Isn't the middle east more of a 'bomb violence' neighborhood than a 'gun violence' one? It seems like there isn't much point in smuggling in the world's shittiest pistol when widely available techniques for bringing in enough explosives to spatter the audience far and wide are available...
Islamist nutjobs are probably out of the running, for the moment, since Morsi was much closer to their camp than the army is. The US used to pay fairly handsomely for the friendship of Mubarak, and a lot of the sugar trickled down to the military; but I haven't heard any good conspiracy theories to the effect that the US is calling in its chits(and even if we were, we'd still have to magic those days of massive popular discontent into existence somehow, after years and years of paying the guy who just stopped oppressing the people recently, which would take some doing...)
It wouldn't totally surprise me if the (banal; but crushing) effect of substantial unemployment, especially among young urbanites, even educated ones, would have made any government's job difficult, and a government that drew its support more heavily from conservative hicks-in-the-sticks was especially vulnerable.
One wonders what would could be saved if things like pyramids and tombs are used to save a cubic ass tonne of knowledge.
Remember that virtually every nontrivial monument/tomb site that we know about was plundered, often pretty quickly after it was built, sometimes several times. If you want to preserve something, it either has to be so valuable that the succeeding civilization continues coddling it, or so worthless that it doesn't get melted down for scrap(unfortunately, given that people will scrape and reuse parchment and use mummies for fuel, the bar for this is pretty low indeed).
Barring the development of a strong-AI level pedagogical expert system that can be stashed away somewhere, the task of actually preserving the present state of human knowledge in the absence of the background is pretty difficult.
Mere storage is actually the easy part: Even clay tablets have a modest survival rate when you burn the civilization that inscribed them down on top of them, and with modern materials and machine tools, we could mass produce something better(or really, really, really mass produce something cheaper, and distribute it all over the world).
The trouble comes once you start dealing with knowledge that exists largely in the form of continually-refreshed human capital, and with tools that exist largely in the form of a long chain of worse tools building better tools building better tools, etc. The amount of pure written knowledge you would need to restart/rebuild all the supporting industry to refill, say, a totally undistinguished hardware store, would be considerable, quite probably more than actually is written down(rather than learned on the job by the new guy from the old guy, and fabricated on tools that were built with parts fabricated with tools that go back to the early 20th century if not earlier).
You also run into encoding problems. "Graecum est; non legitur", and that was the allegedly educated class in a civilization that probably had some greek speakers available(and it'd hardly been a global thermonuclear holocaust that ended classical civilization). You'd need to choose some human languages, and god help you with the digital file formats...
Wouldn't it take a buttload more power to move the air down, and then back up, than it would generate?
Any flavor of energy storage is going to introduce some sort of conversion losses: battery banks aren't 100% efficient to charge or discharge, flywheels suffer from friction losses, pumped-water hydro suffers from inefficiency in the pumping uphill and the conversion to electricity downhill backup generators suffer from the fact that small heat engines generally get lousy efficiency compared to big ones(and need to be kept supplied with diesel, which doesn't help you 'green' cred).
The advantage to pressurised air is that(in geologically suitable locations) you can build in fairly large amounts of storage without anything obtrusive on the surface, and at comparatively low cost(compared to buying and keeping fresh huge banks of batteries, say).
Given that most of these satellite navigation systems have 'guide munitions to target' as a major(often primary) goal, building a purely domestic one is a bit of a waste of time.
This is great, I wonder how it will compare to traditional methods of testing for these blood disorders, in terms of cost and time. Obviously automated means it can be faster but the people doing these tests don't always have the funds for a device like this.
I'd imagine that the big win would be if they could get the whole system implemented in solid-state/MEMS hardware:
At least some blood cell histology requires only relatively primitive instruments and a few not-particularly-esoteric dyes; but it does require a trained examiner and accuracy suffers if you overwork them. Some flavor of color-coded test strips(with suitably crafted antibodies or such) are probably easier to use; but rather less likely to hold up well if stored under lousy conditions for long periods/replaced by counterfeits in dodgier markets, etc.
If this could be implemented entirely in robust electronics, the device would presumably be fairly easy to ruggedize, fairly long lasting, and pretty easy to use, as well as being a suitable basis for a much higher throughput test system for use in better equipped facilities where efficiency is important.
We do have some deep-cover operatives working in Texas(as with other authoritarian petro-theocracies, it pays to keep an eye on them); but if somebody tells you that they are "an American from Texas", they are probably telling one of the inside jokes that they use on foreigners. Texas has texans which are a totally different thing.
Apparently, the list is a decent sized one, among recent phones. My understanding is that(outside of mathematically-interesting-but-practically-useless SDR setups, which are really cool; but very computationally demanding and cost as much as most smartphones even without a host to do the compute) most GPS or GPS+others modules abstract away virtually all the dirty details and just provide position, heading, and time information(possibly some additional parameters, SNR, that sort of thing, depending on vendor and model), so the amount of OS-level support needed to include GLONASS or Galileo in addition to GPS is fairly low.
Well, I really fucked that up, teach me to post while sick. Anyway, my intent was to suggest that a coverage area that gets you a good chunk of southeast asia, a bit of middle east, plus the entire Indian subcontinent, some stuff to the north of it, and the Indian ocean(not exactly an abandoned bit of water, for shipping and all) seems quite likely to be worth shoving into the spec sheet if you just need to implement a few additional algorithms(that something else in your product line for the Indian market will need anyway); but without world coverage it wouldn't be worth actually increasing the BoM cost all that much.
Is India's space navigation system sufficiently similar(in terms of frequencies, antenna demands, etc.) that it will be relatively easy to shoehorn into navigation chipsets along with GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo, or is it enough of an oddball in some way, either technologically or administratively(a more hardass version of the old GPS civilian precision reduction that the US used to use or occassionally threaten to use), that this is basically irrelevant for everybody who isn't Indian military?
Don't worry, soon enough obnoxious physical failures, like printhead clogging, will be replaced by internal tamper-resistant RTCs that cause consumables to time out shortly before company revenue statements are due.
In the bold future, consumables will be internet connected, so they'll know whether or not they need to fail in order to help meet shareholders' revenue expectations!
God I remember those things. Long after they were stopped being produced many of those models were the holy grail to evil pirates in the days of ever increasing disc based anti-piracy measures. After awhile it was hard to find burners that could do 1:1 raw with under/over burn.
Ironically, even having a SCSI bus in your system now causes some DRM systems to freak out at you. For whatever reason, all the 'virtual CD' ISO-mounter programs in Windows always emulated SCSI CD drives, not IDE ones, so pity the poor sucker who had a physical SCSI device, even with a 'real', original, CD in it...
What I find continually curious is the idea that a 3D printer in every pot is the ideal end state:
TFA specifically says " I look forward to the day when 3D printers are as cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to use as their 2D inkjet printer counterparts." Guess what? 2d inkjet printers are precisely as easy to use as 2d inkjet printers are(because they are the same thing) and people still choose to get their photos printed by assorted outside services, and buy laser printers if they actually want to do much printing in-house. The experience of using printers brought down to the price point of consumer inkjets is just that horrible. An actually-good inkjet in-house is still quite common for certain classes of pro users, who don't want the turnaround times and uncontrollable variables associated with going 3rd party; but nobody makes a ~$100 inkjet that is nearly as good, or(once you count up the consumables) as cheap as renting a teeny slice of some seriously expensive hardware.
3D printers seem likely to go the same way: I can totally understand the desire of serious hobbyists, along with pro users, to have one in house, just like machine tools; but we'll need absolutely amazing improvements(that mysteriously don't accrue to really expensive printers as well) before it becomes worth it for somebody who isn't willing to tweak their reprap to own a 3D printer, rather than just upload the.stl to somebody who will rent you time on some monster that is worth as much as your car, maybe your house, and have the result fedexed back to you in a couple of days.
Unless they are utter morons, they'll have a GP switch to turn this off. Of course, I said the same thing about having a GP switch to 'just boot to desktop, for fuck's sake, there isn't a touchscreen in this entire building', and look how that turned out...
If this is true that Motorola is spying on everything you do, stealing your goddamn IMAP and facebook passwords then sue their asses and press criminal "wiretapping" charges.
Silly consumer, the CFAA only makes more or less anything you do with or to a computer a felony if you aren't a corporation...
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the middle east more of a 'bomb violence' neighborhood than a 'gun violence' one? It seems like there isn't much point in smuggling in the world's shittiest pistol when widely available techniques for bringing in enough explosives to spatter the audience far and wide are available...
As a professional fungus in good standing, I recommend an old Cold War Mycotoxin...
Their LNG exports are nontrivial; but Egypt is hovering on the verge of worthlessness as an oil source.
Islamist nutjobs are probably out of the running, for the moment, since Morsi was much closer to their camp than the army is. The US used to pay fairly handsomely for the friendship of Mubarak, and a lot of the sugar trickled down to the military; but I haven't heard any good conspiracy theories to the effect that the US is calling in its chits(and even if we were, we'd still have to magic those days of massive popular discontent into existence somehow, after years and years of paying the guy who just stopped oppressing the people recently, which would take some doing...)
It wouldn't totally surprise me if the (banal; but crushing) effect of substantial unemployment, especially among young urbanites, even educated ones, would have made any government's job difficult, and a government that drew its support more heavily from conservative hicks-in-the-sticks was especially vulnerable.
Is "We don't really want to get dragged into bringing Peace And Democracy to yet another sandbox hellhole" not a consistent policy?
Funny is says the Constitution was Suspended.
Like it was ever a democracy in the first place.
Is there something requiring you to be a democracy in order to have a constitution?
Now that is a heroically inefficient process, at least with current technology...
... store knowledge within.
One wonders what would could be saved if things like pyramids and tombs are used to save a cubic ass tonne of knowledge.
Remember that virtually every nontrivial monument/tomb site that we know about was plundered, often pretty quickly after it was built, sometimes several times. If you want to preserve something, it either has to be so valuable that the succeeding civilization continues coddling it, or so worthless that it doesn't get melted down for scrap(unfortunately, given that people will scrape and reuse parchment and use mummies for fuel, the bar for this is pretty low indeed).
Barring the development of a strong-AI level pedagogical expert system that can be stashed away somewhere, the task of actually preserving the present state of human knowledge in the absence of the background is pretty difficult.
Mere storage is actually the easy part: Even clay tablets have a modest survival rate when you burn the civilization that inscribed them down on top of them, and with modern materials and machine tools, we could mass produce something better(or really, really, really mass produce something cheaper, and distribute it all over the world).
The trouble comes once you start dealing with knowledge that exists largely in the form of continually-refreshed human capital, and with tools that exist largely in the form of a long chain of worse tools building better tools building better tools, etc. The amount of pure written knowledge you would need to restart/rebuild all the supporting industry to refill, say, a totally undistinguished hardware store, would be considerable, quite probably more than actually is written down(rather than learned on the job by the new guy from the old guy, and fabricated on tools that were built with parts fabricated with tools that go back to the early 20th century if not earlier).
You also run into encoding problems. "Graecum est; non legitur", and that was the allegedly educated class in a civilization that probably had some greek speakers available(and it'd hardly been a global thermonuclear holocaust that ended classical civilization). You'd need to choose some human languages, and god help you with the digital file formats...
Wouldn't it take a buttload more power to move the air down, and then back up, than it would generate?
Any flavor of energy storage is going to introduce some sort of conversion losses: battery banks aren't 100% efficient to charge or discharge, flywheels suffer from friction losses, pumped-water hydro suffers from inefficiency in the pumping uphill and the conversion to electricity downhill backup generators suffer from the fact that small heat engines generally get lousy efficiency compared to big ones(and need to be kept supplied with diesel, which doesn't help you 'green' cred).
The advantage to pressurised air is that(in geologically suitable locations) you can build in fairly large amounts of storage without anything obtrusive on the surface, and at comparatively low cost(compared to buying and keeping fresh huge banks of batteries, say).
An N-dimensional spreadsheet probably wouldn't be too hairy to describe as a mathematical structure; but the UI might get pretty dreadful.
Given that most of these satellite navigation systems have 'guide munitions to target' as a major(often primary) goal, building a purely domestic one is a bit of a waste of time.
This is great, I wonder how it will compare to traditional methods of testing for these blood disorders, in terms of cost and time. Obviously automated means it can be faster but the people doing these tests don't always have the funds for a device like this.
I'd imagine that the big win would be if they could get the whole system implemented in solid-state/MEMS hardware:
At least some blood cell histology requires only relatively primitive instruments and a few not-particularly-esoteric dyes; but it does require a trained examiner and accuracy suffers if you overwork them. Some flavor of color-coded test strips(with suitably crafted antibodies or such) are probably easier to use; but rather less likely to hold up well if stored under lousy conditions for long periods/replaced by counterfeits in dodgier markets, etc.
If this could be implemented entirely in robust electronics, the device would presumably be fairly easy to ruggedize, fairly long lasting, and pretty easy to use, as well as being a suitable basis for a much higher throughput test system for use in better equipped facilities where efficiency is important.
We do have some deep-cover operatives working in Texas(as with other authoritarian petro-theocracies, it pays to keep an eye on them); but if somebody tells you that they are "an American from Texas", they are probably telling one of the inside jokes that they use on foreigners. Texas has texans which are a totally different thing.
Apparently, the list is a decent sized one, among recent phones. My understanding is that(outside of mathematically-interesting-but-practically-useless SDR setups, which are really cool; but very computationally demanding and cost as much as most smartphones even without a host to do the compute) most GPS or GPS+others modules abstract away virtually all the dirty details and just provide position, heading, and time information(possibly some additional parameters, SNR, that sort of thing, depending on vendor and model), so the amount of OS-level support needed to include GLONASS or Galileo in addition to GPS is fairly low.
Well, I really fucked that up, teach me to post while sick. Anyway, my intent was to suggest that a coverage area that gets you a good chunk of southeast asia, a bit of middle east, plus the entire Indian subcontinent, some stuff to the north of it, and the Indian ocean(not exactly an abandoned bit of water, for shipping and all) seems quite likely to be worth shoving into the spec sheet if you just need to implement a few additional algorithms(that something else in your product line for the Indian market will need anyway); but without world coverage it wouldn't be worth actually increasing the BoM cost all that much.
I'd probably avoid asking Europe for advice on navigation systems for a few years until they work things out...
Well, for one, it will only cover the region around India, so it is irrelevant for everyone that is not in the area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Regional_Navigational_Satellite_System
That's a coverage area, so it seems like the sort of thing that would be worth throwing in if the only additional cost above the existing GPS module/antenna is a few Kb of extra firmware; but not large enough to be worth the effort, outside of India-specific devices, if you need to throw additional hardware at the problem.
Is India's space navigation system sufficiently similar(in terms of frequencies, antenna demands, etc.) that it will be relatively easy to shoehorn into navigation chipsets along with GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo, or is it enough of an oddball in some way, either technologically or administratively(a more hardass version of the old GPS civilian precision reduction that the US used to use or occassionally threaten to use), that this is basically irrelevant for everybody who isn't Indian military?
Don't worry, soon enough obnoxious physical failures, like printhead clogging, will be replaced by internal tamper-resistant RTCs that cause consumables to time out shortly before company revenue statements are due.
In the bold future, consumables will be internet connected, so they'll know whether or not they need to fail in order to help meet shareholders' revenue expectations!
God I remember those things. Long after they were stopped being produced many of those models were the holy grail to evil pirates in the days of ever increasing disc based anti-piracy measures. After awhile it was hard to find burners that could do 1:1 raw with under/over burn.
Ironically, even having a SCSI bus in your system now causes some DRM systems to freak out at you. For whatever reason, all the 'virtual CD' ISO-mounter programs in Windows always emulated SCSI CD drives, not IDE ones, so pity the poor sucker who had a physical SCSI device, even with a 'real', original, CD in it...
What I find continually curious is the idea that a 3D printer in every pot is the ideal end state:
TFA specifically says " I look forward to the day when 3D printers are as cheap, ubiquitous, and easy to use as their 2D inkjet printer counterparts." Guess what? 2d inkjet printers are precisely as easy to use as 2d inkjet printers are(because they are the same thing) and people still choose to get their photos printed by assorted outside services, and buy laser printers if they actually want to do much printing in-house. The experience of using printers brought down to the price point of consumer inkjets is just that horrible. An actually-good inkjet in-house is still quite common for certain classes of pro users, who don't want the turnaround times and uncontrollable variables associated with going 3rd party; but nobody makes a ~$100 inkjet that is nearly as good, or(once you count up the consumables) as cheap as renting a teeny slice of some seriously expensive hardware.
3D printers seem likely to go the same way: I can totally understand the desire of serious hobbyists, along with pro users, to have one in house, just like machine tools; but we'll need absolutely amazing improvements(that mysteriously don't accrue to really expensive printers as well) before it becomes worth it for somebody who isn't willing to tweak their reprap to own a 3D printer, rather than just upload the .stl to somebody who will rent you time on some monster that is worth as much as your car, maybe your house, and have the result fedexed back to you in a couple of days.
Unless they are utter morons, they'll have a GP switch to turn this off. Of course, I said the same thing about having a GP switch to 'just boot to desktop, for fuck's sake, there isn't a touchscreen in this entire building', and look how that turned out...
I'm assuming that I shouldn't come to you with my "They should have named them 'Kerberos' and 'LDAP'" suggestion?
If this is true that Motorola is spying on everything you do, stealing your goddamn IMAP and facebook passwords then sue their asses and press criminal "wiretapping" charges.
Silly consumer, the CFAA only makes more or less anything you do with or to a computer a felony if you aren't a corporation...