I think that the punchline is " if the texter knows, or has special reason to know, the recipient will view the text while driving."
Merely sending a text message, or making a phone call, or being a talkative passenger, or something, is not a problem. Only doing so with knowledge (how this would be obtained is unclear, and the situation is hypothetical) that the driver will be distracted by your action is seen as problematic.
It's irrelevant; because the hypothetical proposes a fairly stiff standard of evidence to meet (and would only kick in when both that standard is met and a text-reading driver does something unpleasant enough to get the courts involved); but it's actually not dissimilar from reasoning in other contexts:
Bringing a delicious peanut butter sandwich to work for lunch is totally innocuous. Doing so with the full knowledge that Bob from Accounting is lethally allergic is...not. Few scenarios are as clear cut as 'prior knowledge of atypical and dangerous allergy'; but it's hardly unreasonable to expect that certain people will be specially vulnerable to certain agents, and that people who know that and expose them anyway should be treated as though they intended the consequences that they knew about, rather than the consequences that would have resulted for any random normal person.
Is it, perhaps, a sign that your product line is the problem if you feel the need to build an expert system to elucidate it for customers? Sure, an expert system designed to help the customer beats an inexpert human paid to hurt the customer; but seriously.
"Tesla has some teething pains, as they are in completely new territory, and are not in the usual good ol' boy club with the other automakers"
All of that should be an advantage when building the web-related software features... A nice clean slate, no horrible-legacy-spaghetti-of-grafting-more-and-more-shit-onto-the-onboard-bus; but plenty of lessons conveniently learned by other people about how not to fuck up authentication on the internet.
That's the sort of baffling thing about this class of problem. A bad web API isn't a 'Oh, yeah, I can see how that would be a really subtle one if you haven't been building cars for 50 years' type of issue.
Phosphorous is a slightly vexing character because it wears quite a few hats:
It is viciously incendiary; but it's also a superb smoke-producing compound, and it's fairly toxic (not in the same class as purpose-built chemical weapons; but absorbing it through your burns is not recommended).
Some of those uses are essentially always licit (smoke production), some are sometimes licit (incendiaries are discouraged in populated areas; but not banned), and some are never licit (it's not a very good chemical weapon; but you aren't allowed to use it as one). Enough licit uses that basically everyone has a whole lot of the stuff on hand; but eminently adaptable for more gruesome purposes.
Luckily, we have an ally of each side of the war exercising Security Council veto powers, so the odds of having to get involved are less dire than they might otherwise be.
That isn't exactly how the security council actually works... Sure, we have some very nice, wonderfully principled, declarations to that effect; but they are totally optional (especially for boring genocides that none of the permanent members give a fuck about).
No, I'll wait until you are finished with the newsletter, everyone throws them out sooner or later. No matter where you are in the food chain, I'm always one step behind you. Waiting.
CO2 is a problem. PFC are worse. It is not a good idea to burn CO2 further into CF4, if that was your idea.
Oh, definitely not, I try to stay away from large-scale reactions involving fluorine whenever possible. I was just going for cheap 'funny' points (which really makes no sense, since those aren't worth anything, even karma which isn't worth much of anything; and yet I do it anyway...) and expressing my respect for a chemical that can oxidize all sorts of materials that you think of as already about as oxidized as they get.
You can't help but love something that responds to your attempts to extinguish the fire by enthusiastically burning such not-flammable materials as water, sand, and asbestos!
The one aspect that I find hard to understand is where Amazon thinks that their edge would be in going it alone. You can be an MVNO of any of the major cell companies with just a dash of legal paperwork, and that gets you instant network access, allows you to use commodity cell radio technology from a variety of vendors (and all the messy patent stuff is their problem), and it isn't as though the cell guys are sandbagging in terms of R&D, they're just evil about pricing.
Either they think that they have something very clever up their sleeve, or they are looking for a data service that fits a somewhat different use case than cellular data services do(in which case they might actually be able to do better, since they could build what they want rather than buying some approximation of what they want and beating it into shape).
Unless Globalstar has something really clever on the table, they should think carefully about the sordid saga of LightSquared... They thought that they'd buy a bunch of satellite-to-ground spectrum for peanuts and then get a waiver to use it as (much, much, more valuable) ground-ground spectrum. Shockingly, satellite-to-ground users in nearby spectra, with their feeble transmitters a zillion miles away, were Not Very Happy at the prospect of having comparatively massive towers screaming on nearby channels all over the economically relevant parts of the continental US.
At this point, LightSquared runs a fairly uninteresting satellite internet business and an unbelievably obnoxious lobbying business, stomping their feet and pouting because they aren't being allowed to pull their spectrum conversion trick.
Fluorine considers your 'you cannot burn it anymore' assessment to be a sign of weakness and defeatism. Oxygen may be the 'kleenex' of Oxidizing agents; but it is far from the most competent one...
Given the Ample selection of carbonate minerals, I don't doubt that you can get an equivalent-to-concrete-or-better construction brick out of a process designed to scrub substantial amounts of otherwise freed carbon dioxide. It will be interesting to see, though, how the whole process stacks up once you factor in the sources of whatever other materials will be reacting with the carbon dioxide.
It's less a question of whether it works, this isn't some 'run your car from water! Secrets Big Oil doesn't want you to know!' vaporware; but it may or may not be economic without a subsidy regimen based on its green credentials.
The only potential issue that springs immediately to mind would be vapor escaping through the sleeve in the lid (though, at this point, is anybody even going to notice a little extra evaporation in the face of all the deliberate and ongoing-accidental water releases?), and the possibility of the measuring rod 'binding' if it somehow ends up tilted too far from vertical and placing excessive force on just a couple of contact points (which would quite possibly cause the slip sleeve to bite into the rod and keep it fixed in position even as the water level changes). I'm sure that some clever mechanical engineer has a design for a superior leak-resistant and low-friction slip sleeve; but I don't know the details of such a beast.
Aside from that, though, it was a perfectly serious suggestion. Materials cost, per tank, is peanuts, float-type sensors are fully compatible with electronic instrumentation, if desired; but also work totally passively, and the failure mode still allows you to track state from a safe distance with a clipboard minion and some binoculars (unlike the failure modes of ultrasonic rangefinders, photointerrupters, or similar widgets, which might stop responding or start sending back dodgy numbers, with no ability to verify except by sending somebody into the tank farm to check it out.
I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to stand on the roof of the shoddily-built radiation-goo tank and retrofit a sensor sleeve; but including it in the design of new tanks wouldn't be difficult.
Its about money. There's no other reason to make an effort in anything in this world other than to gain extra cash.
That's part of my confusion, though: 22k and limited edition of 260 seems high by the standards of altruistic motives (even if the fancy 3d printing really does cost the full amount, which wouldn't be beyond the realm of plausible, the limited edition is clearly artificial); but seem quite low by pure cash grab standards.
If you are going to judge people's attitude toward privacy by what they use is there any demographic other than 'subsistence farmers at the ass-end of the developing world' who would actually be judged to care about privacy?
"But the museum is hoping to increase access to pictures"
"Every Relievo is numbered and approved by a museum curator. There is a limited edition of 260 copies per painting."
Well, what's it going to be? If this is about 'increasing access' or some similar highflown motivation, why are they limiting the editions and pushing the individual-numbering-and-'approval'-to-make-a-reproduction-feel-authentic nonsense?
Honestly, I'd be inclined to do it the 'keep it really, really, simple, TEPCO' way:
Float style liquid level meters are extremely simple devices. Small lighter-than-water float on the bottom, a rod(ideally with stripes or distance markings, like scale bars), and a sleeve in the lid of the tank that keeps the apparatus upright and allows the rod to move up and down freely.
If you do have rad-hard electronics in place, an optical sensor for the stripes, or a hall effect sensor for a rod with magnets at intervals, or similar, are easy to add. If not, the amount of protruding rod can be read from some hundreds of meters or more with a wholly unexciting pair of binoculars.
I'm mostly unimpressed by the twee nonsense about kids these days being 'digital natives' or something, imbued with mysterious computer-using powers (sure, kids these days are almost all users, unlike older age brackets that have holdouts; but the bar is not high for 'using technology', thanks to years of dedicated UI polishing and idiot-proofing, so only the usual much smaller percentage of nerds have any reason to go beyond trivial levels of knowledge); but it seems perfectly reasonable that they'd be a relatively privacy-conscious group.
After all, kids are among the demographics most likely to be surveilled and to be punished or otherwise restricted based on that surveillance. Parents, teachers/admins, peers, present or near-future employers and college admissions officers, cops (whether they just come and break up that party you foolishly put on facebook or whether you are already familiar with being stop-and-frisked depends on other demographic variables, of course), all actively watching and frequently acting on that.
Adults are still pretty heavily watched; but the range of banal behavior they can engage in without consequence is substantially greater.
"I'd be more surprised if AutoDesk weren't moving to subscription delivery of online product. They are the most widely "pirated" company of non-consumer software, ever.:-)"
Given that, for most of the software Autodesk makes, 'online product' is going to mean 'you download the install package and the DRM phones home a lot' rather than 'runs in a web page' or 'is delivered via ICA/RDP/X11/whatever from Autodesk's machine'. Heavy 3d (and customers who may not be at liberty to just ignore NDAs surrounding the stuff they are working on) don't fit well with that model unless you have impressive bandwidth and minimal latency.
Because of that, the anti-piracy effects of 'cloud' (in this sense) are pretty minimal, they certainly have been with Adobe's flavor. What this sort of subscription model does do, though, is remove the need to make version N+1 so compelling that people who own version N or version N-1 are moved to buy it, or at least pay an upgrade fee. This doesn't mean that you'll totally stop making improvements or adding features; but you get paid either way, so you no longer face the "Is our new product actually a meaningful improvement over our old one?" test on a regular basis.
That's what makes moving to a subscription model (for what is fundamentally client software, obviously charging fees for ongoing access to things hosted on my servers or otherwise generating recurring costs is a different matter) raises suspicions of 'lack of imagination'. Do you have enough market power that you can dictate an often-unpopular pricing arrangement? Do you suspect that you have no ideas for version N+1 that will motivate people to upgrade? Subscription model time!
I guess it is if you live in the middle east... but as an American this unlike the purly domestic shit is exactly what the NSA and allied signal intelligence agencies should be doing.
GCHQ decided to fuck with The Guardian and with Greenwald's partner.
Greenwald said "If the UK and U.S. governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further."
A little story about a probably-sensitive GCHQ listening post seems like a warning shot in exactly that direction.
Not necessarily. Given the, um, togetherness in that neighborhood, do you think that the countries you'd really want to listen in on run their fiber any closer to the Israelis than they absolutely have to?
It's also just a question of sheer size: Commercial nuclear reactors have an economic incentive to convert as much mass to energy as possible (nuclear fuel assemblies aren't exactly free, and shutting down/cutting power output to refuel carries substantial costs, and nobody wants more waste on hand than strictly necessary); but it costs them very little to add mass to their designs. I don't know about the Fukishima units specifically; but a big BWR can have north of 100 metric tons of fuel (not counting the weight of cladding, control rods, and other non-fissile parts) loaded at a time. It's all low-enriched, and built into protective assemblies; but nobody builds bombs so big that you'd need a cargo-variant 747 to deliver them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the punchline is " if the texter knows, or has special reason to know, the recipient will view the text while driving."
Merely sending a text message, or making a phone call, or being a talkative passenger, or something, is not a problem. Only doing so with knowledge (how this would be obtained is unclear, and the situation is hypothetical) that the driver will be distracted by your action is seen as problematic.
It's irrelevant; because the hypothetical proposes a fairly stiff standard of evidence to meet (and would only kick in when both that standard is met and a text-reading driver does something unpleasant enough to get the courts involved); but it's actually not dissimilar from reasoning in other contexts:
Bringing a delicious peanut butter sandwich to work for lunch is totally innocuous. Doing so with the full knowledge that Bob from Accounting is lethally allergic is...not. Few scenarios are as clear cut as 'prior knowledge of atypical and dangerous allergy'; but it's hardly unreasonable to expect that certain people will be specially vulnerable to certain agents, and that people who know that and expose them anyway should be treated as though they intended the consequences that they knew about, rather than the consequences that would have resulted for any random normal person.
...that is one ugly not-quite-a-tablet they have there.
It'll make a great companion device for one's similarly elegant laptop...
Is it, perhaps, a sign that your product line is the problem if you feel the need to build an expert system to elucidate it for customers? Sure, an expert system designed to help the customer beats an inexpert human paid to hurt the customer; but seriously.
"Tesla has some teething pains, as they are in completely new territory, and are not in the usual good ol' boy club with the other automakers"
All of that should be an advantage when building the web-related software features... A nice clean slate, no horrible-legacy-spaghetti-of-grafting-more-and-more-shit-onto-the-onboard-bus; but plenty of lessons conveniently learned by other people about how not to fuck up authentication on the internet.
That's the sort of baffling thing about this class of problem. A bad web API isn't a 'Oh, yeah, I can see how that would be a really subtle one if you haven't been building cars for 50 years' type of issue.
Phosphorous is a slightly vexing character because it wears quite a few hats:
It is viciously incendiary; but it's also a superb smoke-producing compound, and it's fairly toxic (not in the same class as purpose-built chemical weapons; but absorbing it through your burns is not recommended).
Some of those uses are essentially always licit (smoke production), some are sometimes licit (incendiaries are discouraged in populated areas; but not banned), and some are never licit (it's not a very good chemical weapon; but you aren't allowed to use it as one). Enough licit uses that basically everyone has a whole lot of the stuff on hand; but eminently adaptable for more gruesome purposes.
Luckily, we have an ally of each side of the war exercising Security Council veto powers, so the odds of having to get involved are less dire than they might otherwise be.
That isn't exactly how the security council actually works... Sure, we have some very nice, wonderfully principled, declarations to that effect; but they are totally optional (especially for boring genocides that none of the permanent members give a fuck about).
Are we going to be greeted as liberators this time? If so, we might want to not bother.
No, I'll wait until you are finished with the newsletter, everyone throws them out sooner or later. No matter where you are in the food chain, I'm always one step behind you. Waiting.
CO2 is a problem. PFC are worse. It is not a good idea to burn CO2 further into CF4, if that was your idea.
Oh, definitely not, I try to stay away from large-scale reactions involving fluorine whenever possible. I was just going for cheap 'funny' points (which really makes no sense, since those aren't worth anything, even karma which isn't worth much of anything; and yet I do it anyway...) and expressing my respect for a chemical that can oxidize all sorts of materials that you think of as already about as oxidized as they get.
You can't help but love something that responds to your attempts to extinguish the fire by enthusiastically burning such not-flammable materials as water, sand, and asbestos!
The one aspect that I find hard to understand is where Amazon thinks that their edge would be in going it alone. You can be an MVNO of any of the major cell companies with just a dash of legal paperwork, and that gets you instant network access, allows you to use commodity cell radio technology from a variety of vendors (and all the messy patent stuff is their problem), and it isn't as though the cell guys are sandbagging in terms of R&D, they're just evil about pricing.
Either they think that they have something very clever up their sleeve, or they are looking for a data service that fits a somewhat different use case than cellular data services do(in which case they might actually be able to do better, since they could build what they want rather than buying some approximation of what they want and beating it into shape).
Unless Globalstar has something really clever on the table, they should think carefully about the sordid saga of LightSquared... They thought that they'd buy a bunch of satellite-to-ground spectrum for peanuts and then get a waiver to use it as (much, much, more valuable) ground-ground spectrum. Shockingly, satellite-to-ground users in nearby spectra, with their feeble transmitters a zillion miles away, were Not Very Happy at the prospect of having comparatively massive towers screaming on nearby channels all over the economically relevant parts of the continental US.
At this point, LightSquared runs a fairly uninteresting satellite internet business and an unbelievably obnoxious lobbying business, stomping their feet and pouting because they aren't being allowed to pull their spectrum conversion trick.
Your proposal to add massive amounts of cellulose and lignin to the environment is relevant to my interests...
Fluorine considers your 'you cannot burn it anymore' assessment to be a sign of weakness and defeatism. Oxygen may be the 'kleenex' of Oxidizing agents; but it is far from the most competent one...
Given the Ample selection of carbonate minerals, I don't doubt that you can get an equivalent-to-concrete-or-better construction brick out of a process designed to scrub substantial amounts of otherwise freed carbon dioxide. It will be interesting to see, though, how the whole process stacks up once you factor in the sources of whatever other materials will be reacting with the carbon dioxide.
It's less a question of whether it works, this isn't some 'run your car from water! Secrets Big Oil doesn't want you to know!' vaporware; but it may or may not be economic without a subsidy regimen based on its green credentials.
The only potential issue that springs immediately to mind would be vapor escaping through the sleeve in the lid (though, at this point, is anybody even going to notice a little extra evaporation in the face of all the deliberate and ongoing-accidental water releases?), and the possibility of the measuring rod 'binding' if it somehow ends up tilted too far from vertical and placing excessive force on just a couple of contact points (which would quite possibly cause the slip sleeve to bite into the rod and keep it fixed in position even as the water level changes). I'm sure that some clever mechanical engineer has a design for a superior leak-resistant and low-friction slip sleeve; but I don't know the details of such a beast.
Aside from that, though, it was a perfectly serious suggestion. Materials cost, per tank, is peanuts, float-type sensors are fully compatible with electronic instrumentation, if desired; but also work totally passively, and the failure mode still allows you to track state from a safe distance with a clipboard minion and some binoculars (unlike the failure modes of ultrasonic rangefinders, photointerrupters, or similar widgets, which might stop responding or start sending back dodgy numbers, with no ability to verify except by sending somebody into the tank farm to check it out.
I wouldn't want to be the lucky guy who gets to stand on the roof of the shoddily-built radiation-goo tank and retrofit a sensor sleeve; but including it in the design of new tanks wouldn't be difficult.
Its about money. There's no other reason to make an effort in anything in this world other than to gain extra cash.
That's part of my confusion, though: 22k and limited edition of 260 seems high by the standards of altruistic motives (even if the fancy 3d printing really does cost the full amount, which wouldn't be beyond the realm of plausible, the limited edition is clearly artificial); but seem quite low by pure cash grab standards.
If you are going to judge people's attitude toward privacy by what they use is there any demographic other than 'subsistence farmers at the ass-end of the developing world' who would actually be judged to care about privacy?
"But the museum is hoping to increase access to pictures"
"Every Relievo is numbered and approved by a museum curator. There is a limited edition of 260 copies per painting."
Well, what's it going to be? If this is about 'increasing access' or some similar highflown motivation, why are they limiting the editions and pushing the individual-numbering-and-'approval'-to-make-a-reproduction-feel-authentic nonsense?
If this is just a fundraiser, why start at 22K?
Honestly, I'd be inclined to do it the 'keep it really, really, simple, TEPCO' way:
Float style liquid level meters are extremely simple devices. Small lighter-than-water float on the bottom, a rod(ideally with stripes or distance markings, like scale bars), and a sleeve in the lid of the tank that keeps the apparatus upright and allows the rod to move up and down freely.
If you do have rad-hard electronics in place, an optical sensor for the stripes, or a hall effect sensor for a rod with magnets at intervals, or similar, are easy to add. If not, the amount of protruding rod can be read from some hundreds of meters or more with a wholly unexciting pair of binoculars.
I'm mostly unimpressed by the twee nonsense about kids these days being 'digital natives' or something, imbued with mysterious computer-using powers (sure, kids these days are almost all users, unlike older age brackets that have holdouts; but the bar is not high for 'using technology', thanks to years of dedicated UI polishing and idiot-proofing, so only the usual much smaller percentage of nerds have any reason to go beyond trivial levels of knowledge); but it seems perfectly reasonable that they'd be a relatively privacy-conscious group.
After all, kids are among the demographics most likely to be surveilled and to be punished or otherwise restricted based on that surveillance. Parents, teachers/admins, peers, present or near-future employers and college admissions officers, cops (whether they just come and break up that party you foolishly put on facebook or whether you are already familiar with being stop-and-frisked depends on other demographic variables, of course), all actively watching and frequently acting on that.
Adults are still pretty heavily watched; but the range of banal behavior they can engage in without consequence is substantially greater.
"I'd be more surprised if AutoDesk weren't moving to subscription delivery of online product. They are the most widely "pirated" company of non-consumer software, ever. :-)"
Given that, for most of the software Autodesk makes, 'online product' is going to mean 'you download the install package and the DRM phones home a lot' rather than 'runs in a web page' or 'is delivered via ICA/RDP/X11/whatever from Autodesk's machine'. Heavy 3d (and customers who may not be at liberty to just ignore NDAs surrounding the stuff they are working on) don't fit well with that model unless you have impressive bandwidth and minimal latency.
Because of that, the anti-piracy effects of 'cloud' (in this sense) are pretty minimal, they certainly have been with Adobe's flavor. What this sort of subscription model does do, though, is remove the need to make version N+1 so compelling that people who own version N or version N-1 are moved to buy it, or at least pay an upgrade fee. This doesn't mean that you'll totally stop making improvements or adding features; but you get paid either way, so you no longer face the "Is our new product actually a meaningful improvement over our old one?" test on a regular basis.
That's what makes moving to a subscription model (for what is fundamentally client software, obviously charging fees for ongoing access to things hosted on my servers or otherwise generating recurring costs is a different matter) raises suspicions of 'lack of imagination'. Do you have enough market power that you can dictate an often-unpopular pricing arrangement? Do you suspect that you have no ideas for version N+1 that will motivate people to upgrade? Subscription model time!
I guess it is if you live in the middle east... but as an American this unlike the purly domestic shit is exactly what the NSA and allied signal intelligence agencies should be doing.
GCHQ decided to fuck with The Guardian and with Greenwald's partner.
Greenwald said "If the UK and U.S. governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further."
A little story about a probably-sensitive GCHQ listening post seems like a warning shot in exactly that direction.
So, it's in Israel.
Not necessarily. Given the, um, togetherness in that neighborhood, do you think that the countries you'd really want to listen in on run their fiber any closer to the Israelis than they absolutely have to?
It's also just a question of sheer size: Commercial nuclear reactors have an economic incentive to convert as much mass to energy as possible (nuclear fuel assemblies aren't exactly free, and shutting down/cutting power output to refuel carries substantial costs, and nobody wants more waste on hand than strictly necessary); but it costs them very little to add mass to their designs. I don't know about the Fukishima units specifically; but a big BWR can have north of 100 metric tons of fuel (not counting the weight of cladding, control rods, and other non-fissile parts) loaded at a time. It's all low-enriched, and built into protective assemblies; but nobody builds bombs so big that you'd need a cargo-variant 747 to deliver them.