The sad thing in this whole saga is that we can actually source a large amount of our demand for natural gas from our own waste using technology which has been known for centuries.
Not really. Most sewerage disposal plants generate methane and use it for power. There's more than enough to run the plant, but it's not a major source of power. Our local landfills in Silicon Valley capture methane to generate power. The big landfill near Google HQ used to do that, but over time, the methane decay slowed down, the generators were removed, and a golf course and rock music venue were put on top of the garbage piles.
UTF-8 still lacks a lot of things that most of us in the US and most of Europe don't really wrestle with, but there is a reason there is also a UTF-16 and UTF-32 and
many variations there of.
No, no. UTF-8 is a variable length encoding and can represent all 1,112,064[ potential Unicode characters. RTFM. That's all you need in a sequential file. The in-memory representation of strings is usually expanded to a fixed-length character size, but that's specific to the implementation and independent of the file format.
The actual paper is worth a read. This has nothing to do with drones. It's about taking out leaders, and what effect that has.
Assassination of political leaders by an external power has historically been a losing strategy. A new political leader soon takes power, and is generally more hostile to the external power. (When the new leader set up the assassination of the old one, that's a coup d'etat, which is a different situation.) The point of the paper is that terrorist groups tend to be held together by a charismatic leader, and killing that leader, more often than not, kills the group.
The older the group, the less likely this is to work. For a group that's only a few years old, it usually works; for one more than 20 years old, it rarely does. The half-life of terrorist groups is 15 years; half of them collapse in that time, and the survival rate of such groups follows a classic decay curve.
It doesn't work for drug and crime lords, because drug cartels are economic organizations. The organization and profit motive remain. Eliminating a leader just leaves a power vacuum at the top, which is quickly filled.
Interestingly, assassination of religious leaders is highly effective. "Although religious groups appear to be 80 percent
less likely to end than nationalist groups based on ideology alone, they were almost five times as likely to end than nationalist groups after experiencing leadership decapitation." The conventional wisdom is that it is very difficult to take down a religion, short of outright extermination of all followers.. That may not be the case.
A few years back, it looked like XHTML was the future. The basic idea of XHTML is "the syntax has to be right". XHTML parsers are not required to parse anything that isn't valid XML. HTML5 parsers have explicitly defined semantics for common errors in HTML, like malformed comments. With XHTML, there was no question what the tree representation of the document was.
But people wanted the freedom to copy and paste broken ad code into HTML documents, so we ended up with HTML5. Personally, I'd like to have strict XHTML and require that everything be UTF-8. It's time to retire that "upper code page" crap.
I would like a source for the statements "He apparently thought he was the Joker" and "disarming the booby traps in his apartment".
CNN:
"The suspect in the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater screening of the new Batman film early Friday had colored his hair red and told police he was "the Joker," according to a federal law enforcement source with detailed knowledge of the investigation."
Denver Post via Mercury News -- "Aurora shooting suspect left apartment "booby trapped," music blaring":
"Oates said Holmes made a statement to officers about possible explosives in his home. That prompted police to evacuate five buildings nearby and begin searching his third-floor apartment using a police robot and camera attached to a
long pole. Inside, officers found trip wires attached to 1-liter plastic bottles that contain an unknown substance. Police Chief Dan Oates said the explosive devices were "pretty sophisticated." "We could be here for days," he said at midday."
Mass shooting at the Batman opening at an Aurora, CO, theater. 12 killed, 59 wounded. "Police say Holmes, 24, dressed head-to-toe in protective tactical gear, set off two devices of some kind before spraying the Century 16 theater with bullets from an AR-15 rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and at least one of two.40-caliber handguns police recovered at the scene." He apparently thought he was the Joker. He's in custody, and bomb squads are disarming the booby traps in his apartment.
I'm worried about this. We're seeing too many attacks and persistent threats that seem to be laying the groundwork for something. Viruses and worms used to do something actively hostile. Now, there are ones that just slowly take over machines and wait for further instructions.
There's a lot of infrastructure which used to have big maintenance forces, but no longer does. Water systems, pumping stations, power substations, cell sites, air conditioning, and railroad signalling are all remotely controlled, and some of the links do go over the Internet. The power and railroad people take reasonable precautions, but the others, not so much. Few companies have the armies of maintenance people they used to. This is becoming a big problem in the power industry, where recovery from storms is taking weeks instead of days.
I'd worry about an attack on the financial services sector. If someone took down the NYSE or the NASDAQ or the CBOT, or the links between them, for a week, the financial center of the world would no longer be in the US, even after the systems came back up. That's a very attractive target. Back in 2001, the markets outside the US weren't ready to take over. Now they are.
I spend a lot of time at TechShop, and I'm not that impressed with "maker culture".
The RepRap is a piece of crap. Yes, the live-in-their-parents-basement crowd can make RPG figures with one. That's about all it's good for - little plastic decorative junk. Melting pieces of ABS string together can only take you so far.There are better machines at higher price points that can make working parts, but you have to spend upwards of $5000 to get anything good.
As for making electronics, that's never been easier. Custom board-making services are cheaper and easier to use than ever. (Making boards yourself using iron-on toner transfer is obsolete - the pro shops do a much better job, can do plated-through holes, and end up being cheaper than DIY jobs.) Digi-Key has almost every part in existence and can deliver in 24 hours. Good electronic CAD programs are available for free. You can even get free auto-routing. SPICE will run on most desktop computers, so you can debug analog circuits in simulation. Surface mount reflow has filtered down to the hobbyist level.
The reason more people aren't building their own electronics from parts is that you can usually buy a cheap consumer product to do whatever it is you want to do. You need both a lot of theory and assembly technique to build new electronics. Writing an iPhone app is much easier. Building your own audio system or TV to save money hasn't made economic sense since the 1960s.
TechShop has a few different groups of users. There are artists, who are usually turning out decorative stuff on the laser cutters, vinyl cutter, CNC embroidery machines, or silk-screen machines. There are pro machinists, who are doing jobs for pay on TechShop's equipment. There's a small group with the motto "designed in Silicon Valley, made in Silicon Valley", which makes little plastic iPhone stands. (As a long-time Silicon Valley resident, I see this as pathetic. The high-tech stuff comes from China and we make cheap plastic accessories for it.) There are people who are just there to be on their laptop, because it's cheaper than Starbucks. There are people working on cars. There are a few people doing live-steam model railroad builds. A few people are building robots, but the ones that are any good are from people who do robots as their day job.
It's a hobby shop. It's not about changing the world.
For mobile devices, the software is controlled by the carrier and the data path is controlled by the carrier, and the apps are controlled by the carrier or the handset maker. Mobile devices don't act as hosts. And all the growth in devices is in mobile. So why aren't they all on IPv6?
If the carrier has to do an IPv6 to IPv4 translation, they can do that at their head end.
Is this announcement definitely from Dell, or is it more bullshit from Canonical? Canonical has previously announced various machines as coming with their Linux preloaded. Canonical claimed that for an EeePC model. Didn't happen.
That's a classic way to run a resistance movement. Mao, Marighella, the IRA, al-Queda, etc. It works fairly well in the early phases. As the revolution advances, tighter coordination is necessary. This leads to centralized leadership. In the end, there's a Stalin or a Castro.
The US is one of the very few countries to get a stable democracy out of a revolution. That's not what usually happens.
The surprising thing is that a flat key will work. Laser cutters are 2D devices; they do a great job cutting flat sheets, but you can't make 3D objects with them. The process is fast and cheap, though. Stereolithography takes forever.
I'm surprised that laser-cut acrylic would work. Thin acrylic isn't very strong. Polycarbonate ("Lexan") doesn't cut well with CO2 lasers. Acetyl ("Delrin") is probably the best choice. It's kind of expensive, but a key isn't very big.
memory corruption bugs that inevitably crop up in complex pieces of code...
Well, if they didn't use an OS written in C, or they used a static verifier, they wouldn't have that problem.
Address space randomization only protects against inept attackers. If the attacker can get anything running at a low privilege level, and there's an overflow exploit that lets them look into the address space they're attacking, they can find whatever is being moved around.
Address space randomization at best turns attacks into system crashes.
The power is high, but there's not much total energy. 1.85 megajoules is only about half a kilowatt-hour. Energy cost about $0.10. No asteroid-melting potential here.
The National Ignition Facility is for nuclear weapons testing. It's for studying H-bomb type events without having to detonate a nuclear weapon. It's not a prototype for energy production.
It's a convention hall, not a theater. Bad acoustics, no projection room, no good audio system, folding chairs. Here's what the screens look like. Look at the screen size and quality. They have to have auxiliary screens around the room so people in the back can see. Some of the auxiliary screens are dim around the edges. That's a setup for a marketing presentation. Of course you don't introduce a new movie technology there.
Movies with new technologies are typically previewed for critics in venues with ideal conditions, like the Technicolor Theater in Hollywood or the screening room at Dolby headquarters in San Francisco.
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
There's a classic book, "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut", which discusses risk from the point of view of someone in the program. He was willing to accept the risks of space flight. He was worried about being killed flying around in a T-38 jet trainer. Four astronauts were killed in T-38s in the 1960s. He figured there was a 1 in 5 chance of being killed that way.
That wasn't an exaggeration.
In the 1950s and 1960s, about 1 in 5 US fighter pilots died in a crash without any help from the enemy. (Jet fighters have improved a lot since then. So have ejection seats.)
Spacecraft still have terrible reliability compared to aircraft. The US shuttle had 2 crashes in 135 flights. Commercial launches to geosynch orbit are still only about 95% successful. (2 fails in 35 launches in 2011, 3 fails in 36 launches in 2010. No fails in 19 launches so far in 2012; it's a good year.) There's progress; that number was in the 80% range in the 1980s. But it's a long way from aircraft-type stats. The current numbers are barely acceptable for unmanned satellite launches.
Our local multiplex theater in Silicon Valley is running fewer screens in 3D. All their projectors are digital and 3D-capable. When the 3D boom started out, about 80% of showings were in 3D, with only 20% in 2D. Now it's about 50-50.
There's a strong tendency in 3D movies to have a big "3D scene". These tend towards either roller coaster simulations or stuff coming at you. Both are boring after you've seen a few of them.
There's been progress. I just looked at all the solar magnetic disturbance messages on the PJM dashboard for the last 10 years. The sun has been quiet for the last few years, during the low part of the sunspot cycle. The last big event was in 2005, when a K-9 event was observed. PJM went to "conservative operation" for about 12 hours. (Normally, generation is controlled through a market process, but when there's a problem, the control center in Valley Forge PA orders "conservative operation", which means generating stations bring extra reserves on line, ready in case there's trouble.) Appropriate preparations were made,
but not much happened.
Social spamming is cheaper and easier than classic link farm spamming. Link farms cost money to set up and run. Social spam is hosted for free by Facebook, Google, Yelp. etc. Attempts to stop this have not been successful. Even if 80% of fake accounts are killed off, that just means the spammers have to run more fake account generators. Remember Google's "real names" policy? That didn't work out.
Google, and, to a lesser extent, Bing, are running into a big problem - most of their "signals" are spammable. Links are mostly spam - who links to sites that exist only to advertise? Most content, by volume, is now spam - spam blogs, scraper sites, AOL, and Demand Media. There are even spam newspapers, newspapers that get their content from Demand Media and PR Newswire. The San Francisco Chronicle does this, and fake PR then "stories" show up in Google News.
Sure they look good when you have all the right sources, but since I don't spend my life building a movie collection most normal content is stretched and full of digital garbage.
Well, that's what happens with pirated content. Copied, recompressed, ads and logos added, recompressed again, and reassembled from blocks on multiple overloaded servers. Of course it looks like crap.
Just checked the PJM dashboard, which shows what's going on for the power grid in the northeastern US. They haven't put up a Solar Magnetic Disturbance Warning for this event.
The last event that caused a blackout was in 1989. Since then, more monitoring gear has been added and plans made for when this problem occurs.
The basic effect is that the solar wind induces DC currents in the earth, causing a huge ground loop between distant grounding points. This causes DC current to flow through AC high tension lines, which heats up transformers and causes some confusion in measurements. Those DC currents are constantly monitored. When DC flows are observed, the AC currents on the line have to be reduced to prevent transformer overheating. It's an operational problem, but not a disaster.
(If you're really interested in this topic, here's the PJM training presentation that covers solar and magnetic disturbances. This is the perspective from the people who operate the power grid. "When solar magnetic disturbance is confirmed, Salem 1 and 2 units will reduce to 80% power and Hope Creek to 85% power...")
Slashdot Mirror
The sad thing in this whole saga is that we can actually source a large amount of our demand for natural gas from our own waste using technology which has been known for centuries.
Not really. Most sewerage disposal plants generate methane and use it for power. There's more than enough to run the plant, but it's not a major source of power. Our local landfills in Silicon Valley capture methane to generate power. The big landfill near Google HQ used to do that, but over time, the methane decay slowed down, the generators were removed, and a golf course and rock music venue were put on top of the garbage piles.
UTF-8 still lacks a lot of things that most of us in the US and most of Europe don't really wrestle with, but there is a reason there is also a UTF-16 and UTF-32 and many variations there of.
No, no. UTF-8 is a variable length encoding and can represent all 1,112,064[ potential Unicode characters. RTFM. That's all you need in a sequential file. The in-memory representation of strings is usually expanded to a fixed-length character size, but that's specific to the implementation and independent of the file format.
The actual paper is worth a read. This has nothing to do with drones. It's about taking out leaders, and what effect that has.
Assassination of political leaders by an external power has historically been a losing strategy. A new political leader soon takes power, and is generally more hostile to the external power. (When the new leader set up the assassination of the old one, that's a coup d'etat, which is a different situation.) The point of the paper is that terrorist groups tend to be held together by a charismatic leader, and killing that leader, more often than not, kills the group.
The older the group, the less likely this is to work. For a group that's only a few years old, it usually works; for one more than 20 years old, it rarely does. The half-life of terrorist groups is 15 years; half of them collapse in that time, and the survival rate of such groups follows a classic decay curve.
It doesn't work for drug and crime lords, because drug cartels are economic organizations. The organization and profit motive remain. Eliminating a leader just leaves a power vacuum at the top, which is quickly filled.
Interestingly, assassination of religious leaders is highly effective. "Although religious groups appear to be 80 percent less likely to end than nationalist groups based on ideology alone, they were almost five times as likely to end than nationalist groups after experiencing leadership decapitation." The conventional wisdom is that it is very difficult to take down a religion, short of outright extermination of all followers.. That may not be the case.
A few years back, it looked like XHTML was the future. The basic idea of XHTML is "the syntax has to be right". XHTML parsers are not required to parse anything that isn't valid XML. HTML5 parsers have explicitly defined semantics for common errors in HTML, like malformed comments. With XHTML, there was no question what the tree representation of the document was.
But people wanted the freedom to copy and paste broken ad code into HTML documents, so we ended up with HTML5. Personally, I'd like to have strict XHTML and require that everything be UTF-8. It's time to retire that "upper code page" crap.
The CPU is an Allwinner A10, designed and built in China and selling for about $7. It's an impressive piece of technology.
That board, though, looks like the guts of a tablet or notebook, not a development board. There are a number of development boards available at various price points. For $70 you can get an A10 in a box with connectors, suitable for entertainment applications.
I would like a source for the statements "He apparently thought he was the Joker" and "disarming the booby traps in his apartment".
CNN: "The suspect in the mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater screening of the new Batman film early Friday had colored his hair red and told police he was "the Joker," according to a federal law enforcement source with detailed knowledge of the investigation."
Denver Post via Mercury News -- "Aurora shooting suspect left apartment "booby trapped," music blaring": "Oates said Holmes made a statement to officers about possible explosives in his home. That prompted police to evacuate five buildings nearby and begin searching his third-floor apartment using a police robot and camera attached to a long pole. Inside, officers found trip wires attached to 1-liter plastic bottles that contain an unknown substance. Police Chief Dan Oates said the explosive devices were "pretty sophisticated." "We could be here for days," he said at midday."
Mass shooting at the Batman opening at an Aurora, CO, theater. 12 killed, 59 wounded. "Police say Holmes, 24, dressed head-to-toe in protective tactical gear, set off two devices of some kind before spraying the Century 16 theater with bullets from an AR-15 rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and at least one of two .40-caliber handguns police recovered at the scene." He apparently thought he was the Joker. He's in custody, and bomb squads are disarming the booby traps in his apartment.
Weapons were provided by Bass Pro Shop in Denver and Gander Mountain Guns (sale on assault rifles this week!).
I'm worried about this. We're seeing too many attacks and persistent threats that seem to be laying the groundwork for something. Viruses and worms used to do something actively hostile. Now, there are ones that just slowly take over machines and wait for further instructions.
There's a lot of infrastructure which used to have big maintenance forces, but no longer does. Water systems, pumping stations, power substations, cell sites, air conditioning, and railroad signalling are all remotely controlled, and some of the links do go over the Internet. The power and railroad people take reasonable precautions, but the others, not so much. Few companies have the armies of maintenance people they used to. This is becoming a big problem in the power industry, where recovery from storms is taking weeks instead of days.
I'd worry about an attack on the financial services sector. If someone took down the NYSE or the NASDAQ or the CBOT, or the links between them, for a week, the financial center of the world would no longer be in the US, even after the systems came back up. That's a very attractive target. Back in 2001, the markets outside the US weren't ready to take over. Now they are.
Did those guys just re-invent Active-X controls?
Oh, please.
I spend a lot of time at TechShop, and I'm not that impressed with "maker culture".
The RepRap is a piece of crap. Yes, the live-in-their-parents-basement crowd can make RPG figures with one. That's about all it's good for - little plastic decorative junk. Melting pieces of ABS string together can only take you so far.There are better machines at higher price points that can make working parts, but you have to spend upwards of $5000 to get anything good.
As for making electronics, that's never been easier. Custom board-making services are cheaper and easier to use than ever. (Making boards yourself using iron-on toner transfer is obsolete - the pro shops do a much better job, can do plated-through holes, and end up being cheaper than DIY jobs.) Digi-Key has almost every part in existence and can deliver in 24 hours. Good electronic CAD programs are available for free. You can even get free auto-routing. SPICE will run on most desktop computers, so you can debug analog circuits in simulation. Surface mount reflow has filtered down to the hobbyist level.
The reason more people aren't building their own electronics from parts is that you can usually buy a cheap consumer product to do whatever it is you want to do. You need both a lot of theory and assembly technique to build new electronics. Writing an iPhone app is much easier. Building your own audio system or TV to save money hasn't made economic sense since the 1960s.
TechShop has a few different groups of users. There are artists, who are usually turning out decorative stuff on the laser cutters, vinyl cutter, CNC embroidery machines, or silk-screen machines. There are pro machinists, who are doing jobs for pay on TechShop's equipment. There's a small group with the motto "designed in Silicon Valley, made in Silicon Valley", which makes little plastic iPhone stands. (As a long-time Silicon Valley resident, I see this as pathetic. The high-tech stuff comes from China and we make cheap plastic accessories for it.) There are people who are just there to be on their laptop, because it's cheaper than Starbucks. There are people working on cars. There are a few people doing live-steam model railroad builds. A few people are building robots, but the ones that are any good are from people who do robots as their day job.
It's a hobby shop. It's not about changing the world.
For mobile devices, the software is controlled by the carrier and the data path is controlled by the carrier, and the apps are controlled by the carrier or the handset maker. Mobile devices don't act as hosts. And all the growth in devices is in mobile. So why aren't they all on IPv6?
If the carrier has to do an IPv6 to IPv4 translation, they can do that at their head end.
Is this announcement definitely from Dell, or is it more bullshit from Canonical? Canonical has previously announced various machines as coming with their Linux preloaded. Canonical claimed that for an EeePC model. Didn't happen.
That's a classic way to run a resistance movement. Mao, Marighella, the IRA, al-Queda, etc. It works fairly well in the early phases. As the revolution advances, tighter coordination is necessary. This leads to centralized leadership. In the end, there's a Stalin or a Castro.
The US is one of the very few countries to get a stable democracy out of a revolution. That's not what usually happens.
The surprising thing is that a flat key will work. Laser cutters are 2D devices; they do a great job cutting flat sheets, but you can't make 3D objects with them. The process is fast and cheap, though. Stereolithography takes forever.
I'm surprised that laser-cut acrylic would work. Thin acrylic isn't very strong. Polycarbonate ("Lexan") doesn't cut well with CO2 lasers. Acetyl ("Delrin") is probably the best choice. It's kind of expensive, but a key isn't very big.
memory corruption bugs that inevitably crop up in complex pieces of code...
Well, if they didn't use an OS written in C, or they used a static verifier, they wouldn't have that problem.
Address space randomization only protects against inept attackers. If the attacker can get anything running at a low privilege level, and there's an overflow exploit that lets them look into the address space they're attacking, they can find whatever is being moved around.
Address space randomization at best turns attacks into system crashes.
The power is high, but there's not much total energy. 1.85 megajoules is only about half a kilowatt-hour. Energy cost about $0.10. No asteroid-melting potential here.
The National Ignition Facility is for nuclear weapons testing. It's for studying H-bomb type events without having to detonate a nuclear weapon. It's not a prototype for energy production.
It's a convention hall, not a theater. Bad acoustics, no projection room, no good audio system, folding chairs. Here's what the screens look like. Look at the screen size and quality. They have to have auxiliary screens around the room so people in the back can see. Some of the auxiliary screens are dim around the edges. That's a setup for a marketing presentation. Of course you don't introduce a new movie technology there.
Movies with new technologies are typically previewed for critics in venues with ideal conditions, like the Technicolor Theater in Hollywood or the screening room at Dolby headquarters in San Francisco.
You want to see an incumbent business model act like a pack of pissed-off wolverines? Watch the small-paper lobby go to town when a state legislature suggests that putting legal notices online might -- might! -- be more efficient.
That just happened in Texas. The newspapers won, this time.
In Illinois, there's a real battle. The newspapers have their own lobbying site. Several bills are pending in Virginia and the newspapers there are frantically lobbying.
There's a classic book, "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut", which discusses risk from the point of view of someone in the program. He was willing to accept the risks of space flight. He was worried about being killed flying around in a T-38 jet trainer. Four astronauts were killed in T-38s in the 1960s. He figured there was a 1 in 5 chance of being killed that way.
That wasn't an exaggeration. In the 1950s and 1960s, about 1 in 5 US fighter pilots died in a crash without any help from the enemy. (Jet fighters have improved a lot since then. So have ejection seats.)
Spacecraft still have terrible reliability compared to aircraft. The US shuttle had 2 crashes in 135 flights. Commercial launches to geosynch orbit are still only about 95% successful. (2 fails in 35 launches in 2011, 3 fails in 36 launches in 2010. No fails in 19 launches so far in 2012; it's a good year.) There's progress; that number was in the 80% range in the 1980s. But it's a long way from aircraft-type stats. The current numbers are barely acceptable for unmanned satellite launches.
Our local multiplex theater in Silicon Valley is running fewer screens in 3D. All their projectors are digital and 3D-capable. When the 3D boom started out, about 80% of showings were in 3D, with only 20% in 2D. Now it's about 50-50.
There's a strong tendency in 3D movies to have a big "3D scene". These tend towards either roller coaster simulations or stuff coming at you. Both are boring after you've seen a few of them.
There's been progress. I just looked at all the solar magnetic disturbance messages on the PJM dashboard for the last 10 years. The sun has been quiet for the last few years, during the low part of the sunspot cycle. The last big event was in 2005, when a K-9 event was observed. PJM went to "conservative operation" for about 12 hours. (Normally, generation is controlled through a market process, but when there's a problem, the control center in Valley Forge PA orders "conservative operation", which means generating stations bring extra reserves on line, ready in case there's trouble.) Appropriate preparations were made, but not much happened.
I've been pointing this out for some time now. See my paper "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social". As soon as some social signal feeds into search ranking, it gets spammed.
Social spamming is cheaper and easier than classic link farm spamming. Link farms cost money to set up and run. Social spam is hosted for free by Facebook, Google, Yelp. etc. Attempts to stop this have not been successful. Even if 80% of fake accounts are killed off, that just means the spammers have to run more fake account generators. Remember Google's "real names" policy? That didn't work out.
Google, and, to a lesser extent, Bing, are running into a big problem - most of their "signals" are spammable. Links are mostly spam - who links to sites that exist only to advertise? Most content, by volume, is now spam - spam blogs, scraper sites, AOL, and Demand Media. There are even spam newspapers, newspapers that get their content from Demand Media and PR Newswire. The San Francisco Chronicle does this, and fake PR then "stories" show up in Google News.
Google tried weighting links less in their Panda update.. It didn't help. Their results in heavily spammed areas became semi-random, and social spamming went up.
That's why there are all those fake accounts.
They look more like cardboard cut-outs placed at varying distances or like layers of 2D images.
That's what "Disney Real3D (tm)" is. Anything "converted" from 2D to 3D actually is a stack of layers of 2D images.
Sure they look good when you have all the right sources, but since I don't spend my life building a movie collection most normal content is stretched and full of digital garbage.
Well, that's what happens with pirated content. Copied, recompressed, ads and logos added, recompressed again, and reassembled from blocks on multiple overloaded servers. Of course it looks like crap.
(That's what most of YouTube looks like, too.)
Just checked the PJM dashboard, which shows what's going on for the power grid in the northeastern US. They haven't put up a Solar Magnetic Disturbance Warning for this event.
NOAA predicts a maximum A index of 25 and a maximum K index of 3 at low latitudes, 6 at high latitudes (Canada, roughly). PJM says they issue an alert when there's an A index of 40 or above or a K index of 5 or above. K=6 and 7 level events aren't serious problems; trouble occurs around 8 and 9.
The last event that caused a blackout was in 1989. Since then, more monitoring gear has been added and plans made for when this problem occurs. The basic effect is that the solar wind induces DC currents in the earth, causing a huge ground loop between distant grounding points. This causes DC current to flow through AC high tension lines, which heats up transformers and causes some confusion in measurements. Those DC currents are constantly monitored. When DC flows are observed, the AC currents on the line have to be reduced to prevent transformer overheating. It's an operational problem, but not a disaster.
(If you're really interested in this topic, here's the PJM training presentation that covers solar and magnetic disturbances. This is the perspective from the people who operate the power grid. "When solar magnetic disturbance is confirmed, Salem 1 and 2 units will reduce to 80% power and Hope Creek to 85% power...")