You seem to be under the mistaken impression that businesses always do what is in their best interest. Sure, most companies try their best to maximize profit, but they also make critical blunders over and over again. My company, for example, spent a ton of money on rent to own equipment, because the bean counters didn't want to approve a bigger, cheaper purchase.
Maybe having this DRM last time helped them, but I sincerely doubt it. I would suspect that the same managers that pushed it last time are pushing it this time. They just for some reason think it will work better on the second time around.
There is also another factor that is not mentioned anywhere here: maintenance. If you take a plane fresh off the line it is going to be much more robust than something with tens or hundreds of thousands of miles on it. Then take into account airlines trying to cut costs, and maintenance on EMI critical parts may not be up to what is needed.
So A plane might not be susceptible - but as these anecdotes are implying(as well as my experience in EMC engineering) shows that planes can be susceptible.
I doubt it will cause major issues - as the pilot will react to the event and ask for PEDs to be shut down. My only concern would be during take off and landing.
Yes, you are. Boeing is anal about EMC. They have detailed requirements for test plans and nothing is going on the plane until it has passed at minimum a safety of flight test. Anything that will affect flight performance is going to be tested for susceptibility, and not just emissions.
Power line frequency is significantly less of a problem. Most electronics are not going to be affected by anything at those frequencies because of the huge wavelength. I've seen equipment that has no issue with a 30 kV/m test at 60 Hz, but will have failures at 30 V/m in the 10-100 MHz range.
That said, I am surprised something like this made it through. Having worked with engineers from both of these companies, this should have been caught earlier. My best guess is that they did not test specifically at 2.4 GHz because at the time it was designed, wireless was not a concern.
I would like to see more literature like this, but it is so often terribly done. Wicked was really bad. It's like he wrote a novel, then in the last 50 pages had to ignore the entire book up to that point just to fit it with the previous work. The Broadway show was much more enjoyable.
Nice list, but vacuum tubes are still in use. They're less common, but very much in use. I would add the abacus and sounding line to the list. While a handful of people worldwide may still use them, they have been replaced by calculators and electronic depth finders, respectively.
How about the right against improper search and seizure? It is performing a search of your person every time you enter your vehicle, and seizing your property from being used.You see to be ok with the government searching you every time you get into your car. That's bullshit. Why do you think the government should have that ability? Are you so concerned with your safety that you are willing to give up personal freedoms? This also is ripe for a slippery slope. If not alcohol, why not marijuana, meth, or coke? How about gunpowder residue? What happens when your friendly, only thinking of safety, federal government decides that stopping your car isn't enough? With the ubiquity of wireless devices, it could easily report you to your local police station. Attempted to drive drunk? You're losing your license.
How good are these sensors? Are they going to kill my car at.08? Has it been tested against breathalyzer data? How does it actually measure impairment? What happens when it breaks, like so many things do on modern cars? Congratulations, you now have a $20,000 paperweight until you can get a tow truck.
We do not test cellphone interference for planes. The primary reason being that the test standards for commercial aircraft do not require it. Plane manufacturers - Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, etc. have their own requirements, but I have not seen any that specifically cover cell phone frequencies or modulations. It is my belief that they consider the HIRF testing with pulse modulation to be covering that threat.
That said, automotive standards for Europe require testing to GSM frequencies and modultion.
You're falling into the same trap many here are - conflating the threat from different sources and declaring that because A doesn't cause failures, B won't either. I work in this industry, and we do tests like this every day, on equipment for commercial and military aircraft. If all they need is to be immune to lightning, why are there dozens of tests related to EMI?
Commercial aircraft average being struck by lightning once a year. It is a significant concern, and all the electronics(even the coffee makers) are tested to make sure they do not become damaged from the induced currents and voltages. This protection is significantly different from the protection designed to prevent radiated EM fields.
The radiated portions of testing are more centered on interference from radar or general EMI(unmodulated or square wave).
The question is - what has been left out? Does it have airbags and rated seat belts? A radio? Crumple zones and all that required by the feds. What about reliability testing? EMC, environmental, etc.
I like to see advancements like this. I don't like the head in the clouds reporting saying it's a miracle.
Re: Defending the inept
The idea is not the legal action, but the grievances and myriad other difficulties in removing any union employee. Most union bosses don't want a single union guy let go, and it doesn't matter what his performance looks like. The classic example is the NY teacher's union. An expose a few years ago showed that there are teachers that are paid to sit in a room all day because they can't be allowed near children. Yet they remain on the payroll because of the extremely laborious process to fire anyone.
Similar situations happen in other industries as well. The union had the good intent to prevent employers from firing union organizers or experienced people that are paid highly. Instead it turned into this - once you're in the union, we only care about you paying dues and staying in the union.
Have you played Age of Mythology? The levels were more like:
Easy: My cat could beat this
Normal: You would have a hard time losing, unless outnumbered 3:1 or worse.
Hard: You lose. The only way to win is to pair an AI teammate with you, and outnumber the enemy AI essentially having the AI do battle, with you added as a little bonus.
Yeah, except that won't neccessarily fix the problem. I got caught by a drive-by downloader on my work laptop, where I do not have admin priviledges. I didn't click on anything, or agree to download anything. I merely visited a popular webcomic - then bam, install script trying to give me AntiVirusPro2010 or something along those lines. I got rid of it easily enough with MalWareBytes, but I couldn't even use safe mode to run HiJack this because I have no admin privileges.
Even worse is how they have rebranded things. It used to be that you bought an anti-irus program to prevent your computer from getting hosed by viruses or whatever was out there.
So then they started on with worms, trojans, spyware, keyloggers, and on and on. 'New' threats that require different software, and more money. It is at the point where the average user is not likely to be able to protect themselves without multiple programs, and even then they probably will have to do more recovery than prevention.
That said, Norton has stopped me from getting a few actual viruses. It did absolutely nothing to prevent the drive-by downloaders from installing 'WinPro Antivirus 20XX' when I visit some websites.
That's why I have only bought GH3 new. The rest I find used after a few months to get them cheaper. I am a huge Metallica fan, but $60 for what was essentially downloadable songs does not sound reasonable. Sure it may be cheaper to buy the disk than buy the DLC, but that doesn't mean it feels like anything other than getting ripped off.
Your nomenclature is wrong. Newspapers are productive, but not profitable. So you are taxing profitable activities to pay for unprofitable ones.
If you ignore the quality of their work, sure, fire all the employees and never have printed news again. The quality of the work is one of the key points, and is the entire point of the argument. Let's look at your example - "taxing kerosene to pay idle whalers when people gave up on whale-oil lamps"
Kerosene was a better product, and more easily made. It replaced whale-oil for those reasons. The internet/newspaper issue is completely different. The internet is a tool - but it does not replace the primary purpose of newspapers - gathering and distributing news. The internet may greatly speed dissemination of information, but it does not help gather news, and does nothing for accountability or veracity.
A free press is vital to democracy. Letting ours die and be replaced by blogging is going to hurt the country.
I am not advocating for the tax. I AM advocating for newspapers.
Every time newspapers are brought up, we get the old arguments about how they are dying, out of date, and irrelevant - with lame historical comparisons that don't make sense.
The problem is this - despite well known media failures, the newspaper industry does a majority of the in depth reporting and investigative journalism. The technophiles of Slashdot seem to ignore what we are losing, because they think looking up something online is just as good. When the newspapers die out, who will actually research any stories? Instead you will get a blog by a semi-literate, along with the suggestion to read wikipedia for background information.
Amateur newsgatherers will not adequately replace what we have. TV news is soundbites - no real content, just attention grabbing blather. How many times have you heard something like "This popular xxxxx could be deadly! We'll tell you about it at 10 PM." As for 60 minutes or similar shows, they do some minor analyses, but still fail in many key areas - mainly neutrality and science.
I do not think new taxes are the answer. I do think that when the newspapers die, they will be replaced by something worse - and that will be bad for everyone.
Anecdotes are obviously not data, but my most recent experience is why I do not want to return to my local comics shop.
I stopped by on a Saturday, and they were having an event - a game tournament or the like. The one image I most easily recall is a very overweight, poorly groomed, 30-something guy playing Yu-gi-oh. If that is not a stereotypical patron, I don't know what is.
Well, pacemakers can be susceptible to cell phone signals. The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation(AAMI) has a standard that addresses this - AAMI PC69.
Having done this testing on many devices, I have seen a wide range of results. We have tested devices that do not malfunction in the presence of 50 Watt fields. I have also seen a device (defibrillator, not pacemaker) deliver a 30 J shock due to the simulated cell signal of less than 120 mW. We also see devices that will sense heart pacing incorrectly, or at an incorrect rate due to the interference.
Saying that cell phones can not affect implantable medical devices is absurd. Saying they will not is similarly false. What can be said is that during normal use of both devices, a well made implantable is unlikely to be affected by RF fields generated by a cell phone.
The problem isn't not knowing how to use it. The problem is ease of use with a different interface. We have both Tektronix and HPs in my lab. I can do nearly anything I want quickly and easily with the HPs. I dislike the Tektronix, because it takes me forever to find what I need. I do not want to have to go into the third nested submenu to find what was a simple button on another scope.
Your logic is flawed. Just because there are other sources of EMI, devices are not immune to all of them. For example, cooking in a microwave and a convection oven both heat food, but they are significantly different in many factors.
Aircraft are designed to withstand many sources of EMI - from radar, lightning, VHF, UHF, etc. The aircraft manufacturers do their best to make sure nothing is susceptible to interference, but it is practically impossible to test for every possible condition.
The potential interference caused by different sources of EMI are significantly different. Lightning has specific waveshapes for induced currents and voltages, radar is a pulsed signal in specific frequency bands, etc. No blanket statement can be made about the immunity or susceptibility of an aircraft to EMI.
Did you miss the part where he has a government job? It can be extremely difficult to fire anyone for even the most egregious conduct. My father works for the USDA, and he has had people at his office caught sleeping more than once, and they did not get fired because it takes so much effort.
Yeah, but shouting at them doesn't work that well. I mean, who is going to stand around the whole time while I shout, "This guy's corporation is violating your personal privacy, subverting the courts into a money making operation instead of a justice system, twisting laws to suit his own needs, bribing members of congress with contributions to their campaigns or charities, harming innovation with restrictive IP laws, violating anti-trust laws via industry groups, and he's also badly dressed."
Really, the problem with protesting any of this is threefold: 1 - the problem is poorly understood by the general public 2 - protestors are starting to be ignored as whackos 3 - even if you can get the point across and have people understand why this is a problem, they will be apathetic
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that businesses always do what is in their best interest. Sure, most companies try their best to maximize profit, but they also make critical blunders over and over again. My company, for example, spent a ton of money on rent to own equipment, because the bean counters didn't want to approve a bigger, cheaper purchase.
Maybe having this DRM last time helped them, but I sincerely doubt it. I would suspect that the same managers that pushed it last time are pushing it this time. They just for some reason think it will work better on the second time around.
There is also another factor that is not mentioned anywhere here: maintenance. If you take a plane fresh off the line it is going to be much more robust than something with tens or hundreds of thousands of miles on it. Then take into account airlines trying to cut costs, and maintenance on EMI critical parts may not be up to what is needed.
So A plane might not be susceptible - but as these anecdotes are implying(as well as my experience in EMC engineering) shows that planes can be susceptible.
I doubt it will cause major issues - as the pilot will react to the event and ask for PEDs to be shut down. My only concern would be during take off and landing.
Yes, you are. Boeing is anal about EMC. They have detailed requirements for test plans and nothing is going on the plane until it has passed at minimum a safety of flight test. Anything that will affect flight performance is going to be tested for susceptibility, and not just emissions.
Power line frequency is significantly less of a problem. Most electronics are not going to be affected by anything at those frequencies because of the huge wavelength. I've seen equipment that has no issue with a 30 kV/m test at 60 Hz, but will have failures at 30 V/m in the 10-100 MHz range.
That said, I am surprised something like this made it through. Having worked with engineers from both of these companies, this should have been caught earlier. My best guess is that they did not test specifically at 2.4 GHz because at the time it was designed, wireless was not a concern.
Geez, who wrote this summary? It reads like a corporate shill trying to drum up business.
I would like to see more literature like this, but it is so often terribly done. Wicked was really bad. It's like he wrote a novel, then in the last 50 pages had to ignore the entire book up to that point just to fit it with the previous work. The Broadway show was much more enjoyable.
Nice list, but vacuum tubes are still in use. They're less common, but very much in use. I would add the abacus and sounding line to the list. While a handful of people worldwide may still use them, they have been replaced by calculators and electronic depth finders, respectively.
How about the right against improper search and seizure? It is performing a search of your person every time you enter your vehicle, and seizing your property from being used.You see to be ok with the government searching you every time you get into your car. That's bullshit. Why do you think the government should have that ability? Are you so concerned with your safety that you are willing to give up personal freedoms? This also is ripe for a slippery slope. If not alcohol, why not marijuana, meth, or coke? How about gunpowder residue? What happens when your friendly, only thinking of safety, federal government decides that stopping your car isn't enough? With the ubiquity of wireless devices, it could easily report you to your local police station. Attempted to drive drunk? You're losing your license. How good are these sensors? Are they going to kill my car at .08? Has it been tested against breathalyzer data? How does it actually measure impairment? What happens when it breaks, like so many things do on modern cars? Congratulations, you now have a $20,000 paperweight until you can get a tow truck.
We do not test cellphone interference for planes. The primary reason being that the test standards for commercial aircraft do not require it. Plane manufacturers - Airbus, Boeing, Bombardier, etc. have their own requirements, but I have not seen any that specifically cover cell phone frequencies or modulations. It is my belief that they consider the HIRF testing with pulse modulation to be covering that threat. That said, automotive standards for Europe require testing to GSM frequencies and modultion.
You're falling into the same trap many here are - conflating the threat from different sources and declaring that because A doesn't cause failures, B won't either. I work in this industry, and we do tests like this every day, on equipment for commercial and military aircraft. If all they need is to be immune to lightning, why are there dozens of tests related to EMI? Commercial aircraft average being struck by lightning once a year. It is a significant concern, and all the electronics(even the coffee makers) are tested to make sure they do not become damaged from the induced currents and voltages. This protection is significantly different from the protection designed to prevent radiated EM fields. The radiated portions of testing are more centered on interference from radar or general EMI(unmodulated or square wave).
The question is - what has been left out? Does it have airbags and rated seat belts? A radio? Crumple zones and all that required by the feds. What about reliability testing? EMC, environmental, etc. I like to see advancements like this. I don't like the head in the clouds reporting saying it's a miracle.
Sweet! I am totally going to 'admit' that I have a 12" penis. Someone please report me to the Swedish bikini team.
Re: Defending the inept The idea is not the legal action, but the grievances and myriad other difficulties in removing any union employee. Most union bosses don't want a single union guy let go, and it doesn't matter what his performance looks like. The classic example is the NY teacher's union. An expose a few years ago showed that there are teachers that are paid to sit in a room all day because they can't be allowed near children. Yet they remain on the payroll because of the extremely laborious process to fire anyone. Similar situations happen in other industries as well. The union had the good intent to prevent employers from firing union organizers or experienced people that are paid highly. Instead it turned into this - once you're in the union, we only care about you paying dues and staying in the union.
Yeah, except that won't neccessarily fix the problem. I got caught by a drive-by downloader on my work laptop, where I do not have admin priviledges. I didn't click on anything, or agree to download anything. I merely visited a popular webcomic - then bam, install script trying to give me AntiVirusPro2010 or something along those lines. I got rid of it easily enough with MalWareBytes, but I couldn't even use safe mode to run HiJack this because I have no admin privileges.
Even worse is how they have rebranded things. It used to be that you bought an anti-irus program to prevent your computer from getting hosed by viruses or whatever was out there.
So then they started on with worms, trojans, spyware, keyloggers, and on and on. 'New' threats that require different software, and more money. It is at the point where the average user is not likely to be able to protect themselves without multiple programs, and even then they probably will have to do more recovery than prevention.
That said, Norton has stopped me from getting a few actual viruses. It did absolutely nothing to prevent the drive-by downloaders from installing 'WinPro Antivirus 20XX' when I visit some websites.
That's why I have only bought GH3 new. The rest I find used after a few months to get them cheaper. I am a huge Metallica fan, but $60 for what was essentially downloadable songs does not sound reasonable. Sure it may be cheaper to buy the disk than buy the DLC, but that doesn't mean it feels like anything other than getting ripped off.
It's time to stop using the MMORPG label. It is not just a MMOG. Role-playing has been replaced by money-taking.
Your nomenclature is wrong. Newspapers are productive, but not profitable. So you are taxing profitable activities to pay for unprofitable ones.
If you ignore the quality of their work, sure, fire all the employees and never have printed news again. The quality of the work is one of the key points, and is the entire point of the argument. Let's look at your example - "taxing kerosene to pay idle whalers when people gave up on whale-oil lamps"
Kerosene was a better product, and more easily made. It replaced whale-oil for those reasons. The internet/newspaper issue is completely different. The internet is a tool - but it does not replace the primary purpose of newspapers - gathering and distributing news. The internet may greatly speed dissemination of information, but it does not help gather news, and does nothing for accountability or veracity.
A free press is vital to democracy. Letting ours die and be replaced by blogging is going to hurt the country.
I am not advocating for the tax. I AM advocating for newspapers.
Every time newspapers are brought up, we get the old arguments about how they are dying, out of date, and irrelevant - with lame historical comparisons that don't make sense.
The problem is this - despite well known media failures, the newspaper industry does a majority of the in depth reporting and investigative journalism. The technophiles of Slashdot seem to ignore what we are losing, because they think looking up something online is just as good. When the newspapers die out, who will actually research any stories? Instead you will get a blog by a semi-literate, along with the suggestion to read wikipedia for background information.
Amateur newsgatherers will not adequately replace what we have. TV news is soundbites - no real content, just attention grabbing blather. How many times have you heard something like "This popular xxxxx could be deadly! We'll tell you about it at 10 PM." As for 60 minutes or similar shows, they do some minor analyses, but still fail in many key areas - mainly neutrality and science.
I do not think new taxes are the answer. I do think that when the newspapers die, they will be replaced by something worse - and that will be bad for everyone.
Anecdotes are obviously not data, but my most recent experience is why I do not want to return to my local comics shop.
I stopped by on a Saturday, and they were having an event - a game tournament or the like. The one image I most easily recall is a very overweight, poorly groomed, 30-something guy playing Yu-gi-oh. If that is not a stereotypical patron, I don't know what is.
Well, pacemakers can be susceptible to cell phone signals. The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation(AAMI) has a standard that addresses this - AAMI PC69.
Having done this testing on many devices, I have seen a wide range of results. We have tested devices that do not malfunction in the presence of 50 Watt fields. I have also seen a device (defibrillator, not pacemaker) deliver a 30 J shock due to the simulated cell signal of less than 120 mW. We also see devices that will sense heart pacing incorrectly, or at an incorrect rate due to the interference.
Saying that cell phones can not affect implantable medical devices is absurd. Saying they will not is similarly false. What can be said is that during normal use of both devices, a well made implantable is unlikely to be affected by RF fields generated by a cell phone.
The problem isn't not knowing how to use it. The problem is ease of use with a different interface. We have both Tektronix and HPs in my lab. I can do nearly anything I want quickly and easily with the HPs. I dislike the Tektronix, because it takes me forever to find what I need. I do not want to have to go into the third nested submenu to find what was a simple button on another scope.
Your logic is flawed. Just because there are other sources of EMI, devices are not immune to all of them. For example, cooking in a microwave and a convection oven both heat food, but they are significantly different in many factors.
Aircraft are designed to withstand many sources of EMI - from radar, lightning, VHF, UHF, etc. The aircraft manufacturers do their best to make sure nothing is susceptible to interference, but it is practically impossible to test for every possible condition.
The potential interference caused by different sources of EMI are significantly different. Lightning has specific waveshapes for induced currents and voltages, radar is a pulsed signal in specific frequency bands, etc. No blanket statement can be made about the immunity or susceptibility of an aircraft to EMI.
Did you miss the part where he has a government job? It can be extremely difficult to fire anyone for even the most egregious conduct. My father works for the USDA, and he has had people at his office caught sleeping more than once, and they did not get fired because it takes so much effort.
Yeah, but shouting at them doesn't work that well. I mean, who is going to stand around the whole time while I shout, "This guy's corporation is violating your personal privacy, subverting the courts into a money making operation instead of a justice system, twisting laws to suit his own needs, bribing members of congress with contributions to their campaigns or charities, harming innovation with restrictive IP laws, violating anti-trust laws via industry groups, and he's also badly dressed."
Really, the problem with protesting any of this is threefold:
1 - the problem is poorly understood by the general public
2 - protestors are starting to be ignored as whackos
3 - even if you can get the point across and have people understand why this is a problem, they will be apathetic