The ugly bit is that (while most online 'journalism' is even worse than the printed flavor or propped up by it) the internet doesn't need to do any journalism to make newspapers financially problematic.
Unless all the ads are just for show and subscriptions and purchases actually fund the operations, simply getting hammered by online mechanisms that do nothing but classified ads or job searches, or theater tickets, or all the other bits and pieces that used to be something you'd check the newspaper for could be enough by itself.
Online delivery of news is pretty tepid (at best, it's a straight copy of what gets printed in a nice machine readable format); but the various ancillary functions? Game Over Man. Game Over. Not only cheaper; but typically better as well. This unbundling of what used to be profitable items in a paper is something that laws of this flavor, based on the premise that internet copying is killing journalism, won't have an effect on (since these various non-news services don't have any need to copy newspaper material, they just replace it); and is also something that attempting to compete with the internet on quality won't change(since none of these promise news of any quality as a feature).
It depends on the orbit of course; but the metaphorical waters are muddied a bit because it's more like a Space Coast Guard than a Space Navy; but in a world with every country with an enthusiasm for missiles or lasers has its own personal Strait of Hormuz, a mixture of everybody's military and civilian shipping passes through all of them every 90 minutes or so, and if some asshole forgets to anchor his dingy it might break into hundreds of lethal fragments and sink a couple of oil tankers and a bulk carrier more or less anywhere...
In 1959 there were plans to establish a moon base before 1970... Complete with anti-cosmonaut mines to keep the commies away and an org chart. We ended up not doing that.
I could have sworn that there was a non militarization of space treaty in place
According to TFA, this 'military space force' is a somewhat hyperbolic description of orbital debris tracking(presumably for satellite protection, as such systems currently are). Depending on the local appetite for defense contracts and the diplomatic PR issues such a purely 'defensive' system will have a greater or lesser chance of becoming the target acquisition mechanism for some sort of anti-satellite system on the ground.
To the best of public knowledge, I don't think anyone has yet followed through on some grand design to put weapons on satellites; but you can put more or less whatever you want on the ground and satellites are not known for their durability...
Worse than that. If there's a metal foil involved, vibration measurement should be doable with RF as well as light. Only with a next generation reduced radar cross section geometries and RF absorbent materials can a truly secure tinfoil hat be constructed.
Unfortunately, walking around with what appears to be a small F-117 attached to your head offers limited visual camouflage potential and may prove counterproductive in your attempts to avoid Their surveillance.
Depends, does it work on objects of sub-pixel size?
Just to make life more fun, a planet with life would likely have an atmosphere and those make a bit of a mess of light that passes through them(which might be handy if we are looking for atmospheres; but substantially less so if we are trying to look through them).
Clearly, if your work is that important having a window office becomes a sign of extremely low status and institutional nonimportance, rather than professional advancement...
(At least until they discover the guy spying on the basement dwellers with sophisticated seismometers)
The general notion that all sorts of things will vibrate in the presence of ambient noise is definitely not new. Even perfectly ordinary mics depend on it, though they bring their own specialized vibrating surface in order to make the problem considerably easier.
However, there's very little similarity, aside from the use of available objects rather than specially designed surfaces; between using an interferometer to measure vibrations and using a machine vision algorithm to do so.
Aside from its symbolic value, is that really such a scary move? The Russians offer pretty good prices for satellite launches; but are not the only player by any means(and their launch industry can choose between serving as a diplomatic pawn or not scaring customers, so they pay a penalty if they try to push that too hard). For manned launches, their position is better; but those are painfully close to ceremonial, and of limited scientific and less than zero commercial value.
The...dysfunctional...interaction of state and market go way back. Round one was during the post-soviet privatization, where most of the state assets worth either controlling or plundering were sold off for peanuts to a number of particularly well connected parties. Once the honeymoon was over on that, round two was the people who had turned political influence into economic power making investments in political influence. Now round three is the people who won round two using political influence to consolidate their economic hold.
It will be interesting to see if the situation stabilizes, or if the squabbling will eventually burn off most of the property value that can't be directly sucked out of the ground and exported, in classic dysfunctional petrostate style. It would also be interesting to know how many of the bright-eyed and optimistic free marketeers that we shipped over to handle the consulting were just naive and how many just didn't care. I know that some of them spent at least the 90's and early 00's thinking that it actually would work; but I don't know how common that was.
This is David Cameron we are talking about. His previous Big Bold Project involved attempting to build the great firewall of Britain to save the children from internet porn. He isn't one of those people who know how to size up a task...
Given that hotel keying tends toward assorted mag-stripe flavors, which are certainly more obscure than RFID/NFC(mag stripe readers and writers aren't terribly expensive or in any way controlled; but nobody is pushing to build them in to random consumer electronics); but which have only whatever testing the vendor gave them and security-through-obscurity, I'm not seeing why the security risks would necessarily be 'obvious'.
Yes, connecting anything to the network raises the stakes; but I'd be shocked if the existing systems are exactly flawless, even ignoring the human element of social engineering the front desk staff or the practice of finding the cheapest maids available and issuing them full access for room cleaning...
This will probably go poorly; but it might actually go poorly in a visible enough way that they have to fix it or risk embarassment/lawsuits, rather than just having it go poorly more or less forever.
What I find slightly curious is that they'd bother to transport the patient for a disease that (at present) has no treatment other than supportive therapy to try to keep the symptoms from killing you. The Liberian medical system is not exactly a shining star; but this isn't one of those "Oh, sure, we could cure that; but this hospital doesn't have an endoscopic microsurgery suite and we'd need $250k worth of drugs that you can't even buy here." diseases.
Is there a research interest? Is supportive therapy that much better here and the CDC is the place with isolation expertise? What advantage is being sought?
As a qualified Computer Systems Necromancer I've been disappointed by the lack of demand for combine technical aptitude with an ability to work with the undead creatures of nightmare. HP's plans are an exciting development for me and my colleagues!
Fabrication costs eat you alive if you try to approximate a fractal too closely; but that is essentially where the later generations of solid metal heatsinks were heading before heatpipes hit the scene.
In the cheapest and simplest incarnation is just a beefy heat spreader plate on the bottom to ensure that each fin gets a reasonable connection to the heat source. In fancier versions, the spreader also extends vertically to help transfer heat to the more distant parts of the fins.
Recent AMD retail heatsinks use a clever design (cheap, because it's an aluminum extrusion with just a couple of cuts for the retention clip; but a combination of fins for surface area and bulkier conductive struts to feed the fins): image. The central slug is about the same size as the CPU heat spreader, and is solid throughout except for the slits for the retention clip. The longest fins are the ones directly attached to it. The four thicker struts on each corner support shorter fins(longer close to the base, shortest at the edges where there will be the least heat available for dissipation).
Heatpipes are superior enough to just about any solid material(with the possible exception of diamonds and carbon nanotubes; but those aren't really options) that most of the more expensive coolers have moved to 'heatpipes as close to the CPU as possible, loads of sheet metal fins with the heatpipes running through them' design; but you can definitely see the tradeoffs between surface area and conductive cross section in today's cheaper extrusion designs and the last generation or two of pre-heatpipe enthusiast gear.
Honestly, that's the bit that surprised me. If the payoff exceeded the potential legal exposure I don't doubt that you'd be able to find contractors willing to vivisect the homeless; but I am surprised that 'studies' on such a population(heavily weighted as it is with potentially confounding mental and physical morbidity, difficult to track over anything but the short term, etc.) would be treated as adequate.
From what friends in biology tell me, I gather that the reviewers would spit on you if you tried to do a rodent study by 'eh, we set out a nonlethal trap in the basement of the building and used whatever mice wandered in'. Obviously you can't order custom humans the way you can standardized mouse strains; but impoverished homeless people seem like about the least desireable study population you could imagine, except for the cheap and highly unlikely to sue you bit.
With finned heat sinks, one of the limits on size was that the comparatively low conductivity of the fin material made surface area increasingly unhelpful as you got further from the heat source. Especially with paper-thin lightweight aluminum you could just keep making them bigger; but much of the fin would be essentially wasted because the delta-T between the more distant areas of fin and the source of the heat would be so high. Plenty of heat exchange surface; but not much heat making it out that far.
This is why more or less all contemporary heatsinks started embedding heatpipes some time ago, since that was the only way to get a reasonable amount of heat to the more distant parts of the heatsink.
This 'sponge' is more aesthetically interesting; but I see a lot of surface area that is only tenuously connected to the actual heat source. Newer Intel silicon just doesn't pump out the watts the way the old stuff did, so it might actually work; but I'd be shocked it if works any better than a much more prosaic heatpipe-and-fins design.
Not really an outlier, its a difference between cancellation on the phone and cancellation in person. The phone drones (or "the lost and the damned") are extraordinarily closely scrutinized and their paychecks and/or not getting shitcanned are directly dependent on 'retention'. The in-store people, apparently, are paid to be in store but not directly induced to hassle you.
I'm not quite sure why Comcast hasn't emiserated the in-store situation yet; but apparently they haven't, and it's not as though the front-line peons are fucking with you for their pleasure, so if they aren't forced to they generally won't.
I suspect that, at very least, 3d printing servics will be harassed (like youtube vs. the music labels) about this possibility, and some users will definitely try it.
The one thing that(as much as it surprises me) makes me a trifle skeptical of the lethality is that doing resin(or wood's metal or similar alloys if you want some extra weight and don't mind a little cadmium) castings from figurines isn't rocket surgery, especially for people with enough interest and fine motor skills to paint the things, and I've not heard anything about major disruption from that.
3d printing will lower the bar, since you don't actually need the master to create a mold from; but even if you exclude clandestine trade in cloned figurines, people could easily buy enough parts to copy an acceptably varied army for much less than they could buy the entire army.
The really nice stuff is still pretty expensive per unit volume, even aside from the purchase price, so Amazon probably isn't interested; but they are almost definitely using relatively nice plastic printers.
Amazon's offering is substantially less flexible than that of existing players (shapeways is the name that comes to mind; but there are others), who already accept basically any STL that isn't horribly munged in some way and spit the result out in a number of different materials.
You still have to model the part, or buy a (currently rather expensive) 3d scanner to do it; but if you are willing to put on your CAD hat, you could have the part by next week, just not from Amazon. I wonder if they are just moving slowly, or worried about the copy cops coming after them once people start knocking off action figures or something...
It lacks the sci-fi appeal of pure printing; but there are a variety of techniques that use the 3d printed part as the first step and then subject it to additional treatment steps in order to make up for those sorts of deficiencies.
As long as the subsequent processing steps don't change the dimensions(or change them in predictable ways that you can compensate for) you can get away with whatever tempering, annealing, and so on your application requires.
A poorly calibrated fused filament unit will produce stringy junk that delaminates if you look at it funny. A well calibrated one will achieve something reasonably close to what the plastic it is using is actually capable of. Outside the cheap seats, you can print all kinds of things(especially if you count parts that require one or more additional processing steps as '3d printed'. Printing wax, for example, is pretty undemanding, and allows you to do lost-wax casts of more or less any shape that will cast properly, without needing a printer that can sinter or melt metals. Some of the techniques for producing ceramics are in the same vein, the printer just needs to tack the ceramic material together long enough for firing, which takes care of the mechanical properties.)
The one thing that is (relatively) easy with injection molding that 3d printing (to my knowledge) isn't so hot for is overmolds. When injection molding you can use insert molding or multi-shot systems to achieve the (enormously common and fairly popular) combination of a rigid plastic structure with an elastomeric surface treatment for grip or aesthetic reasons. For prototyping purposes you can get paint-like coatings that emulate elastomeric overmolds that you can brush on to 3d printed parts; but the quality isn't as good and production takes longer.
Slashdot Mirror
The ugly bit is that (while most online 'journalism' is even worse than the printed flavor or propped up by it) the internet doesn't need to do any journalism to make newspapers financially problematic.
Unless all the ads are just for show and subscriptions and purchases actually fund the operations, simply getting hammered by online mechanisms that do nothing but classified ads or job searches, or theater tickets, or all the other bits and pieces that used to be something you'd check the newspaper for could be enough by itself.
Online delivery of news is pretty tepid (at best, it's a straight copy of what gets printed in a nice machine readable format); but the various ancillary functions? Game Over Man. Game Over. Not only cheaper; but typically better as well. This unbundling of what used to be profitable items in a paper is something that laws of this flavor, based on the premise that internet copying is killing journalism, won't have an effect on (since these various non-news services don't have any need to copy newspaper material, they just replace it); and is also something that attempting to compete with the internet on quality won't change(since none of these promise news of any quality as a feature).
It depends on the orbit of course; but the metaphorical waters are muddied a bit because it's more like a Space Coast Guard than a Space Navy; but in a world with every country with an enthusiasm for missiles or lasers has its own personal Strait of Hormuz, a mixture of everybody's military and civilian shipping passes through all of them every 90 minutes or so, and if some asshole forgets to anchor his dingy it might break into hundreds of lethal fragments and sink a couple of oil tankers and a bulk carrier more or less anywhere...
So...yeah.
In 1959 there were plans to establish a moon base before 1970... Complete with anti-cosmonaut mines to keep the commies away and an org chart. We ended up not doing that.
I could have sworn that there was a non militarization of space treaty in place
According to TFA, this 'military space force' is a somewhat hyperbolic description of orbital debris tracking(presumably for satellite protection, as such systems currently are). Depending on the local appetite for defense contracts and the diplomatic PR issues such a purely 'defensive' system will have a greater or lesser chance of becoming the target acquisition mechanism for some sort of anti-satellite system on the ground.
To the best of public knowledge, I don't think anyone has yet followed through on some grand design to put weapons on satellites; but you can put more or less whatever you want on the ground and satellites are not known for their durability...
Worse than that. If there's a metal foil involved, vibration measurement should be doable with RF as well as light. Only with a next generation reduced radar cross section geometries and RF absorbent materials can a truly secure tinfoil hat be constructed.
Unfortunately, walking around with what appears to be a small F-117 attached to your head offers limited visual camouflage potential and may prove counterproductive in your attempts to avoid Their surveillance.
Depends, does it work on objects of sub-pixel size?
Just to make life more fun, a planet with life would likely have an atmosphere and those make a bit of a mess of light that passes through them(which might be handy if we are looking for atmospheres; but substantially less so if we are trying to look through them).
Clearly, if your work is that important having a window office becomes a sign of extremely low status and institutional nonimportance, rather than professional advancement...
(At least until they discover the guy spying on the basement dwellers with sophisticated seismometers)
The general notion that all sorts of things will vibrate in the presence of ambient noise is definitely not new. Even perfectly ordinary mics depend on it, though they bring their own specialized vibrating surface in order to make the problem considerably easier.
However, there's very little similarity, aside from the use of available objects rather than specially designed surfaces; between using an interferometer to measure vibrations and using a machine vision algorithm to do so.
Aside from its symbolic value, is that really such a scary move? The Russians offer pretty good prices for satellite launches; but are not the only player by any means(and their launch industry can choose between serving as a diplomatic pawn or not scaring customers, so they pay a penalty if they try to push that too hard). For manned launches, their position is better; but those are painfully close to ceremonial, and of limited scientific and less than zero commercial value.
The...dysfunctional...interaction of state and market go way back. Round one was during the post-soviet privatization, where most of the state assets worth either controlling or plundering were sold off for peanuts to a number of particularly well connected parties. Once the honeymoon was over on that, round two was the people who had turned political influence into economic power making investments in political influence. Now round three is the people who won round two using political influence to consolidate their economic hold.
It will be interesting to see if the situation stabilizes, or if the squabbling will eventually burn off most of the property value that can't be directly sucked out of the ground and exported, in classic dysfunctional petrostate style. It would also be interesting to know how many of the bright-eyed and optimistic free marketeers that we shipped over to handle the consulting were just naive and how many just didn't care. I know that some of them spent at least the 90's and early 00's thinking that it actually would work; but I don't know how common that was.
We don't have to be 20 years in the future to look at right now and think what an awful thing chemo is.
The trouble is acting on that knowledge today...
This is David Cameron we are talking about. His previous Big Bold Project involved attempting to build the great firewall of Britain to save the children from internet porn. He isn't one of those people who know how to size up a task...
Given that hotel keying tends toward assorted mag-stripe flavors, which are certainly more obscure than RFID/NFC(mag stripe readers and writers aren't terribly expensive or in any way controlled; but nobody is pushing to build them in to random consumer electronics); but which have only whatever testing the vendor gave them and security-through-obscurity, I'm not seeing why the security risks would necessarily be 'obvious'.
Yes, connecting anything to the network raises the stakes; but I'd be shocked if the existing systems are exactly flawless, even ignoring the human element of social engineering the front desk staff or the practice of finding the cheapest maids available and issuing them full access for room cleaning...
This will probably go poorly; but it might actually go poorly in a visible enough way that they have to fix it or risk embarassment/lawsuits, rather than just having it go poorly more or less forever.
What I find slightly curious is that they'd bother to transport the patient for a disease that (at present) has no treatment other than supportive therapy to try to keep the symptoms from killing you. The Liberian medical system is not exactly a shining star; but this isn't one of those "Oh, sure, we could cure that; but this hospital doesn't have an endoscopic microsurgery suite and we'd need $250k worth of drugs that you can't even buy here." diseases.
Is there a research interest? Is supportive therapy that much better here and the CDC is the place with isolation expertise? What advantage is being sought?
As a qualified Computer Systems Necromancer I've been disappointed by the lack of demand for combine technical aptitude with an ability to work with the undead creatures of nightmare. HP's plans are an exciting development for me and my colleagues!
Fabrication costs eat you alive if you try to approximate a fractal too closely; but that is essentially where the later generations of solid metal heatsinks were heading before heatpipes hit the scene.
In the cheapest and simplest incarnation is just a beefy heat spreader plate on the bottom to ensure that each fin gets a reasonable connection to the heat source. In fancier versions, the spreader also extends vertically to help transfer heat to the more distant parts of the fins.
Recent AMD retail heatsinks use a clever design (cheap, because it's an aluminum extrusion with just a couple of cuts for the retention clip; but a combination of fins for surface area and bulkier conductive struts to feed the fins): image. The central slug is about the same size as the CPU heat spreader, and is solid throughout except for the slits for the retention clip. The longest fins are the ones directly attached to it. The four thicker struts on each corner support shorter fins(longer close to the base, shortest at the edges where there will be the least heat available for dissipation).
Heatpipes are superior enough to just about any solid material(with the possible exception of diamonds and carbon nanotubes; but those aren't really options) that most of the more expensive coolers have moved to 'heatpipes as close to the CPU as possible, loads of sheet metal fins with the heatpipes running through them' design; but you can definitely see the tradeoffs between surface area and conductive cross section in today's cheaper extrusion designs and the last generation or two of pre-heatpipe enthusiast gear.
Honestly, that's the bit that surprised me. If the payoff exceeded the potential legal exposure I don't doubt that you'd be able to find contractors willing to vivisect the homeless; but I am surprised that 'studies' on such a population(heavily weighted as it is with potentially confounding mental and physical morbidity, difficult to track over anything but the short term, etc.) would be treated as adequate.
From what friends in biology tell me, I gather that the reviewers would spit on you if you tried to do a rodent study by 'eh, we set out a nonlethal trap in the basement of the building and used whatever mice wandered in'. Obviously you can't order custom humans the way you can standardized mouse strains; but impoverished homeless people seem like about the least desireable study population you could imagine, except for the cheap and highly unlikely to sue you bit.
With finned heat sinks, one of the limits on size was that the comparatively low conductivity of the fin material made surface area increasingly unhelpful as you got further from the heat source. Especially with paper-thin lightweight aluminum you could just keep making them bigger; but much of the fin would be essentially wasted because the delta-T between the more distant areas of fin and the source of the heat would be so high. Plenty of heat exchange surface; but not much heat making it out that far.
This is why more or less all contemporary heatsinks started embedding heatpipes some time ago, since that was the only way to get a reasonable amount of heat to the more distant parts of the heatsink.
This 'sponge' is more aesthetically interesting; but I see a lot of surface area that is only tenuously connected to the actual heat source. Newer Intel silicon just doesn't pump out the watts the way the old stuff did, so it might actually work; but I'd be shocked it if works any better than a much more prosaic heatpipe-and-fins design.
Not really an outlier, its a difference between cancellation on the phone and cancellation in person. The phone drones (or "the lost and the damned") are extraordinarily closely scrutinized and their paychecks and/or not getting shitcanned are directly dependent on 'retention'. The in-store people, apparently, are paid to be in store but not directly induced to hassle you.
I'm not quite sure why Comcast hasn't emiserated the in-store situation yet; but apparently they haven't, and it's not as though the front-line peons are fucking with you for their pleasure, so if they aren't forced to they generally won't.
I suspect that, at very least, 3d printing servics will be harassed (like youtube vs. the music labels) about this possibility, and some users will definitely try it.
The one thing that(as much as it surprises me) makes me a trifle skeptical of the lethality is that doing resin(or wood's metal or similar alloys if you want some extra weight and don't mind a little cadmium) castings from figurines isn't rocket surgery, especially for people with enough interest and fine motor skills to paint the things, and I've not heard anything about major disruption from that.
3d printing will lower the bar, since you don't actually need the master to create a mold from; but even if you exclude clandestine trade in cloned figurines, people could easily buy enough parts to copy an acceptably varied army for much less than they could buy the entire army.
The really nice stuff is still pretty expensive per unit volume, even aside from the purchase price, so Amazon probably isn't interested; but they are almost definitely using relatively nice plastic printers.
Amazon's offering is substantially less flexible than that of existing players (shapeways is the name that comes to mind; but there are others), who already accept basically any STL that isn't horribly munged in some way and spit the result out in a number of different materials.
You still have to model the part, or buy a (currently rather expensive) 3d scanner to do it; but if you are willing to put on your CAD hat, you could have the part by next week, just not from Amazon. I wonder if they are just moving slowly, or worried about the copy cops coming after them once people start knocking off action figures or something...
It lacks the sci-fi appeal of pure printing; but there are a variety of techniques that use the 3d printed part as the first step and then subject it to additional treatment steps in order to make up for those sorts of deficiencies.
As long as the subsequent processing steps don't change the dimensions(or change them in predictable ways that you can compensate for) you can get away with whatever tempering, annealing, and so on your application requires.
Depends on what you pay.
A poorly calibrated fused filament unit will produce stringy junk that delaminates if you look at it funny. A well calibrated one will achieve something reasonably close to what the plastic it is using is actually capable of. Outside the cheap seats, you can print all kinds of things(especially if you count parts that require one or more additional processing steps as '3d printed'. Printing wax, for example, is pretty undemanding, and allows you to do lost-wax casts of more or less any shape that will cast properly, without needing a printer that can sinter or melt metals. Some of the techniques for producing ceramics are in the same vein, the printer just needs to tack the ceramic material together long enough for firing, which takes care of the mechanical properties.)
The one thing that is (relatively) easy with injection molding that 3d printing (to my knowledge) isn't so hot for is overmolds. When injection molding you can use insert molding or multi-shot systems to achieve the (enormously common and fairly popular) combination of a rigid plastic structure with an elastomeric surface treatment for grip or aesthetic reasons. For prototyping purposes you can get paint-like coatings that emulate elastomeric overmolds that you can brush on to 3d printed parts; but the quality isn't as good and production takes longer.
Are you honestly equating process separation in multi-user OSes with rootkits?