The belief that it's current that kills you probably originates with the charming American method of execution which literally involved using electric current to fry people's brains, which must count as one of the nastiest ideas of one of the world's nastier penal systems. By comparison, a bullet in the back of the neck is much more humane.
However, the system most liable to disruption by electric current is in fact the heart. Years ago I was designing a system which had to protect users of a piece of test equipment against an accidental current pulse. I worked with an expert in the UK Health and Safety executive, and he told me that a current of a mere 2.5mA is enough to induce fibrillation in some people. In fact, there is no lower safe limit and in sensitive individuals it can be much less. Get a current of 5mA through your chest and you have a significant chance of dying if there is no intervention.
In the end we fitted our system with a very sensitive earth leakage detector which could divert the current in under 500 microseconds as soon as it reached 1mA. But we still had to include a warning.
I think I've just fallen in love with the parent poster. Female, biker, embedded systems designer. Now, one small problem, how does a 50+ male become an attractive lesbian?
(a) you can kill yourself with 48V if you're unlucky. It is very unlikely, anything below 60V is considered to be "safety extra low voltage" or SELV, but it's possible to induce fibrillation.
(b)If deploying a system like this, IEC says the positive wire should be BLUE and the negative should be GREY. If the wires are completely isolated (i.e. neither is grounded or connected to PE) the positive wire should be BROWN. In the US (Opera isn't in the US) the wiring convention is WHITE for the return and BLACK for the negative wire. Just DON'T ever use red and black and reverse their normal functions. 48V can make very impressive arcs.
If you have an enemy, at least someone cares about you.
The British cartoonist Giles is said to have made himself practically sacking proof by one of his cartoons. The Duke of Edinburgh remarked that "The [Daily, owned by Beaverbrook] Express is a bloody awful newspaper."
Giles promptly did a cartoon of his employer being led off in chains by Yeoman Warders, watched by the Duke, with the caption
"Ah well", said Lord B, as they trotted him off to the Tower, "At least he reads it, or he wouldn't know it's a bloody awful newspaper."
It costs a lot to train a sniffer dog, far more than $40k, but any electronic equivalent would most likely be much more expensive. Especially a self-guided one.
You jest but perhaps you do not know how close you are. The original Manchester computer (Manchester UK that is) used teletypes for input and output, and they could not afford to change the balls. Baudot code is, to say the least, nonobvious. So 5-bit binary zero printed out as / and because this was the default state of the memory, early printouts consisted mainly of pages full of slashes.
It's said that when they gave their first presentation in London, most people present knew nothing about computers and were quite unable to understand why they were looking at pages of slashes. One person asked if they were "the Manchester rain beating on the windows".
Years later, I amused myself doing hex dumps using a teletype. It's quite easy to produce a rainy city-scape in this way. But, indeed, with hand coded hex, zeroes predominated and ones were much more scarce.
Nine other European democracies also have "Royal families" and put their heads on their notes. The reason for this is simple (and it applies to Australia and NZ too.) So long as we have the Battenbergs notionally in power, there is no risk of a member of the Bush or Murdoch families ever becoming British (or Head of State. We have a powerless monarchy (and in the UK case the prospect of a tree hugging left wing eco-friendly King) precisely because we've seen how Presidential systems work, and we want nothing of it.
The sort of English people who need to pronounce "courgette" are the sort who still go to old fashioned food shops, not supermarkets, and so have to ask for things. The sort who tend to be better off, older and who have spent more time on holiday in France and Italy (which is where we learnt to eat them in the first place.)
Cats that make the most attractive noise get fed most. Have the most offspring. Eventually dominate. Given what we've done to dogs by selective breeding in just a thousand years or so, this is a simple and believable scenario. Selecting cats for their purr is no more extraordinary than, say, the difference we've created between a spaniel and a Mexican Hairless.
I do wonder about this. Microsoft seems determined to try to destroy the 12 inch netbook market, but the fact that they are trying to do that shows that the market wants 12 inch screens. Apple has an opportunity. A 12 inch screen is not far off US letter size, but also the additional surface area allows the incorporation of a much bigger battery and passive cooling. The Macbook Air has a screen 1 inch larger than the mainstream thin and light notebooks, and the extra space would prevent any cannibalisation of the Apple handheld markets. The Macbook Air also hasn't been very successful - too many compromises. A replacement which was smaller, lighter, cheaper and had working handwriting recognition (and perhaps a good onscreen keyboard) in a portrait format would be perhaps sufficiently different from the mainstream, while being genuinely useful.
Conservatism about CPUs comes for a variety of reasons, all of which I like. First, it is much better to use an inherently rad-hard technology than to radiation harden an existing design. Rad-hard technology tends to lag commercial technology because it is much, much more expensive. Second, however, modern processor technology is in some ways the enemy of reliability. With things like out of order execution, multilevel cache and the release of cpus that have minor microcode bugs that are fixed with CPU drivers, it's hard to produce a verified design. Back in the days when I was doing this stuff, the RCA1800 (damn slow), Texas 9989 (good) and the Ferranti F100-L (bad) all had designs simple enough to be fully verified with the tools available, and when you wrote code for them you could actually be sure of exactly what it would do on a clock cycle by clock cycle basis. MMUs add another layer of potential unreliability, so for mission critical stuff a processor with a flat memory architecture where it is possible to state exactly what variable may occupy any memory location at a given point in program execution obviously offers more security blanket per dollar. (Both the CPUs I mention have minimal registers, so that everything gets stored in independently testable external memory.
Modern designs are amazingly reliable given their complexity but, as you say, you want to be very sure once out of the stratosphere that you know exactly what your little thinking machine is thinking.
Oh dear. I too have signed the Official Secrets Act, and I can tell you that none of the basic stuff is classified at all. No need to make a big mystery of it. Indeed, when working on a restricted project in the early 1980s which involved detecting very small signals, we borrowed a full EMI secured trailer to use backwards (i.e. keep all the external RFI out, including that down all power lines.), and no security measures were applied to its use. Subsequently I worked on EMC for a while, and all the power line and data line securing technology has been in the public domain for ages, along with EMI gaskets for faraday cages, various means of applying conductive films, silver loaded epoxies, CRT enclosures and the rest. The stuff available from Japanese companies on the commercial market was far more advanced than the approved military technology we had been using, owing to the delay involved in the military approvals process.
Securing notebooks is of course much easier than securing PCs because the keyboard data doesn't go outside the system. The intro to the article appears confused. Any signal on the earth line has to be due to capacitative coupling between a keyboard and external ground owing to the well known law that the sum of all the currents in all circuit paths to any junction must be zero. If you want to improve security against ground line signalling when using a notebook, run it on battery using secured wireless networking, and use the built in keyboard and monitor.
The old idea that brain cells are lost and new ones don't form has turned out to be just plain wrong. The evidence is that the more you think about a subject, the bigger relevant parts of the brain get. For instance, London cab drivers have to memorise large chunks of the road system to pass a test, and it has been shown that the relevant part of the brain does actually grow during the process.
The US is in the process of extraditing Gary McKinnon on the basis that he hacked into a US server, and that the crime (hacking) was committed in the US even though McKinnon was in the UK at the time.
If this principle was applied in this case, the uploader could be liable because he actually acquired the images in the UK.
Having said that, I apologise for the fact that our entire government is run by an unelected chinless aristocracy, similar to the old Soviet nomenklatura, who still think of us as "subjects" not citizens. What you are seeing here is their attitude - we run the country, national assets belong to us not you.
The Esaki (tunnel) diode is a two terminal device which basically exists in two states (I am simplifying, I know) at two different currents. Its weakness is that (a) it requires a current source to keep it in one or the other state and (b) both input (changing state) and output need amplifying devices. As soon as cmos become fast enough things like tunnel diodes were dead in the water because a cmos transistor does its own amplifying, and requires almost no power to keep in one state rather than the other.
Therefore, a device which requires effectively no power to keep in one of two states, and has much greater speed than either flash or magnetic domains would be a step forward compared to the current state of the art.
Some of Microsoft's technologies - like data files that can execute code - need to be broken. It is sometimes necessary to sacrifice convenience for a degree of security. The personal computer industry has been slowly coming to terms with this for the last 10 years or so, it would be nice if we don't have to wait another 10 before it all works properly.
The problem is that standard of living is extremely hard to define, especially as it is relative. (the Arabs, for instance, were shocked to discover that the Crusader knights lived like Arab peasants.) If you define standard of living in square meters of house and lawn, the decline will be drastic. But if you define it in, say, terms of active life expectancy and access to information, it might be improved (especially compared to the effects of taking no action.) Good luck with your model, but you'll need entire think tanks just to define some of your parameters.
I hope that no patent will be granted until they produce a working prototype. On another planet, identical to this one.
The catch is that as Bill would have to visit Magrathea to get the planet built, it would be cheaper just to engage them to fix the global warming on this one. (and add a few more fjords while at it.)
Er...you do know that all the first transistors were germanium based and that early transistor computers used germanium? Before Schottky diodes, computer power supplies used germanium rectifiers because they were twice as efficient (half the heat) as silicon ones. And early audio amplifiers used germanium power transistors in the output stages because at the time they offered lower distortion than silicon, as they had better transfer characteristics in the crossover region. You could easily hear the difference between class AB tube amps, class B germanium amps and class B silicon into the early 70s. Germanium was initially seen as a low frequency technology because thin junctions were hard to form, but this is not necessarily true (Esaki (tunnel) diodes.)
Having said that you are entirely right in your main observation. The main problem for germanium has always been fabrication; no germanium ICs. This is because there is no germanium equivalent of planar technology. It has been known for a long time that if this could be overcome there would be a role for germanium. It's just that, as with so many apparently breakthrough technologies, making it happen turns out to be very hard.
Out of curiosity, how do you know severe solar storms recur roughly every 500 years? You would need to show that there were reliable records going back a couple of thousand years. Since the Carrington Event was the first such storm where there was enough electrical equipment in the world to notice the effects, any previous records must be speculative.
I think the truth is that we don't know enough about the Sun to be sure of anything it might do, certainly not to be able to date future events with the predictability you suppose. Looking at your previous posts, you seem to be in some sort of IT support role. I have to say that I wouldn't put someone like you in charge of the disaster recovery program! Like the quants in the City - possibly, from your comments, where you work - you seem to underestimate the importance of the possible size of the downsides in the long tail. I, on the other hand, have actually worked in the EMC/lightning protection area, and all I can say is, I'm not as optimistic as you are.
Believe me, sextants are still in use. You don't think serious sailors don't know how to use them? Here in the UK, port towns usually have classes available in stellar navigation and the use of the sextant, and all the marine chandlers I use still sell them, including cheap training ones for kids.
One good solar flare and no GPS and VHF for a while. Did you realise that? Solar storms in the past have gone on for days, which is a long time to be without navigational aids. Your hurrahing for technology is misplaced. Yes I have GPS, yes I keep conventional maps and compass in the car as a backup. I've known too many people drive around London for ages because they were in an urban canyon and the GPS could not distinguish parallel streets. Our problem around here is Bulgarian and Polish drivers who use car GPS until they find themselves as a T-junction too small for their Actic (semi) to get round, unable to reverse, and have to pay a local farmer to drag out their trailer with a tractor. Great fun unless they're blocking your way home.
(As for "taking pictures will steal souls", can I just point you at the late Michael Jackson, an obvious case of the phenomenon? I think it was Terry Pratchett who observed something like "the idea that taking pictures steals souls is held only by primitive tribes and advanced psychologists".)
private static String getRuling(LitigationObject individual, RichLitigationObject evilCorporation) throws NYCLException {
if(individual.sues(evilCorporation)) {
return "IP address is not personal identification";
} else if(evilCorporation.sues(individual) {
return "IP address is personal information";
} else return "Please submit amount available to donate to my election campaign";
}
Slashdot Mirror
However, the system most liable to disruption by electric current is in fact the heart. Years ago I was designing a system which had to protect users of a piece of test equipment against an accidental current pulse. I worked with an expert in the UK Health and Safety executive, and he told me that a current of a mere 2.5mA is enough to induce fibrillation in some people. In fact, there is no lower safe limit and in sensitive individuals it can be much less. Get a current of 5mA through your chest and you have a significant chance of dying if there is no intervention.
In the end we fitted our system with a very sensitive earth leakage detector which could divert the current in under 500 microseconds as soon as it reached 1mA. But we still had to include a warning.
I think I've just fallen in love with the parent poster. Female, biker, embedded systems designer. Now, one small problem, how does a 50+ male become an attractive lesbian?
See my other post on this thread.
(b)If deploying a system like this, IEC says the positive wire should be BLUE and the negative should be GREY. If the wires are completely isolated (i.e. neither is grounded or connected to PE) the positive wire should be BROWN. In the US (Opera isn't in the US) the wiring convention is WHITE for the return and BLACK for the negative wire. Just DON'T ever use red and black and reverse their normal functions. 48V can make very impressive arcs.
The British cartoonist Giles is said to have made himself practically sacking proof by one of his cartoons. The Duke of Edinburgh remarked that "The [Daily, owned by Beaverbrook] Express is a bloody awful newspaper."
Giles promptly did a cartoon of his employer being led off in chains by Yeoman Warders, watched by the Duke, with the caption
It costs a lot to train a sniffer dog, far more than $40k, but any electronic equivalent would most likely be much more expensive. Especially a self-guided one.
It's said that when they gave their first presentation in London, most people present knew nothing about computers and were quite unable to understand why they were looking at pages of slashes. One person asked if they were "the Manchester rain beating on the windows".
Years later, I amused myself doing hex dumps using a teletype. It's quite easy to produce a rainy city-scape in this way. But, indeed, with hand coded hex, zeroes predominated and ones were much more scarce.
Nine other European democracies also have "Royal families" and put their heads on their notes. The reason for this is simple (and it applies to Australia and NZ too.) So long as we have the Battenbergs notionally in power, there is no risk of a member of the Bush or Murdoch families ever becoming British (or Head of State. We have a powerless monarchy (and in the UK case the prospect of a tree hugging left wing eco-friendly King) precisely because we've seen how Presidential systems work, and we want nothing of it.
The sort of English people who need to pronounce "courgette" are the sort who still go to old fashioned food shops, not supermarkets, and so have to ask for things. The sort who tend to be better off, older and who have spent more time on holiday in France and Italy (which is where we learnt to eat them in the first place.)
Reading stuff like this at a too early age helped get me into physics rather than law...my bank account hates science fiction.
Cats that make the most attractive noise get fed most. Have the most offspring. Eventually dominate. Given what we've done to dogs by selective breeding in just a thousand years or so, this is a simple and believable scenario. Selecting cats for their purr is no more extraordinary than, say, the difference we've created between a spaniel and a Mexican Hairless.
I do wonder about this. Microsoft seems determined to try to destroy the 12 inch netbook market, but the fact that they are trying to do that shows that the market wants 12 inch screens. Apple has an opportunity. A 12 inch screen is not far off US letter size, but also the additional surface area allows the incorporation of a much bigger battery and passive cooling. The Macbook Air has a screen 1 inch larger than the mainstream thin and light notebooks, and the extra space would prevent any cannibalisation of the Apple handheld markets. The Macbook Air also hasn't been very successful - too many compromises. A replacement which was smaller, lighter, cheaper and had working handwriting recognition (and perhaps a good onscreen keyboard) in a portrait format would be perhaps sufficiently different from the mainstream, while being genuinely useful.
Modern designs are amazingly reliable given their complexity but, as you say, you want to be very sure once out of the stratosphere that you know exactly what your little thinking machine is thinking.
Securing notebooks is of course much easier than securing PCs because the keyboard data doesn't go outside the system. The intro to the article appears confused. Any signal on the earth line has to be due to capacitative coupling between a keyboard and external ground owing to the well known law that the sum of all the currents in all circuit paths to any junction must be zero. If you want to improve security against ground line signalling when using a notebook, run it on battery using secured wireless networking, and use the built in keyboard and monitor.
The old idea that brain cells are lost and new ones don't form has turned out to be just plain wrong. The evidence is that the more you think about a subject, the bigger relevant parts of the brain get. For instance, London cab drivers have to memorise large chunks of the road system to pass a test, and it has been shown that the relevant part of the brain does actually grow during the process.
If this principle was applied in this case, the uploader could be liable because he actually acquired the images in the UK.
Having said that, I apologise for the fact that our entire government is run by an unelected chinless aristocracy, similar to the old Soviet nomenklatura, who still think of us as "subjects" not citizens. What you are seeing here is their attitude - we run the country, national assets belong to us not you.
Therefore, a device which requires effectively no power to keep in one of two states, and has much greater speed than either flash or magnetic domains would be a step forward compared to the current state of the art.
Some of Microsoft's technologies - like data files that can execute code - need to be broken. It is sometimes necessary to sacrifice convenience for a degree of security. The personal computer industry has been slowly coming to terms with this for the last 10 years or so, it would be nice if we don't have to wait another 10 before it all works properly.
The problem is that standard of living is extremely hard to define, especially as it is relative. (the Arabs, for instance, were shocked to discover that the Crusader knights lived like Arab peasants.) If you define standard of living in square meters of house and lawn, the decline will be drastic. But if you define it in, say, terms of active life expectancy and access to information, it might be improved (especially compared to the effects of taking no action.) Good luck with your model, but you'll need entire think tanks just to define some of your parameters.
The catch is that as Bill would have to visit Magrathea to get the planet built, it would be cheaper just to engage them to fix the global warming on this one. (and add a few more fjords while at it.)
Having said that you are entirely right in your main observation. The main problem for germanium has always been fabrication; no germanium ICs. This is because there is no germanium equivalent of planar technology. It has been known for a long time that if this could be overcome there would be a role for germanium. It's just that, as with so many apparently breakthrough technologies, making it happen turns out to be very hard.
I think the truth is that we don't know enough about the Sun to be sure of anything it might do, certainly not to be able to date future events with the predictability you suppose. Looking at your previous posts, you seem to be in some sort of IT support role. I have to say that I wouldn't put someone like you in charge of the disaster recovery program! Like the quants in the City - possibly, from your comments, where you work - you seem to underestimate the importance of the possible size of the downsides in the long tail. I, on the other hand, have actually worked in the EMC/lightning protection area, and all I can say is, I'm not as optimistic as you are.
http://www.solarstorms.org/SRefStorms.html
One good solar flare and no GPS and VHF for a while. Did you realise that? Solar storms in the past have gone on for days, which is a long time to be without navigational aids. Your hurrahing for technology is misplaced. Yes I have GPS, yes I keep conventional maps and compass in the car as a backup. I've known too many people drive around London for ages because they were in an urban canyon and the GPS could not distinguish parallel streets. Our problem around here is Bulgarian and Polish drivers who use car GPS until they find themselves as a T-junction too small for their Actic (semi) to get round, unable to reverse, and have to pay a local farmer to drag out their trailer with a tractor. Great fun unless they're blocking your way home.
(As for "taking pictures will steal souls", can I just point you at the late Michael Jackson, an obvious case of the phenomenon? I think it was Terry Pratchett who observed something like "the idea that taking pictures steals souls is held only by primitive tribes and advanced psychologists".)
private static String getRuling(LitigationObject individual, RichLitigationObject evilCorporation) throws NYCLException {
if(individual.sues(evilCorporation)) {
return "IP address is not personal identification";
} else if(evilCorporation.sues(individual) {
return "IP address is personal information";
} else return "Please submit amount available to donate to my election campaign";
}