or individually? In all these cases the controller has to know the MAC (or other) address of the new unit. In Z-Wave the address is dynamically set; in Insteon it's a 3-byte MAC address.
As I said, Z-Wave and Insteon went through years of development, deployment, and fixes before they became more or less usable. Zigbee made big mistakes early on, and because of that Zigbee devices were not interoperable. That made use of them risky. Now Z-Wave (Sigma Designs) has certification schemes, where every new device is tested in special labs that it conforms to all the aspects of the protocol and will not interfere with other devices. There is a lot of that stuff in every successful large scale system. The guys who came up with this WiFi idea probably don't appreciate how much exactly it takes to become successful in this market.
Will they succeed? I don't know. There is nothing, technically, that would prevent them from making a system that is better than existing ones. But they must be careful to not construct roadblocks. For example, existing systems support battery-powered nodes that can work on a single battery for about a year. This calls for very rare activation, and for a special "beaming" scheme to wake up such a device. Is their system capable of that? It better be, otherwise they cannot build motion sensors, and smoke alarms, and doorbells, and door/window sensors, and many other similar devices.
You can bump the switch with your elbow when your arms are full
This light bulb has to be always ON at the switch. Perhaps you can cycle it off and on, and then it will default to "on" after application of power. But that's inconvenient and counter-intuitive.
you can have the lights turn on when your phone is in range after you come home
Perhaps that will work if you are a King and live in a palace, with rooms that are far apart. Modern homes have rooms packed close to each other, and drywall does not block RF. You will end up activating lights in all adjacent rooms, regardless of the need.
automatically turn on when your garage opens and it's dark at the end of the day
My garage opener already has two light bulbs (LED) that activate for 5 minutes after the door moves. That's plenty of time to park the car, grab your things and get into the house.
you can turn them on from a button in your car
Once you get into this level of functionality you want to have an established home automation system, like Z-Wave or Insteon. They already have portable and stationary controllers, and a bunch of devices that can be controlled. Is this company on Kickstarter is trying to compete with Z-Wave? They'd become yet another proprietary solution that is a thing in itself. The huge advantage of Z-Wave is that it is a standard, and everyone can make Z-Wave devices that will work with everyone else's Z-Wave devices. For that purpose Z-Wave has published a set of classes, where the programming instructions for every class (sensor, light switch, etc.) are explained in detail. Technology-wise, Z-Wave is also a mesh, it runs in the 900 MHz ISM band, and it does not interfere with your 802.11 networks. Insteon is a mixed (power line and wireless) technology. Both are pretty inexpensive.
But I get it - smart phones are complicated and those damn kids use them too much already so no one should have more technology - especially not nerds on a tech news site.
You want more than one controller at your home. Do you want to pay for several smartphones that are just laying around the house so that visitors can use them? Do you *always* have your smartphone on you? (I don't even own one, and I have no plans to get such a thing.) What if you forget your smartphone at work, or lose it, or break it?
There also the significant downside in that all your light switches become useless because you have to leave them all on, all the time.
There is a more significant downside, but to learn about it you have to have a few of those smart switches in your house.
That downside is that they consume a lot of power, regardless of whether they are on or off. They don't have transformers; but that wouldn't be a good solution either because 1 to 2 watt transformers are horribly inefficient (I measured them personally.) A switcher would be efficient, but they cost too much, and they require medium frequency, ferrite-based transformers, and an optocoupler... it gets expensive fast.
So what are these switches using instead? They have a small capacitor, a small resistor, a rectifier bridge, and a Zener diode. That's basically all that they have. This is a horribly inefficient system; a typical dimmer switch with remote control (Z-Wave or Insteon, doesn't matter which one exactly) easily dissipates a watt of power. Multiply by 24 and 365.25, and you end up with about 9 kWh wasted just on that one switch. If you have ten of them, that'd be 90 kWh per year. Not much, but it's energy that you did not have to burn. To put it differently, each switch consumes enough energy to keep an incandescent 100W light bulb on for more than three days and three nights. If you use an LED or CFL light bulb, it takes 10% of that power, and then the switch itself burns enough power to keep that light on for a whole month.
I have these switches, and they are heating the walls of my house. This is particularly easy to notice in summer. I can afford that because all my power comes from the solar (PV) array. But it's a factor if you just want to "become green." The best way to be green is to use LED light bulbs and regular, dumb switches - and to use those switches whenever you enter and leave the area. Automation saves energy only in very specific circumstances, when you cannot expect the lights to be turned off promptly. Corridors of office buildings, at night, is one such example. At home most people neither want nor need home automation. They will not be better off with it. It's just a toy, and as most toys go it costs you more than you save.
I don't use X10, actually, except a couple of motion sensors and one receiver for them. X10 is not reliable. Most of my house runs on Insteon because it's cheaper than Z-Wave. I have a few Z-Wave devices too, and I make new ones. Z-Wave is pretty good, but it's complex in programming (the firmware that goes into the device.) The serial protocol of the controller is not a pleasure either; to begin with, it's binary...
Insteon is a proprietary design, but the protocol is open. It is necessary if you want to control something. I have the PDF on this box somewhere, and I used it to hack the thermostat code to add a function (fan on/off) that wasn't there initially.
Insteon can work with Linux. My own setup runs on Windows, just because I'm using Homeseer - and until just a month ago HS did not run on Linux at all. The hardware interface (USB or serial) plugs into a userspace service, and that one exposes a port (don't remember what type) for multiple clients to connect. HS connects to that port. You can bypass all that if you need to, or you can even build your own Insteon hardware if you have nothing else to do :-) I can't think of anything secret there.
You can write Bash scripts to run your house. You will want to have some framework, though - you get a better view from shoulders of giants. Check out MisterHouse and LinuxHA. Do not waste your time on reinventing the wheel; use existing code and build on top of it.
I use Insteon and Z-Wave at this house. They run on cheap 8-bit processors and do not require fancy clocks, or complex modulation, or multiple channels. WiFi is overdesigned for the task, is chatty, and needs configuration of some sort.
If you are interested in home automation, the last thing you want to do is to jump on a technology that is advertised to you through Slashdot. There is not much you can do with a single light bulb; however if you get a proper set of sensors, switches and stuff (Z-Wave on more expensive end, Insteon in the middle, and X10 at the dirt cheap prices) then you can build a usable system out of that, one that detects your activities and does the right thing. A single light bulb might be fun to play with ... for about five minutes. To do more you need more. Insteon market has many devices that do what you need. Z-Wave manufacturers make new devices every day.
I can't wait for these things.
That's very good because you don't need to wait, or to pay at Kickstarter.
Putting the brains in each bulb makes it more generally accessible and effortlessly scalable.
Unless cost is a factor.
I'm not trying to justify murder, but there is a difference between killing your own people and killing someone else's people. You may not like the difference, you may not think it matters, but there is one.
The people that are being murdered probably don't care much about who exactly is doing the killing. After all, would you, standing against the wall, be thinking of the execution squad as of "your own people?" Such executions are common in civil wars, and you can bet that the warring sides do not think of each other as of long lost, beloved brothers.
But if you want to approach this legally, what difference does it make? I think it's the matter of having legal power of a souvereign over a given person. If he is under the jurisdiction of a country then that country can use its laws, however unjust, to oppress that person, all the way up to killing. Governments have that right, and the USA uses it even today, sometimes even without a trial, and sometimes it knowingly kills innocents. This means that mass deaths in USSR were ... legal? Apparently so, as long as the actions of the government were in accord with the laws that the same government had adopted and published. Can a country have harsh laws that make no sense? Sure it can; how about Saudi Arabia today, or Thailand, or Afghanistan? If you don't like their laws, don't go there. If you are a citizen... you either obey, or you escape, or you fight those laws, or you die.
Now, what about a situation when conquerors come into a country and kill its population without accepting that population under their jurisdiction? (That's the situation you posed.) Then this becomes a plain vanilla war crime. Politically speaking, the USA would be better off interpreting the Indians as citizens. The government has power to order its citizens around. It does not have such power over foreigners.
If you need 90kg for your trip maybe you should consider not taking all your gold medallions and lead bricks.
As I said, trains work only for people who travel light. Now if you want to debate *why* people have to carry lots of equipment with them, I guess you never met hikers, climbers, fishers, hunters, or even bicyclists who have to drive to the location to enjoy their bikes there. Not every cargo is of Princess Vespa's selection, loaded with hair dryers on a desert planet. Some people actually know what they are doing. In my case, for example, I have a huge bag of clothing that covers all cases from -10C to +30C, in the field (layered clothing) and at the lodge, so much variable is the climate in High Sierras. I may go through several different types of weather just on my way there - rain, fog, snowstorm, ice, mud - I have seen it all there. Carrying chains too, by the way. Oh, the nearest train station is in Reno, NV - about 150 miles away.
Four hours of solid driving is pushing it for most people, at which point a half hour break and refuel is a good idea for you as much as the car.
Today 30 minutes won't be enough to recharge the car. Tesla can be recharged to 50% in 20 minutes if you are using their supercharger. Charging to 100% will take longer. Stopping for 20-30 minutes every 100-150 miles is not practical. I personally stop after 4 hours for 15 minutes to eat a sandwich. There is no need to stay around for longer - you aren't going to relax sitting in a chair at McD if you were sitting in a chair in your car for hours prior. You need to walk, but you won't want to walk for even 15 minutes, let alone an hour.
They are fine for the vast majority of journeys and the 0.01% they are unable to conveniently cover would be cheaper to just rent a petrol car for considering the savings you get the rest of the time.
A week-long rental of a car will cost you 10% of the cost of a car. Those rentals are not charities, and their services are very expensive. It is cheaper to buy a gas car and drive it everywhere than to buy an EV (in itself a more costly car) and then additionally pay for rent.
It would be easier to just build a good public transport system with normal trains so you didn't need to take a car at all.
It's easy to say if you travel light - such as carrying nothing outside of pockets of your clothes.
However if you go to a freeway and have a look at other cars, you will see that many are fully loaded. Long trips require a lot of stuff, unless you are willing to travel like a hobo.
When I go on a vacation in my car I load it with 200 lbs of clothes, food and equipment that I need while there. I load it in my garage, and I unload it at the site. No handling is required between these points. Public transit would be useless to me - how do I get this mountain of stuff to the train? You can't even load that much into a bus because it takes ten minutes to load if you are lightning fast (and if nobody steals some of your bags while you are not looking.)
Train is excellent only if you wake up one fine morning, put on your pants and your shirt, take your iPhone, and go to a place hundreds of miles away. I don't know too many people who need to do just that.
USSR, in their attempts to build socialism, reached the end of the line by 1980's. Nobody was working, but everyone was paid. The industry collapsed. Changes were not just desired, they were mandatory, because the country was about to experience another wave of hunger. Gorbachev started the reforms, but he had no clue what to do. By Putin's time things got sorted out on their own, in a naturally capitalist way. A young capitalist economy, running under minimal control of the government, can be very efficient - more efficient, in principle, than the mature - if not creaking old - capitalism of the USA, bound in seventeen layers of red tape, so that BANANA is the only available industrial option.
It's the old tale of Phoenix. Empires get born, mature, get old, and then die. Young empires take the lead until it's their turn to get old and die.
Does killing tens of millions of your own citizens in forced collectivization, forced relocations, artificial famines and camps that worked their prisoners to death count for anything?
Are you talking about American Indians?
An advanced civilization, by definition, is not barbaric.
So what is the Skynet, not an advanced civilization or not barbaric?
There could be civilizations that don't even realize that chemical compounds may interlink to support life. There could be civilizations to which we are microscopic creatures; or the other way around. We destroy bacteria in most places where we come across them, and if they attract our attention we just do it faster.
There may be civilizations that define the word "barbaric" differently. We had those here, on Earth - Aztecs, for example. Not even mentioning many examples from the 20th century.
Most of terrestrial communications on VHF and above is done with antennas that don't radiate much into space. HF and longer wavelengths reflect from ionosphere and don't leave Earth. Most unintended transmissions don't have enough power to be detected outside of the Solar system, and they don't employ noise-resistant coding.
However if you take a 60 dBi dish, shove a kilowatt or ten into the feed, and slowly modulate the signal with error correction codes, that transmission might be detectable from a larger distance - depending on how much gain the receiving antenna has.
Why is the first part of the wave a perfect and uniform triangle wave followed by a clear and steady zero-level, then it degrades into a much noisier signal?
This knowledge is lost along with the analog television. Clear and steady zero level is blanking interval, and the "noisier signal" is the analog video of the scan line.
If you rotate the disk backward you will get the image flipped, and the sequence of the frames inverted (assuming that the recording is done in a spiral, and thus has only two ends.) An observer may be able to figure out which end is up even without hints.
A lot of folks know how to clear their on-phone text/call history, after all.
Does that also clear big databases at Verizon and AT&T and Sprint? The databases that are used to bill you for air minutes, long distance and international calls, and all that? The databases that record your GPS location and the nearby towers?
Naturally, it's always possible that the driver uses someone else's phone. But then there is nothing that the LEO at the scene can do, short of searching the car. The driver can say "Sorry, officer, I do not have my phone with me" and he wouldn't be lying. What if there are several people in the car and several phones? Who did the texting? How would one prove it? What if there is no SIM card in the phone? (Not difficult to "lose" one while waiting for the police to arrive. Sorry, officer, the impact threw the phone out of the holder and the card must have fallen out. I'm sure you can find it.)
If we want this situation to improve, we'll have to start identifying the aspects of our society that leave so many people overly stressed & unhappy, and start changing them.
I don't think that popular rejection of whiners has anything to do with it. There are far more objective reasons. For example:
Most people cannot do much about that, except to drink and use drugs. The most wise refrain from having children. The future is not going to be pleasant. Humanity hasn't mastered psychohistory yet, but we have good enough understanding of its basics.
If you are facing the choice to either sit down in front of the TV or to go in the street and kick the living dayligths out of an innocent stranger, now you know which one is safer.
Perhaps. But it's even more useless then. Who needs textures and models that are encoded with a proprietary editor for a very specific use, with zero documentation, and can be rendered only by a very specific engine? (Like the swaying grass in Far Cry 2, for one example.) Music could be the only readily usable asset - if somehow it pains one too much to plug the S/PDIF in and record it in all its digital glory. Sometimes studios publish the music separately, in better format. Such music is "out there" for many games, and it was not recorded during the game.
I'd have thought that in 2013 nobody cares about SYN floods on open ports any more than they do about receiving just a barrage of random packets in general.
Well, SYN cookies and TCPCT have their place. But would you like to stay in your home, behind the locked door, while groups of masked men try, day and night, to pick the lock? Most people would prefer to not even allow such people onto the property.
Not if an account is permanently locked out after 20 unsuccessful tries, like it should be.
There is a little catch with that. Imagine that some miscreant connected to your SSH port (22 or whatever) and tried a bunch of logins and passwords. The account locked out. Now you need to urgently connect to the box and do something, in the middle of the night. The server is 300 miles away, and there is nobody at the site to clear the lockout. What do you do then? Jump into the car and start driving? Lockouts are usable only if there is always an admin available to clear them. Login rate controls are far more practical, being just short lockouts that reset themselves automatically. Even then if the attack continues you may not get a chance to log in before the account locks out again. That'd be a damn effective DoS, done with hardly any effort.
Heck, I'd say that by default ssh should only allow password-less logins anyway.
I do exactly that. To connect, you must have the private key, and you must know the password for the key. Neither of them is ever leaving your [trusted] system.